Sethop’s Interesting Times

Here’s a screenshot of a link being previewed in the new Interclue 1.5 Beta, which you should install if you haven’t already.

See the hint next to the magnify cursor you get when you mouseover a thumbnail in a the new clueviews? When you mouseover the comics in XKCD you can usually see a little in-joke in the title hint. Sometimes, the titles are pretty long, and Firefox the tooltips don’t wrap. This has been a subject of some complaint, but thankfully, with the landing of the infamous reflow branch (count the dependencies!), this will be resolved in Firefox 3.

Yep, in the 1.5 Clueviews, images of sufficient size are thumbnailed, you can click to see the image full size, and then click again to go back from there. It’s pretty cool, and we think it’s a good compromise to showing no images, or a full size window with all the images, like Cooliris does (frankly, if I wanted to see the whole page, I’d just open a new tab).

I love this cartoon, and I wish he’d put it on a T-shirt, because Turing featured in one of my favorite assignments [1] while I was at UC, where I majored in Philosophy and Computer Science.

I was never a great academic, far too scatterbrained most of the time, and being up till 3am most nights running my BBS, playing Civilization, or online backgammon (FIBS 1700+, back when that was actually pretty good), sure didn’t help, but I do have my name in the credits of one academic paper, “On Alan Turing’s Anticipation of Connectionism”, because our logic lecturer, who later went on to become co-director of the Turing Archive, discovered a mostly ignored paper by Turing from 1948, in which he definitely did anticipate “Neural Nets”, which is pretty amazing given that at the time there was only one non-specialized computing machine on the entire planet, ENIAC. [2]

Unfortunately, Jack couldn’t figure out how to make Turing’s “B Type” networks actually compute something, so in a brilliant combination of laziness, sadism and cunning, he gave his 3rd year students the option of skipping one our 20% take home assignments for the year, and instead figuring out how to make Turing’s type B networks work.

It was fun trying. In the end, I was one of about 3 students who instead succeeded in making a logical proof that these networks couldn’t work, (as specified by Turing, anyway). As I recall, I had to prove it 3 times, the last by structural induction, because Jack couldn’t accept that Turing might have got it wrong. He gave in eventually and I got full marks.

I put this achievement at the top of my list of 10 things I’ve done you probably haven’t, back in Feb 2005. Number 10 on that list was in fact Interclue, which was in the prototype stages even back then. It took a bit longer than expected to actually get it out, to same the least. I blame Hofstadter’s Law. But I’m really happy with the new beta so far, although it’s going to need some testing and tweaking, and we’d love your feedback. So if you’ve got firefox, go for it!

[1] And one of my favourite books, Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson

[2] Although others were under construction, and Turing had a hand in two of them - see Jack’s “A Brief History of Computing” for details).

Along with Carl from e2-media I gave a talk on Web 2.0 tonight, to 20 or so folks from the Canterbury Software Cluster. Just 20 minutes each, and it was frightening how fast those minutes wizzed by.

I was particularly pleased that a few folks there told me that they’d been been using Interclue and enjoying it. Thanks very much to Dave Tinkler of Holliday Corporation for inviting me to speak and helping to steer me in the right direction as I began to run out of time!

It was good to have an excuse to talk about the 2.0 Big Picture for once. Normally I lose people in the first few sentences…for a more gentle introduction, I’ve got some great videos on my 2.0 page linked in my menu above.

Of course lots of folks wanted to know what I thought Web 2.0 really is, and I put forward my opinion that “Web 2.0 is what Tim O’Reilly says it is“. I’m at least half serious about that. Tim and his company have been the thought leaders of this revolution, almost as much as they’ve just been “Watching the alphageeks” as Tim calls it. Of course they wanted specifics, so I gave them Tim’s compact definition, which is:

Web 2.0 is the network as platform, spanning all connected devices; Web 2.0 applications are those that make the most of the intrinsic advantages of that platform: delivering software as a continually-updated service that gets better the more people use it, consuming and remixing data from multiple sources, including individual users, while providing their own data and services in a form that allows remixing by others, creating network effects through an “architecture of participation,” and going beyond the page metaphor of Web 1.0 to deliver rich user experiences.

