The Casio Exilim I bought for my wife just arrived. Dropped it into the charging cable and…blinking red light. Won’t charge.

Called the Casio rep, told her the symptom, and she spoke the title of this blog entry.

Me: “And that ‘characteristic’ would be a tendency to be dead on arrival?

She: “Um, basically, yes. We’ll send you another one.”

Glad it wasn’t somebody’s Christmas present.

Last month’s Long Now podcast summarizes the arguments in Gwyneth Cravens’ new book Power to save the world: the truth about nuclear energy. Cravens was a protester against nuclear power in the 1980s. D.R. (“Rip”) Anderson, who knows a thing or two about the subject, changed her mind. In Stewart Brand’s summary of the talk, he notes:

Comparing the environmental footprint of nuclear versus coal was the most persuasive mind-changer for Cravens. Coal involves vast quantities of mine spoil, vast quantities of fuel, vast quantities of pollution (including mercury and uranium), and vast quantities of carbon dioxide poured into the atmosphere. Nuclear, by contrast, uses the most concentrated form of energy in the world, the plants are small, and the waste amounts to one Coke can per person’s lifetime of energy use.

The podcast lays out the big picture in a comprehensive way. I’d like to pretend that none of it surprised me, but that’d be a lie. Although I’ve never been opposed to nuclear power, I’ve never wanted to seriously contemplate a major ramp-up either.

Why not? I guess I have to admit that the confluence of The China Syndrome and Three Mile Island was a mind-changer. And not just for me. It changed the mind of our society.

I wonder what combination of art and circumstance would change our society’s mind on this subject again?

I’ve been continuing to receive requests to update the LibraryLookup bookmarklet generator which, since it’s hosted at InfoWorld, I can no longer maintain. So took a snapshot at jonudell.net/LibraryLookupGenerator.html, and I’ll make updates there. Today, thanks to Betsy Ptak, I added support for a newer version of PowerPac.

While I was at it, I resolved a longstanding annoyance. On Firefox, I was never able to figure out how to ensure that the lookup window would open in front of the current window. Turns out that Michael Moncur found a workaround over two years ago. Apparently it’s still needed in the current version of Firefox, so I rolled it into the generator.

On Friday I’ll be speaking at a Wharton School event on technology-enabled business transformation. I was asked to provide an outline of my talk, and decided to try using Listas to do that. Recently launched as a Live Labs technology preview, Listas is different things to different people:

Webware: It’s basically a social bookmarking service for keeping track of content you come across while browsing the Web.

BetaNews: The application can be used not only for lists, but for notes, favorites and other communal types of information.

WebPro News: Listas provides you with a WYSIWYG which allows you to quickly and easily create/edit lists and share them with others for read or write – in a sense a bit like a wiki.

Although none of those reviews describes Listas as a web-based outliner, it is one. You don’t get drag-and-drop list reorganization, as with iJot or some others. And it currently exports RSS only, not OPML. But you can shuffle things around using the toolbar controls. And there are also some keyboard controls: you can use tab and shift-tab to indent and outdent. It was easy enough to make an outline of my talk.

As always when I try a new outliner, I find myself asking: Why don’t I make regular use of outlining? I believe that I should, and whenever I do feel virtuous, but it never becomes a habit. After all these years, and many different outliners, I don’t think that’s because the software lacks some magical feature that would convert me into a regular user. I suspect that outlining appeals to a cognitive style that’s more well-developed in some people than others, and I’m one of the others.

For this week’s ITConversations show I interviewed Mike Caulfield about BlueHampshire.com, the influential New Hampshire political blog that he, Laura Clawson, and Dean Barker started a year ago. The lessons that Mike has learned will be of particular interest to folks who might want to launch political blogs for other state or local communities, but his advice will also be useful to anyone who wants to nurture online community participation.

One of the points that resonates strongly with me: Don’t say the last word. Like me, Mike enjoys doing a comprehensive analysis of an issue and writing a definitive piece laying out his conclusions. But he noticed that when he did that, it tended to be a conversation stopper. People read the essay, but didn’t feel there was anything they could add.

So instead, he’s learned to plant seeds that can grow. A smaller, less finished posting to which others can add may wind up being more influential than a polished essay, because it engages a community of contributors.

Another lesson learned: Reward those contributors, early and often, with attention. it’s crucial to acknowledge their contributions, and to feature them in prominent locations on a site.

Regular listeners will notice that the audio sounds a bit different this time. That’s because Mike lives in my town, so we were able to record face to face. And thereby hangs a funny tale. Mike’s allergic to my house (well, to the cats in it), so we thought we’d find a room at the public library where we could record without disturbing patrons. It would have been a perfect demonstration of the notion, which I advanced in my recent Remixing the library talk, that public libraries can become centers of production as well as of consumption.

But nothing doing. Meeting rooms were available, but not to us, not for this purpose. We were directed to the second floor landing, far enough away from the main hall so as not to disturb patrons. There, surrounded by locked and dark meeting rooms — gorgeous richly paneled rooms! — we sat and recorded the interview. Hence the faint echo you’ll hear in the recording. That second floor landing is a large space, not ideal for audio recording.

I know the library was only following its rules. Those rooms are for non-commercial groups whose meetings are open to the public. But I rarely see them occupied, and I’d like to think that recording a podcast about BlueHampshire.com for ITConversations.com would be a qualifying use.

Seriously, think about it. Where, in our society, can people get together in a public venue to do this kind of productive work? Restaurants and coffee shops shouldn’t be the only answer.

