[etech] Marc Smith Marc Smith is a Microsoft researcher who last year gave a winning talk about NetScan, software that aggregates tons of interesting data about usenet discussions. Now he’s talking about well, not sure yet. But he’s funny and interesting, in a Jeff Goldblum-y way.

Not all groups are groups. Groups should be people who know one another and are treated roughly as equals. Much of what’s on line is more like civic associations like the Shriners. Like such groups, most members in online groups don’t do anything beyond showing up once or twice. They are “places,” Virtual “Schelling Points” (i.e., places in a landscape you might naturally go to meet).

Yhprum’s Law: Systems that shouldn’t work sometimes do. E.g., eBay’s reputation system. [Ironically, Smith misspells Yhprum.]

What sort of furniture do you need in these social places? Ostrum’s design principles for groups: Boundaries matter. (“Don’t give me seamless computing. Seams, please.”) Groups need to monitor their members’ behavior. Groups need a graduated system of sanctions. [And others I didn’t catch.]

Smith studies UseNet. It’s a 23-year-old “standing structure for conversation.” 240M messages in ’03. 8.5 unique identities. 151,000 newsgroups. About 50,000 are very active. Mark’s group tracks metadata about UseNet. He goes through the presentation I saw and liked at eTech last year.

The new mice are almost upon he says: Handheld devices that allow us to click on things. They read tags and get info off the Web. “Every object has a story to tell.” [Also from last year.]

He’s touting NTag, an e-ID tag system I used at Pop!Tech. He’s more excited about it than I was.

His sytem is called “AURA.” [See last year’s blog.] Your cellphone becomes a mouse and the label becomes as big as cyberspace. Anyone with an opposing view can attach a message to the object.

AURA is about to launch a public annotation repository. Marc describes the benefits of resolution services that can aggregate data and annotations.

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Hits on World of Ends, a page Doc and I posted months and months ago, today are going through the roof – 70,000 today so far, and 10,000 in the past 45 minutes. I doubt this is a coincidence.

Anyone know who linked to us? Must be a hell of an A-Lister!

[Later] Answer: BoingBoing.

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Liz is one of the founders of Misbehaving.net, among other things. Subtitle: “How diversifying your team can expand your market.”

There’s a flawed premise behind most efforts to sell to women: Women aren’t involved in the development of the product. E.g., early voice recognition systems were calibrated to men’s voices. And video conference systems were designed to focus on whoever is talking, so now women can’t be seen and can’t be heard. Seatbelts and airbags were designed for men, and women and children are killed by them.

Who has been really successful in making products that survived the dot-com bust? Anil suggested that it wasn’t coincidental that the two major blogging products (Blogger.com, Movable Type) had significant influence by women (Meg Hourihan and Mena Trott) during their development. Other examples: Dokomo, The Sims, eBay, Microsoft Wollop, Microsoft Research. (Purple Moon, Liz says, failed because it tried to make products only for girls, and thus didn’t get the balance right.)

Liz noticed that there are whole bunch of women who work for O’Reilly. “I think that may have a lot to do with why their product line has been so successful.”

“If you can build a place that women love, the guys will show up. the reeverse is not true.” Tom Melchior.

By changing the requirements, you can diversify your workplace. Liz recommends Unlocking the Club House. She says that prior experience is a poor predictor of success in a job. Far more important is commitment. Don’t just look for hardcore programmers. Look for people who really care about your product.

[Unattributed remarks came from people who’s names I didn’t get]

Q: When women ask me if they should go into technical fields, I say absolutely not. Once you’re 35, it’s almost impossible to be employed any more. It has more to do with being old than being female.

A: (David Sifnoraty) Those employers are idiots.

A: (Anil) Sounds like saying all the good jobs are going to India. You have to fight for your career.

A: Programming is actually a very appealing job, with flexible hours, work from home, etc.

A: (Meg) I loved my computer but I had no interest in taking computer courses. I would have been interested in a couse in building stuff by doing, not in “Advanced C++.”

Liz says that there is a developing area of academic study that’s much more focused on project-based learning, human-computer-interface classes, etc.

Marc Canter: And there’s a disproprotionate number of women in marketing and pr.

Q: (Cory Doctorow) How do we get there?

