Dave Kearns

Surprised by how you react to something. I’ve never been a big Larry Lessig fan (e.g., see Death of the Internet ). We rarely agree about things, particularly in the area of intellectual property. So when all the buzz on the web, the blogosphere, the tweetzone and even the Facebook hustings were filled with encomiums to Professor Lessig’s address to the Italian parliament, I was pre-disposed to: 1) not listen to the recording, and 2) construct arguments to what I supposed would be his theme.

At a certain point, though, it became necessary to listen simply so that I could (I thought) refute whatever sound-byte arguments would be coming my way. So, this morning, I listened.

All I can say is – listen to this recording. While I don’t agree with everything Larry says – I’m not sure anyone could – this is am important address. It sets a marker along the road to the internet age. It points the path and shows what needs to be done and – perhaps more importantly – what shouldn’t be done.

Listen, learn and understand.

Google today unveiled new images to use with iGoogle. The post announcing this said, in part, “At its core, iGoogle is about personal expression.” But if that were really true I could use my own photos in the header, wouldn’t you think?

Today marks the 50th anniversary of the official start of the space age – the day in October, 1957, when the USSR launched Sputnik, the breadbox-sized (18″ in diameter) first artificial satellite in space.

This was the height of the cold war (we were still having air-raid drills in school) and this major win for the Russians could be foretelling their ultimate victory over the western capitalist societies. At least, that’s what our parents were talking about. To me and my contemporaries (I was in the 7th grade at the time) it was simply “neat-o” stuff. Our talk was about how we would all finally go into space someday. We would all be Buck Rogers, or Flash Gordon, or Commando Cody.

Four months later, the US launched Explorer I and the race to land on the moon was on in earnest.

We’ve come a very long way in 50 years. We’ve explored almost all of the planets in our own “backyard” and launched deep space probes which may only be relevant to our descendants. Watching Neil Armstrong land on the moon in 1969 was my biggest thrill (so far) of the space age, but the launch of Sputnik has to be #2 on the list.

Marc Cantor and some others have created “A Bill of Rights for Users of the Social Web” which, while I can generally support in principle, is (as are most internet-based manifestos) remarkably flawed. For example, the BofR includes:

“users of the social web are entitled to certain fundamental rights, specifically…ownership of their own personal information, including…the activity stream of content they create.”

But the “activity stream” is actually compiled by the web site and includes much more than content. It’s that whole “attention” thing again. At least in the US, you are assumed to maintain ownership of the content you create – it’s called “copyright,” and it’s yours until you specifically forego it. So there’s really no need to restate that, is there?

The bigger problem is in the area of “relationships.”

In the words of the BofR: “Allow their users to syndicate their own profile data, their friends list…” But friend-ness is a relationship. A two-way relationship. I can claim to be your friend, but unless you reciprocate there is no “friend” relationship between us. Unfortunately, most social networking sites refuse to choose among differing degrees of relationship (friend, acquaintance, lover, parent, actor-that-I-admire-and-want-to-meet, etc.). Given the binary nature of most social networking sites you can choose either “friend” or “stranger” for a relationship equation and most people will be nice, and choose friend when they at least think they may have interacted with the claimant at least once. In the closed world of that particular social network, most understand that the term “friend” has a very loose meaning. But once you can take that list of “friends” elsewhere and install it – even on a site with a much more fine-grained sense of relationships – there is a great deal of risk to the “other parties” in the relationships. Worse, those “other parties” have no idea of (and no veto power over) the type of site to which their name and supposed relationship might be dragged! I might be OK with being associated with someone on the Manx kitty lovers network, but do I also want to be associated with that same person on Witches&Bitches.net?

Let’s revise the Bill of Rights to both acknowledge reality as well as to protect all users – the primary and all their “relations”.

I usually admire the stuff my friend Kim Cameron writes, and his posting on Andrew Keen’s book, The Cult of the Amateur, is mostly right on target. But Kim does repeat that truly awful identifier “citizen journalist.”

All journalists are citizens! I know many journalists, and every single one of them is a citizen of some country – most are US, Canadian or UK citizens, but I’ve known French, Italian, Brazilian and Australian journalists, also.

Most are also professional journalists – they make their living as journalists. Some are non-professional journalists – they make their living doing something else. People who do something for fun, or for the love of it rather than getting paid for it are called “amateurs” or, perhaps, “hobbyists.” (usually “hobbyist” is reserved for those things that no one gets paid to do and the “hobbyist” designation denotes some stature for the individual within that community, though)

I’ve never heard of “citizen golfers” or “citizen painters” or even “citizen politicians” they’re all called amateurs and so should those who practice journalism without a paycheck.

“Amateur” can be a term of derision when used by a professional. It shouldn’t be, and we should think less of the professional who uses the term this way. But torturing the fine word “citizen” to mean something entirely beyond it’s definition is not the answer.

