Jon Udell

My first podcast on ITConversations is with Phil Libin, president of CoreStreet, a company to which I gave an InfoWorld Innovators Award in 2004 for its approach to massively scalable credentials validation. CoreStreet has worked with the U.S. Department of Defense on its Common Access Card program, so Phil has been a ringside observer of what may be the world’s most successful large-scale deployment of smart identity cards.

From that perspective, I invited Phil to comment on the Department of Homeland Security’s recently published guidelines for the more secure state driver’s licenses mandated by the REAL ID act.

Part of the context for our conversation was a letter to the editor I’d written to my local newspaper in response to an editorial that rejected the notion of REAL ID on the grounds that any government initiative toward stronger credentials will necessarily lead to the Orwellian Big Brother. What I’ve always thought, and what Phil Libin thinks too, is that the technologies of digital identity can be tools of empowerment or oppression, depending on how we understand and apply them, and that for that reason we’ve got to understand them properly.

At one point Phil said:

The basics of asymmetric cryptography are fundamental concepts that any member of society who wants to understand how the world works, or could work, needs to understand.

That’s a tall order. And in fact, it’s outside the scope of the current REAL ID proposal which calls for 2D barcodes rather than for smartcard technology. But Phil makes a great argument for why a broad understanding of the basics of cryptography is necessary, and for how as a society we might achieve it. This conversation is one small step toward that goal.

A couple of nights ago I listened to one of Koranteng Ofosu-Amaah‘s appearances on Chris Lydon’s Open Source show. Here’s how Chris Lydon defines what he does:

We designed the show to invert the traditional relationship between broadcast and the web: we aren’t a public radio show with a web community, we’re a web community that produces a daily hour of radio.

Recently I’ve run into similarly expansive uses of the term open source. Here’s Brian Jones reflecting on his experience at a Harvard workshop entitled “Cross-Boundary Governance through Agreements and Standards”:

I had previously thought about open source more in terms of the licensing model chosen. Well obviously the folks from the defense department weren’t thinking they wanted to put all the content under the GPL, but instead they wanted a system where people could easily share information within their targeted community.

And here’s Dare Obasanjo reacting to Dave Winer’s proposal to create an open source implementation of this month’s cyber-craze, Twitter:

One of the primary benefits to customers of using Open Source software is that it denies vendor lock-in because the source code is available and freely redistributable. This is a strong benefit when the source code is physically distributed to the user either as desktop software or as server software that the user installs.

…
Things are different in the “Web 2.0″ world of social software for two reasons. The obvious one being that the software isn’t physically distributed to the users but the less obvious reason is that social software depends on network effects.

For years now, I’ve been tracing an arc from open source software to open services to open data. What’s the common thread? Collaboration. People working together in shared information spaces, using shared technical and social protocols, to achieve shared goals.

If you asked me to define the essence of openness, I couldn’t say it any better than that.

By a strange coincidence, Wired’s Fred Vogelstein and I were both on Microsoft’s Redmond campus in mid-January. He was there to finish reporting the story that just exploded on TechMeme, and I was there for my new employee orientation. Here are some key perspectives: Chris Anderson (Wired), Fred Vogelstein (Wired), Jeff Sandquist (MSFT, my boss), Frank Shaw (Waggener-Edstrom), and Mary Jo Foley (ZDNET). Bottom line: Vogelstein writes a “transparency” story about Microsoft’s Channel 9, an internal assessment of Vogelstein is inadvertantly forwarded to him, the irony becomes the story.

For me, there are some other Wired-related ironies swirling around here. I have long believed that we’re moving toward the Transparent Society foretold in David Brin’s seminal book. When I attended the Highlands Forum the other week, I learned a bit more of that book’s backstory. I’d known that it was a popular Wired story in 1996. I hadn’t known that the seed of that story was a talk given at the Highlands Forum a few years before.

The transparent society envisioned in that book is profoundly radical in ways that we’re only beginning to appreciate. For example, I was until recently an industry journalist who was studied by Microsoft and Waggener-Edstrom in the same way that Fred Vogelstein found out he was being studied. I’ve since found such reports about me floating around on the Microsoft intranet. As many of today’s commentators have noted, the existence of such documents should come as no surprise to anyone who’s played the journalism game on either side of the fence (or on both). Those documents weren’t published, either accidentally or on purpose, but if they had been, nobody would have been harmed. In fact, I’d have been interested to know how my views were coming across, and I might even have sharpened those views accordingly. That’s one example of a new way of thinking that David Brin’s book has opened up for me.

Here’s another. When I speak in public about the emergent blogosphere, I try to steer clear of the tired old debate in which bloggers and journalists are cast as antagonists. What today’s TechMeme cluster shows is that they are in fact collaborators. Wired doesn’t own this story, everyone involved has a piece of it, and all of those pieces are discoverable and interlinked. It’s a wonderful thing to see.

This will become my new benchmark example of network-based storytelling but, ironically, the old example I’ve been using for years also involves Wired. Five years ago the magazine ran a short piece about Mitch Kapor’s Chandler project entitled The Outlook Killer?. That was precisely what Mitch did not intend. “I don’t want to play into the meme that Chandler is an Outlook killer,” he wrote in an email which he also blogged. Later he elaborated that the headline “firmly bracketed the article in the David vs. Goliath trope I got agreement would not be used,” and concluded:

It’s fortunate that a weblog is a wonderful, alternate, and complementary forum in which to speak directly, thus by-passing the intermediation of formal media.

Back in 2002 his reaction wasn’t as visible as it would be today, but it got noticed, and that was a leading indicator that the famous saying “Never pick a fight with a man who buys ink by the barrel” — attributed variously Twain, Liebling, Wilde and Dr. Johnson — was due for revision. Five years on it’s even clearer that ink — happily for the trees we used to sacrifice to it — matters less, electrons matter more, and the playing field is closer to level.

It’ll never be completely level, nor should it be, because society requires a healthy balance between professional storytellers who synthesize the work that other people do, and amateur storytellers who are the ones doing that work, all operating within a sphere of relative transparency. We have made remarkable strides toward achieving that balance.

