Arkansawyer

Had I made any, that is–but I didn’t, so I’m inserting this note to that effect.

Much praise to those who spot the poem whose first line I shamelessly distorted into this title line.

I’ve had the worst time trying to blog lately. Anyone with an encouraging word might chime in right about now. Discouraging words would be acceptable, too, as a reality check.

Over at a blog I always enjoyed and for some silly reason quit reading, I encountered the cult book meme, which has simple rules: Bold for books you’ve read, italics for books you didn’t finish. “If you want to be tagged, you are tagged”, she said, and for once, I want to do one of these, so:

• Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut (1969)
• The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell (1957-60)
• A Rebours by JK Huysmans (1884)
• Baby and Child Care by Dr Benjamin Spock (1946) It’s a reference book–you aren’t necessarily supposed to finish it.
  
• The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf (1991)
• The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath (1963)
• Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (1961)
• The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger (1951)
• The Celestine Prophecy by James Redfield (1993)
• The Dice Man by Luke Rhinehart (1971)
• Chariots of the Gods: Was God An Astronaut? by Erich Von Däniken (1968 )
• A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole (1980) I don’t know why this didn’t catch me. It’s on my list of try again someday books.
  
• Confessions by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1782)
• The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner by James Hogg (1824)
• Dianetics: the Modern Science of Mental Health by L Ron Hubbard (1950)
• The Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley (1954)
• Dune by Frank Herbert (1965) Times have changed–I’d've expected Stranger in a Strange Land
• The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams (1979)
• The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe (1968 )
• Fear of Flying by Erica Jong (1973)
• The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer (1970)
• The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand (1943) We all have to have one to be ashamed of, I suppose
• Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R Hofstadter (1979)
• Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon (1973)
• The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln (1982)
• I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith (1948 )
• If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino (1979)
• Iron John: a Book About Men by Robert Bly (1990)
• Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach and Russell Munson (1970)
• The Magus by John Fowles (1966)
• Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges (1962)
• The Leopard by Giuseppe di Lampedusa (1958 )
• The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov (1967) Another one that’s supposed to be right up my alley. Maybe a different translation?
  
• No Logo by Naomi Klein (2000)
• On The Road by Jack Kerouac (1957)
• Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S Thompson (1971)
• The Outsider by Colin Wilson (1956)
• The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran (1923)
• The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists by Robert Tressell (1914)
• The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám tr by Edward FitzGerald (1859)
• The Road to Oxiana by Robert Byron (1937)
• Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse (1922)
• The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1774)
• Story of O by Pauline Réage (1954)
• The Stranger by Albert Camus (1942)
• The Teachings of Don Juan: a Yaqui Way of Knowledge by Carlos Castaneda (1968 ) Unlike the sequels, this book doesn’t totally suck
  
• Testament of Youth by Vera Brittain (1933)
• Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1883-85) 
• To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (1960)
• Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: an Inquiry into Values by Robert M Pirsig(1974)

So, Troll Whispering. I just sat and listened and didn’t take notes. Blame me if you will, but I just wanted to listen without running my fingers. I remember some tension on moderated versus free-range discussion, but it didn’t turn into the “You censor!” type of talk, and I was very grateful for that. The panel was clearly in favor of fairly vigorous (if hopefullly unintrusive) moderation, so that helped.

One observation that Teresa Nielsen Hayden made which I’d never heard expressed quite in this fashion before was (to the effect that–a paraphrase, he said sadly): I’ve seen a lot more speech suppressed by arguments over free speech than by moderation. On the bright side, I got her to sign her book (and found her a new typo–the story of the production of this book is interesting); on the other hand, she hasn’t written the other book yet, and that’s a pity. The world needs that book, and I want my copy.

Teresa was very nice to meet and just as fun to talk with as I’d expected. She and Kevin Marks and Brad Templeton and I had a good chat about electric cars (the Zipcar model on steroids) versus public transit, among other things. (A funny thing happened later that day: I was having an interesting talk outside the place we went for the Web2Open evening dinner, but I was also freezing standing outside without a jacket and without moving. I saw Teresa walk by and excused myself by saying, “That woman whose ideas I just told you’d I stole, she just walked by, and I want to go have a word with her.” We talked for three or four blocks, until Teresa looked at her directions and realized she’d headed the wrong way, away from South Park. The last I saw of her, she was wading into traffic as only a New Yorker does, flagging down a taxi.)

You know, that really finishes up what I did here. I saw a couple of old friends, and am planning on meeting folks for dinner tonight, but this about wraps it up. No trips to see music, just sessions, social time, and a bit of rest. I had one beer, a Guinness at the O’Reilly booth while talking with one of those friends. It may not sound like I had a blast, but I did.

