TechFold - Bold tech & web commentary

TSG on Google Maps as a Terror Tool

The Smoking Gun has an article on the use of Google Maps/Earth by prospective terrorists as a tool to scout out locations and vulnerabilities, found via TechMeme.

Should Google be censoring maps? Or reducing zoom levels over airports? Is Google responsible for the actions its tools may enable?

In a nutshell, IMHO, no. The people running airports are responsible for thier facilities, not Google. If terrorists can find vulnerabilities via Google Earth, the only question that should be asked is why the facility managers aren’t finding them first. Use the tools, people.

airports, gmaps, google, googlemaps, safety, smoking gun, terror thesmokinggun

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In an impoverished nation of 900 million people…

…someone is building a 27 storey personal residence. Obscene. Six floors of parking for his cars. 600 staff. As Gizmodo points out, Bill Gates and the Bill & Melinda foundation are real heroes.

billg, india wealth

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What is the real story with Alexaholic/Statsaholic/Amazon?

The Alexa vs. Statsaholic story, in response to which I proposed a boycott of the Amazon eCommerce API, is getting complicated. Pete Cashmore has a petition on Mashable, calling on Amazon and Statsaholic to settle the dispute without litigation.

It emerged in comments however (see comments by James), that statsaholic was not using the Alexa API (which charges fees), but was instead scraping, or otherwise circumventing the API. James points readers to the Alexa Blog post on the topic in which Alexa takes issue with:

1. Trademark infringement via the “Alexa”holic name. Though Alexaholic has changed its name, Alexa points out that Statsaholic still redirects the Alexaholic domain to the new site - a remedy that is not satisfactory to Alexa. Personally, I think Alexa forfeited their rights to demand restitution from Statsaholic by allowing the use of the Alexaholic domain for years, and explicitly stating that they were aware of the Alexaholic, and supportive of it. Alexa should be content with the Statsaholic switch and call it a lesson learned on trademark protection.
2. Alexa also takes issue with Statsaholic’s use of graphs. The Alexa fee-based API (AWIS)does not include graphs - so statsaholic apparently (more-or-less) hotlinks them. This issue has the ring of legitimacy to it. The charts and the system to produce them consume resources, and the IP behind the charting system has value. If Statsaholic used paid AWIS data and their own charting engine, their wouldn’t be a problem. But it seems that Statsaholic is doing neither.

IN summary: (a) Statsaholic is entited to the Statsaholic name, and traffic from Alexaholic. (b) If Statsaholic is a viable business, it can afford to put out for its own chart rendering engine, and pay for use of AWIS data. To be honest, that sound preferable anyway - there’s a lot more opportunity to add value to data when you’re completely in control of presentation; and, that would give Statsaholic the opportunity to blend with data from other sources, creating a superior metric.

In any event, I don’t think Alexa needed to resort to litigation to get this ball rolling, but I don’t know both sides of the story. Pete C. suggests in response to James in comments that Alexa tried to up-charge Statsaholic, asking for more than the standard AWIS fees - is this substantiated?

alexa, alexaholic, amazon, awis, mashable statsaholic

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Exodus from DodgeBall - Google’s Growth Working Against Innovation?

Om covers the departure of DodgeBall’s founder and first employee from the Googleplex. Of particular note is the comment in the departing team member’s announcement:

It’s no real secret that Google wasn’t supporting dodgeball the way we expected. The whole experience was incredibly frustrating for us - especially as we couldn’t convince them that dodgeball was worth engineering resources, leaving us to watch as other startups got to innovate in the mobile + social space.

Sheesh - fighting for engineering resources. Sounds like something more likely to happen at IBM, Microsoft, EDS, or some other lumbering 1.0 titan - not everyone’s favorite wizard of innovation. This is where I question Google’s scattershot approach to prioritization - why does Google pump resources into something like Google Base, Google Bus Routes, or Froogle, while viable acquisitions die on the vine?

If you’re losing presumably valuable people (you paid for them) and flatlining acquisitions (that were previously media superstars), its time to re-visit your internal prioritizion system.

EDIT: Scoble makes a parallel point - that Google has gotten “big company disease” and is no longer able to understand/leverage/utilize things below a certain scale threshold. This is similar to what I mentioned above - Google’s prioritization is skewing away from small/nimble/innovative towards large/slow/monolithic.

dodgeball, google, jaiku, sms, techfold twitter

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Utah Legislators Limit Keyword Advertising, Clog the Tubes with Dumbfounded Journos

AP is wiring out a story about how Governor Jon Huntsman Jr. and the Utah State Legislature have passed a into law a bill limiting keyword advertising. Google, the undisputed king of keyword advertising, is getting its legal machine going; the EFF is riled up; and law professors everywhere are shaking their heads - as one pointed out, only the Feds can pass laws regulating interstate commerce, which the internet clearly is.