Today I created a private blog site — that is, Internet-accessible but SSL-and-password-protected — and realized that there was no easy way for most people to subscribe to it. Even if the popular cloud-based readers like Bloglines and Google Reader supported authenticated feeds, I wouldn’t want to let them use my credentials to impersonate me.

What about the Microsoft RSS Platform? I discovered to my surprise that it won’t read authenticated feeds either. I’m way late to the party on this one. Scott Hanselman sounded the alarm last September. (He also speculated usefully about a CardSpace-strengthened approach to secure RSS.)

Way back in February, Dare Obasanjo had weighed in on why authenticated feeds would matter, and in March Sean Lyndersay explained on Charlie Wood’s blog why the feature didn’t make the cut.

My own case helps bolster Sean’s point that password-protected feeds are rare birds. Despite all the blog publishing and feedreading I’ve done over the years, today was the first time I’ve created, and then turned around and subscribed to, an authenticated feed.

Still, there are all kinds of messages that I’d rather receive from banks and credit card companies by way of RSS pull (under my control) rather than by way of email push (under their control). But if Windows itself doesn’t yet read authenticated feeds, it’s hard for those companies to justify producing such feeds. Chicken and egg.

So how did I finally subscribe to it? With Dare Obasanjo’s RSS Bandit, the first desktop-based reader I’ve touched in years.

Update: Thanks to this comment I have discovered that Outlook 2007 is one of the standalone RSS readers that can subscribe to authenticated feeds. I had originally thought otherwise but that was operator error on my part. It does work, provided that Outlook 2007 is set up to subscribe autonomously rather than to use the common feed store. Here’s a screencast that shows IE7 and Outlook 2007 interacting with the common feed store, as well as Outlook 2007 working autonomously.

Update 2: A followup question came up today. That screencast shows how to make Outlook 2007 use the common feed list. (See File->Import.) But how do you switch away from that choice in order to read authenticated feeds? ANSWER: Tools -> Options -> Other -> Advanced.

This comment on the previous item brought a huge smile to my face. It’s from Koranteng Ofosu-Amaah, a kindred spirit whom I’ve never yet met in person but whose remarkable essays on music, politics, and technology I regard as some of the highest literary accomplishments this new form called blogging has so far produced. You know those services that offer to print blogs and bind them into books? In general I see no point to them, but I would like to hold the Book of Koranteng in my hand and read it by the fireplace. Except not really, because the Book of Koranteng is, appropriately to the medium, ferociously hypertextual.

I’d lost track of Koranteng for a while. A different RSS feed maybe? Anyway, it’s great to reconnect. The last piece I remember reading, from back in October, was this epic poem about journalism, misdirection, a buried lead, and the Middle East. It’s part of his Things Fall Apart series which…well, I can’t begin to describe it, but don’t try to read this stuff at work. Read it at home, by the fireplace, on a WiFi-connected laptop. It’s amazing.

Freebase is aptly named, I am drawn like a moth to its flame. I realize it can be annoying to discuss things that folks can’t try out for themselves, and I can’t (yet) do anything about that, but I hope that a few more observations will be welcome.

The comment attached to my first item about Freebase, by Metaweb’s Chris Maden, provides an enlightening glimpse into how knowledge gardening in a structured wiki like Freebase will differ from its counterpart in an unstructured wiki like Wikipedia. Here’s what Chris had to say about the Freebase record for me, which I had tweaked:

I noted that his place of birth was “Philadelphia,” which was odd; our cities tend to be named with their state included. Sure enough, “Philadelphia” had been created accidentally by some other user as a “location,” and then Jon had reused it. So I:
1) Changed Jon’s place of birth to “Philadelphia, Pennsylvania” (which is a “location” and a “city/town”).
2) Added a type to “Philadelphia”: “duplicate.”
3) Added a property to “Philadelphia”: it is a duplicate of “Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.”
4) Removed the “location” type from “Philadelphia” to keep it from coming up in autocomplete for other location properties.
By marking it as a duplicate, if someone does end up using it, our topic merge tool can find it and its namesake and combine their properties. This will be more heavily automated as we gain confidence in our detection algorithms.

Fascinating.

Emboldened by this narrative, I created my first user-defined Freebase type. Because the system is so new, there are some quite fundamental things that (so far as I can see) haven’t yet been defined. I wanted to create entries for some of my personal projects, such as LibraryLookup and elmcity.info, so I created a type called Project and added the properties Goal and Collaborators. That enabled me to add entries for my two personal projects, describe their goals, and associate myself with them as a collaborator.

But as I said, it’s the social dimension that’ll kick this whole thing into high gear. When I did a text search in Freebase for the word “project” a bunch of things fell out, including the Helix digital media framework. The original Freebase record, sourced from Wikipedia, was typeless. I promoted it to an instance of Project, and by doing so I’ve invited anybody who visits that record to add a Goal and some Collaborators.

I’m not one of those collaborators, but I have an interest in the project and would like to be able to discover who’s working on it. More broadly, I’d like to be able to answer questions like: “Who among the Helix collaborators is also working on .NET projects?”

I can’t answer that question now, and I may never be able to in Freebase or its imminent competitor, Radar Networks. But the point is that it cost me very little to declare Helix as a Project — onced the type was defined, that is — and that provides an immediate benefit just to me. As with social bookmarking, the act of public annotation is a useful aid to memory and recall.

If my invitation to contribute structured data about Helix is accepted by others, that’d be great. But there too, enlightened self-interest can be the prime mover, as it should be. By leaving their fingerprints on things that they care about, people can shape those things for their own purposes. When those fingerprints lead to mutual discovery and collaboration, that’s icing on the cake.

Of course there are all kinds of things that we care about, and would like to declare to be related. For example, I’ve recently been watching these two trend lines, which chart the relative fortunes of weblog.infoworld.com/udell and blog.jonudell.net in the Technorati ranking system:

I’d love to declare once that that these two blogs are related to me, then ask Technorati and a bunch of other services to refer to that relationship. Maybe that’ll happen sooner than I thought.

