TechFold - Bold tech & web commentary

Blog Names - Argh

Dear Everybody - please title your blogs with something useful. Seriously - I’ve been digging through the feed prospects that TechWatching and WheelScore have turned up, and for most of them you can tell absolutely nothing from their titles. For example:

• “Steve-o’s Blog” - about what?
• “Just Another Blog” - I have no reason to follow this whatsoever.
• “0WS3e” - maybe this means something in l33t, but it sure is useless to everyone else.

To those who are guilty of similarly lously blog names, here are some suggested naming conventions:

• Steve-o’s Blog: Family Ramblings
• Just Another Blog about Microsoft Silverlight Development
• OWS3e - HAM Radio in the Internet Age

Yup - that’s it. Just add a three word description to your blog title - please!

If you’re using WordPress, click “Options” in the Admin panel, and under “General Options” weblog title is right there. Anyone that works directly with feeds will thank-you for taking a moment to d o so.

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The Big Digg Disappointment

I long appreciated digg; if not for its content, then for its algorithm’s ability to dynamically sift through the huge volume of submissions and deliver that content. Today we find out digg’s algorithm relies at least in part on human moderation.

What’s the significance (to me)?

1. Digg isn’t an agnostic platform, its as editorial and mod-driven as FARK.
2. Any non-zero amount of moderator activity complete invalidates the democratic elements of the platform.
3. That’s not a bad thing, or wouldn’t be if Digg hadn’t been positioned as agnostic/democratic/algorithmic.
4. Misrepresenting the technology behind one’s site is weak and doesn’t speak well for the digg team’s ability to deliver or for their respect for users.
5. The value of digg’s underlying technology has plummeted.
6. The FARK model works well, and digg has value as a FARK competitor focused on geek news.
7. As TC points out, it makes digg competitors like Reddit a lot more welcoming.

Lord knows I’ve had enough digg-meta news to last a lifetime. Maybe this issue will kick digg off the stage.

digg reddit

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Google’s Doing It Again: Jaiku dying on the vine?

Google has an annoying habit of making acquisitions, and then letting those acquisitions die on the vine as (presumably) the talent behind them is employed elsewhere in the Googleplex. The seminal example is DodgeBall,,
who’s founder’s public departure from Google lead many to question Google’s ability to successfully integrate their purchases into their core proposition.

More recently, it looks like Google’s doing the same to Jaiku. “Jaiku users flee to Twitter,” “Jaiku woes plague Google,” and “What is Google’s plan for Jaiku?” are not the kind of headlines one wants to see three months after a purchase.

So what then is Google’s deal? Does anyone there really know how something like Jaiku or DodgeBall should be integrated into the Google-mission to index all information? It would seem not. Google has been roundly criticized for going off in too many directions, and it would seem that purchases like Jaiku are symptomatic of “executive pet projects” - i.e.: purchases made on a whim when a powerful exec mentions that they’d be good to have under their corporate umbrella, but without any real thought behind it.

While a cash-rich company like Google may enjoy the luxury of making poorly planned purchases, they’re not doing themselves, their customers (us), or entrepreneurs any favors. Internally, Google is building teams of disgruntled, neglected staff that have come in the door with acquisitions but found that their new working environment more or less doesn’t care about their aspirations. Further, once dynamic, growing products become static and neglected, to the detriment of that product’s customers (witness the Jaiku flight). Finally, the bright light of an entrepreneur is covered or otherwise extinguished as its subsumed by the Googleplex.

All told, it seems like a sad state of affairs that should be some senior Google’s priority to rectify.

dodgeball, google jaiku

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Australia Censoring the Internet: mortgaging a nation’s future

At heart, I’m a libertarian: I am firm in my belief that the ills that accompany unfettered access to self-expression and communication are outweighed by the benefits - that the abdication of personal responsibility that seems endemic in our society is a call to community action and education - not an invitation to governments to censor and regulate.

Sadly, those of similar mind are under constant attack; for example, Australia has announced that default censorship of the Internet is coming. At issue are the children who’s parents are no longer deemed capable of seeing to their memetic welfare; instead, the entire nation must bear the cost for their inattention.