The power went out this morning at 8:15, just as I was writing a post to the Virtual Quill. Since it was, at least in theory, timely I needed to find a place that would let me connect to transfer it (I’ve recently switched to using the laptop all the time, so it just meant ‘hibernating’ it until I found a hotspot). We do have municipal wifi here in Sunnyvale, and I can usually get a connection from the patio behind the house, but no luck today. Since the WAP is only a half block away, I guess it lost power too. So into the car and drive up to the local Starbuck’s (I have a Hotspot account for airports and days like today). Lot’s of people milling about outside, no lights on inside – don’t even stop there! I hear that a 75′ tree has toppled over about half a mile away – guess it took the power lines with it! So I head south on El Camino Real and find a Starbucks with power (and a T-mobile store next door!) where I’m sitting right now. There are times I do love the 21st century!

Eric Norlin, over at the Defrag blog, talks about “The user as the alpha and omega:

the idea that “users” are bringing their patterns of usage into the enteprise and demanding that IT shops conform. We saw the first wave of this happen with SaaS

But this behavior goes back well before SaaS (i.e., the last two years!) – over 15 years ago, when I was an IT manager, users were coming to me demanding a graphical user interface (GUI) for the computers on theirdesktops. Some wanted Windows, some wanted Desqview - and one poor, benighted marketing exec wanted me to add his Commodore 64 to the network (note – it could be done!) Ten years before that, savvy users were putting their own IBM PCs in their offices and bypassing the corporate mainframe terminals (as well as the glass-room high tech high priests) Indeed most of the innovation on the enterprise network over the past 25 years has been user driven, not IT driven.

But it’s only the history and the timeline that I disagree with Eric about, I fully subscribe to his thought: “This tidal wave of change is going to blur all of the lines between what we think of as “enterprise” and “consumer-focused” IT companies – and that will alter everything from investing to implementation to acqusition. Big stuff here.” It’s why I said in another place that Microsoft’s CardSpace was going to revolutionize the use of identity data within the enterprise.

Global Warming itself is not a myth: the earth is getting warmer, our climate is changing. Some of the pressures bringing about that change are human-created carbon emissions. But, contrary to what Pacific Gas & Electric would have you believe, we cannot stop global warming! Still, the energy company insists on putting a tag line on it’s TV ads for energy conservation claiming (or, in some cases, alluding to) the consumer’s ability to do just that.

Reducing carbon emissions is a good thing to do. So is conserving energy. But even if we stopped all carbon emissions today, all over the world, climate change would still come.

History shows that those organisms which can survive global climate change are those which are the most adaptable. But to be considered “adaptable,” we’re going to have to either plan for mass migrations as the climate changes, or work to keep our microclimates livable through the use of energy-efficient, low-carbon-emitting changes to our way of life – adding heat or cooling, irrigation, flood-control, and other non-natural impediments to nature. Science fiction talks about humans going to other planets and “terraforming” them – “…deliberately modifying its atmosphere, temperature, or ecology to be similar to those of Earth in order to make it habitable by humans” – but we’re going to have to perfect ways of terraforming the changed Earth first!

UPDATE: I’ve just come across an excellent essay by physicist Freeman Dyson (the inventor of the Dyson Sphere) on this issue. Be sure to read thru to the end where he also tells how he almost set back the course of biology a generation!

Poor John Dvorak. He’s only been writing about, and accurately foretelling, the story of computing for over 20 years. But he recently had the temerity to suggest that another internet bubble is about to burst. He cites the proliferation of so-called “social networking” sites, video-sharing sites and alludes to the eventual crash of Google’s ad-supported search philosophy. He is, of course, instantly attacked – especially by those too young to have suffered through “bubble 1.0″ (less than 10 years ago). One of the more thoughtful disputations was mounted by my friend Eric Norlin (“Because I’m a Sucker“) but even he overlooks the primary reason for the upcoming burst while alluding to it as a benefit: “The last ‘bubble’ occurred around public equity markets, as they provided the liquidity and transparency needed to really drive a mass bubble.” This next bubble will be driven in the same way, but via the Merger & Acquisition market. Google, for example, whose stock is already so vastly overinflated that it alone could fuel a bubble burst, continues to buy up new ventures whose sole business plan is “let’s do something catchy then sell out to Google, or Yahoo, or whoever bids highest.” None of them, from MySpace to Flickr have the remotest concept of a path to profitability – but that doesn’t stop the portal players from throwing money down their drains.
In just a couple of years Dvorak will have been proven prescient once again.

The Luddites who are out to cripple electronic voting (see here, here , here, and here) have found a new ally in the new California Secretary of State, Debra Bowen. According to stories in the San Jose Mercury, Bowen supposedly did a “top to bottom” review of electronic voting machines which found them vulnerable to attack. But the methodology used was to give the machine to a group of hackers, give them a laboratory to work in, and ask them to break into and modify the machines! As numerous county elections officials (not to mention eVoting system vendors) said, “it didn’t take into account their expertise or the security procedures they’ve already put into place to deter tampering and fraud”. As one of them (Contra Costa County registrar Stephen Weir) put it: “I am sorry to say that I find the approach of the so-called top-to-bottom review to be more to do with headlines than with definitive science or the pursuit of legitimate public policy.“

The eVoting machines tested are no less accurate, safe and secure than currently employed voting methods – and are much more accurate, safe and secure than many of them. That’s all we can ask of the technology. Can it be improved? Certainly, but only after being widely deployed so that a large pool of user experience can be gathered. It’s time for the Chicken Luddles get out of the way of legitimate progress.