We put the “ogle” in “Google” (source)

(Yes, I’m aware this video is hosted on Google’s YouTube -more on that later.)

I’m not a fan of Google nor of its CEO, Eric Schmidt, but it’s unfair to blame him for everything Google does: President of Products Larry Page and President of Technology Sergey Brin, also members of Google’s Board of Directors, have their share of responsibility -it’s not like they can’t afford to quit.

But I’d like to say something about Consumer Watchdog’s solution to privacy invasion, a “Do not track me” list.

“Opt-out” is the worst approach to privacy

The fact that privacy champions Facebook and Google push “Opt-out” lists for their services should be a big clue that’s not in your best interests.

Privacy isn’t the same as anonymity, but the idea of preserving privacy by sacrificing anonymity just doesn’t fly, and that’s the basis of “Do not track me” lists: as a website operator, how am I supposed to know I can’t track you without knowing it’s you browsing my site?

Would you protect your privacy with an oversized “don’t look at me” ID taped to your back?

Sure, you can have safeguards and punishments, but the only meaningful way to prevent the storing of personal information that shouldn’t be stored is to make it technically impossible in the first place. Anyone who tells your otherwise is either malicious or ignorant.

“Hi, I’m Eric Schmidt: If you tell anyone you saw me, you’ll regret it!”

OK, that hasn’t happened (yet) but this did happen: in 2005, Eric Schmidt forbid Google representatives from speaking to CNET reporters for a year after CNET’s Elinor Mills googled Schmidt for 30 minutes and published her findings in the article “Google Balances Privacy, Reach”. Neither Mills’ reporting nor Schmidt’s ban were illegal, but they show how hard is to deal with privacy and Google.

More importantly, they show why privacy and Google must be dealt with.

Google likes to equate its private interests with those of the public without having any of the accountability and transparency expected from government or non-profits; the free ice cream works, no doubt.

But that could be Google’s downfall: you can’t be public and private at the same time.

Back to the video on top: you can’t organize the world’s information without including critics and ignorant government officials that believe they know their own information needs better than you do. And no government will let you do it without a tight leash -not because it cares about its citizens’ privacy, but because it wants to ride shotgun.

Your identity should be revealed only on a “need to know” basis

Obvious, right? But a lot of sites will ask for your date of birth instead of simply asking if you are older than certain age, even if you aren’t opening an account or making a transaction. That’s the size of the challenge we face in privacy on the Internet. (Please read the note on OpenID below on why some solutions can be worse than the problem.)

The sad truth is the Internet is just an extremely succesful hack that doesn’t give a damn about privacy.

An even sadder truth is a lot of people, specially younger people, not only think that ice cream is free -they think it “has” to be “free”.

Notes

• OK, if I’m so smart, what’s the solution? Don’t track anyone who hasn’t logged into its Google or Facebook or whatever account. In other words, good ‘ol “Opt-in”. Just don’t be mad if the quality of service goes down -assuming you still get the service at all. This is a shaky solution, as the Internet and the ad-funded model are anti-privacy by design, but it’s as good as it can get without a makeover.
• What about OpenID? The idea itself has merits, but sadly privacy isn’t one of them. From the official site: ”Accepting OpenIDs gives access to a rich set of user data that would otherwise require the completion of lengthy registration forms to obtain. Many OpenID providers collect and share a wide range of demographic information, including name, date of birth, location, gender and an email address.” Yet another reason to avoid a single online identity. (OpenID supports restriction of user data, but all it takes is one mistake on your part and your data is in the open.)
• Browsers like Firefox and Explorer, despite having privacy features, have an interest in not making it too easy to protect your privacy -they are “Free as in Ice Cream”, after all (Firefox gets most of its income from Google, Explorer has Bing’s advertisers). Don’t get me started on Google’s Chrome.
• For more technical users, there are browser plugins that can help you. I’ll admit this is a bit self-delusional -you are trusting your privacy to yet another 3rd party, always a bad proposition. Still, if you are concerned, it’s worth a look, and there are side benefits: you can begin here. Proxies are another option but require more configuration and break more sites. But remember: the Internet is anti-privacy by design -it’s not that easy.
• The easiest solution? Perhaps a compromise by having two different browsers: one carefully configured for private browsing (start by disabling 3rd-party cookies) and another for those times when you want to make sure everything works and don’t mind being tracked, like when you are shopping or banking. I suggest Firefox with Explorer, in that order.
• The right laws can help in curbing tracking abuse. Just keep in mind the government always reserves the right to track you, because they can. How much of a problem this is depends on your government.
• Google is not the only offender, but is perhaps the worst: their only meaningful business is advertising, they have a “Because I can” attitude and the money to follow through.