There were a few little things to improve about the Web2Open experience–more power outlets, better sound environment, keep the coffee coming–but those are quibbles. This was a well-executed event, and the organizers–Sarah Milstein, Tony Stubblebine, Jen Pahlka, and Brady Forrest–deserve both praise and thanks.

This is a replay of the talk from Ignite! and it’s still interesting the second time around. Here’s his website. I note that this time through he did not criticize Sarah Lacy, which shows that he was listening to his audience Tuesday. This is the sort of project I’d love to try myself, if I could find the venue which would support it–it’s a wonderful idea!

Insights:

Build reputation and trust into your service.
Get off the beaten path. Be less of a target.
You can coast the spammers time and effort.

google.com/webmasters/ registration will bring you an alert if your page is hacked.

I live in Boston with six-year old twins who get me up every morning, and so today I got up at three–I’m hoping someone has videotaped this so I can show my kids when they’re in high school, “See! See how shitty I looked!”

I’m really pleased to be here at a historic time, the peak of the second dot-com bubble. (Laughter.) I was really amazed at the size of the event, too. CNet wrote this article “How to survive the next-gen confab” about how to survive this event. “Time is our most valuable asset, and it it’s being wasted, we’re not going to take it. We want our time to be well-invested.” Chris Heuer, Social Media Club. In that life, I’d like to apologize for the next few minutes. I realize you could be twittering yourselves. But someone who belogs to the Social Media Club, then they have a lot of balls talking to other people about wasting time: I mean, it’s a club where you talk about being a member of another club.

Do I want to talk to you about what music you like? No–I’ve got kids who wake me up at six in the morning. I don’t give a fuck. I have no reputation to lose–look at the logo on my blog, and the sorts of things I write. Look at these pictures–Wozniak asa baboon, Larry Ellison as a pimp, Steve Ballmer as Uncle Fester. This is my coverage of Vista–of Microsoft joining Yahoo. (You must look at these–I cannot describe them).

My blog and how I started it, and what I’ve learned from it: A blog written by Steve Jobs as if he were out of control and really high. My day job–a column in Forbes called “Digital Tools”. Then my blog, and my novel: Options: The Secret Life of Steve Jobs.

Three questions: Why? WHy Steve Jobs? Why does it work?

Why? It was a just a stupid prank, which I thought I’d shut down after a couple of weeks. Boredom–at my day job, I cover enterprise tech. Fear–I saw a lot of disruption of our own business. We tell people like Sun to embrace the disruption, but when it’s us. I wanted to change, but had to do that externally, as I could not get transfered to Forbes.com.

I thought of Jonathan Schwartz blog, all transparent and honest, but you know, corporate blogs are all marketing and bullshit. So I thought, “What if someone was a real vicious blogger?”

Why Steve Jobs? Apple, for one thing. Also, Steve Jobs looks scary–he takes himself very seriously, (various pictures, ending with) I think this is how he sees himself (a Steve Jobs as Jesus picture). We’re changing the world–it’s just a fucking cell phone. It’s not the cure for polio. Zuckerberg, Google “Don’t be evil (except a little bit)”–fake Steve Jobs says in the book that he likes hanging out with Bono because he’s one of the only people more absorved than he is. Basically, this is a comic strip, which because a comic strip with news. I covered the news (I couldn’t cover at work) like I was fake Steve Jobs. After six months, ninety thousand readers. People really wanted to know who it was, including the publisher of Forbes, who wrote me with story ideas and such.

So finally, I was in New York trying to get a raise, but I couldn’t so I wrote and asked for a job as fake Steve.

Why does it work? I started off just learning how to blog, but I started getting all these communications from people. Facebook, Twitter–they’re performance spaces. I’ve got sort of an open source version of this. The things my readers do that I can’t be held liable for: Dopplegangers: Mark Zuckerberg and Alfredo Linguini? Linus Torvalds and L. Ron Hubbard. Larry Ellison and General Zod. Wozniak and Jan Brady. Steve and Nixon.

What’s happening in media is exciting. The involvement of the audience. First generation: Take something and put it on line. What people do on my blog is time they aren’t spending on other things. Like you could read Doonesbury, but send a note to the guy who does it, and see it acknowledged or used the next day.

What Gerstner said in the late nineties: The early things were harbingers. When the big companies get the internet, things would really change.

Too much concern on our part about destruction. Think about all the things that didn’t exist ten years ago. We’re in the eye of the storm, but creating the storm. I woke up every day worrying about getting laid off. Now I wake up every day excited, all because I started this silly blog. I don’t think this will last forever, but it will lead to something else.

In the spirit of fake Steve Jobs, let me sign off with “Namaste”. (Much applause)

Here’s a tidbit they get from mobile search: The best place to start a new Starbucks in Arkansas is on I-40 between Little Rock and Memphis. They have a specific exit in mind, which he did not specify.

Jonathan: The greening of Sun: How many CIOs are responsible for their power bills. At a recent event, about half.