As often happens, it seems the Australian government has seized upon a media-manufactured social ill as an excuse to strengthen its powers. The TechCrunch post linked-to above suggests scary motives afoot - that broad filtering is a prelude to future crackdowns against bloggers, policy criticism, and free speech. While that may one day be the case, such conspiracy theories give governments too much credit for forethought. Apply Occam’s razor, and you get a much more utilitarian explanation: like most populations, governments expand when and where they can - purely by virtue of existing. An educated, activist citizenry is tasked with playing the role of antibody and containing their legislative spread. Witness the recent Canadian reaction to music industry sponsored legislation.

Where then are the Australians?

The Australian government has lulled its population by coating its plan in a beguiling, saccharine layer of moral virtue - after all, who doesn’t want to protect the children? (Parents, evidently.) And, criticism has been headed off with an exit clause: those not wishing to see the government’s interpretation of the world may be able to opt-out of the censored view, though the monetary and social cost of that choice are unknown. Wrapping an indecent proposal in a layer of barely acceptable plausibility: a method for selling used cars, not national leadership.

And so continues the slow slide into nanny state societies and the stunning willingness to trade freedom for security (or corporate profit) that has characterized the first decade of the new millennium. Parents are saved from taking responsibility for their children by a government willing to mortgage its citizen’s future.

australia censorship

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Coding Horror on Registration Keys

After bitching about incompatible power supplies earlier today, I thought it would be appropriate to point readers to Coding Horror’s take on the aggravation of registration keys. The use of commonly mistaken characters in keys (”O” vs. “0″), excessively long keys, clunky entry forms, etc. all make registration keys more evil than neccessary.

registration software

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Another Tag Silo - Twitter Hashtags

A few days ago, I riffed on how the failure of user-powered tagging was what was driving the need for a semantic web - that jumbled, discontiguous tagging implementations had created a plethora of tag city-states who’s inability to talk on a “national” level had reduced the tagging movement to a curiosity.

Today, another entrant in the form of Hashtags - tags for twitter post. Again, useful within the silo of the twitter-verse, but clunky to extend outwards. You can read more on hashtags via stoweboyd, or stephanie booth, or check out full coverage.

The stated purpose of hashtags is to all one to follow a topical twitter-stream, as was useful for those techies fleeing the SoCal fires this past year. But how much cooler would it be if you could stitch together Twitter content, Flickr coverage, posted videos, blog posts, and news, into a single realtime view of a given situation? That would look a lot like the output of a semantic application.

To do so now would require onerous hard-coding of proprietary hooks into each services API (twitter, flicker, youtube, etc.), with more custom coding to parse out time and geo-relevance data. As I mentioned in my previous article, a two-tiered tagging system composed of machine and human tags, shared in a consistent format, and conforming to common baseline standards would enable this.

hashtags, semantic, tagging, tags twitter

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Power supply standardization

Over the weekend, a friend was relating how a co-worker fried a terabyte RAID array by connecting it to the wrong power supply. Which got me thinking about how lame the entire hardware industry has been in implementing power supplies, plugs, and adapters.

Given that most hardware uses the same electricity in similar volumes, why is it that both of my laptops have different power supply plugs (one IBM, one Toshiba)? And why is it that my IBM T40 power supply is different than my cube-neighbor’s T60? And why does that same person’s Dell have a different plug than the T40, the T60, or my Toshiba? There’s 5 laptops within a 10ft radius of me right now, each of which requires its own brick with a model-specific plug on one end.

Its equivalent to Honda, Toyota, and Ford each requiring a brand-specific nozzle at a gas station. Same gas, different nozzles. Does that sound like a good idea?

You’d think it would be in the hardware industry’s best interest to standardize power supplies in a few simple form factors (small, medium, large?) as has taken place with USB - for laptops, for peripherals, etc. It should be as simple as “if the plug fits, it works.” It would let me charge my laptop off my wife’s adapter at home. It would have prevented the frying of that terabyte drive. It would reduce the number of bricks, cables, and adapters that one must travel with. It would open up the aftermarket, in the way the iPod universal plug has for Apple accessories. And, it would help manufacturers focus on adding value to their products - not spending budget on plugs and bricks.

Basically it looks like all upside to me.

So - the question manufacturers should be asking is where they deliver value to consumers; the answer is not via power cable - that’s just for delivering electricity.

batteries power

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The Failure of Tagging is what’s driving Web 3.0

Tagging is the dream that everyone more or less forgot about.