A: (Liz) Re-think the qualifications for jobs. Look for ways for people to move across the borders.

Meg: When you hire one woman, it gets easier to hire more. Women geeks know other women geeks.

A: And have women interview your candidates.

A: And make your requirements in things that men programmers often are bad at, such as good social skills, writing skills.

Q: (Tom) “Softening” the requirements sounds patronizing.

A: (Liz) I don’t mean making them easier. I mean focusing on different things.

(Anil) Making the requirements stricter can help. E.g., saying you won’t hire dysfunctional communicators really weeds ’em out.

(Lily) People tend to hire people like themselves. You have to work at trying to balance your teams.

(Judith) If you’re in a large organization, look within it.

(Me) When men are alone, we tend to be complete pigs.

(Marc) I agree.

There are “shoutocracies.” I don’t know how to respond.

(Liz) We do a terrible job of highlighting the women who are out there.

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Dave Sifry, another of my heroes, is listing some of Technorati’s stats: 1.6M sources, a new weblog every 8 seconds, the index updated within 7 mins of a posting. [I’m here even though I alsoreally wanted to see Eric Boabeau‘s talk] [Damn! My first draft of this put this badly! I left the “also” out of the previous sentence. I’m here because Technorati is so damn cool and interesting. And so is Eric.]

Dave shows a hack he created last night: A list of the top products discussed in the last 24 hours. He has us post to our blogs about it to see how quickly our links show up in Technorati. Answer: Three minutes.

“Everyone talks about the power law. I said, Fuck it, I have the data.” He charted Technorati ranking against the number of inbound links. “All the power laws says is that when it’s easy for anybody to publish, by its very nature, you’re going to have a curve with a relatively small number of things that are well-linked by a lot of people.” What’s really interesting is the tail. Even #100,000 has five inbound links. “This is an inclusive community. Not everyone has to be on the A-List for this to be an effective medium.”

This page charts Technorati ranking against the total number of inbound links for people who have that ranking. [No, I don’t understand that.] The aggregate number of links down the curve greatly outweighs the number of the top 100. There are a lot more little clusters than big clusters.

“How can we help people use this service in new and creative ways? Everytime we come out with a major HTML feature, we’ll come out with an XML API as well, free for non-commmercial use.” Dave lists some hacks that have been done: Joi Ito gets IM/SMS notificatiosn of new links. Movable Type plugins. Threading on weblog reads (newsmonster, newsgator, blosxom).

If you want your stuff indexed fast, use the high-priority indexer: http://www.tefchnorati.com/pinger.

Future: Open reviews (RVW format). Subscribe to keywords.

Dave describes a way to get notified whenever a blog you care about is updated, by combining notification, IM and RSS. In his example, we see, on Technorati, Dave’s blogroll with notifications of updates. “This is part of making the blog reading experience more conversational.”

Vote links (an idea from Kevin Marks) lets you add a tag (“vote=”) inside the link that says that the vote is 0,1, or -1. This lets you link to someone you dislike without implicitly giving them more authority.

Technorati is also aware of geoURLs.

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Helen Greiner, iRobot president and cofounder, is giving a commercial. She shows an ad. She tells us her company is hot. She tells us that her company’s robotic vacuums (Roombas) pick up more dirt than conventional vacuums and cost less than the competitors. The only topic of technical interest she touches on is how Roombas escape from tricky areas of houses.

In her demo of the vacuum, she actually sprinkles crumbs on the floor, like every door-to-door vacuum sales person in history. Oy veh.

Vacuum robots are just the tip of the iceberg, she says. [Let’s hope so.] The deep change with robotic systems is: “Sensing tied through intelligent algorithms to action.” Her robots respond to the world, not a model of the world. [Interesting — very Rodney Brooks — but a trivial example. The Roomba vacuum is like a bumpercar that sucks.] In the future: They’ll respond to voice and will find their own power to recharge. [Yawn.]

I left and missed the last half hour. In the hallway, I got to talk with Bob Frankston and Micah Sifry. Very cool.

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[I’m at the O’Reilly Emerging Tech Conf in San Diego for the next three days. Keynote MP3s here. Conference wiki. Digital Democracy MP3s.]