The blogosphere has pre-announced what IDG is now, as a result, “expected to confirm on Monday”: that InfoWorld will cease print publication. There will be plenty of time for fond remembrances of InfoWorld’s storied past, and for clever prognostications about its online future. But for now, as someone who’s loved and lost a magazine, I just want to say to my friends there who were blindsided and are losing sleep over this: Been there, done that, it’s no fun, good luck.

The recent launch of Freebase.com, the first application of the semantic web engine being developed by Danny Hillis’ new company, Metaweb, was written up by, among others, Esther Dyson, Tim O’Reilly, and Martin Heller, from whom I received an invitation to try Freebase. (Note: I don’t yet seem to have invitations that I can dispense.)

If you scan those articles and the blogospheric halo surrounding them, you’ll soon glean the essentials. Freebase is like Wikipedia in the sense that it’s an open data project. But where Wikipedia is a database of unstructured articles, Freebase is a database of categorized and related items. You can use it to add or edit items and, more ambitiously, to create or extend the categories themselves.

There’s been a lot of discussion about how this approach does or doesn’t match up with the W3C’s vision for the semantic web, and the suite of standards and technologies associated with it. I’ll leave that to the experts and simply reiterate one crucial point. The authors of the semantic web are going to be people, not machines. And people will only want to play the game if it’s easy, natural, and fun.

Early indications are that Freebase is going to be a whole lot of fun. In his walkthrough Tim O’Reilly calls it addictive, and explains why. Because the system thinks in terms of relationships among types of items, a single act of data entry can produce multiple outcomes.

Tim’s writeup gives a couple of examples of what that’s like. Here’s mine. I found a record for myself in the system, sourced from Wikipedia. I updated it to say that I’m the author of the book Practical Internet Groupware. Then I added that Tim O’Reilly was the editor of my book. That single edit altered the records on both ends of the author/editor relationship. My book’s record now showed Tim O’Reilly as its editor, and Tim’s record sprouted a Books Edited list that contained my book as its first item.

Nice. This is just a Hello World example, of course, but it has the feel of something that people will be able to understand, will want to use, and will enjoy in a social way.

A couple of years ago, I wrote a column entitled WinFS and social information management. It concluded like so:

Developers have always tried, and so far always failed, to define reusable objects that meet the needs of knowledge workers in the real world. Meanwhile, in the era of social computing, we’re learning to watch for the patterns that emerge as people interact in information-rich contexts, and then pave those cow paths. The first WinFS-aware applications, which will be personal information managers with hooks for sharing and synchronization, won’t align with this strategy.

These WinFS applications will, however, enable you to pave your own cow paths, for example by storing and reusing queries. Nobody can know how people will ultimately want to share these contexts among WinFS clients in a peer-to-peer fashion, on WinFS servers when they emerge, and on the global XML Web. So I hope Microsoft will come to see WinFS not only as a platform for developers, but also as an environment in which users can do simple things that yield powerful social effects.

Nowadays a lot of folks say WinFS was doomed from the start and should never have been attempted. I didn’t think that then and don’t now. I did, clearly, wish that WinFS had been part of a strategy of cooperation with the cloud. And I’d still like to see some version of that scenario play out.

Phil de Vellis begins and ends his 15 minutes of fame with this remark:

This ad was not the first citizen ad, and it will not be the last. The game has changed.

Yeah, but that’s not the game-changing behavior I’m looking for. This is just an attack ad produced by a citizen rather than by an ad agency, not an ironic deconstruction of attack ads. Even if it were, that would be helpful only in small doses.

The game-changing behavior I am looking for is something completely different. As I suggested here, we’re now in a position to slice and dice what politicians and pro pundits say, by candidate and by issue, across venues, recombine that material to support a whole new level of scrutiny and analysis.

It’s doable but, admittedly, not an easy thing to incent or coordinate. So how about this. Along with the opt-in $3 Presidential Campaign Fund, let’s have an opt-in $3 Citizen Media Fund. Use the proceeds to collect raw video footage of candidates, and create Mechanical Turk HITs (human intelligence tasks) to parcel out the editing and tagging. If there’s money left over, apply the same treatment to all of the ads.

In 2001 I went to an O’Reilly conference with the unwieldy name Peer-to-Peer and Web Services. It was, in retrospect, the forerunner of the more succintly named Web 2.0 conference. The 2001 conference, which had originally been scheduled for late September, was pushed into November by the 9/11 disaster. But it wound up being one of the most eclectic I’ve ever attended, and for that reason one of the best. I rubbed elbows with hackers, musicians, lawyers, journalists, venture capitalists, and most unusually for me, soldiers.

It was a soldier who made the most lasting impression. Earl Wardell, who worked for the Joint Chiefs, said things I would never have thought a soldier could say to a crowd like us. Conventional command-and-control wasn’t working. The enemy had mastered the art of network agility. It was now imperative for our military services to understand and apply the ways of the web, and we in the vanguard were invited to help guide that historic transformation.

It was a stunning moment. Since then, I’ve wondered from time to time whether that invitation had remained open, whether it had been accepted, and if so what were the outcomes.

This month that invitation was extended to me, and by a strange coincidence not once but twice. Last week I spoke to an intelligence advisory board at an undisclosed location near Washington, on a panel where I was flanked by a Google executive and a Nashville music promoter. This week I spoke at the Highlands Forum in Carmel, California, where members of the Web 2.0 tribe met with our military counterparts.

Both gatherings were extraordinary events for me. The rules of engagement between “my” tribe and “their” tribe are loosely defined, so I’m not sure how much I can or should say here, but I will report the following observations.

First, the invitation I heard in 2001 was real, and remains open. Some of the best and brightest minds in the US military are keenly aware that the emerging web will be a fundamental enabler of the transformation they urgently wish to effect.

Second, the future is as unevenly distributed inside the DoD as it is everywhere else. I have met folks who are discouraged, cynical, and who see no signs of the needed transformation. And I’ve met other folks who are energized, hopeful, and deeply engaged in making that transformation happen.