Today’s podcast with Sean Nolan, chief architect for HealthVault, continues the discussion that began two weeks ago with Peter Neupert, VP of Microsoft’s Health Solutions Group.

Topics discussed in this podcast include:

• Trust relationships between HealthVault and partner applications
• Current status of, and future prospects for, personal health monitoring devices that can connect to HealthVault
• Ways people can use HealthVault: directly through personal devices and third-party web applications, indirectly through cooperating healthcare providers
• Conformance to existing and emerging standards for the exchange of health information
• Synergy between HealthVault and health.live.com

Although it is not yet evident to many people, HealthVault is a really big deal. “We are not a PHR [personal health record] application,” Sean Nolan says. Instead, he likens HealthVault to eBay. It’s an enabler for an ecosystem of products and services. Of course while both eBay and HealthVault create new marketplaces for existing products and services, HealthVault will also enable some new things not otherwise possible.

Here’s a small but telling example. If you’ve had one heart attack, weight gain is a strong predictor of a second one. A bathroom scale that can transmit readings to HealthVault could alert you to that imminent threat and perhaps save your life. But that’s only possible when there’s an ecosystem like the one HealthVault aims to bootstrap.

If we can get that ecosystem bootstrapped, the conversation — which is today, appropriately, very much focused on privacy and security — will take an interesting turn. Would you make your data available, in an anonymized form, for the sorts of aggregated analysis of treatments, procedures, and outcomes that could improve the quality and lower the cost of health care for everyone?

Some earlier items and commentary on HealthVault can be found here and here.

It’s coming up on two years since I shelved a book idea on the professional uses of blogging. What I mean by that isn’t paid blogging, but rather blogging that represents your professional identity, narrates your work, and connects you to colleagues, to clients, and to the world at large.

I shelved the plan because I didn’t feel confident that the message would resonate with the vast majority who live outside the web 2.0 bubble, and I think that’s probably still true today. But I’m still mulling the idea, and when I find good examples of people who are using the blog medium in the way I think a great many professionals could be using it, I add them to this list: del.icio.us/judell/professionalblog.

Although recent additions to that list include Mike Leavitt, former Utah governor¹, now U.S. secretary for health and human services, and John Halamka, the superstar health CIO, I’m really more interested in tracking professional blogs by the kinds of folks I mentioned in my original posting:

• The coffee shop owner
• The public works engineer
• The middle-school teacher

If you know of good examples of professional blogs written by these kinds of folks, and are inclined to bookmark them or blog them with the tag professionalblog, I’ll catch them at this combined feed.

¹ Former Utah CIO Phil Windley, a pioneer professional blogger, first introduced Mike Leavitt to the idea of blogging.

I haven’t had a chance to test-drive Twine, which is Radar Networks’ still-unreleased “Revolutionary Semantic Web Application,” but I’ve read Tim O’Reilly’s writeup based on a demo he saw, and I’ve been meaning to amplify something that appeared in a comment there. Jeffrey Carr wrote:

I really don’t see anything unique in what Twine has released so far. ClearForest, for example, has offered a Firefox add-on that does the same entity extraction for any web page that your Twine screenshot illustrates, and they had that available several months ago.

Like Tim O’Reilly I’ll reserve judgment on Twine until I’ve tried it myself, and seen it operate at scale. I did, however, recently try the Firefox extension that Jeffrey Carr mentions. It’s called Gnosis, from ClearForest, a company recently acquired by Reuters.

Here’s a picture of Gnosis summarizing Tim’s posting:

Gnosis finds and highlights entities — that is, companies, people, products, and industry terms. Here’s an expanded view of the industry terms, products, and technologies it extracted:

I’d love to see this kind of entity extraction turn into a commodity service that we can wire into our existing email, blogging, social networking, and social bookmarking systems. Being able to easily express, in all those contexts, that twine refers to the company, or the product, not the strong kind of string, would be a huge win.

Here’s a picture of the output from a curious little application:

It’s a picture of Firefox poised to subscribe, in Bloglines, to an RSS feed that monitors keystroke and mouse activity on my notebook PC. As indicated by the stats — 281 keystrokes and no clicks — I was busily writing during the 60-second interval captured in that snapshot. I was writing this entry, in fact.

How will Bloglines be able to read this feed, which originates on my PC? One solution would be to push the feed from my PC to some location in the cloud that Bloglines can access.

That’s not what’s happening here. Bloglines is talking to a service in the cloud. But that service is a relay based on the Internet service bus technology discussed in my interview with John Shewchuk. On the other end of the relay is my notebook PC, running a service that listens for incoming requests and, on demand, reports keyboard and mouse activity.

That reporting service is a desktop application that combines BizTalk Services with a systemwide mouse/keyboard monitor. When I launch it, I authenticate — using CardSpace, not username/password credentials — to the cloud-based relay. Then the application listens for feed requests coming in from the relay. Meanwhile, every sixty seconds, it summarizes my mouse and keyboard activity. When a request does come in from the relay, it materializes the feed with a single item containing that summary.

Here are some of the implications of this scenario:

• Although it’s behind a firewall, the application can still respond to inbound requests.
• If my PC is online and running the application, the feed will report my activity for the last minute. Otherwise, it’ll report nothing.
• Even when the application is unavailable, if it was intermittently accessible to Bloglines or another feedreader, snapshots will appear there as frequently as the feedreader was able to contact the PC.
• If I close my PC to travel downtown or cross-country, the feed will stop responding. But when I flip open the PC at a new destination, the feed will resume at its canonical URL.