Tim O’Reilly, who is one of my heroes, is giving his welcoming keynote. He says the aim of O’Reilly is to change the world by letting the world know about what the techies are up to. But he does more. Communities just happen around Tim. Of course, they don’t “just happen” at all.

Tim’s going to talk about what’s on his radar.

When he asks who uses Linux, about 30% of the hands go up (surprisingly few!). 100% of hands go up when he asks who uses Google and Amazon. His point: Since Google and Amazon run on Linux, we’re all Linux users. “The Internet is the platform.”

Key principle: Harness the power of the user community. E.g., Amazon has “features” contributed by users (LinkMania) whereas Barnes & Noble doesn’t. MapQuest hasn’t achieved an Amazon-like dominance because it doesn’t have any social software aspects; eTech is running a collaborative mapping workshop. “How the real and the virtual interpenetrate will be huge!” [Cool. I just wrote an issue of Esther Dyson’s newsletter on exactly this point. I feel so validated!]

Tim’s hot on social software. He points to the Dean campaign but ppokes fun at Orkut where 50 people he don’t know are waiting to hear if Tim will be their friend.

He likes WordSpy as a “view of pop culture.” It lists the first use of new words. E.g., “blujejacking”: stealing someone’s BlueTooth connection.

iPod is on Tim’s radar because it pulls together so many trends. “Here’s an application that from the gitgo was conceived as a multi-device app.” Rich client front end on PCs, Rendezvous-enabled, big back end…(Rendezvous lets you llisten to music on the machine of anyone on your LAN.) But there’s no “architecture of participation” in iPod. And Apple distributes its features unevenly: Buddy lists are in iChat but not in iTunes.

Also on his radar:L Network-enabled market research. We can figure out what the servers are telling us: Microsoft NetScan, Technorati, Alexa. He’s found that Google AdWords are good predictors of book sales. He’s found, btw, that 23$ of OS books are about Mac, far larger than its market share. “Maybe this is the OS Enthusiasm Index.” [Or it’s the Novel OS Index or the OS Difficulty Index.]

Hacking is on Tim’s radar. E.g., FirstMile in Cambodia picks up email from offline villages. Tim’s seeing more hardware hacking. E.g., the Segway has been underhyped in some ways. “It brings computers into the real world.”

Software is becoming commoditized, he said, but the contributions of users and participants is not (Amazon vs. B&N). (I like time’s “architecture of participation” phrase. Someone send it to WordSpy!)

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First, sorry my site was down for much of the day. This one apparently wasn’t my fault…something went wrong with my most excellent host. It happens.

Also, I seem to have lost maybe 500 emails during the outage. If you sent me some, the chances are very strong you are a spammer, in which case, go to hell. But, for the other 2 of you, if you don’t hear from me within a couple of hours, could you please resend? Thx.

I spent most of the day traveling to San Diego for the Digital Democracy Teach-In and then Emerging Technology. So, I’ll be blogging over at my e-political blog at Corante. At the top of the column to the right are the titles of the blogs I enter there, although the updating is a bit erratic.

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Well, Poppa has a used G4 from MacResQ.

So, after installing OS X (by the way, what’s with the Black Muslim naming scheme?) as easily as XP, I took the machine over to my father-in-law’s to teach him how to use it. The results were mixed.

Keep in mind that my father-in-law only wants to do two things: Pick up email and check on a stock price. This is the low end of the computer stress test, but it turns out that it has its own challenges.

Much of the success of the project was invisible to Grandpa, which is how it should be. For example, the Mac found and installed his HP printer without even being asked to look for it. Lor’ bless USB. Likewise, the trackball — from the Linux box I’d given him that replaced the Windows machine that kept crashing — worked as easily as one would expect.

Grandpa took to Sherlock right away. We loaded in a few stock symbols, and it’s perfect for him. I wouldn’t be surprised if he explored some of the other pages as well.

The dock at the bottom worked better for Grandpa than the Windows’ task bar ever did, and that’s important because windowed machines are essentially confusing: If you’re not comfortable with stacked windows, the 3D cues aren’t enough. Grandpa had trouble switching among windows in Windows in part because he task bar goes for efficiency, truncating names to fit more programs in. But programs sitting in the Mac’s dock are clearly labeled and have, large flashy graphic representations — a deerstalker and magnifier for Sherlock, a postage stamp for email. Grandpa had no trouble switching among windows by clicking on the dock. So, score one for the Mac!