If I’d tried to give them the long version I would have been there all night…

Of course, I live in a slightly different universe to most folks, so I was somewhat thrown by the followup question “So, who is Tim O’Reilly anyway?”. This is why I love the web. We can explain these things with hyperlinks, and not slow down the information flow for the people who already know. Interclue makes it even better because you can view the main body content at the end of the hyperlinks in the context of the current page, without all the cruft around the outside of the page that could distract you off into the distance.

I wasn’t quite sure which bits of 2.0 the audience was going to be interested in, but I had faith in my ability to wing it, so I prepared a little mindmap of the various things 2.0ish that have caught my attention over the past couple of years (distracting me and slowing down the progress of Interclue quite considerably as a result). Unfortunately it’s a bit large. Click the image for a version large enough to actually read!

Also please note that this certainly isn’t a map of all things 2.0 - just the people, projects, platforms and protocols that I think I know a little bit about. And it’s not a complete map of those either.

I wish I’d had time to highlight the bits I find particularly interesting/important, hyperlink relevant articles, and add some more detail, but I’ll regard this as a starting point and post an update later. If anyone sees something they want to have a chat about, feel free to get in touch, or just leave a comment about something they’d like me to blog about in the future.

Guy Kawasaki, who is a blogger/author that every startup CEO needs to read, seems to have fallen in love with The Turk. Maybe one of the companies he backs will actually find a good use for it.

Have you done a search and seen the jobs being offered? Most of them are simple SEO work - writing filler to wrap adsense around and confuse the search engines, or “voting up” something or other. And the payrates offered are atrocious.

Update: After marking up this screenshot. I figured out how to get a list without doing a search, just clicking on HITs, you can go here. There are only 193 “HITs” posted right now. None of them pay more than $5. That’s not even worth the time I took to make the screenshot, let alone the time I took to write this post. But, I guess I’m a startup CEO, not a starving third worlder! But frankly, anyone with a clue and with an internet connection knows that their time is worth more than this. BTW (obligatory plug) if you’ve got a clue and an internet connection (and Firefox), you really ought to try the Interclue Beta.

Essentially, it was an idea that sounded great and original and interesting and got Amazon a lot of attention when they released it, but it doesn’t seem to have gotten used in the way they might have hoped. I guess there are a lot of ideas like that. Maybe things will change, but I imagine that they’re looking at the lack of uptake and pondering that to make it worthwhile they would have to be doing 100x more business, so why bother when they’ve got so much else on. (note to self: finish post about Google Answers…)

But as for Amazon trying stuff non “book” related, I’m vastly more impressed with S3, EC2, SQS, etc than I am with Mturk. We are planning to migrate Interclue onto S3 and EC2, once we have launched (Soon! I promise!) and got some more investment underneath us. Amazon is a great company, doing great things.

Last minute thought: I wonder if there’ll be an upsurge in mturk uptake on the supply side after they start rolling out millions of OLPCs…

I’ve got a little badge on this blog pointing to a “Blog Honor” code of conduct. It relates to disclosure policy, and in truth I linked to it because I didn’t have time to write my own, and it seemed fairly close to what I believed at the time (and still do).

The “code of conduct” that Tim O’Reilly is calling for does not cover disclosure, but the real question is whether linking to any shared codes of conduct is a good idea. To say the least, it’s somewhat controversial. I think that as posted, it’s impractical and doesn’t show the depth of thought I would expect from Tim, who’s one of the biggest blogospheric thinkers out there. Sadly he’s being more or less shredded in the comments of the assembled masses, who hate even a whiff of censorship far more than they respect Tim or Kathy, it would seem. Seth Finklestein is an anti-censorship crusader (who I generally have admired in the past when I’ve run across his writing), so it’s no wonder he’s one of the loudest critics, and he makes a valid point about enforcability. I think his comments insinuating this is designed to reinforce the tyranny of the supposed “A List” are dead wrong, however. [1]

In my case, I thought “good start, needs more work” and got stuck in over at the Wiki they set up. I think having a voluntary code of conduct that people can sign up to if they want is not a bad idea if it’s structured properly, which to me means it’s got variants and versions, and ideally you can fit it all in a microformat as well as link an online version that not only shows the code but links to the discussion regarding each point so that people can see why those points were arrived at. So if people want to allow anonymous posting, or what to play with their trolls, but still want some sort of set of declared principles to point to when they delete a comment for stepping over the line, then they can do that.