I don’t think I’ll leave this feed running. The BizTalk Services substrate on which it depends is still a preview; my mouse/keyboard monitor is a tad flaky; the scenario is obviously contrived.

But it’s a powerful reminder of the peer-to-peer experimentation I was doing almost a decade ago. I asked then:

Peer-to-peer Web computing is the future. Why not start exploring the possibilities now?

A couple of years later, that idea became red hot. Then it cooled off again. And while there have been some notable P2P apps — Groove, BitTorrent, Skype — the cloud’s where most of the action is today.

But the pendulum always swings. And when it swings back toward peer-to-peer computing again, those peers will sometimes be service endpoints. The services they provide will be different from the ones running in the cloud, but complementary to them.

For example, my contrived demo suggests a local service that helps you gauge my interruptibility. Keyboard and mouse activity is a rough but not unreasonable proxy for that. If you see a lot of clicks and not much typing, you might conclude that I’m just reading feeds or email, and decide it’s OK to call me or IM me. Conversely if you see that I’m typing furiously, you might decide not to.

What about my privacy? Well, this isn’t an either/or scenario. The desktop and the cloud are in cahoots, connected by a service fabric — in this case, Biztalk Services — that I’ll use to declare who gets access to my activity feed.

That feed can say a lot more about me than my rate of typing and clicking. It could show you that I’m editing a podcast, or doing research, or talking on a VoIP channel. If it were really clever, it would hide the details of these activities but help me categorize and prioritize them, and publish just those categories and priorities.

It’s appropriate for some of this interaction data to live in the cloud. But as desktop, laptop, and handheld devices become capable service endpoints, it will also be appropriate for some of that data, along with the services associated with the data, to live at the edge.

My guest for this week’s ITConversations podcast is Stuart Weibel, a researcher for the OCLC (Online Computer Library Center) who’s now a scholar in residence at the University of Washington. We talked about Stu’s decade of involvement with the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative¹, and about the nature and uses of the OCLC’s WorldCat database. Note: Stu speaks softly and I didn’t compensate for that as well as I should have, so parts of this podcast are hard to hear.

We share an interest in canonical names for web resources, and Stu mentioned that an OCLC identifier is arguably the most canonical way to refer to a book — more so than an ISBN, or an Amazon or other bookseller’s URL. So for example, the OCLC handle for my book is:

http://worldcat.org/oclc/43188074

If you want to refer to books that way, it’s handy to use the WorldCat search provider. When I visited that page I found a Firefox plugin but none for IE7, so I made one here, which actually turns out to work for both Firefox and IE7.

Among other things, WorldCat embodies the xISBN service that I’ve used in several versions of LibraryLookup including this RSS-based alerter. If you visit the above WorldCat URL, you’ll see that my book has two ISBNs: one for the print edition, one for the Safari Books Online edition. Using WorldCat’s advanced search you can search for either of those ISBNs and land on the canonical record for the book.

This is an example of what I’ve come to call an equivalence service, by which I mean a service that maps from various representations of a resource to a canonical representation.

Another such equivalence service is WorldCat Identities, which distinguishes between me, the Jon Udell who writes about Internet technologies:

http://orlabs.oclc.org/Identities/lccn-nb99-99357

And Jon G. Udell who writes about economics:

http://orlabs.oclc.org/Identities/lccn-n82-53290

In every domain, of course, there can be competing or overlapping equivalence services. Who gets to run them? On what authority? These are political and economic questions that will be sorted out in the usual ways. If we can make equivalence services as easy to swap in as search providers, that’ll help.

¹ By the way, it’s Dublin, Ohio, the home base of OCLC, not Dublin, Ireland.

Scott Hanselman asks a critical question:

I know you’re the IT Department for your family, Dear Reader. This is our charge and ours to bear happily, but are you also the Web Bullsh*t detector?

How do you protect your friends and family from these things? How do you teach Web Savvy?

The example that Scott cites is instructive. His mom asked about the recirculating rumor that cell phone numbers are being released to telemarketers. In finding and evaluating the FTC website that refutes the claim, Scott reflexively uses a strategy that Anne Zelenka calls orienteering which entails the use — and critical assessment — of a plurality of information sources and tools.

Although it won’t help Scott’s mom or mine, I think we need to teach the principles of orienteering early, starting in grade school. One of my pet peeves in the whole discussion about “digital immigrants” versus “digital natives” is the presumption that the natives — i.e., younger folk who grew up with the web — are innately savvy. I don’t buy that. My sense is that for a whole lot of natives, critical inquiry ends at the first page of search results, or the Wikipedia entry.

Meanwhile, we need to realize that immigrants — like Scott’s mom, and mine, and a lot of older educators — do in many cases possess the necessary critical skills. They’re just disoriented by the infosphere, and unsure how to apply those skills in online contexts. That’s why I like Anne’s word ‘orienteering’ so much. Life is a game of orienteering that immigrants can often play more effectively than natives. If we could find the right way to have the conversation, learning could flow in both directions across this generation gap.

Update: Just now my wife showed me a phishing attempt that gave her a moment’s pause. She’s very savvy when it comes to search and critical assessment, and normally would have blown this off, but in this case — for the first time in her experience — the attempt purportedly came from a bank she actually does business with.

Now here’s the funny thing. In spite of what I just said above, my first response was to show her the email headers and point out the obvious mismatch between the purported and actual sender. Wrong, wrong, wrong! She doesn’t need to do that. She only needs to trust her own instincts. In this case the email said:

You are requested to follow the provided steps and update your Online Banking details, for the safety of your accounts by clicking Account Update. However, failure to do so may result to temporary account suspension.