© 2010 Héctor Cuevas. All rights reserved.

A single index, like Tom proposed, would reduce bandwidth load for websites, indirectly speeding the Internet, but the very structure of the index is part of a search engine’s secret sauce -unless it’s a very simple index. This could appeal to some niche search engines and researchers, and might become their only option as website operators tighten their robot.txt policies, but still doesn’t solve the fundamental problem: several parties duplicating the same data in the same ineffective way.

So I propose what I call Contextual Semantic Publishing, or CSP, based on semantic web technologies and cloud computing, complete with business model and use examples. This is a process improvement, both for publishing and indexing.

Showing a web site in search results requires several distinct activities, each with its own optimizations:

Crawling

Currently optimized by sitemaps and robots.txt policies. These suggest robots which parts of a website should be indexed and the frequency of updates; they work at the page and directory level.

Mirroring/caching

Search engines keep a copy of the page for their own use and as an archive visible to users. If you have lots of secondary content in a page (dynamic and navigation sidebars, notices that should be ignored when indexing) it will hit bandwidth, CPU and storage for everyone -my proposal in this post deals with this. (An automatically updated sitemap might reduce, but not eliminate, the hit).

Indexing

Page analysis by the search engine, to decide when to show a page in search results. Usually part of a search engine’s secret sauce, but could be shared or licensed.

Why bother changing publishing and indexing?

Because the current model for both is reaching its limits. The fantasy that web sites should be punished for reacting to evaluation by search engines (aka PageRank) has to end, as well as the fallacy that what’s good for search engines is good for readers.

The components of CSP

Contextual

Web crawlers should retrieve just what they need and just once. This implies bots will see different, probably more spartan, pages than humans. Yet the current state of the web almost ensures this can’t and -given current search engine policies- won’t happen.

Semantic

Put short, it means that web content should be tagged for disambiguation purposes, so a machine algorithm doesn’t have to guess what you mean when you say you feel like one night in Paris -does it get you plane tickets or a DVD movie starring a blonde socialite? [As fate would have it, Google just bought a semantic index.] For bots this means they can “decide” if they are interested or not in a specific component of a page without downloading it first.

Publishing

A publishing system with these enhancements lets web crawlers ask for updates only on those parts of a page they are interested in, and know that a site-wide element (say a footer) should be retrieved just once for the whole site. Furthermore, since I know it’s for bots, I can further optimize fragment and page serving in a way that doesn’t make sense when humans are involved.

You can already find the seeds of CSP in the current Internet:

• Facebook and other social sites already serve bots and logged-in users a different version of the same profile url. Contextual but not semantic.
• WordPress and other modern CMS have structured pages, almost (but not quite) semantic and might create automatic sitemaps -but they aren’t meant to accept queries, serve different versions or just specific parts of a page.

So what’s the problem, then? Getting search engines to trust your CSP engine to be honest and not play SEO tricks. That’s where the cloud comes in.

Cloud computing

At its core, it’s about getting access to a shared pool of computing resources for your own purposes, across the network and in a most transparent way.

To be efficient, all indexers should share the same updated mirror of the Internet and trust it to be accurate. A caveat: this will probably be a “mainstream Internet” mirror. It’s OK -they are getting most of the traffic anyway, and you can differentiate by crawling lesser known corners of the net on your own.

Clouds are made for sharing: best bandwidth, redundancy, scaling and support. For startups, it’s only natural to host their indexes and algorithms in the cloud, further boosting efficiency.

What about trust? The closest thing you can get to that is a written agreement between industry giants on behalf of their respective clients: in this case, between the cloud provider and the large search engines. Now you can put CSP to work.