Here’s a telling quote from the AP story that captures the ridiculousness of the whole affair:

Consumers might wonder what the fuss is all about. But House Majority Leader David Clark likened the deed to diverting a shopper who enters a particular department store to buy a dress shirt.

“You get right to the front door and somebody whisks you away to a different store,” Clark said.

So…

1. If consumers don’t care, who is pushing for this law? Some confused group of lobbyists? Or is it do-good legislators that don’t have a clue?
2. Stores can run promotions for brands. So when I go in to buy a Lacoste dress shirt and see the big Hilfiger display at the front of the store, does that violate this law too? Are stores now required to present all brands identically?

Anyway, I come from Canada, the land of well-intentioned, useless laws, and confused, out-of-touch parliamentarians, so its nice to see that were not alone.

advertsing, eff, google, keywords utah

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Thanks, priestofmemory: the “Civil Anyway” Badge

Blogger priestofmemory has a great post about the ongoing Blogger Code of Conduct flap. He’s of the same mind as yours truly on the issue, and was kind enough to create a badge to symbolize his adherence to a reasonable, un-regulated, self-applied code of conduct: no nanny badges, just a declaration that you’re an intelligent, reasonable, non-troll.

I wear the badge at the top of my right-hand column. If you’d like to do the same, warm up your right-click-save as - here’s the badge:

And feel free to link it to:

http://techfold.com/2007/04/09/an-alternative-to-oreillys-politeness-manifesto-the-un-code/

…which is where priestofmemory pointed his, or:

http://priestofmemory.livejournal.com/57566.html

…which is his post.

Either way, the message gets across that its OK to be a nice normal person without adhereing to anyone’s arbitrary assumptions of what “nice” and “normal” are. Just to quote quickly from my original post, here’s my “Simple Test” declaration:

THE BLOGGERS CODE OF CONDUCT: A Simple Test

1. “Do online as you would in person.”
Before every post or comment you make, ask yourself whether you would be comfortable shouting it out loud from a well-lit lectern in an auditorium full of 300 people that included, friends, family, and a whole lot of strangers. If the answer is “No,” revise and retest before posting.

blogging, blogosphere, blogs, code, oreilly, sierra techfold

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An Alternative to O’Reilly’s Politeness Manifesto: The Un-Code

As Mike A. lines out effectively on CrunchNotes, the stink around the Sierra blog attacks from a week or two ago is now being perpetuated by Tim O’Reilly, who has surfaced a fluff-ridden “Blogger’s Code of Conduct.”

Out of all of the huggable, do-gooder posturing in the Code, there’s only one line that really makes any sense: “We won’t say anything online that we wouldn’t say in person.” That is to say, don’t be an jerk in your posts or in your comments. Or, if you are, expect to be banned/ostracized/etc. the same way you would be in the RW.

Other notions about banning anonymous comments, chasing commenters to get them to apologize to each other (puh-leez), aim to do nothing more than turn the blogosphere into the same padded, supervised, politically correct, injury free, la-la-la happy land that has replaced school playgrounds. For crying out loud, let’s put on our adult-hats, take the good with the bad, and move on with a newfound sense of awareness that (a) there are jerks on the internet and you probably don’t want to be one, and (b) the web community is very effective at calling out jerks without the need for codes of conduct.

Of course, I certainly don’t condone what happened to Sierra or any reprehensible behaviour like what took place in that context. Nor, however, do I think the appropriate response is the nanny-fication of the blogosphere or the introduction of a vigalante politeness corps. Instead, I propose a revised manifesto, based on O’Reilly’s pt. 4, like this:

THE BLOGGERS CODE OF CONDUCT: A Simple Test

1. “Do online as you would in person.”
Before every post or comment you make, ask yourself whether you would be comfortable shouting it out loud from a well-lit lectern in an auditorium full of 300 people that included, friends, family, and a whole lot of strangers. If the answer is “No,” revise and retest before posting.

I think that really sums it up. It leaves plenty of room for freedom of speech, and leaves “regulation” in the hands of individual bloggers and readers. That is to say, if you’re comfortable shouting out offensive stuff in a roomful of people, expect to be heckled, and then the auditorium to empty quickly.

blogging, blogosphere, blogs, locke, oreilly sierra

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