Her comment was: “I can’t read those email headers. All I know is that my bank wouldn’t threaten me that way.” Setting aside the grammatical weirdness, it’s the coercion that tipped her. You don’t need to know how to read email headers. You just need to trust your coercion detector, and know that nothing that happens online invalidates it.

On the eve of this year’s Keene Pumpkin Festival, the buzz is starting to build. For those who will never visit Keene, and for those who live here but will avoid the madness, here’s my short documentary film from 2005 which, if I do say so myself, captures the essence of event very nicely.

Back in February I noted that Photo Gallery can embed metadata — including tags — directly into images. One implication of this “truth in the file” strategy was that photos tagged on the desktop in Photo Gallery would someday be able to carry their tags with them when uploaded to Flickr. Today is that day. The latest beta refresh of Photo Gallery introduces a tag-preserving Flickr upload feature. Excellent!

There is, of course, no absolute truth in this game of tag. From Photo Gallery’s perspective, not all image formats are created equal. Some are friendlier than others to the embedding of metadata. So while you can tag both a JPEG and a PNG image in Photo Gallery, the tags have different relationships to the photos. In the case of the JPEG, the tag lives inside the image file. In the case of the PNG, it lives in an external data store.

It was already the case that a tag assigned to a PNG image would not survive a trip through your local recycle bin. For the same reason, a tag assigned to a PNG image will not survive a trip to Flickr.

What about the reverse trip? If you download a tagged JPEG from Flickr, will Photo Gallery see the tag? So far as I can determine, no. (Update: As per kellan’s comment below, the largest size of your photo — and the one you’re likeliest to want to fetch back — is unmodified and does retain the tag.)

It follows from these observations that there is no straightforward way to synchronize your cloud-based tag vocabulary with your local tag vocabulary. If these evolve, they will diverge.

Mind you, I’m not complaining. There really is no practical solution to this problem. I’m delighted that we’ve taken this first step, not only because it offers real practical benefit but also because it will get more people thinking about how we might want to manage our self-assigned metadata in a decentralized world.

Here’s what I envision. In a hosted lifebits scenario, every chunk of bits I produce — on the desktop or in the cloud — has a canonical, globally-unique, and cloud-accessible name, along with one or more representations and associated pieces of metadata. When I upload a photo to Flickr I don’t transfer the bits that directly represent the photo. Instead I transfer that canonical name. When Flickr or another service needs to materialize a representation of the photo, it sources the image data from one of my hosted representations. These services likewise syndicate my metadata, including tags, so that when my tag vocabulary evolves, it evolves everywhere.

I know, I know, there is a crazy amount of stuff that would need to happen in order to make this possible. But it would be good stuff, for users and for service providers, and I can’t help imagining what it would be like.

In response to some questions about creating standalone HealthVault applications, Eric Gunnerson responds on the HealthVault blog:

With client applications, we can verify what user account is being used, but we can’t verify which application they’re using. Given the importance of maintaining the privacy of health data, that makes us concerned.

There are, of course, cryptographic protocols that could be used to verify a client application. And the kinds of folks who read this blog are among the most likely to be able to make reliable use of those protocols. But I can appreciate the dilemma. The archetypal user of HealthVault is a mom who functions as a family’s health manager. How are you going to walk her through the protocols necessary to assure that a client application she downloads from the Net is properly certified for use with HealthVault? A screwup isn’t just her problem, of course. It’s a big time problem for HealthVault. Eric concludes:

In the longer term, it may be possible to construct an application verification that is sufficiently trustworthy to grant access similar to what web applications get.

Does anyone think this problem is more tractable in the near term? If so, how?

There is, meanwhile, this interesting twist:

In the short term, we are considering allowing partners to build client applications that only have write privs – applications could use them to add data to HealthVault, but wouldn’t be able to read any data (an interesting case where write access is less privileged than read access). This would allow developers to write applications such as data importers.

A curious inversion indeed. HealthVault is going to create all kinds of fascinating thought experiments.

Erin McKean, whose favorite word is erinaceous, and whose ALL YOUR TEXT ARE BELONG TO US Pop!Cast is not to be missed, has a brief message today about neologism. Even more briefly:

Give it a shot. Not all your new words will survive, but neither do all your new ideas!

As an unrepentant neologizer I completely agree. There are multiple benefits to word coinage. New vocabulary not only expands our repertoire of concepts, but is also easily tracked as it swirls through the infosphere.

I consider the tags we now routinely invent for conferences are an important class of neologism. For example, I proposed GRL2020 for the future-of-libraries summit I recently attended. Now I’m subscribed to an RSS feed that notifies me whenever any of a blended set of tagging services reports a new GRL2020-tagged item.

Our newfound ability to observe and measure the mutation of language is truly one of the wonders of the modern world.

As I was synching the podcast feed for this LibriVox essay collection, to keep me company on a long walk tonight, I was reminded of a wart in the feed generator. The auto-generated filenames are just auto-incremented book names. That’s not so bad when you’re listening to a chapter book, but pretty lame when you’re sampling a collection. I don’t want to see:

01_librivox_nonfiction_collection

02_librivox_nonfiction_collection

03_librivox_nonfiction_collection

Instead I want to see:

What Is Enlightenment? by Immanuel Kant

Deity and Design by Chapman Cohen

Escape by Christopher Benson

What idiot wrote that feed generator?

Oh yeah. Me.