Cloud-based CSP in practice

From the point of view of the entirely fictitious

• Publishers
  • “Popular Blog”, using a popular open-source blogging platform
  • “News organization”, using a proprietary CMS platform
• “Cloud”, a cloud provider
• Search engines
  • “Behemoths”, one of the largest search engines in existence
  • “Startups”, a newcomer with its own indexing algorithm

Popular Blog

“Popular Blog” is at “Cloud”, running a hosted version of their blogging platform with CSP enhancements that only accepts crawling by the “CloudBot”, which stores a mirror copy of “Popular Blog” in the cloud. CSP and the CloudBot keep “Popular Blog” usage fees low, and since both are outside its control, there’s no way “Popular Blog” can cheat the system.

Bots from search engines are directed to index the bot-optimized CSP mirror: most of the time “Popular Blog” picks the bandwidth tab for “Behemoths” and lets “Startups” pay directly to “Cloud”. This way “Popular Blog” gets as many visibility as it wants, at a fraction of the cost. Better yet -they always know who is using their bandwidth for indexing.

News Organization

“News Organization” would rather self-host their proprietary platform; still, they are interested in slashing bandwidth costs without blocking crawlers. So they make a deal with “Cloud” (they are large enough for it to be worth Cloud’s time) and together they draft a document schema describing the components of their news pages in semantic terms. With this, News Organization can serve the CloudBot just the information it needs to do its job, and Cloud has something to show to interested search engines. The deal has fidelity clauses to assuage search engines’ fears, and now Cloud can afford to monitor them.

Bot access is handled pretty much the same, except News Organization reserves the right to manage access itself, paying Cloud for bandwidth and storage and treating its CSP cloud mirror as just another asset.

Alternatively, News Organization implements support for the CSP API in their proprietary platform and modifies its robots.txt policy to grant bots different levels of access to the API, if they want to index their site.

Search engines: “Behemoths” and “Startups”

“Behemoths” would rather call all the shots as they do now, but is not that easy anymore. They want the full page anyway, but don’t mind getting it from the more efficient CloudBot if Cloud agrees to sign a free “fidelity agreement” and “Popular Blog” picks the bandwidth tab for them. They might insist on signing another agreement with News Organization, but again -given their size, it’s worth their time.

“Startups” like the savings they can get from CloudBot -including not having to run their own bot. But not everyone likes Startups, and certainly not everyone’s gonna pay their bandwidth. Still, they need less bandwidth, vertical search engines can do with only parts of the page and they might get a better deal by running in the cloud, too. If the sister CloudIndex proves to be good enough they might just license it and win the market on user experience alone.

Why cloud computing?

Because cloud providers are in a unique position to serve as brokers: they can prevent websites from cheating and keep bots in check. And now you can be as closed or as open as you want (OpenStack).

Still, there’s no reason you can’t have CSP in your current publishing platform -it just won’t fly as easily as if you were on the cloud with everyone else. I’d love it if someone could point me to bot traffic statistics for larger organizations and government. Here’s Jeff Atwood’s 2008 take on Stackoverflow and search engine traffic.

Notes

1. Alternate names for CSP: “Contextual publishing” could have been appropriate, but it’s taken for ad publishing. “Semantic publishing” is a bit “base” and misses the important point of serving different versions of the same page. So I put C and S together and got CSP.

© 2010 Héctor Cuevas. All rights reserved.

The title of the article is the somewhat tame “Newspaper Chain’s New Business Plan: Copyright Suits” but the permalink is far more eloquent: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/07/copyright-trolling-for-dollars/

Just one thing: when you actually read the article, it turns out Righthaven only has “clients”. How could they be a “copyright troll”, suing for unauthorized reposting of their clients’ very own articles?

While I’m not sure about outright suing (usually you just send a DMCA notice), media companies can’t copyright-troll!

Why does it matter?

Because Wired.com is trying to shame an owner for defending its property.

(Partial list of sued websites)

Here’s a rundown of Wired’s article

I’ll be referring to paragraph numbers from the version found at Wired.com in the early hours of July 23, focusing only on finding out whose copyright’s Righthaven bought to become a copyright troll.