The alternative to a shared Code of Conduct is posting your own individual one, and I think it’d be very hard to go past borrowing and tweaking this one by Allen Jenkins, as Tyme did. Allen has is own wise words about all this.

If there was going to be a shared code of conduct, then you’d want it to be agreed as part of a shared process, not handed down by fiat. What an enormous number of Tim’s commenter seem to have missed is that this is exactly what Tim wanted to happen, and why there was a wiki and a mailing list set up to discuss it. But naturally enough everyone ignored those and fired away on their blogs or in comment sections.

[1] The problem of “enforcement” happens when someone who’s blog is wearing the badge ignores the code. Obviously it can’t be enforced on anyone who hasn’t signed up for it.

SethF appears to be arguing that an “A lister” involved in such a dispute would win any such arguments with the help of the “Pilot Fish” wanting to impress them and scared of being, ah, I don’t know, excluded? Called out? I’m not sure. I’m not buying it. Arguably being attacked by an A-lister is a great way to get noticed - and if they’re wrong to attack you then it’s going to be obvious to some of the other big guns, who will call out that A-lister, and bingo, you’re subscription count jumps up.

The moment another “A lister” comes in on the other side, then any “Pilot Fish effect” will pretty much evaporate because they wouldn’t know which way to turn. And I think it’s a delusion that the “A listers” somehow all conspire in some fashion to stay on top of any given argument. I also think calling the rest of the blogosphere “pilot fish” is pretty damned derogatory - certainly anyone who wants to gain an audience won’t want to be seen to be a slavering toadie, and anyone who doesn’t want to gain an audience is really unlikely to care what these supposed A listers think of them. So I just don’t buy that line of argument at all.

Besides, the reason these people are the “A list” is partly because they usually make a certain ammout of sense. I can only read so many feeds, and anyone who stops making sense just gets deleted.

Of course, the problem with wanting to engage in this particular conversation, which covers a topic of great interest to me (and was long before Kathy’s shock announcement), is that it’s taking time away from Interclue, which I will get back to forthwith!

Ok, so I started this post 3 weeks ago, and have only just got around to finishing it. Bad Seth, slap hand. But there’s been so much going on, and I’d sorta been waiting until Interclue was definitely nearing launch before poking my head up in the blogosphere again.

A month ago was what we in NZ call “Waitangi Weekend” or roughly “the weekend closest to Waitangi Day”. For the last decade or so I’ve celebrated this particular weekend by going back into the past, doing Medieval re-enactment with my friends in the SCA.

This year I instead paid a trip to the future, having scored a late invite to Kiwi Foo Camp (aka “Baa Camp” (an in joke too long to explain), organised by Russell Brown and Nat Torkington, who are both awesome overachievers in their own different ways.

In fact, most of the people I talked to during the weekend were awesome in some fashion. As an invite only event, with the karma of O’Reilly and the two organisers behind it, sponsored by Google and Rod Drury’s Xero, they really were able to pick and choose, and although there were plenty of people they realised ought have been invited, the ones they did choose were pretty damned interesting. I think I may have been one of the last ones to sneak onto the invite list, apparently later on it was more a matter of “Ok, if it’s Jesus Christ come to announce the second coming, then *maybe* we’ll let him in…

So Jayne and Glynn, thanks for prodding me to ping Nat about it when you did! Was good travelling with you (and Damien and Phil).

The event started with everyone introducing themselves with 3 relevant words (eg I was “attention deficit infojunkie”, and Rod Drury was “Stock Options. Hiring”), and filling out forms with among other things, the top 3 things they would bring back from the future if they had the chance (I chose Immortality Pills, a Pocket Quantum Computer, and an iCar, but later I decided I should have gone with a USB2 compatible storage device containing a copy of the future’s version of Wikipedia - or, if their drive was big enough, a copy of the future’s Internet Archive Project…now that would be a big drive.)