Third, I have met the enemy and it is tribalism. I recently heard an interview with E.O. Wilson in which he was asked to react to the critiques of religion that Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins have famously been making. The problem isn’t religion, Wilson said, it’s tribalism. The two often coincide but they are not the same thing. Religion is not a pernicious force in the world. Tribalism is.

I said when I joined Microsoft that my goal was to build bridges. We need to build bridges within the technical world, between the Microsoft tribe and the open source tribe. We also need to build bridges between the geek tribe as a whole and the rest of the world, because when you strip away the Linux and Vista T-Shirts we geeks share much more DNA with one another than with the vast majority born without the hacking chromosome.

We also need to build bridges between the civilian tribe and the military tribe. I’ve now had the rare opportunity to see that those bridges are in the process of being built, and I’ll do whatever I can to keep that momentum going.

Meanwhile, here’s my takeway. Tribalism is an aspect of human nature, so it must once have served a purpose, but it no longer does. It’s a piece of evolutionary baggage that we can no longer afford to carry around. I don’t know if we can let go of it, but we had better at least try.

Last week Brendan Eich and Dare Obasanjo were batting around the topics of openness, rich Internet applications, and user innovation. The statement that found its way into my del.icio.us stream was this one from Brendan:

I assert that there is something wrong with web-like “rich” formats that aren’t hyperlink-able or indexable by search-engines.

Me too. Linking and indexing, which are enabled by open standards, are in turn key enablers of user innovation. To the extent that Flash can be web-like, or that WPF/E can, we surely want them to be.

But to Dare’s point, that’s not the endgame. Rich Internet apps should also expand what linking and indexing mean, suggest new standards, and create opportunities for new kinds of user innovation.

I see one such opportunity in the realm of audio and video. I’ve been wrangling both this weekend for an upcoming talk, and it’s a huge chore. The kinds of standard affordances that we take for granted on the textual web — select, copy, reorganize, link, paste — are missing in action on the audio-visual web. The lack of such affordances in our current crop of (mostly) proprietary media players suggests that open source and open standards can help move things along. But nobody in the open world or in the proprietary world has really figured out what those affordances need to be in the first place. So I guess we’ll keep on running parallel R&D efforts until we do.

The Friday podcast will be on vacation this week and next. When it returns, on March 30, I’m thrilled to report that the show will have a new home on IT Conversations. I started out there with the Gillmor Gang back in May 2004. In the summer of that year, according to Lucas Gonze’s alternate history, podcasting was born.

Two years later I struck out on my own in order to pursue a different style. I’ve done 42 episodes in that style, I’ve worked hard to make each of them worth listening to, and I’m proud of the results.

I’m delighted to now bring my show to IT Conversations, a groundbreaking operation that continues to thrive under the guidance of my friends and mentors Doug Kaye and Phil Windley, and thanks to a crew of other folks who keep the bits flowing.

Art Rhyno’s title is Systems Librarian but he should consider adding Mad Scientist to his business card because he is full of wild and crazy and — to me, at least — brilliant ideas. Last year, when I was a judge for the Talis “Mashing up the Library” competion, one of my favorite entries was this one from Art. The project mirrors a library catalog to the desktop and integrates it with desktop search. The searcher in this case is Google Desktop, but could be another, and the integration is accomplished by exposing the catalog as a set of Web Folders, which Art correctly describes as “Microsoft’s in-built and oft-overlooked WebDAV option.”

There’s more going on in this example than even I can easily wrap my head around, but let’s step back and consider the document itself, which Art provides at this URL:

http://librarycog.uwindsor.ca:8087/artblog/librarycog/indexcat

That’s a vey special URL. Art explains:

This document was created in OpenOffice and is served directly on the web using Cocoon’s nifty Zip support and the elegant and sensible XML syntax of OpenDocument.

In other words, Art writes and maintains an OpenOffice document, but an intermediary translates it on the fly into an HTML document. Other translations are equally feasible — to Word’s XML format, for example. What’s more:

Add in WebDAV support, and the barriers between the desktop and the Web start to blur, and the options for repurposing content achieve megaton levels.

Now let’s switch gears and look at some remarkable developments in the realm of Office. In this entry, Doug Mahugh explores the anatomy of a Word document that embeds within itself a contact record that’s in hCard format. The exact same chunk of XHTML data that you’d find on a web page, like this one, lives inside the Word document.

What’s more, the fields of the contact record can be individually read and written because they’re bound to controls. So if you download the file from Doug’s blog and open it up in Word 2007, you can modify the contact record in situ. The rewritten fields appear inline with the text of the document, but under the covers they’re written into a custom XML part — that is, a file of XML that lives inside the ZIP file that is the new format for Word docs.

(The mechanism that Doug describes for wiring the interactive controls to the custom part in which they’re stored is radically simplified by Matthew Scott’s Content Control Toolkit, a really nice visual editor and mapper that’s freely available as both an executable .NET program and as C# source code.)

The style of intermediation that Art Rhyno’s been developing — based on the notion of what he calls a WebDAV proxy — could produce powerful effects in this realm too, blurring the boundaries between XML file formats on the one hand and between the desktop and the web on the other. For example, the act of opening a file containing an embedded hCard could silently trigger the extraction of that contact information, and the storage of it locally or remotely or both.

I’d like to explore this theme on the Windows desktop and find out what’s possible. Art’s weapon of choice is Cocoon, the Apache project’s XML pipelining framework. And of course Cocoon can run on the Windows desktop. But deploying it there isn’t something many people are likely to want to do. So I’m looking for a way to achieve similar effects with infrastructure that’s based on (or ideally already contained within) the .NET Framework. Does it exist?