Sun approached this in many ways. Multi-thread and distributed systems–more efficient peformance even without speedups.

How many of those CIOs have used MySQL? None raised their hands, but the downloads ranged from a hundred to five thousand (I’d love to see that in detail).

Black Box: If power is the number one cost in running a data center,then perhaps you want to be able to move it to a source of power. Make it portable, a third more efficient powerwise, plan never to visit it via remote management and provisioning. In operation with various companies–one locatedin a cold area where heating is the problem.

You don’t really want to run generators–you want to be on the grid.

Tim: But distributed solar–

Jonathan: That makes sense.

The network is the computer, but data…how to get ZFS out and ubiquitous. Trying to get it out to the community.

Tim: So open source drives cloud computing drives infrastructure.

Jonathan: Yes.

Brad Templeton from the EFF organized this talk, and he’s currently speaking:

Brad: The fourth amendment does not apply to documents held by a third party. Important not just in criminal but in civil cases. The process of discovery allows your lawyers to see what’s being given out–not so if documents are taken directly from the third party. Not “data portability” but “easy export of my data”.

Time-travelling robots from the future: Improved AI, visual and textual recognition, capable of reaching into the stored past and interpreting, indexing, and making it available.

Paradox: Ease of use can be a bug. Who doesn’t want ease of use? Well, when it’s exporting everything about you, maybe you don’t want it to be easy. Suppose you were asked to enter much information about yourself in order to join a site. You’d say, “No way.” But suppose it could be done through your portable data–much easier to do, much more common to ask for.

Data portability and single sign-on move the bar for what is much easier to ask from the user. How many of you use Facebook? Consider their “applications”: Essentially a sub-website run by a third party. There is a check box when you install, which says, “Let this application access my data.” Have you every tried to uncheck that box? A lesson in one-click data export.

Second paradox: These applications allow the user to control what happens to their data. Now, data portability arose from Microsoft Passport, then the Liberty Alliance, now OpenID. When you click to join a website, you either accept the term or go away. No negotiation as in a contract agreement. The process of user control precludes the ability to negotiate.

Perversely, a Microsoft as the broker in this transaction would’ve allowed negotiation on their part in the interests as users. Some organizations, such as AAA, can negotiate in this manner. Perhaps Consumer Reports, something of that nature could.

Audience: British government data loss: When information requested on an individual, it used to be unitary. Now being reworked for more granularity.

Brad: How to solve this problem. It is not going away, so it must be dealt with. Many useful things which can be done with data portability. Development of a layer–trusted partner–for hosting data (identity). An application wants to email all our friends in the Bay Area. That application gets to send the email without seeing any more data about them. Difficult–RSVPs complicate that.

Guy from Disney: We don’t allow our data out. Used internally. Do our own mailings.

How to have all the flexibility in that layer to give the functionality people want? Possibly use of code sandbox to see what is done with your data. You could, perhaps, be your own trusted host for an interaction with (for instance) Disney.

Me: Is this self-hosted, identity providers, or identity service through a third party such as an ISP or a hosting company. Answer: Yes, all three.

Don’t really want people to do their own hosting–some form of group negotiation required.

Privacy policies: All I’ve seen (that I didn’t work on) have said, “If we wish to change this at any time, we can do so without notifying you.” Not just policy, but also in terms of service.

Me: Why this not a subject for regulation? HIPAA and FERPA have been very effective. (No answer.)

Q: Why not make it easy to get data, but not effective to use it? For instance, watermarking for e-mail. A: I do that–use a different e-mail address for everything.

And now the answer for regulation: If that data gets out, regulation doesn’t stop that. It’s better to keep it from getting out. (I don’t find this convincing. If data gets out with or without regulation, it’s hard to get back either way, and data which is or is not regulated can still get out either way. The question is whether regulation makes it harder or easier to keep the data in the first place.)

Some discussion on the relative disastrousness of the original British privacy release, a bulk release of about twenty million names, versus the twenty percent of that original release whose information was sent to an old address. Who is living at that address? Possibly an ex-spouse–this database was about children with single parents. No clear answer to this–good arguments on both sides.

Again, an unconvincing answer on how mixing data on which current state is all that’s held and data in which history is kept and how that can be done with change data capture.

More concerned about people being evil on accident, rather than on purpose.

Q: How do you keep someone (like Facebook) from doing this? A: Competition or social pressure. Gives Google as an example, but notes they also had legal concerns. Also a balance between ease of entry (small companies want it, established companies don’t) and user needs.

I hesitate to generalize from this tiny sample, but I’m continuing to find EFF’s disdain for regulatory action unproductive. It’s a valuable session and I’m enjoying it, but there’s the point on which I’m in disagreement with what they’re doing–valuable work, but lacking on this point.

I did not expect to get into a discussion of Oliver Sipple and Dan White during this discussion, but it’s an interesting ending.