Then everyone wrote down on big sheets of paper what they were going to talk about. Goodness, but there were a lot of interesting sessions. The problem was that there were 5 different sessions per slot, and I usually wanted to see at least two of them! Later on I discovered it was even worse, because there was usually someone hanging around the common area who I really wanted to talk to *as well*. So I usually wanted to be in 3 places at once.

Highlights

Our Minister for Communications was great value. I think everyone was impressed by the depth of his understanding of the issues surrounding telco reform. He also was able to get a sense of the consensus in the room regarding the need for peering policy, which is something that has driven everyone a bit batty since the major Telco’s stopped doing it - for a while now traffic that used to travel from one box to another inside the WIX or AIX has had to go via Australia, because our local BigCos are hoping the SmallCo’s will pay them interconnect fees. Judith Tizard was also there, and definitely seemed to be enjoying herself.

A fantastic performance from the Vospertron guys. Conversation overheard in the carpark afterwards was along the lines of: “so, what microprocessor do you use in these light suits?” - “Uh, it’s a PICAXE…” - “Wow, AWESOME, I market those. I’ve got something to write about on our site tonight!”. The other cameraphone in this video belongs to Russell Brown, who I introduced myself to afterwards. He’s a really down to earth and severely clueful media guy, who’s right across technology and politics in this country. I like him.

Showing Interclue to a bunch of people, who were actually pretty impressed on the whole. My actual presentation wasn’t as good as I wanted, I wish I’d spent more time preparing for it, but the week before was just madness. Got some useful feedback on things people wanted to see, none of which we’ve actually managed to implement yet, but it’s all on the drawing board.

Rod Drury’s demonstration of Xero - wow, now that was what I call a presentation. You’d almost think he’d done this sort of thing before…

The Firefox 3 show and tell - some great things coming up there.

Talking with Asa Dotzler, who is a very clever man. In fact, all the Mozilla guys there were wicked smart. But Asa was speaking my language - the big picture stuff, why Google needs Mozilla, how Firefox is assuring the future of the web as a platform, etc. Asa is the head of QA - essentially nothing gets into the final release of Firefox without him signing off on it! He also started the Spread Firefox website, and is a key evangelist for the Mozilla Foundation. [1]

Chatting with Mike from Pitch Black, his friends in the entertainment space, and seeing their awesome multimedia mashup demos. I first saw Pitch Black perform at Roots Festival in Kaikoura - they had the last set of the night and by the end of it I remember thinking “Pitch Blue”. Awesome electronica and great visuals. Kudos to Nat and Russell for inviting some people from the more entertaining side of the geekosphere.

Chatting with Peter Guttman, Stephen Viles, Andy Linton, Charles Coxhead, Colin Jackson, Rob McKinnon and any number of other terribly interesting folk.

Playing Werewolf for the first time. I didn’t last long. I was a werewolf. I picked the two smartest fast-talking villagers I knew, killed the first one in the first round, but failed to convince the other two werewolves to nab the second one, who fingered me in the next round. Doh! Unfortunately that particular game ended at 4am, I was somewhat drunk, and I forgot to set my alarm. So much for sunday morning :(

Top 3 things I really regret missing out on:

Quinn Norton’s session on Bodyhacking (apparently she was appearing with the aid of Provigil, which is marketed under the brandname “Modavigil” in this country, you can get it for “Shift Worker Sleep Disorder”, and yeah, it’s useful, but it’s not a magic bullet.)

The session from the Public Address bloggers, who are great value.

Chris di Bono’s session on the OLPC project, a project I’ve been meaning to blog about for a while, as it is one of the definitive Philanthrogeek projects of our time…but I was having a good conversation with Asa Dotzler at the time, so I missed it. Bugger.

There are a lot of people I want to get back in touch with and continue conversations started at Kiwifoo, but every time I started an email I got to a certain point and remembered that I didn’t actually have time to talk, and that anyway I should at least get the new website up, which we still haven’t finished. I’ll go back through my drafts soon and ping them.

After it all, I came back, caught up on sleep, progressed an important deal for the company, and then headed out for the final night/day of Canterbury Faire. I was probably the freshest person on the site, apparently everyone had been having a fabulous time, and I’m so sorry I missed all the action, but well, Kiwi Foo was a bit of unique event (well, hopefully not unique, and hopefully not on Waitangi weekend next time). I did make the Steward pretty happy when I fetched cold caffeine for him and his crew during the hot and dusty packdown.