• Paragraphs 1-3 introduce Steve Gibson and his company, Righthaven, as “buying out the copyrights to newspaper content for the sole purpose of suing blogs and websites …” Evil enough, but no facts yet. Let’s read more before flooding Wired.com with the same old angry comments.
• Paragraphs 4-6. Kravets defines Righthaven’s efforts as a ”copyright trolling litigation campaign”, complete with Gibson’s portrait. But Gibson is described as doing all this for his client, not for himself. His client (also his first and the only one mentioned in the article) is Las Vegas Review-Journal, published by Stephens Media. So Gibson is suing for unauthorized copying of Review-Journal’s original articles on their behalf.
• Paragraphs 7-12 hardly mention Righthaven at all, let alone buying someone’s copyrights. More of background info.
• Paragraphs 13-20 have Gibson’s success stories about his client, the Review-Journal.

And that’s it.

I’ll apologize if I’m wrong

But after reading Kravets’ article several times, I can’t find anything that supports the characterization of Righthaven’s business model as “copyright trolling”, nor any mention of Gibson actually ”buying out” someone’s copyrights just to launch a lawsuit. Even less after doing some research.

Maybe he just forgot and will add the relevant facts, maybe he misunderstood the story at first and didn’t correct his initial draft -whatever it was, I expect more from a Wired.com article.

All I see so far is a media company contracting a technology company to defend its assets. <yawn> Call it what you want, but copyright trolling it isn’t.

Updates: Righthaven finally sued a company with deep pockets, which should make an interesting match. And Las Vegas Review-Journal publisher Sherman Frederick himself answers criticism, pointing out they haven’t seen any traffic or revenue decline, and even if they did, it’s worth it. He does have a point: anyone who thinks a bunch of links can pay a newsroom hasn’t done the math. Even the sending of DMCA notices isn’t free -nothing on the Internet really is.

[Update: In August 2010 Apple and Liquidmetal Technologies created a joint IP company for licensing purposes out of Liquidmetal's IP. Apparently Righthaven was created this way -still no troll.]

Notes

1. “Patent trolls” are companies who buy patents with the sole aim of finding infringing companies and sue them; they don’t have the slightest intention of actually using or licensing them outside of court.
   “Copyright trolls” were described by Rapidshare (of all things!) as “essentially a paralegal service masquerading as a [content] company”.
2. This is how the publisher of the Las Vegas Review-Journal describes its relationship with Righthaven. BTW: this wasn’t included in Wired’s story, I had to research for it. (Note: I really object to equating piracy to theft. Stephan Kinsella wrote a must-read on the nature of property and the so-called “intellectual property” [PDF]. Still, I believe a copyright system is needed, just not a “Sonny Bono” one).
3. What’s “Fair Use”, anyway? Read some thoughts on the matter from the Electronic Frontier Foundation. BTW, from what we know, the sites sued by Righthaven didn’t just quote but reposted full articles -no way on Earth a “Fair Use” defense will work, I think (I’m not a lawyer).

© 2010 Héctor Cuevas. All rights reserved.

The miserable marriage of AT&T and Apple is making headlines -again. Maybe it’s time to put it out of its misery.

How does Apple kick AT&T to the curb?

Um, Apple already has, sort of. Remember that iPhone presentation where none of the cool features they introduced would work on AT&T’s network? However, they just won’t drop the exclusivity agreement.

How does AT&T kick Apple to the curb?

Easy -pull a Steve Jobs:

“We’re not perfect. Networks are not perfect. We all know that. But we want to make our users happy.”

Then bring an iPhone owner and have him do all the cool stuff the iPhone can on stage. Bring another, and another, and another, until either AT&T’s network or the stage falls apart and the survivors are left with broken screens and substandard coverage. Distribute free band-aids (for users! Steve already gave bumper cases for the iPhones!) and discounted MicroCells.

Don’t break the exclusivity agreement yourself -let Apple do that, collect early termination fees and see if they can find another sucker that thinks is fun to feed their baby.

AT&T: “But I love Apple!”

She doesn’t love you, kid, and you can’t afford her. Don’t worry, you’ll get over it.

© 2010 Héctor Cuevas. All rights reserved.

Before finding your site: contextual ads in search results

This works when the search engines processes the user’s query and returns an ad along search results. However,

• if the search results are so good, why should users bother looking at the ads?
• if the search results aren’t so good, how can I expect the right ad to be shown?

And that’s assuming the ads shown have something to do with the search query and aren’t the result of buying competitor’s trademarked keywords.

Another problem: user queries aren’t the same as user intent. Since the point of an ad is to get visitors to do something, let’s focus on user intention.