For several of my screencasts I used an unusual method which I mentioned here. I made my camcorder be the computer’s display, and dubbed the output to tape¹. My reasons were twofold. First, I wanted to capture a lot of raw footage without having to wait for the captured data to get written to a file, which can be slow. Second, I wanted to be able to edit in iMovie. Although I have Camtasia and use it often, I reach for iMovie when I need precise frame-by-frame control, and when I’m laying down audio narration in a precise way. Camtasia isn’t good at those things, and neither is Windows Movie Maker. I’ve tried Adobe Premier but it does way more than I need and the learning curve intimidated me. (It also ain’t cheap.) If there is a basic Windows movie editor that meets my requirements, I’d love to hear about it, and so would my screencasting colleagues at MSDN Channel 9. Meanwhile I’ll continue to reach for iMovie. But moving files from a Windows-based capture tool over to iMovie on the Mac, and then back to Windows where I continue to rely on Camtasia for final production, is a huge hassle. Hence the notion of using the camcorder as a bridge between the two worlds.

For the screencasts mentioned above, I connected my Mac to the camcorder with an S-Video cable, detected the camcorder as a display, and captured at 720×480. It’s a challenge to arrange a presentation in that small rectangle, but — particularly when you’re demonstrating a single application window — it can be done.

Today when I updated the Vista video driver for my Compaq nc8340, which has an ATI Mobility Radeon X1600, I repeated the experiment in Vista. This 20-second screencast shows the results for two different capture resolutions: 1024×768 and 800×600. (With this Windows-based setup, talking to the same camcorder, 720×480 doesn’t seem to be an option.) Both captures get squashed down to the standard digital video resolution of 720×480, and neither is crystal clear, but I think both are usable, though you should judge for yourself. I’d lean toward the 800×600 resolution which I’ve found to be ideal for two reasons. First, it minimizes the amount of video data you have to ship over the wire to your viewers, and that still matters. Second, it forces the demo to focus on where the action is, rather than displaying the full panoply of the modern GUI which can often be overwhelming.

¹ One of my goals in writing that post was to assure that a future search for ‘udell pv-gs400 s-video’ would find the reminder to myself, embedded in that post, about how to dub to tape. And now, sure enough, it does.

I’ve been meaning to mention that on two different Vista boxes, the Flash runtime did not install in its usual seamless way. In both cases I wound up going to the Adobe website and installing manually from there. I believe I tried from both IE and Firefox, but I can’t remember for sure.

I promptly forgot about the issue, but heard about it recently from some other folks. Does anyone within earshot of this blog know what the issue might be?

In a few different ways and places, lately, I’ve asked the question: “How many social networks can one person join?” The context for that question was the recent appearance of the social network fatigue meme.

Discussion of this topic has focused on how to make it easier to join and participate in multiple networks. That’s an interesting challenge, and it invites technical solutions in the realm of data portability. If I could carry my reputation and group affiliations with me from one social network to another, the argument goes, I could more easily hop from one network to another.

Maybe so. But that argument begs two key questions. First, why would I want to hop from one network to another? Second, is making that easier a good thing for me and for everyone else involved?

On one level the answer to the first question is obvious. Every social network provides its own unique experiences and enforces its own set of rules. Those experiences and rules are designed for different purposes. Flickr is about sharing photos, not finding a mate, though I’m sure Flickr has made more than a few matches by now. Conversely Match.com is about matchmaking, not photos, though photos play a central role on Match.com. So in order to satisfy multiple needs we may be obliged to join different networks, have different experiences, learn different rules.

A subtler answer to the first question is that having different experiences and learning different rules is inherently valuable. That’s why travel is a good thing. When we visit other places, and observe (or ideally participate in) other cultures, we’re better for it. We learn new things about the cultures we visit, and we deepen our understanding of the culture we return to.

From this perspective, the answer to the second question is that there are wrong ways and right ways to grease the skids for culture-hoppers. An example of the wrong way is the Burger King on the Champs-Élysées. An example of the right way is the ATM machine next door that takes my American debit card and dispenses Euros.

I mention all this because I’m returning from a meeting that brought together people from very different networks and cultures. The purpose of the meeting was, somewhat reflexively, to discuss how to build bridges of understanding among people from different networks and cultures. These kinds of cross-disciplinary efforts are always fun and interesting, but in my experience they end when the meeting ends.

In principle we could visit one another’s worlds more often by visiting them virtually. In practice I’ve never seen a virtual exchange program, but it’s a conceivable application of online multiplayer gaming. And it would be a valuable one.

Culture-hopping is a skill that, like any other, improves with practice. In the real world it’s one that’s slow, expensive, and arduous to improve, so most of us don’t improve it as much as we could. Simulation could help make the process faster, cheaper, and easier.

The best culture-hoppers are the ones Malcolm Gladwell calls connectors. They are scarce resources and prime movers. Lois Weisberg was able to bring people together and make things happen, according to Gladwell, because she could move in many different social circles and adapt to a variety of cultural protocols. That’s a hardwired talent fully expressed in relatively few Lois Weisbergs. But it’s also a talent that we all possess in some degree, that we could improve with practice, and that would make us more effective to the extent we did.

A good simulator would make it easy to visit a foreign culture, but not too easy. Your ATM card should work, because without it you wouldn’t be able to do anything at all. But no Burger Kings, that’d be cheating. To play the game properly you’d have to sample the local cuisine.

Last week Kim Cameron wrote about a problem at Flickr that resulted in wrong photos being displayed. Flickr’s acknowledgement and explanation of the problem earned this commendation from Axel Eble, which Kim cited:

Folks, this is one of the best pieces of crisis management I have ever seen! It states the problem; it states the solution; it takes the blame where necessary and it gives a promise to the future. Now, if we could set this as mandatory teaching for all companies worldwide I would feel so much better. [The Quiet Earth]

Kim went on to note that while this new transparency is a great thing, it’s not enough to be transparent, you must also be competent. And he borrowed this wonderful phrase from Don Tapscott: “If you are going to be naked, you had better be buff.”

Yesterday my DNS provider, GoDaddy, had a bad buffness day. My site was offline for hours, during which time the blogosphere speculated wildly about problems related to Daylight Saving Time. GoDaddy had nothing to say about it when I checked yesterday, and has nothing now, though it seems that at some point a note about technical difficulties was posted.