[1] I’m pretty Bullish on Google and Mozilla at the moment, but Microsoft have finally shipped Vista and Office, which means that they have a bundle of manpower that’s suddenly not completely overoccupied, they’ve been hiring some very smart people like Jon Udell, and Google has decided that they want to start charging for their online office apps, so it’s seriously game on at this point. We (Interclue) are intending to stay more or less neutral, and support both IE and Firefox (and Safari, and Opera, and others) as best we can with the resources we have. We wanted to launch with both Firefox and IE supported, but IE just proved to be a bit more difficult to work with than we hoped - we are almost there, but I decided to give priority to giving the best possible UX for one rather than an average UX for both at the beginning. Hopefully I made the right call on that.

Another of my favourite Philanthrogeeks is Mark Shuttleworth. Mark sold his first business, Thawte, for $575m to Verisign, who thus formed a temporary monopoly on 128bit SSL certificates (vs the more common and less secure 40bit ones). Every ecommerce site needs one of these and they get renewed every year, so you can imagine the potential value, but after not long the tech bubble burst, and not long after that the browsers started accepting other brands of certificate[1] and I’m not sure if Verisign recouped its investment in the end. Versign later bought Network Solutions and thus obtained an actual monopoly on the .com namespace, but that’s another very long story, in which perhaps I will point out the stupidity of giving away extremely valuable worldwide monopolies to private corporations, who then get bought by bigger corporations.

As I recall the story goes that Mark then gave a million Rand to every one of his staff, including the gardener. Good show, I thought. Next I heard anything about him he had paid his way onto a soviet rocket and was going to be the first African in space. Well, lucky for some I thought.

A couple years later I heard he was forming his own Linux Distro. Cool, I thought, that should go well. It certainly did. Ubuntu is now the most popular linux distribution on the planet. That probably makes Mark one of the most important Benevolent Dictators in Open Source, and although not quite as Karma-laden as RMS or Linus Torvalds yet, he has the advantage of having a fortune in the bank and a few other philanthropic projects and foundations up his sleeve, so that definitely puts him in the upper eschalon of open source people who are really making a difference.

I see from his official bio that he’s an Iain Banks fan. I’ll post about Iain soon, who as well as being my favourite author is probably more than anyone responsible for my techoprogressive outlook on life.

Ubunto is apparently an African altruistic ideology of sorts and a word very difficult to translate into English, according to the Wikipedia entry - but frankly, it sounds pretty appealing, and perhaps it’s not a good sign that there isn’t a good English translation for it. English usually just steals any useful works from foreign languages, but at the moment, in English, “Ubuntu” means “popular linux distribution” and it may be a long time before any other meaning could shine through that. Apparently Nelson Mandela baked Ubuntu into the spirit of post-apartheid South Africa, which may have been part of the reason the transition actually sort of worked. Mandela is a pretty amazing statesman, I wish there were more like him on the world stage.

If/when I finally switch to Linux on the desktop (been using it server-side for many years) I’ll probably switch to Ubunto. I like the founder, I like the concept, and I like what I’ve seen of the distro so far. Can’t go wrong really.

[1] I know, I’m simplifying. But a discussion of how SSL certificates really work is way too technical for this blog.

There are rather a lot of people and groups I’m intending to talk about on this blog, the problem is that right now I’m insanely busy so it may take me a while to get around to all of them. So I thought I’d give a brief list, and if anyone wants me to write about any particular one, they can let me know in the comments.

So, not in any particular order, here are some incredibly cool people doing great things for the people of this planet:

Steven Clift whose tireless promotion of e-democracy may shortly be rewarded with an Ashoka fellowship. I have been following his do-wire mailing list for at least 5 years now and I think he’s well worthy of that honour. It’s a bit of a fluke, but the company behind the forum software he’s using for his Issue Forums is run by people here in Christchurch.

Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, who recently suggested that we could be a bit smarter about the way we discuss politics online and may be hoping to kickstart another revolution of sorts. Personally this is an area where the idealist and the pragmatist within me have an argument. On the one hand I’d like to see net culture transcend the pathetic sloganeering of broadcast politics, but on the other hand I’m aware that for the moment a fully integrated strategy that bows to the tyranny of the “swing voter” might be necessary in 2006.

