An afterthought on transferability of expertise

After I conceived my post on expertise vs. crowdsourcing, but before I finalized and posted it, I ran across a blog post from Louis Gray about how he used social media to buy a car. Now it got me to thinking about a particular use case - the use case doesn't fit the facts of Gray's story (I'll explain why below), but I'm not going to let the actual facts get in the way of a blog post. First, here's a bit of Gray's story:

Upon hearing I needed to pay upwards of $4,000 to fix my broken Tracer, my tendency would be to walk down the street to the nearest dealer and find something, anything to replace it. But instead, this time, I posted a note to FriendFeed, explaining the situation, and asking the vibrant community for feedback. In the discussion, seeing more than 80 comments, I explained I wanted to be more like my peers in Silicon Valley, but honestly didn't want to go in debt for the privilege.

In the middle of our back and forth, Robert Scoble swooped in with an offer I had to pay attention to. He posted, "Louis: we are selling our 2006 BMW 325i with 56,000 miles. Make me an offer. Well maintained and fun to drive."

Now here's where the facts of the story don't fit the point I want to make. Most people, including myself, look at Robert Scoble as "a recognized expert in business and personal use of social media tools" (recognizing, of course, that a tool is not a way of life). However, in Louis Gray's case, Robert Scoble is a personal friend. They've probably dealt with spit-up from each other's young kids, which is the true mark of a personal friend.

But let's change the facts for the moment and pretend that Gray and Scoble were not personal friends. Assume that Louis Gray had posted his question on FriendFeed, and this social media person named Robert Scoble, a person that Gray knew by reputation but did not know personally, had offered his 2006 BMW for sale.

In the words of 20th century political commentators, would Gray buy a used car from this man?

To me, my fictional version of the episode suggested an interesting question. Let's say that a person has some sort of certification in a particular area - David Risley with a Better Business Bureau certification, Robert Hilburn as someone who was employed as a music critic, etc. Would we be more likely to use that certification to trust this person in a completely different area? For example, if Risley released a disco CD, would I be more willing to buy it because his online business is BBB-approved?

In truth, there ARE many cases in which we believe that certification is transferable. One of the most popular cases, often cited by baby seal clubbers and other conservatives, is when we pay attention to the political views of Hollywood stars. But this is used for much more than politics. Turn on the radio and listen to any public service announcement. Let's say for the moment that the PSA features a celebrity talking about some medical condition. Chances are that the celebrity who is talking, even if he/she suffers from the medical condition in question, does NOT have a medical degree and is not truly qualified to authoritatively speak about the medical condition. Yet because of the celebrity's credibility, gained from making us laugh in a top 10 show in the 2003-2004 season or whatever, we transfer that certification and trust the celebrity's words about Muscular Dystrophy or myopia or whatever.

Another example was a favorite of Howard Cosell's during his lifetime (and, knowing his persistence, perhaps beyond it). Cosell was fond of speaking of the jockocracy, or the practice of television networks of hiring retired sports figures to offer commentary on sporting events. In Cosell's view, the mere fact that you once played a sport does not necessarily qualify you to effectively communicate about the sport to others, or to effectively function as a professional television or a radio broadcaster. Frankly, he's right - years later, I still recall the scintillating observation of one of these ex-jock broadcasters: "He's an athlete." That's deep. Of course, the argument can be turned on its head, and one can claim that mere skills in radio or television broadcasting in one area (say, law) do NOT qualify you to broadcast about sports. And if you think otherwise, perhaps you'd like to discuss this on Pat Sajak's talk show - or even Chevy Chase's talk show.

Despite Cosell's misgivings, however, we often ARE willing to transfer prowess from the field into the broadcast booth. And despite the misgivings of certain broadcasters, we are willing to listen to broadcasters who have never played the game.

There are countless other examples, but you can easily find them yourself. The next time you hear a well-known person pontificating on something, ask yourself - does thi person have expertise in this particular area, or in another area? And if the expertise is in another area, do I believe what the person is saying now?