Scanning the commentary on various sites yesterday yielded no conclusion. The outage either was, or wasn’t, a denial of service attack unrelated to DST. I never knew which, yesterday, and I still don’t today.

The corollary to “If you are going to be naked, you had better be buff” is clearly not “On a bad buffness day, cover up.”

When the inspector general of the US Department of Justice issues a special report, it tends to make news. The latest report, a dissection of the FBI’s use of “national security letters” under the Patriot Act, is no exception. References to this report are everywhere in the news today. But links to the report are less plentiful.

I made the chart below by scanning the first three pages of Google’s cluster of stories on this topic. After eliminating duplicates, I found 12 sites linking to the original report and 42 sites not linking.

In the blogosophere, you could scarely imagine mentioning a publicly-available report without also linking to it (e.g., Technorati, Bloglines). But in the mainstream media, it’s still the exception rather than rule.

(PS: I went to junior high school with the DOJ’s inspector general, whose name is Glenn Fine. I’ve mused before about the anomaly that makes my web presence so much larger than his. But in the real world, he’s the one who commands the respect of the US attorney general. Way to go, Glenn!)

(PPS: Ryan Tomayko was surprised to see that any of the sites linked to the report. It’s a good point. Things are progressing.)

I met Barry Ribbeck, who’s Director of Systems Architecture and Infrastructure at Rice University, a few years ago at a Dartmouth conference on the deployment of public key infrastructure (PKI) in higher education. I attended that conference several times as an observer, and wrote a couple of InfoWorld columns about it. For today’s podcast I invited Barry to reflect on what’s been happening with token-based authentication, PKI, and identity federation in the realm of higher education.

Near the beginning of our conversation I mentioned that people are spooked by the Real ID initiative, and Barry offered a great perspective. We already have a national — indeed, international — federation of machine-readable identity documents. It’s called the ATM network, and we all use it routinely.

For years, people like Barry Ribbeck have been working toward the same kind of ubiquitous deployment of smartcards and digital certificates. It’s been slow going, and still is, but these folks have a long-term vision and the patience and determination to make it real.

As I go back and forth between Vista and OS X, I’ve been trying to map out the similarities and differences of their respective security models.

On both systems you can be either the administrator or a standard user, but you are never the fully-privileged root, or superuser.

When you want to change a secure setting (like the firewall), or install an application, you have to temporarily elevate your privileges.

On a default OS X system, the administrator can write a secure file or alter a secure setting without being prompted. A standard user who tries to do these things is prompted for an administrator’s name and password.

On my OS X system, as administrator, I’m prompted for name/password even to change a secure system setting, because I’ve checked the Require password to unlock each secure system preference option. Because I’d forgetten that I’d done that, the Apple ads dinging Vista for its chatty security prompts initially made no sense. From my perspective OS X was chattier than Vista.

On a default Vista system, the administrator and standard users are both prompted, but in different ways. For the administrator it’s a click-through dialog, for the standard user it requires (as on OS X) an admin’s name and password.

On my Vista system I’d prefer to mimic the OS X behavior and require a full name/password challenge. I believe that’s possible using the Local Security Policy editor but in my case, since my system is part of a managed domain, I might not be able to make that change myself.

Another thing that initially made no sense to me was that the account on my freshly-installed Vista system came up as an administrator, not as a standard user. That’s because I’d made a faulty conceptual mapping between XP and Vista. On XP, you can try to implement the old Unix best practice of creating and mostly running as a standard user, reserving the root account for occasional privilege elevation. That strategy rarely works, though, and I had initially thought that Vista’s User Account Control (UAC) system was a way to remove the obstacles that prevent it from working.

In fact Vista’s model is less like Unix or XP, where root and administrator mean basically the same thing, and more like OS X where they mean different things.

It would be extremely helpful to me, and I’m sure to many others, to see a comparative chart of exactly what those meanings are. If someone can point to one, that’d be great, because there’s been some confusing semantic drift. That word ‘administrator’: I do not think it means what you think it means.

Despite the separation of root and administrator, the old best practice of relinquishing the administrative account remains available on both OS X and Vista. Given that it’s not the default on either system this is mostly an academic question, but does anyone think that it should still be a best practice? If so, why?

On interesting data point comes from a recent interview in which Charles Torre speaks with UAC gurus Jon Schwartz and Chris Corio. (If, like me, you don’t have 65 minutes of viewing time but do have 65 minutes of listening time, you can find just the audio here.) Towards the end of the interview Jon Schwartz mentions that he considered, and rejected, the idea of setting up his parents’ machine so they’d only be able to log in to user accounts.

Because I’ve lived through the evolution of all this stuff, I still feel a twinge of guilt for running as administrator on both OS X and Vista. But most people never knew why that might be a problem, and now it’s water under the bridge — with one huge exception. There are hordes of people on XP today who will be there for years to come. So while it’s difficult to use standard accounts routinely on XP, anything that can be done to make that strategy more viable will be a huge benefit to everyone.

I’m in the midst of installing a big honking piece of software over a cable modem connection, so it’s taking a while. In order to explore exactly what is taking a while, I’ve been checking out Vista’s Reliability and Performance Monitor. Under the covers it’s still good old perfmon.exe, a system monitoring tool that had me at hello, way back whenever I first saw it, in whatever version of NT that was, maybe the first one.

The name change in Vista refers to a new feature which is mentioned in my podcast with Partha Sundaram about software instrumentation. In addition to all the low-level counters for disk, memory, CPU, and network activity, there’s a view that summarizes the stability of your system and correlates it with application-level events. Last week, for example, I was using a beta third-party application that crashed a half-dozen times. That made the system’s overall reliability dip down in the summary view, and the details reveal why.

In Vista, the default views of the traditional low-level counters are more comprehensive than in XP or in Server 2003. Everything’s correlated to the process that are running, and the files they’re reading or writing. You could learn a whole lot about the internals of Vista by just leaving perfmon running on your second monitor while going about your business.