Tags - little topical keyword snippets that were supposed to herald the start of a new, exciting web of user-classified content. By appending your blogposts/photos/videos/user-generated-content (ugc) with a few simple keywords, the web was expected to “self-organize” into an organic, emergent user-powered taxonomy that would provide the framework for parsing out “meaning.” It was going to make it easy to find deep information on any topic - linking up the long tail of all content types into a parseable, coherent, human-organized whole. Effectively, tagging was intended to provide a distributed, free, human powered search index - one publicly-owned, free super-index to rule them all.

Unfortunately, it didn’t happen. The practicalities of execution were pushed by the wayside in rush to embrace the decentralized nature of ugc under the guise of woodsy, campfire “folksonomies.” A point of balance between “free” and “structured” was never identified, and “Tagging” was never executed in a way that would give it a fighting chance to live up to its promise; a hodge-podge of formats, options, and implementations guaranteed that the concept’s deployments would remain silo’d and keep conceptually linked material fragmented. The glow from each of the folksonomy campfires didn’t extend off of its own URL.

As a result, what we’ve come to accept as “tagging” is the silo’d view. Flickr and del.icio.us are the two brightest burning fires here - both have deep tag taxonomies that have been successfully integrated into the core of their respective user experiences, but neither is designed to extend outwards from their individual campground silos.

And therein lies the core of the problem: a standardized means of sharing tags was never devised, and as anathematic (sp?) as it might be to the “open” nature of Web 2.0, a clearing-house mechanism to reconcile divergent taxonomies never arose. Technorati tried and failed to provide this: remember the days when “tag search” was a prominent Technorati home page option? Its not any more. Do you see “Tag Search” on Google Blog Search? No - because Google’s algorithm does a better job of stitching together meaning than user-supplied tags.

The fundamental broken-ness of tagging has been compounded over time by user’s recognition that outside of those certain successful silos, tagging really has no point - consider the example of tag-based classified search engine Edgeio - which just went belly up. Or “geotagging” as a concept outside of Flickr. At the core of the dismisssal is the user’s desire for consistency - with a Google-esque algorithm you at least know that the logic that generated your SERP (search engine results page) was applied consistently; with tags each content source has its own human-powered logic which likely bears limited resemblance to anyone else’s. Thus - people search by tag less, leading content producers to tag less, etc. - an unvirtuous cycle.

So - in a nutshell, tagging as a Web 2.0 concept is a mess: its fragmented and forgotten.

Let’s look at how it got there, and possibly how it can come back:

1. Standardized means of tagging: Standards. Yes, they add value, as clunky and overbearing and non-west-coast-hipster-info-wants-to-be-free as the concept may sound. Consider: from a technical standpoint, how do you describe what a tag is? Its meta-data, sure. But how is it content encoded? Is it one word only, or n-words? How do you separate multiple words? Are blog post categories “tags” as well, or are they strictly user-supplied? What about other meta-data that may be collected - like EXIF stuff from pictures? IMHO, a standard definition of what a tag actually is would have been a good first step to interoperability, laying out a baseline for connecting tags between sites. You can successfully implement tagging on a site without giving much thought to these questions - but you won’t be able to do much else with your tag data.
2. Standardized means of communicating tags: Tags in RSS in a non-proprietary format - seems like a no brainer to me. Tags on pages: the “rel=tag” concept never seemed to get consistently executed; let’s nail down a crawler-friendly spec, and complement it with an useful meta tag spec. Take a look at a Flickr photo page and hit “view source” - how are the tags identified as such? Not with a rel attribute. Take a look at del.icio.us - no rel attributes there too. And, each blogging platform and plugin has its own, different way of going about it too. No wonder Technorati gave up on tags - crawling this stuff is a nightmare.
3. Standardized “complement” tags: Before you get your back up on “standardizing” tagging, I’m proposing a two-tiered tag system: Date, time, latitude, longtitude, camera type, movie length, format, etc. are meta-data types that lend themselves to structure. A community defined “standard” for tagging time, for instance, might simply list descriptors in different languages - “morning,” “evening,” “mid-day” - etc., which content platforms (WordPress, Flickr, etc.) could then add to posts in a consistent fashion. That would allow for searches along the lines of “media:pictures [taken in the] time:evening [around] location:Sydney+Harbour.”

Ok - so lets sum it all up: what I’m advocating isn’t really about tagging at all: its about meta-data interoperability, for which tagging is one, convenient vector. Convenient because bits and pieces of the technology are in place already, and because there’s some familiarity with it all ready.