We'll see if FamilyMember's tool becomes a way of life

As I mentioned in the newsletter for another blog, a family member (whom I will refer to as FamilyMember) obtained a MacBook over the weekend. FamilyMember likes this, and appreciates the thought that went into the design of the MacBook, its software, and its support, but FamilyMember isn't about to quit her church and give thank offerings to the Mac six times a day. In this regard, FamilyMember is similar to Notcot, who dares to declare:

For me, a mac is *just* a tool, not a way of life.

Note that this is NOT identical to the phrase I used previously, "a tool is not a way of life." But obviously it conveys the same sentiment.

But perhaps I'm wrong on my assumptions. Notcot links to Engadget, who links to a PR Newswire release from Mindset Media which includes the following statement:

According to Mindset Media...people who are highly open-minded or, in Mindset Media parlance, "Openness 5's", are 60 percent more likely than people in the general population to have purchased a Mac. These purchasers are also more liberal, less modest, and more assured of their own superiority than the population at large.

Really? I'm shocked.

Worldwide prospects for Green Dam Youth Escort software - will your government promote it?

Follow-up to my Friday post Perhaps Chinese censorship IS bad for Chinese business. But what about Singapore?

You've probably heard by now that China is requiring companies who sell computers in China to install "Green Dam Youth Escort" software on the computers sold in China. Rebecca McKinnon discusses this further and links to the Green Dam web site (in Chinese). But the New York Times has the interesting story:

Green Dam’s own website offered a hint of discontent over the filtering software. On the bulletin board section of the site, several users complained that pornographic images slipped through or that their computers had become painfully slow. “It seems pretty lousy so far,” read one posting. “It’s not very powerful, I can’t surf the Internet normally and it’s affecting the operation of other software.”

By Monday night, however, most of the comments had been deleted.

Now these comments were probably not deleted by a Communist Party official; they were probably deleted by Green Dam itself. Because, you see, the Chinese government isn't the only entity that blocks access to information.

And it isn't the only entity that would like to do so.

Now one would expect that at this latest example of evil commie doings, the good governments of the free world would rise up in unison and say how evil China is and how terrible the idea is. Only problem is, many of the "good governments of the free world" would love to do the same thing. As would many private entities.

Who knows, maybe Stephen Conroy might want to contact Green Dam to get a sitewide license for Australia.

And if the American Family Association runs into budget issues, perhaps they'll dump their support for bsecure and opt for Green Dam instead. However, the Chinese product would obviously have to be renamed to Green Darn - don't want to get blocked by a profanity filter...

OK, perhaps it's wild thinking that the American Family Association would promote a commie software product. Which raises the question - as bsecure and Green Dam and other companies battle for worldwide control, who will win? Which firm will have access to the information that it needs to vanquish its competitors? Which firm will emerge from its protective cocoon (PRC sponsorship, AFA sponsorship) and demonstrate an ability to fully respond to customer needs, adapt to changing circumstances, and function effectively in a market economy - remembering that one of the key assumptions of a market economy is a free flow of information?

Synthesizing seeming contradictions - a tool is not a way of life, but it is

Baptism tools by Lars Plougmann used under a Creative Commons License

I'm working on something behind the scenes (which is why my weekly Empoprise-BI News has a "behind the scenes" section, by the way) which includes the possible use of the phrase "a tool is not a way of life." I'm trying to distill something that I've effectively said in previous posts in this blog and elsewhere. For example, here's how I said it on June 3 (even if I spelled it incorrectly):

I can cite all sorts of software industry examples in which software was robust enough to handle a new use case that the software developers never envisioned. In some cases, the software developers reacted negatively, stating that "our software was not intended for that [purpose]." In other cases, the software developers reacted positively, and their software reached dizzying heights of success that they never envisioned.

In longhand form, I'm trying to say that something like Twitter is not a solution, but is a tool that helps you reach some other solution (increasing brand awareness, selling fluffy bunnies, what have you). And if you are a tool developer who believes that your tool can only be used in one way, you're wrong. I will use your tool as I please; don't tell me how I can or cannot use it.

Or, a tool is not a way of life.