If someone wants to improve this before I can find the time, just go for it. The LibriVox crew would really appreciate it, and so would I.

I spend a lot of time recording and editing audio interviews for two shows: ITConversations and Perspectives. I also do a lot of interview-style screencasts. I’ve been meaning to write up a FAQ for interviewees, so here goes.

Preparation

As the interviewee, you need not prepare anything. Your life is the preparation. You might, however, want to help me prepare, by referring me to background materials that I may not already know about. I don’t show up with a script in mind, but I do like to be as informed as I can be.

Recording

My preference is that you use a landline, not a cellphone or a speakerphone. If you have a strong preference for Skype, I can accommodate.

Either way, it’s ideal if you can make a decent recording of your half of the call — for example, by using a USB microphone plugged into your computer, or a standalone digital audio recorder — and convey that recording to me as uncompressed audio. It’s easy to splice the two halves of the conversation together in post-production, and if you got a decent result on your end, the combined result will be way better than any current scheme for squirting audio through a long-haul network. If the local recording doesn’t pan out, we’ll just fall back to the phone recording that will occur in parallel.

Editing

As discussed in this essay on the audio digital darkroom, I’m fairly aggressive about editing audio interviews. As a result, you and I will come out sounding somewhat better than we really are. I do this out of respect both for the listeners’ attention, and for the importance of the ideas we’re discussing.

The amount of editing varies from show to show. Some hour-long interviews have produced twenty-minute shows, other hour-long interviews have produced fifty-five-minute shows. I would say the compression is normally in the ten-to-fifteen-percent range. In all cases, I apply one rule: Focus on the most interesting and important stuff. Interviewees have so far always been pleased with the results.

One of the useful consequences of this approach is that, since you know there’s a safety net, you can relax, there’s no pressure to perform flawlessly, and we can work together to capture the interesting and important stuff.

Mike Caulfield points to this video which, he says, “does a nice job of showing what a museum a university education has become.” The large lecture hall shown in that video certainly reinforces the point. Seeing it reminds me of a telling episode this past April. I was writing about Darwin and I recalled something I’d heard in a biology lecture I’d heard the previous spring on one of the Berkeley podcasts.

I went back to the site and wound up referring to the current year’s version of that lecture in video form. As I scrubbed back and forth on the timeline looking for the part I remembered, my daughter — who was then between high school and college — watched over my shoulder. Eventually she said: “So, the students just sit there?”

That was the first of three revelations. The second was my realization that I’d certainly absorbed those lectures more fully on a series of bike rides, breathing fresh air and soaking up sunshine, than had the students sitting in the lecture hall.

The third revelation came when I found the part I was looking for, and realized that it wasn’t as good as last year’s version, which had been overwritten by the current version.

I love university life. I’d give anything to have had the tools we have today — for recording, research, communication, and collaboration — back when I was in school. If I had a year off, I’d want to spend a chunk of it in an academic environment, experiencing it in ways that were never before possible. I’d use the same strategy I apply to tech conferences: absorb most of the packaged content out of band, and seek to maximize high-value personal interaction. My guess is that as more students begin to expect that — and as parents, who can now peer into the institution as never before, and actually see what they’re paying for, also begin to expect it — universities will adapt.

The most inspirational story I’ve read about college lately is this New York Times magazine article about Olin College, a clean-slate redesign of an engineering school:

The result is a school with no academic departments or tenure, and one that emphasizes entrepreneurship and humanities as well as technical education. Its method of instruction has more in common with a liberal arts college, where the focus is on learning how to learn, than with a standard engineering curriculum. “How can you possibly provide everything they need in their knapsack of education to sustain them in their 40-year career?” [president Richard K.] Miller asked. “I think those days are over. Learning the skill of how to learn is more important than trying to fill every possible cup of knowledge in every possible discipline.”

Also notable in that issue was this Rick Perlstein essay about how college, as a discrete experience outside the flow of normal life, is coming to an end:

To me, to Doug Mitchell, to just about anyone over 30, going to college represented a break, sometimes a radical one and our immediate postcollege lives represented a radical break with college. Some of us ended up coming back to the neighborhood partly for that very fact: nostalgia for four years unlike any we had experienced or would experience again. Not for these kids.

Hamilton Morris, with his hip, creative parents, is an extreme case of a common phenomenon: college without the generation gap. (As I write this at a coffee shop near campus, a kid picks up her cellphone — “Hi, Dad!” — and chats amiably for 15 minutes. “When we went to college,” a dean of students who was a freshman in 1971 tells me, “you called on Sunday — the obligatory 30-second phone call on the dorm phone — and you hoped not to hear from them for the rest of the week.”)

Morris is an exaggeration too of another banal new reality. You used to have to go to college to discover your first independent film, read your first forbidden book, find freaks like yourself who shared, say, a passion for Lenny Bruce. Now for even the most provincial students, the Internet, a radically more democratic and diverse culture — and those hip baby-boomer parents — take care of the problem.

A good thing? A bad thing? Probably both. It was a great essay.

PS: I almost couldn’t find that Rick Perlstein essay. It bugs me when magazines work so hard to put together a thematic issue, like that NY Times Magazine college issue, and then scatter the stories online. You guys worked hard on that issue! It has thematic integrity! Why not publish the table of contents and link each article to it?Here was the search strategy I had to employ:

1. Find the Olin article
2. Note the date: September 30 2007
3. Search the Times archive for September 30 2007
4. Restrict that search to the magazine section

In the realm of software services we can pretty much connect everything to everything because, as Sam Ruby’s tagline says, it’s just data. But subtle wrinkles emerge when you join things together. Case in point: the Twitter application for Facebook, which synchronizes the blurbs you post to Twitter with the status updates you post to Facebook. That’s what it’s supposed to do, anyway, I’m not sure it’s working properly, but never mind, the point is that the contexts are subtly different.