There was a time when I would have found that mesmerizing. Part of me still does. But most of me cares more about the people I’m communicating with, and the information I’m producing and consuming. And of course the vast majority of people who use personal computers care only about those things.

So as I watch the Reliability and Performance Monitor xray the guts of my system, I’m imagining what it would be like to have an equally capable People and Information Monitor to xray my activities in the infosphere.

It sort of exists, but in a fragmentary way. The Recent Changes view in Vista’s desktop search, which I mentioned the other day, is a step in that direction. It can see into multiple local data siloes — the file system, email, calendars.

Then there all my siloes in the cloud: my blog, various other online services. To the extent these offer RSS feeds I can begin to aggregate them. But there’s no way to really correlate my interactions with people and information across those services, never mind across the desktop/cloud chasm.

Such a thing is conceivable, though. A desktop operating system could monitor the union of local events and network events, could correlate the names and addresses of people and items of information, and could offer visualization and analysis in the realm of people and information rather than CPUs and netcards.

Maybe one person in a hundred, or in a thousand, will ever appreciate a sexy low-level Reliability and Performance Monitor. But a People and Information Monitor? Everybody needs one of those.

Joe Gregorio posted a gem the other day. It’s a little tutorial on how to model a common operation on the web — validating zipcodes — using the principles of the REST architectural style. Along the way, almost certainly without intending to, he taught me some things about the Python programming language that I hadn’t known.

Joe’s example uses two features of Python — memory-mapped files and array bisection — to speed up the search for a zipcode in a sorted file of zipcodes. But you don’t need to know anything about REST or Python to appreciate the aspect of Joe’s example I want to highlight here, which is that when we narrate our work on the web, we may convey more value than we know or intend.

The purpose of Joe’s posting was to show how to apply a recipe for RESTful design, and it accomplishes that nicely. In doing so, Joe is helping to articulate principles that are widely practiced but not always well understood. By reflecting on his knowledge of those principles, by writing them down, and by sharing that writing, Joe makes that knowledge available to the rest of us.

Along the way, other useful things happen. In the dialectic that emerges in the comments section, Richard Searle proposes — and Joe agrees — that the word originally chosen to invoke the validator, lookup, is too verb-like. The recipe calls for nouns, and so the word becomes zipcode instead.

Why did Joe choose lookup initially? Knowledge is imperfect. When we externalize what we know, we can observe and discuss and correct those imperfections. That’s one of the subtle benefits that flow from externalizing knowledge in public performance.

Another is the one I’ve already mentioned. Although I doubt Joe meant to teach me about memory-mapped files and array bisection in Python, he did anyway, as a happy side effect.

When the blogosphere works this way, as it often does, it exemplifies the best qualities of professional discourse. I wish I could show more people how this works. But it’s hard to abstract away from the knowledge domain of this example — RESTful design and Python programming — to general principles that can apply in any knowledge domain.

In the technical blogosphere, we have an almost perfect confluence of factors. Almost everything related to the work of software development — both products (source code) and processes (specifications, conversations) — is a text document that can flow easily and naturally on the web. And our examples are often self-reflexive — we use the web to illustrate work that is about the web itself.

This way of externalizing knowledge in public performance doesn’t translate so easily to other domains, at least not yet. I think that’ll change, though, as all work products and work processes tend toward digital representations. And I think that rich media will play a huge role in that change. Programming is fundamentally a textual craft, as are others, but many are not. If you’re a builder or a firefighter or a pilot, the most effective medium in which to publicly perform your knowledge won’t be text, it’ll be video.

Suppose you’re a builder, firefighter, or pilot who wants to share (and clarify) your knowledge of green construction, rescue operations, or cockpit instrumentation. It’s admittedly a stretch to imagine that, just as Joe Gregorio posted a textual blog entry in order share his knowledge of RESTful design, you’ll post a video in order to to share your knowledge in these areas. But I hope you will imagine it.

When I posted a video clip of Hillary Clinton’s talk at the Keene High School, which I’d TiVo’d from our community access cable station, I wasn’t entirely sure it was OK to do that. But when I asked Lee Perkins who runs Cheshire TV he said absolutely, go for it.

The following week I was puzzled by a New York Times primer on which C-Span videos can, or cannot, be excerpted and reposted. Apparently only the “5 to 15 percent” of C-Span’s programming that’s from the House and Senate floor is considered to be in the public domain. Here was C-Span VP and general counsel Bruce Collins’ explanation:

What I think a lot of people don’t understand — C-Span is a business, just like CNN is,” Mr. Collins said. “If we don’t have a revenue stream, we wouldn’t have six crews ready to cover Congressional hearings.

I wondered about that, but lacked context. Now Carl Malamud has provided the missing context. In a stunning letter to C-Span’s president and CEO Brian Lamb, which includes the above quote, Malamud points out that C-Span is supported not only by its revenues operating as a nonprofit business, but also by “considerable public largesse.” Taxpayers, Malamud argues, are footing the bill for much of the facilities, wiring, and equipment that enable C-Span’s camera crews to do their work.

Malamud concludes:

I thus write to you today with a specific request and a notice:

1. Your inventory shows 6,251 videos of congressional hearings for sale in the C-SPAN store at an average price of $169.50, for a total retail value of approximately $1,059,544. I am offering today to purchase this collection of discs from you for the purpose of ripping and posting on the Internet in a nonproprietary format for reuse by anybody. I understand your store would take a while to process such an order and am willing to place it in stages.
2. I have purchased Disc 192720-1 from the C-SPAN store, ripped more than one minute of video from the disc, and used it for the creation of a news and satirical commentary of compelling public interest and then posted the resulting work at the Internet Archive. I did not ask C-SPAN for a license and I assert fair use of this material.

Mr. Lamb, C-SPAN has been a pioneer in promoting a more open government. You
created a grand bargain with the Cable Industry and the U.S. Congress. When I
created the first radio station on the Internet and was asked why I did so as a non-profit instead of going for the gold like many of my colleagues, my reply has always been that I was inspired by your example.