After search: user intention in websites

Now that your site has been found, what’s next? Online stores have it incredibly easy: they simply can’t put ads -everything is a site link, and every single one of them can lead to a sale.

Site links are cool -readers pay attention to them and won’t think twice of visiting them, even if they are less flashy and prominent than ads. People couldn’t care less about ads. Why? Because site links are part of your site’s purpose, and ads just get in the way -no one reads your website for the ads, yet you expect visitors to pay them the same attention they would to a site link.

In the user’s mind, if it’s relevant it’s not an ad, it’s a site link.

How do I turn an ugly ad into a beautiful site link?

The old recipe holds true: know your site first, then know your readers. Analytics are your friend, but you still have to work at it:

• Don’t bait-and-switch your users -go with what brought them to you in the first place. Simple keyword matching will only take you so far. One quote from the previous link says it all: “The idea is (…) the advertising really does become the content you were hoping to find.”
• Make others care by showing you do: users won’t ignore the most transparent of paid insertions if it adds value (however minimal) to your site, is placed accordingly and you are upfront about it. Think SuperBowl half-time.

Sometimes the ad resists the upgrade, but you can improve future odds with return visits: don’t depend on being found again. This is where your site must pull itself. Again, stores and services have it a lot easier (exhibits A, B and C) but entertainment does well too.

Since you are counting on being the last stop before the real deal (the ad buyer’s site), ask yourself how much sense it makes for your site to be standing in the way of someone else’s shop, and go from there.

For a proposal on how to make indexing easier for everyone, please read Contextual Semantic Publishing and the Open Index

© 2010 Héctor Cuevas. All rights reserved.

We can expect anytime now a book titled “The Consumers Are Running IT”, describing how employees tell their bosses what products to buy, not because they are efficient or fulfill a business objective, but because it’s amazing employees can get the toys they want for free!

Enter the iPhone 4 – the mobile phone that can’t make calls when you hold it in your hand (I admit I’m exaggerating a bit). [Update: Scott Adams explains why now he can't make a comic strip about that.]

What are customers saying?

“If you can afford it, carry a second Verizon phone for backup.”
Steve Wozniak, Apple co-founder (source)
 [Verizon is the primary competitor of the iPhone's exclusive carrier, AT&T]

“It’s not really my concern because I hardly make calls.”
Ross Beck, student (source)

What are the pundits saying?

“… can’t everyone just put a Bumper case on their iPhone 4 and then go out enjoy the best phone on the market? Or a piece of tape. Is this so hard?”
David Morgenstern (source)
[BTW, this guy, like everyone else quoted here, is 100% serious in his suggestions.]

What’s wrong here?

Nothing. This people didn’t want a mobile phone -they wanted an iPhone and that’s what they got. To understand this subtle philosophical point, watch this: (warning: strong language)

Still confused?

Then you must be one of those enterprise types who can’t choose the right product even when the people that know best -people like Woz, Beck and Morgenstern, quoted above- point it to them.

” (What I hate about the enterprise market) The people that use the products don’t decide for themselves. And the people that make those decisions sometimes are confused.”
Steve Jobs, Apple CEO (article, video – 28:30)

There’s still hope, however, for those unenlightened people thinking the iPhone 4 should make phone calls just like any of the cheap $10 phones do: Steve Jobs has just agreed to give you a FREE bumper case to make sure the iPhone 4 doesn’t come into contact with you, until September 30. Be grateful -other companies would have given you just a piece of duct tape.

Related: the love-hate AT&T-Apple relationship. If you feel sorry for AT&T, read AT&T should pull a Steve Jobs on the iPhone. Oh, and just in case someone cares, what the other mobile phone manufacturers are saying.

For more enlightenment on how to run an enterprise (from someone who doesn’t think you need to own one to run it as you like, no less) read What part of “selling” didn’t understand Michael Widenius?

© 2010 Héctor Cuevas. All rights reserved.