On Twitter, for example, the subtitle of this entry comes out looking like this:

That sort of one-liner is fine on Twitter. But on Facebook, it comes out looking like this:

Not so good. Facebook’s ‘is’ wants to be followed by a present participle (‘thinking’) or an adjective (‘happy’). So to write this blurb in a service-independent way, it should probably be:

Thinking about how it all depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is.

That makes for a better Facebook update, but a worse Twitter tweet. And what about initial capitalization? Good for Twitter, bad for Facebook.

So what’s a post-modern epigrammatist to do? Write epigrams that play well in both venues? Optimize for one over the other? Convene a standards group to hammer out agreements about capitalization and the use of participles?

Sillier things have happened. But there’s a serious lesson here for technologists who, like me, love to stitch services together. Just because we can doesn’t mean that we should. Facebook’s ‘is’ invites a mode of discourse that is importantly different from Twitter’s. I’m not sure I’ll invest heavily in either of those modes but, to the extent I do explore them, I’m going to use each in its own way.

The genesis for this week’s ITConversations show was an offhand remark that Dmitri Williams made to Joi Ito at this year’s Social Computing Symposium. Both of these guys are avid World of Warcraft players who also think, write, and speak professionally about the emerging dynamics of collaborative online gameplay. Comparing notes on the difficulty of recruiting and retaining a capable raid leader, Dmitri mentioned how pleased he has been with his guild’s current occupant of that crucial role. “And the thing that amazes me,” Dmitri said, “is that Jake’s only seventeen.”

What amazed me was Dmitri’s amazement. Why should anyone be surprised that a competent online gamer is seventeen? But from Dmitri’s perspective, the role of raid leader demands qualities of judgment, tact, social skill, and grace under pressure that you’d normally expect to find only in a more mature and seasoned person.

At the symposium the next day, Joi Ito spoke about his use of World of Warcraft as a laboratory in which to, as Stanford management professor Bob Sutton puts it, prototype new organizational forms. On his blog, Bob Sutton writes:

Modern organizational life is increasingly an online game, but the modern organizational form hasn’t caught up yet.

Never having been an MMORPG player myself, I’m in no position to evaluate the extent to which these environments can help people develop real organizational and leadership skills. So I invited Dmitri Williams to discuss the proposition, and he in turn invited his raid leader, Jake, a.k.a George Vickers. Although neither makes extravagant claims for the real-world uses of in-world skills, it’s hard not to conclude that there’s value in an experience that requires the player to assess personalities, recruit talent, manage complex scheduling and logistics, resolve interpersonal conflict, and nurture long-term career development.

Back in June I wished that ITConversations, where my weekly podcast appears, and its sister channel Social Innovation Conversations, could get mashed together. Thanks to the indefatigable Doug Kaye, my wish is granted. The backstory is here, and it involved a ton of hard integration work, but this blurb I found today on the Social Innovation Conversations site illustrates the result I was hoping for:

The blurb appears on this page, which introduces one of a series of extraordinary talks by Amory Lovins that I’ve been listening to over the past week or so. (The others so far published appear in the above blurb.) I love the fact that my interview with Ned Gulley shows up in that list. Although there’s no obvious connection between Ned Gulley and Amory Lovins, I see both as technologists and social innovators, and I’d describe all of the guests on my show in the same way. Until recently, there was no easy way for ITConversations listeners to discover SIConversations shows, and vice versa. It’s great to see the cross-pollination starting to happen.

The Amory Lovins series is particularly interesting in this regard. He is this year’s MAP/Ming visiting professor for energy and the environment at Stanford. From the announcement:

Amory B. Lovins, cofounder and CEO of the Colorado-based Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) will speak at a one-of-a-kind series of nightly lectures focusing on energy efficiency.

It really is a one-of-a-kind experience. What you will hear, in these talks, is the distillation of a lifetime of experience in the creative optimization of the use of energy. The principles are all laid out in Natural Capitalism: integrative design, whole-system engineering, radical resource productivity, tunneling through the cost barrier. But it’s something else again to hear Lovins pile up the case studies, one after another, in a plain-spoken but cumulatively overwhelming stream of revelatory common sense.

So, to take just one example, shorter and fatter and straighter pipes, along with variable speed motors instead of valves, will reduce friction — and thus energy use — in pumping systems. But there are complementary benefits: the pipes are easier to install and insulate, they occupy less space, they require less maintenance.

To those of us who live and breathe software, this dance of optimizations will sound very familiar. We understand performance tradeoffs, refactoring, and the value of shedding complexity.

We understand these things because our industry began its life in a regime of scarcity. The critical resources — compute cycles, storage, pixels, bandwidth — were always in short supply. We always had to focus on doing more with less.

Until recently, that is. Efficiency still matters, but increasingly there are big payoffs for designs that assume resources are, or will soon become, abundant. (Excluding energy, of course, which we are now for the first time considering how to optimize.)

It’s a weird crossover because as we transition from scarcity to abundance, the disciplines that Amory Lovins concerns himself with — construction, heating and cooling, transportation — are going the other way. In those disciplines, designs could always assume resource abundance and now must adjust to scarcity.

This leads to a pair of questions. First, what can those of us who have long practiced scarcity-driven optimization teach those who are only now coming to it? Second, what can they teach us about how — and how not — to exploit abundance?