The Omidyar Network, who support many worthy causes and have this amazing community of altruists around them.

Jeff Skoll, definitely a philanthropist after my own heart says here : “In my case, I like to support causes where “a lot of good comes from a little bit of good,” or, in other words, where the positive social returns vastly exceed the amount of time and money invested.” - or, in other words, he’s a Philanthohacker. One of the very clever things he’s doing is running Participant Productions, who are harnessing the power of the movie theatre for the sake of good with films like An Inconvenient Truth. and Syriana

Benetech, who I first spotted because they employed Brendan Nyhan who was involved with Spinsanity, an amazing blog I was following that covered the unprecedented level of media spin in the post 9/11 era, right up until they re-elected Bush, after which I guess they decided that the American public wasn’t quite ready for this whole “sanity” concept yet.

Dave Pollard who was Chief Knowledge Officer of Ernst & Young before he decided that he could do more to save the world through blogging. A fantastic blog.

The WorldChanging bloggers, who I wish I had more time to read. They are supported by the above mentioned Omidyar Network (it’s funny how often I discover something amazingly cool and then later discover the Omidyars have started funding it)

Richard Stallman, who more than anyone is responsible for the worldwide open source movement. Met him once at a party here in Christchurch. Nice guy.

The Responsible Wealth network, who definitely have a few clues.

George Monbiot - who mainly draws attention to big problems, but occasionally comes up with some very interesting solutions, unfortunately they often seem to involve the British and/or American Governments behaving responsibly, so don’t expect to see any of those solutions implemented anytime soon.

Aubrey de Grey, who’s somewhat radical proposal is that we could engineer the end of biological ageing within the next 50 years. He’s causing a bit of a stir in the biogerontology world, many of whom think he’s holding out false hopes and probably resent his grabbing all the headlines, but he’s got enough scientists supporting him that I think he has to be taken seriously. Given the acceleration in scientific and medical research that is being driven by the internet and cheap computing power, I find it all remarkably plausible. It’s certainly an amazing time to be alive - the age of possibility.

…and of course I am still yet to discuss the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation in any detail.

Finally here are a few random links from my philanthrogeek bookmarks:

• Center for Inquiry Transnational
• Democracy 2.0
  
• Open The Government
  
• Oligopoly Watch

Please note that this is far from everyone who’s impressed me in a philanthrogeek capacity over the last few years, but it’s enough to talk about for the moment.

Every now and then I read something that makes me think “wow, almost exactly what I would have said, were I three times smarter”. The last guy to really make me think that was Umair Haque after reading one of his insanely long powerpoints, but tonight it was Dale Carrico, after reading this - anyone studying at Berkley, get thee enrolled in one of his courses, I’m sure you won’t regret it.

If I had to pick the one person on the planet who I admire most at the moment, it would probably be George Soros. I was reminded of this when he recently poked his head up and said some intelligent things on Rocketboom - major kudos to Amanda for scoring an interview with one of the planet’s major players. One very appropriate question given her audience - how does he use the net? I was interested to discover that he uses it “through other people” - a pity, I think it’s better to get your feed unfiltered. I guess it all depends on whether your people are paid to give you the truth, or shield you from having to know the truth. ^[1]

Anway, what I admire about Soros as a philanthropist is that he has a great grasp of the complexity of human societies, just how hard it is to effect any significant change, and then he goes ahead and does his best anyway, without fear of the inevitable failures. He isn’t hoping to find easy answers or make flashy gestures, but he knows that there are things that can be done that definitely help - like investing in education and health, and monitoring government activity, that will gradually move a society in the right direction.

I think quoting Soros is the ultimate answer to naive libertarianism and free-market fanatics. It’s obvious that he has a very strong understanding of the world financial markets, from which he has made billions, but he is also very clear that markets are not enough on their own, and can do some serious damage if left unchecked.

“We need to maintain law and order. We need to maintain peace in the world. We need to protect the environment. We need to have some degree of social justice, equality of opportunity. The markets are not designed to take care of those needs. That’s a political process. And the market fundamentalists have managed to reduce providing those public goods.” - George Soros

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