On the other hand, the minimize button that causes a program to be sucked into the right hand corner (sorry, I don’t know the Mac argot) was somewhere between confusing and terrifying, so we skipped it. For Grandpa, it’s better that all the windows be in a single state: open, big, and ready to go.

There were little inconsistencies that had me apologizing for the Mac’s design, though. For example, I had confidently told Grandpa that he could remember which button closes a window because not only was it red, but when you mouse over it, an X shows up. (Why isn’t the X there all the time?) Within minutes, though, we’d come across an X-less red button and a red button that had a dot in the center. Where are the GUI fascists when you need them?

I also couldn’t figure out how to get the spell checker to accept my father-in-law’s email address as a legit word. I’d click on the right menu choice, but it would only accept the part before or after the at sign, toggling the other side. Small annoyance.

I had trouble with the address book. I ended up inadvertently creating a couple of “NoName” entries. This is probably because I couldn’t figure out how to tell it that I was done entering contact info except by clicking on the “+” to create a new one. Well, I didn’t want to create a new one. I just wanted to say “I’m done!” with the old one. This is a place where the Mac seems to have opted for efficiency at the expense of explicitness.

Nits nits nits. But here’s the big problem: Email and Web pages repeatedly broke.

The very first email message we looked at had an attachment. When I clicked on it, I was told that it can’t be viewed, and I was given instructions for downloading a plugin. The plugin didn’t work either, although it did open a bunch of windows with icons, instructions, warnings and technobabble. The second message had a link to a video. To demonstrate the Mac’s multimedia proficiency, I clicked on it. Same drill.

Now, because I’ve been using a computer for a while, I know that the document didn’t open because it was a Word file and the video didn’t play because it’s (apparently) a Windows media file. [See Note 1 below before you go MacBallistic on me.] But:

1. The Mac handled these problems gracelessly. Had I not been there, Grandpa would have had to reboot just to clear the screen of the posters telling him that he’s paying the price for adopting a minority technology.

2. From Grandpa’s point of view, it doesn’t matter whose fault it is. The fact is that the Mac isn’t letting him do what he got a computer to do.

3. Worse, when he makes a mistake, it digitally throws up — same as XP and Linux — without giving him a clear, one-button way to say “Ok, I understand. Skip it. Pretend I never asked.” Instead, I’m going to have to get on the phone and direct him to the right red buttons — some with X’s and some without — to clear the debris off his screen.

So, overall so far: Assuming the Mac is as stable as I expect, it’s the right OS for Grandpa. I got tired of reinstalling Windows, and desktop Linux (Mandrake and RedHat) is too unstable and too hard to do simple things with. But it is by no means the straightforward, simple machine that makes computing as easy as falling off a blog for a novice user like Grandpa.

NOTE 1: Because I’m a moron, the OS X disks I bought over eBay are in fact for an Ibook or an IMac or an IPod or some other over-branded Mac product. OS X seems to be doing fine, but the system restoration disks don’t run. So, it’s possible that there’s some default set of products I’m missing that would solve the Windows doc and media problem. If not, then I assume that buying AppleWorks to view Word files will do the trick. All advice gratefully accepted, as usual. And a big wet kiss to all of you who have been so helpful so far. Thank you!

NOTE 2: Grandpa sometmes reads this blog, so pretend you like me.

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Oh no! The Frog Phone seems to be down! Maybe 1-888-31-FROGS (1-888-313-7647) only works in Canada…

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Jane Black at Businessweek Online reports that more than half of the states that signed up for the MATRIX law-enforcement database have quit it. The Multistate Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange lets the police draw on multiple databases to create instant dossiers on, well, anyone they want. Here are Jane’s conclusions:

There’s no doubt that MATRIX raises privacy red flags, though after an extensive briefing by the Florida Law Enforcement Dept., which is spearheading the project, I believe that it’s little more than an efficient way to query multiple databases.

The real furor over MATRIX demonstrates something much more important — and surprising: Privacy advocates have gained a lot of ground in the two years since September 11. And the pendulum is swinging back in their favor.

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