So, with the important caveat they might (hopefully) have already been taken into account by the developers and some of these aren’t doable in version 1.0 (but they have to be planned for now), these are my worries:

Design

• I can’t share with my friends unless they have their own Diaspora seed. The most important of all. If I need one other person with Diaspora installed to make it work, that’s one installation too many. How it works, then? With guest-passes sent by email and special email addresses, allowing limited access and upload capacities. This is hardly new -Flickr!, Facebook and specially Posterous do a lot of things with email. For more fine-grained control and broader access, they can sign-up at my own seed; having their own should be strictly optional.
  Sharing with my friends has nothing to do with their ability or willingness to share with me.
• Postponing internationalization. It will be a long time before Diaspora is available in other languages, but if they don’t implement real internationalization/localization from the beginning, at every level, they will be in a lot of pain afterwards.
• Not learning from file-sharing programs’ mistakes. Even government agencies that should know better have been sharing confidential info just because a secretary or clerk wanted free music.

Usability

• The “stupid defaults only burn stupid people” mindset: the misguided belief of the UNIX guru that if your data becomes compromised for not changing the default settings it’s your own fault for running software you’re not smart enough to use. I call this incompetence and laziness: if you’re a developer and know a setting is insecure, it’s your responsibility to turn it off by default, and make it clear to everyone that changing it is not recommended.
• Making the user interface an afterthought. Sure, implementing all those standards and protocols is difficult, even if you stick with existing ones, but the UI is the thing users see every day. The worst part? User interface problems can’t be solved simply by writing better code.
• Failing the single download, 2-click install test. Of those two-clicks, one is for bypassing Windows UAC. And of course I can install two Diaspora seeds in the same host, although the second might require (possibly automatic) configuration. Bonus points if I can run it from a memory stick.
• Not learning from Facebook’s mistakes.
  • Lesson number one: People think “Everyone” means “All my friends” instead of ”Whole Wide World”.
  • Lesson number two: Just say no to Opt-out.
  • Lesson number three: “Friend” is a terrible catch-all term for including “People or organizations I believe exist”. (Lunch.com does something nice: you have Friends, Followers, Communities and Similars -you even take a simple quiz!)

Security

• Not having automatic/easy patching. It does have its drawbacks (like the McAfee patch that nuked a lot of PC’s), but it really increases security in the long run, specially in the consumer space. Just make sure you don’t corrupt people’s photos.
• Not including monitoring tools. Yep, this goes against the privacy of visitors to my seed, but if I’m going to host my seed I need a minimum of information, specially if my ISP charges for bandwidth usage -in this case, the possibilities of mischief are endless.
• Including the Diaspora team as “trusted” in the GPG keystore. This happened in the original PGP, where the author’s public key was marked as “trusted”, meaning it could be used for verifying unknown digital signatures. Thus PGP users learned their first lesson in public-key encryption security: trust someone you don’t really know to verify other people’s signatures. Diaspora should keep track of who “introduced” who, in case of impersonation or revocation.
  (This is kind of a ”trick pitfall”: you really shouldn’t need to know there’s a keystore at all).
• Requiring 3rd-party cookies. Third-party cookies are anathema to privacy, but sometimes you can’t avoid them, for example when you are using a third-party for authentication. Although this problem should be addressed by browsers, they usually provide a crude all-or-nothing configuration. Until this improves, Diaspora should make its best not to use them.
• root-awe. ”OK, you know the root password, so clearly you are an authorized user and can do everything you want”. The UNIX-style permissions are so outdated it hurts. A variant of this: letting another user of my computer have access to my files. Unfortunately, encrypting storage has its share of problems.

Privacy and anonimity

• Not supporting multiple, isolated identities. Why does the chess club has to know I’m also an avid mountaineer? Why do my coworkers have to know who my relatives are? I don’t have to protect my privacy only from advertisers -also from my connections.

This last point has nothing to do with Diaspora, but I think it’s worth mentioning: nothing prevents your Diaspora friends from automatically reposting your photos with them to Facebook and similar services. The problem with digital is that “sharing” is a lot like “giving” -bad news if you want to share and keep control.

Update: I’m not sure whether this is a technical pitfall or not, but I can’t believe I forgot about it: patents.