Is there a service that will deliver a feed containing the union of tagged items for one tag across a set of various services? For example, the union of:

Easy to do, I suppose, but I don’t want to reinvent a wheel.

Doc Searls likes the idea behind HealthVault, if not the name. Along with Joe Andrieu, he’s asking reasonable questions and making reasonable comments. Although I did interview Peter Neupert about the project, I don’t have any other privileged insight into how it works. But here’s what I’ve discovered by poking around.

Comment: I’m not sure how this is going to work for non-obsessed civilians. Which is to say, filling it with useful data takes work, a lot of it manual.

So far, I’ve only been able to manually inject data by way of peer applications. I’ve tried two: USWellness and PureWellness. Automatic injection can happen in a couple of ways. If you own a connectable home health device, like a blood pressure monitor, you can squirt its data into the vault. Or, if your doctor or hospital uses a cooperating clinical application, it can squirt data into the vault. I’ve yet to experience either of these modes, or talk to anyone who has.

Question: How can I get data out again?

A: For each category of data, there’s an Export Data link that produces a CSV (comma-separated variable) file. So for example, I just recorded a single blood pressure entry, and here’s the data:

“wc-id”,”wc-version”,”wc-note”,”wc-tags”,”wc-date”,”wc-type”,”wc-typeid”,”wc-source”,”wc-brands”,”when”, “systolic”,”systolic-in-mmHg”,”diastolic”,”diastolic-in-mmHg”,”pulse”,”pulse-in-bpm”
“4e028a05-8cfb-4d94-9a8e-c708efa75ceb”,”2cf7cc76-d880-4c33-8ae9-b70b39e3d5ab”,””,””,”2007-10-09″,”Blood Pressure Measurement”,”ca3c57f4-f4c1-4e15-be67-0a3caf5414ed”,””,””,”2007-10-09 00:00:00″, “120 mm Hg”,”120″,”80 mm Hg”,”80″,””,””

That’s the interactive way of getting data out, and it comes out in a form that a regular person could use — for example, in a spreadsheet. For programmers, there are a whole bunch of information types defined — vital signs, weight, glucose, many more — and each inherits a GetItemXml method from a parent class.

Question: Is there an API that will allow me, at my discretion, to share the data with parties of my own choice?

Yes. For both USWellness and PureWellness, I had to grant access to my vault. The permissions they requested, and I gave them, are:

USWellness: View, update, create and delete Aerobic Exercise Session, Blood Glucose Measurement, Blood Pressure Measurement or Vital Signs.

PureWellness: View, update and create Aerobic Exercise Session, Blood Glucose Measurement, Blood Pressure Measurement, Daily Dietary Intake or Weight Measurement.

In these cases, I used these applications to inject data into the vault. That is, I created a blood pressure record in USWellness, and some weight records in PureWellness, and then asked those applications to synch the data to my vault. Later I revoked their access, and the data was retained — in both places, actually, which leads to the next question:

Question: What if any of my data, or data about my data, is locked out of my control? That is, what cannot be copied out or removed by me?

It looks like I can delete everything in my vault. The deletions, however, are retained in the change log which is accessible only to the Custodian — i.e., the family’s health data manager. I don’t know whether the change log can be purged short of cancelling the account.

A related question is: What happens in the peer system when you delete a HealthVault record? In the examples I’ve tried, it sticks around. In other words, after deleting my PureWellness-originated weight records from HealthVault, they were still present in PureWellness. I’d have to delete them there too if I wanted a complete purge.

Question: Is this a system that only works with Microsoft-approved “partners” of one kind or another?

The Go Live document sez: “You must work with the HealthVault Business Development team to author a partnership agreement. You can kick off this process by emailing HVBD@microsoft.com.”

Question: Does the system welcome the development of standard mechanisms by which my doctor and other health care providers can put data into my “vault”?

Yes. It’s a platform with an SDK and a developer’s guide and all that kinda stuff.

Comment: I would like my future diagnoses and treatments to be copied, by my permission, from my provider into the “vault”. I would also like be able to share that data, at my discretion, with other providers should the need arise.

That’s the whole idea.

Comment: Far as I know these systems are not yet in place, or fully in place. Whether they are or not, I would like them to be built on open standards and to use open data types, rather than ones controlled by Microsoft or any other company.

It’s brand new, and there are as yet only a few early partners. Regarding standards and formats, Peter Neupert says in the interview:

We have used data standards, where we could find them, that were generally accepted, and we’ve deployed many of those. The one we’re using for the discharge summary is called CCR, which isn’t quite an official standard yet, and is a fairly loosely described XML format, but will be useful enough, and better than not having anything. So much has gotten stuck in trying to put all the semantic meaning into the structure, whereas having the information is really valuable in and of itself. So we’ve been very pragmatic in taking standards where we could find them, and saying, it’s going to be valuable for us to implement them. And we have an extensible environment so it’s easy for us to add as we go along, and we know we’ve got a lot more to add.

Doc concludes:

If HealthVault is yet another system for creating dependencies that trap individuals into coercive relationships, it will fail. If it’s a system that brings a new and better way for patients to relate to health care providers — without trapping the patient inside a closed system — that would be cool.

None of us will know what it’s really going to be like until we’ve interacted, over time, with participating providers and (in some cases) connected devices. But in my view the goal is laudable, the architecture is correct, and coolness is attainable.