Your grand bargain has served the American people and the C-SPAN organization well. Holding congressional hearings hostage is not in keeping with your charter, and it is not in keeping with the spirit of that grand bargain you made with the American people. Please re-release this material back into the public domain where it came from so that it will continue to make our public civic life richer.

Wow.

This week’s podcast is a conversation with Terry Swack. She’s a graphic designer, Internet strategist, and serial entrepeneur. In recent years she has focused on helping businesses use the Internet to respond to the growing demand for environmentally sustainable products and services.

One of her projects is Green Building Blocks, a directory of “green” design and building professionals. She’s about to launch Clean Culture, a “customer experience strategy firm” that will help companies explain how they’re advancing the cause of sustainability.

How do you get from graphic design to green construction and clean energy? By following your intuitions, and always learning and doing new things. In the end, everything’s connected.

Yesterday my local newspaper ran an editorial entitled Death to Real ID. That link will turn into a pumpkin in five days, but here’s the intro:

Although the Bush administration today is announcing possible delays in the Real ID program, it’s beginning to look as if New Hampshire could play a role in killing the thing outright. That would be a welcome development.

Real ID, passed by Congress in 2005, is designed to turn state drivers licenses into “electronically readable” national identity cards. As the law now stands, beginning on May 11, 2008, Americans will be required to show the cards before they board airplanes, open bank accounts, collect Social Security payments or receive almost any other government service.

And of course it won’t be long before every huckster and propane salesman in the country will be demanding to examine your Real ID card along with your Social Security number before doing business with you.

Now I rather enjoy New Hampshire’s “Live Free or Die” state motto, and I’m not an uncritical supporter of Real ID, but in the US as a whole, and in New Hampshire in particular, it’s hard to even have a discussion about digital identity and I think that’s a shame.

My letter to the editor, below, does not argue for Real ID. It’s just an effort to avoid foreclosing all discussion on the subject of digital identity. Is it effective? What other arguments would help?

To the editor:

At a moment in history when the President of the United States is asserting that the government has the right to intercept phone calls and emails without a warrant, it’s a good idea to raise the totalitarianism alert level from orange to red. But Real ID isn’t a black and white, or green and red, issue. The Sentinel’s March 1 red flag (“Death to Real ID”) fails to address, or even acknowledge, the complex and evolving story of digital identity.

Real ID, we’re told, “is designed to turn state drivers licenses into ‘electronically readable’ national identity cards” that we’re required to show before boarding planes or accessing bank accounts.

That’s true.

Today, by contrast, our drivers licenses are electronically unreadable national identity cards that we’re required to show in all the same circumstances.

That’s better how?

It’s fascinating to compare our national stance on identity cards, epitomized by New Hampshire’s state motto, with that of other countries. Last fall, at the 40th International Council for Information Technology in Government Administration, I met the guy who runs Belgium’s national ID card program. Belgians are receiving these cards at the rate of 10,000 a month, and will all have them by 2009.

There’s also a youth version of the eID. When Belgian children turn 12, they’ll receive a smartcard and a reader from the government. Americans would regard this program as an Orwellian intrusion. For Belgians, it’s a way to help protect kids without compromising their privacy.

One of the first uses of the youth eIDs will be to prove age to age-restricted web sites. There’s no technical requirement to disclose identity, and a strong cultural preference not to. Kids will need only prove (by knowing the card’s PIN) that they are citizens, and prove (by selectively disclosing their birth date) that they meet the age requirement.

Selective disclosure is one of the privacy-enhancing features that electronic ID cards, unlike regular cards, can offer. When you show your drivers license at the liquor store, for example, all the clerk really needs to know is your birth date. An electronic card can be configured to disclose only that fact, and none of your other personal information.

Phil Windley, who was CIO of Utah and is the author of a leading book on the subject of digital identity, said this in an interview with me last year:

“If you talk to people from a number of countries in Europe, they would just laugh at the idea that we don’t have a national ID. But they would be scared to death of the fact that we don’t have strong privacy laws.”

The issues surrounding digital identity are complex and subtle, but they’re not going away. When the Sentinel reduces those issues to “totalitarianism” and “police-state claptrap” it does readers a disservice.

I’ve been noodling around with search folders in Vista. The one that shows up by default in the shell’s Favorite Links panel, entitled Recently Changed, is of particular interest. Just like the Recent Changes page in a wiki, it’s a nice way to monitor activity in a dynamic system that’s always accreting new stuff.

Good news: The Recently Changed folder is governed by an XML file, in the Searches subdirectory of the home directory, called Recently Changed.search-ms:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<persistedQuery version="1.0">

<viewInfo viewMode="details" iconSize="16">
  <sortList>
    <sort viewField="System.DateModified" direction="descending"/>
  </sortList>
</viewInfo>

<query>
  <conditions>
    <condition type="leafCondition" valuetype="System.StructuredQueryType.DateTime"
    property="System.DateModified" operator="imp"
    value="R00UUUUUUUUZZXD-30NU" propertyType="wstr" />
  </conditions>

<kindList>
  <kind name="document"/>
  <kind name="picture"/>
  <kind name="music"/>
  <kind name="movie"/>
  <kind name="video"/>
  <kind name="note"/>
  <kind name="journal"/>
  <kind name="email"/>
</kindList>

<subQueries>
  <subQuery knownSearch="{4f800859-0bd6-4e63-bbdc-38d3b616ca48}"/>
</subQueries>

</query>
</persistedQuery>

Bad news: I can’t figure out to write my own queries. value="R00UUUUUUUUZZXD-30NU"? What’s up with that? I guess this relates in some way to the advanced query syntax for Windows desktop search. But I can’t find any examples that look like this:

<conditions>
  <condition type="leafCondition" valuetype="System.StructuredQueryType.DateTime"
  property="System.DateModified" operator="gt" value="date:yesterday" />
</conditions>

There must be documentation for this somewhere, but at the moment there are very few hits in any of the search engines for the query: vista persistedquery. That’s a shame. I know that advanced search doesn’t appeal to the masses, but sure does appeal to me.