Suggestions

• Publish by email for grandma (send her a pdf file of my latest album or whatever). She can send her comments back by email, of course. A variant of this: create a website that can be burned to DVD and mailed for off-line browsing. This can be used for yearbooks.
• Panic button for temporarily closing your seed to everyone (aka “Damage control mode”).
• I’m glad you exceeded your funding goal by an awful lot of money (1,925% at the time of writing). What about using the extras for a 3rd-party security audit for the first few major releases of your code? I don’t know how much it costs, but if you can afford it, it’s worth it.
• A big differentiator would be a “Dislike” button. Just don’t try to turn it into a poll or moderation system. Better yet -rethink the “Like” system.
• Parental controls -this would be great for school networks. Mattel did some pretty smart things with BarbieGirls (check their Parent’s Place). Look for “B Chat” levels -a way to control chat interactions to prevent griefing and dissemination of personal information, mostly via dictionaries, word analysis and physical procedures (think iPod/iTunes) to ensure participants know each other in the real world.
• Find a way to deal with dead or just inactive users. Believe me, you’ll have to.

I know it’s been two consecutive posts about Diaspora, but it’s nice to see people are starting to pay attention to online privacy; besides, most of these points apply to all social platforms.

© 2010 Héctor Cuevas. All rights reserved.

So what else Diaspora needs?

• Income without ads. Diaspora got a lot of funding for writing the software and launching their hosting service, but I have doubts about their business model. It seems they won’t have free accounts, which is logical if they won’t do advertising -and today, effective advertising relies on personal info.
  Unfortunately, the public thinks differently -the one mistake Facebook hasn’t made yet is billing their users, and it’s the only one people won’t ever forgive. Not even the most raging privacy advocates have suggested Facebook bills their users to eliminate the need to get income from advertising (venture capital won’t last forever).Without steady income, their service will fail, and the barrier to entry will be insurmountable.
  WordPress is a successful example of a free/paid service, but blogs aren’t social -taking Wordpress.com as a role model for Diaspora could be very dangerous, and even WordPress.com throws in an ad or two (not to mention the VIP Blogs, a category in themselves).
• Natives. Facebook grew out of schools. It was easy and logical to be part of Facebook -I mean, of your school community. Diaspora (as most other free software alternatives) has the low requirement of hosting your own server or paying someone else to do it.
  I think Diaspora has a better chance by embracing closed societies -schools, clubs and medium-sized organizations that don’t want to interact with the rest of the Internet and are willing to pay for the privilege (these are the customers of SocialGo and Ning). Diaspora with Moodle integration could be a winner in the education space.
  Update: The following is Eureka Streams, a Lockheed Martin open source social platform for businesses. Still in the early stages, but worth watching; the documentation section of their website is worth reading.
  

The real problem with Facebook (and most other social platforms) is that they insist on grasping the individual by the neck and making him cozy with the rest of the world, stripping him clean of anonymity and privacy, then retrofit access controls (like friend lists) to pretend to make up for it.

The myth of the global village is the first thing any social platform has to repudiate to protect user privacy.

© 2010 Héctor Cuevas. All rights reserved.

A lot of people seem to be searching for an “Anathem movie”. As far as I know, the only thing like that is Anathem’s official video trailer.

While reviewing a less than half-read book is risky business, I think it’s warranted for two reasons: I actually pulled myself to read that much, so I have to make something for it, and I can’t help thinking the people who praise it so much do it because they haven’t read a good book (if you have read both “Anathem” and one of the books I mention below, please comment).

Although “Anathem” has to explain itself almost since the first page, I won’t give spoilers. I will just point out the novel failures:

• It kinda tries to expose a philosophical point, but not really.
• It kinda tries to create a different world out of an unbelievable Earth with misspelled names -and fails to the point it has a spoiler at the beginning to get its failure out of the way early.
• It kinda tries to impress its readers with the subtlety of abstract mathematical thought, but the protagonists are just dumb, despite all the big words.

And it does it very persistently, all the time. Its only success is to confirm spectacularly xkcd’s Fiction Rule of Thumb:

"Except for anything by Lewis Carroll or Tolkien, you get five made-up words per story. I'm looking at you, Anathem."

A while ago there was the “remix culture” fad. Basically, you took a work (book, movie) and edited it to suit your tastes. “The Phantom Edit” was Star Wars: Episode One without Jar Jar Binks, for example.

I might give “Anathem” a try if I could replace all the fake, misspelled exotica with the properly spelled names. I’m aware it might be a writing device -just like a novel about a boring person might be purposely written in a boring way to bring the point home. I also caught the self-referential points in the story. However, as a reader, I just wanted to skip to the last 10 pages and be done with it. Not good. When I found out I had to pay for the privilege, I cut my losses and wrote this. Fail.