Last week at the Global Research Library 2020 conference I gave a talk that wound up being more about the role of public libraries in civic life than about the role of research libraries in academic life. I hope there was enough thematic overlap to have made the talk useful for the participants who attended.

I’ve posted a written version of the talk here: Remixing the library. It ties together a number of threads I’ve been pursuing: lightweight integration of information services, the hyperlocal web, and the emergence and use of public data. I’d be curious to know what folks think of the idea, presented in this talk, that libraries can play an important role not only as curators of existing information resources, but also as advisers to individuals and organizations as they increasingly create new resources.

In this week’s ITConversations podcast, Ned Gulley — who is the organizer of The MathWorks’ semi-annual programming contest — reflects on the lessons he has learned about how to design problems that elicit the optimal mix of cooperation and competition.

In a 2004 ACM paper Ned wrote:

Our contests resemble a wiki in the sense that anyone can modify any of the code on display. As with wikis, the result is a fertile meeting of the minds, and a model for successful collaborative design.

Players enjoy the social and collaborative aspects of the contest, and they value the ideas and techniques they learn as they participate, but they are also intensely motivated to compete and win:

In the Matlab contest your performance is measured objectively, quickly and often, on a level playing field, against real competitors. Pride in your programming prowess is quickly confirmed or corrected. There is egotistical gratification in seeing your name at the top of the board, and there is crushing disappointment when your pet algorithm fails or is beaten by a better programmer.

I hate to talk about it in terms of winning and losing but I can’t come to any other conclusion – a major part of the fascination is about outwitting the competition, if only for a moment. Somewhere on your website the contest is described as turning “MATLAB coding into a highly entertaining full-contact sport.” I think that says it better than I could.

And yet, while everyone wants to win, other kinds of rewards have emerged as well. For example, one player who had employed a disruptive strategy of code obfuscation in an earlier contest became an influential contributor of lucid comments in a subsequent contest, and was praised for his efforts.

Can we harness these dynamics in a broader educational setting? Ned thinks we can:

I’m picturing Mrs. Jenkins’ third period class versus Mrs. Jenkins’ fourth period class — it’s not hard to set these things up once you’ve got the scaffolding in place, and as we move into more service-based software I think we will see this approach move into middle school and beyond.

To get there, we’ll need to empower Mrs. Jenkins to create games that engage students in this kind of productive play. It’s a worthy goal.

Travelers’ advisory: Don’t let this happen to you.

I should be home by now, but instead I am writing this in O’Hare Terminal B. Why? Here was the dialogue as I prepared to board at SeaTac this morning:

United agent: “Where’s the TSA stamp on your boarding pass?”

Me: “Stamp?”

United agent: “Yep. They have to rubberstamp them now, and they’ve missed you.”

Oh for god’s sake.

I had to hop back on the shuttle train and head back to the main terminal where a dour TSA guy patted me down and, right about the time the door to my plane was closing, stamped my now useless boarding pass.

It made me feel ever so much safer.

Today I published an interview with Peter Neupert about the HealthVault initiative announced today. The most thoughtful commentary I’ve seen comes not from TechMeme but rather from the always thoughtful Lauren Weinstein who writes:

The most serious problem is that once medical data is in a centralized environment, there are essentially no limits to who can come along with a court order (or in the case of the government, as we know, secret orders or illegal demands that can’t usually be resisted) for access to that data. Service providers typically have no choice but to comply. The only way to prevent this is for the data to be encrypted in such a way that even the service provider cannot access it without your permission, even with a court order staring them in the face. As far as I know, none of the systems currently in development or deployment take that approach to encryption — but I’d love to have someone inform me that such techniques would be used. That would change the equation considerably.

Agreed. That’s precisely the kind of system I want, and that I would pay for. But I don’t think many folks realize what translucency is, or why they might want to pay for services that work that way. So I see the advertising-supported model as a sensible first step. And I hope that Microsoft’s HealthVault and Google’s forthcoming competitor will, among other things, help create a market for translucent medical records.

A while ago I published a blog essay and screencast on the evolution from a folder-oriented to a tag-oriented metaphor for storing, organizing, and searching for digital objects. The subject of the screencast was Windows Photo Gallery, an application that lives at the intersection of those two metaphors. Since then, I’ve looked for opportunities to explore what happens at that intersection.

One case study happened a few months ago. The test subject was my wife, an artist who has lots of images of her work and needs to rearrange them in various ways for various purposes. As is typical, those images sit in folders that aren’t aligned with the new arrangements she needs to create. Being a tagoholic, I suggested a tag-based strategy. Leave the photos in their existing folders, point Photo Gallery at those folders, and then use tags to define a series of virtual views. She often needs to burn CDs, and you can do that directly from the virtual view produced by a tag query, so this strategy looked promising.

But it didn’t work for her, and here’s my take on why not. Yes, it’s theoretically better not to duplicate images into separate folders. But in practice, the virtual views produced by tag queries were too abstract. She really wanted to materialize “physical” folders that felt more tangible, more permanent.

More recently, I found myself in a similar situation. For a presentation I was making, I needed to find photos in various folders, collect them, and include them in the presentation. I’m a tagoholic, and I’ve got no problem with virtual views produced by a tag query. But I wound up having to materialize a “physical” folder anyway, because there was no way to browse to the virtual view from applications other than Photo Gallery.

There are no easy answers here. On the desktop as well as on the web, we’re in the midst of a long transition from container-based to query-based storage and retrieval. And really, transition is the wrong word, because the two approaches will coexist into the indefinite future.

Given that coexistence, how can we help people understand the relationship between these two approaches?