So - my suggestion is to bring tagging back by creating a body like the RSS Advisory Board, composed of individuals and organizational stakeholders, to kickstart a “Universal Tag Metadata Format” (UTMF). Publish an initial spec, get some buy in from the big players (Google, Flickr, etc.), and then try this again.

In the title for this post, I note that the failure of tagging is driving “Web 3.0:” if you think about it, the promise of the semantic web is more or less the same as that of tagging - information that knows what it is and its context. Much of the the 3.0 development hinges on AI techniques to achieve what human tagging hasn’t - consistent, exhaustive classification of information so that it can be linked together. I’m of the mind that truly effective AI is still decades away, and that most “3.0″ plays are just extensions of 1.0 algorithmic search engine technology.

The wait for AI leaves a significant gap - which well thought-out human tagging structure could fill.

semantics, tagging, tags web3.0

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Wantrepreneurs: Always wear protection with the Wallet NDA

If you’re like me, you like to tell everyone around you all of the time about whatever mashup/widget/paradigm-shifting-whatever is on your mind at any given moment. BUT: as they say at the ‘wag, “one person’s oral contract is another person’s dorm room chit-chat” - which can lead to your killer ideas getting built and monetized by someone else… not good!

So - to protect myself, I built the TechFold Wallet / Pocket NDA - a short and sweet non-disclosure agreement that I get friends, family, & coworkers to sign whenever chit-chat turns to business. Its fast, free, and easy to print, and fits perfectly in your wallet - always ready to CYA!

And best of all, in the spirit of litigation 2.0, its free! Click here for the Word file, then print, fold, tear, pocket — and profit! You can bet Tyler Winklevoss wishes he’d had one of these in his wallet when he started chatting with Facebook…

Step 1: Print!

Step 2: Fold along the dotted line…

Step 3: Tear along the creases…

Step 4: Fold in half into business-card sized pieces…

And you’re done! Have a great, litigation free weekend!

UPDATE: Here’s the full text of the NDA for you to “mashup” as you see fit. Widgetize it baby!

This Non-Disclosure Agreement is between __________________________ (herein referred to as “YOU”) and __________________________ (herein referred to as “ME” or “I”), who desire to discuss a concept or idea thought up by ME. I wish to have this discussion for the purposes of (1) passing the time, (2) getting positive feedback, (3) pitching you for funding, or (4) filling a gap in table conversation. The Parties listed above hereby agree to the following terms as they relate to the disclosure of information considered proprietary by ME.
At no time from the date of this agreement shall YOU directly or indirectly disclose, sell or give any information it receives from ME to any person, firm, or corporation, or use the information for its own benefit, except for the purpose described above, without the express written consent of ME.
Should any dispute arise from or relate to matters covered by this Agreement, the parties agree first to attempt to resolve the matter in confidential, private meetings between the parties or arm wrestling. If this fails to produce a mutually satisfactory resolution, the parties shall, as an alternative to litigation, enter into legally binding arbitration. The parties understand that these methods shall be the sole remedy for any controversy or claim arising out of the matters covered by this Agreement and expressly waive their right to file a law suit or claim against one another for such disputes, except to enforce arbitration decision or the provisions of this paragraph.

connectu, facebook, litigation, valleywag winklevoss

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Google Results Suck Hard… so does my SEO

I’ve always tried to stay out of SEO/SEM discussions as I’ve invested very little time into understanding the dynamics of search algorithms and the practicalities of SEO. As a content site owner, however, I’m starting to understand that its not just a traffic booster, but fundamental to the survival of my site (upcomingdiscs.com).

UpcomingDiscs has a great crew of reviewers cranking out quality dvd reviews - that Google can’t find. Here’s an example: take a look at the results for “planet terror dvd review” - seems like a natural enough search, right? UpcomingDiscs has a good review of “Planet Terror” - quality, original content.

1. The #1 result from Google is a Netscape/Propeller page with one vote.
2. The #6 result from Google is a Digg page with two votes.
3. UpcomingDiscs doesn’t appear in the index. Rather, I only looked to page 10 of results, but we weren’t there.
4. The first 10 pages are a mish mash of review indexes, reviews, newspaper stories about the movie, and so on.

So - what conclusions can I draw from this little experiment?

1. Google’s algorithm is damaged. Propeller and Digg in first and sixth place are not right.
2. UpcomingDiscs needs some radical SEO.

The first of these I have little control over; the second, I have lots. I figured that producing an XML sitemap pointing to original content with clean URL’s would suffice; apparently not.

google, search, sem seo

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