I will list a few books. They are not “replacement”, ”Anathem”-like novels -that’s the whole point! They are superb works that might be appealing to readers who out of ignorance thought “Anathem” was incredible.

Warning: After reading these, you won’t be satisfied by just any hyped book.

Atlas Shrugged

The classical philosophical novel by Ayn Rand. Not as popular outside the United States, but still a classic. Not for everyone, because being a philosophical novel, the characters are ”restricted” by the ideas and attitudes they represent, feeling a bit differently from your usual novel; but the plot is interesting, and as an unapologetic defense of Capitalism, is a must-read book to everyone with an opinion on it. The official website is http://atlasshrugged.com/

There has been a Hollywood movie in the works forever, it might be for the best it hasn’t happened yet; the dystopian world of the original Bioshock video game (highly recommended) was clearly inspired by it (Hello, Andrew Ryan!).

A Canticle for Leibowitz

Technically a science-fiction novel, it’s actually a story of Humankind told in three short glimpses spanning hundreds of years in a future, post-apocalyptic Earth. While a careless reader might think it’s similar to “Anathem” (both novels are centered around monks and their convent), they couldn’t be more different. “A Canticle for Leibowitz” is about the preservation of knowledge for a world that is not ready to reclaim it, and might never be. Walter M. Miller manages to do in plain English what Stephenson fails to do with its dictionary of misspelled words: create an engaging, believable world. And unlike the poseurs in “Anathem”, the monks of the Order of Leibowitz are real Christian monks (in the fictional world of the book, of course).

A bad, fake ”sequel” (more of a spin-off, a side story set some time after the second part of the original) was “Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman”. It was edited out of Miller’s incomplete drafts, and published posthumously. Don’t waste your time -comparing it to “A Canticle for Leibowitz” is like comparing a season of ”24″ to Orson Welles’ “Citizen Kane”. It’s hard to believe they come from the same author. But it is not totally worthless -even being an inferior novel, “Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman” does a better job at creating a fake world (complete with fake culture and history) than “Anathem”. In fact, they share this emphasis -for worse.

His Dark Materials Trilogy

Known to most people from the movie loosely based on the first book, “The Golden Compass”.  Philip Pullman shows us a different but still recognizable and believable world. This strange reality is a central part of the story, but the story is not about it -it’s about the people who inhabit it. Although not a philosophical novel, it does have an underlying point: live life for life itself. Incredibly engaging, one of the few series that really needs all its books.

“The Golden Compass” movie wasn’t neither a commercial success nor faithful to the first book (in fact, it’s way shorter). Sure, there is a talking polar bear and the protagonist is a child, but it’s not for children. Is for young adults and older people who don’t mind having their world rocked a bit. Imagine what would happen to “Kirikou and the Sorceress” if it was remade by Disney; this is what they did to “The Golden Compass”.

The Martian Chronicles

One of Ray Bradbury’s classics, in an unusual genre: science-fiction chronicle. Born as short stories written separately, as a whole they have a nostalgic quality, as the repeated attempts of Humankind to colonize Mars finally succeed, more than they thought.

Flatland: a romance of many dimensions

 By Edwin A. Abbott. Written from the point of view of a square living in Flatland, it describes its people, ranked by the number and regularity of its sides, and the once-in-a-millenium Revelation he received from a higher-dimensional being. The full text is at Project Gutenberg’s site: http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/97

There’s even a movie oriented to students based on it.

© 2010 Héctor Cuevas. All rights reserved.

For updated coverage on Wikileaks, see http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsmaker/wikileaks/

Initial release

The video was posted at several sites by Wikileaks, with some problems: 

• Vimeo had it for a short while, then it was deleted -I don’t know why or by whom. 
• The YouTube page of the video is blocked by age controls, but the direct link in collateralmurder.com works fine. I never had such problems to watch Neda’s death.
• Facebook censored sharing of its version of the video and some links to the Collateral Murder website: it told you it was published in your Profile, but it wasn’t. After two or three days they stopped censoring it, a lot of time given the prominence of the video, if it really was a mistake.

Watch the video and all its associated materials at http://www.collateralmurder.com/