Now whenever I want to formally adopt a word or phrase for some purpose, I always conduct a web search first to make sure that I'm not stepping on someone else's toes. And therefore I have determined that, according to Google, I am the first person to use the quoted phrase "a tool is not a way of life."

But someone has used a similar phrase. In my search, I found a FastCompany article with the title Social Media is Not a Marketing Tool; It Is a Way of Life.

Are Jacob Morgan and I in complete disagreement? Not necessarily. Here's a bit of the background behind his statement.

Marketers are getting so excited over the emergence of this new marketing tool (or medium) known as social media. All marketers have to do is join Youtube, Digg, and Twitter; add a bunch of friends, and start shoveling content at them…right?

Morgan then goes on to say:

Wrong, on several accounts; first, social media is not a marketing “tool” at all; it is a way of life.

What does he mean by this?

So what is all this mumbo jumbo about social media being a way of life? Well social media profiles are extensions of physical people. Profiles are designed so that you can learn about a person based on the information they have filled out. When people are not out and about, they are online interacting with one another through Twitter, Facebook, blogs, etc. Your social media profile IS YOU.

In essence, Morgan is trumpeting the virtues of relationship marketing, and stating that you can't really market to someone unless you know the person. Now this is not universally true; if I'm at the Epicenter and want to get a hot dog, I don't necessarily need to know who the woman at the grill has befriended, or what she had for breakfast (although if she had her hot dog for breakfast, I'd take it as a good sign). But for more substantial purchases, you're either going to want to establish a relationship with the seller, or you're going to want to get guidance from either experts or the crowd.

So with some little exceptions, Jacob Morgan is right. Social media will often yield better results if you use it to build relationships than if you use it as a megaphone.

However, there are again exceptions to this rule - spam is an ugly thing and people hate it and decry it, but you have to admit that spam is a cost-effective way to do business. If it weren't a cost-effective way to do business, there would be no spammers. SOMEONE is buying this stuff, so even though spamming is the "wrong" way to do it...it works!

And it should also be noted that Morgan's article only addresses a limited topic. He addresses how to use social media effectively, and how to build relationships, but he doesn't address WHY you want to market and build relationships. What do you want to sell? Those questions need to be answered long BEFORE you set up your Corporate Rules of Twitter Engagement, because it may turn out that building relationships via social media is the exact wrong way to market whatever it is you want to market.

Take my Epicenter example; if the Rancho Cucamonga Quakes hired someone from Zappos, and the ex-Zappos person declared, "Social media is a way of life, and therefore all food service personnel need to get Twitter accounts," the new hire would probably get hit over the head with a baseball bat.

So, while social media is a way of life (sometimes), a tool is not a way of life (ever).

Hope this helps.

Postscript regarding religious issues - depending on how you're reading this post, you may have seen the Lars Plougmann picture with which I started the post, a picture entitled "Baptism tools." Theologically, it should be noted that in most if not all traditions, the only material item that makes any difference in a Christian baptism is the water. Perhaps the SIZE of the item containing the water may matter, but in effect that is only a commentary on the amount of water that is used. You can make your baptism goblet/pool out of metal, wood, plastic, or whatever. If you are a swimming pool manufacturer, you cannot attach a prohibition to your pool warranty explicitly saying that your pool cannot be used for baptisms. (Well, you could try, but you usually won't succeed.)

Expertise or crowdsourcing? David Risley practices good housekeeping

What is expertise? by Alan Levine (cogdog) used under a Creative Commons License

Online and in the real world, there's a continuing debate regarding whether we should turn to so-called experts to provide analysis, or if we should instead trust the wisdom of the crowds.

On June 3, David Risley wrote a post entitled Just Got BBB Accreditation. But, Does It Matter Anymore? While some of his comments were specific to his online business, and how people feel about online businesses, Risley also addressed more general issues.

We most definitely live in a world of information now. Chances are, if you want to find out if a business is reputable, a quick Google search will tell you all you need.

The BBB was formed with the mission of advancing “marketplace trust”. They do this by holding their members accountable to trustworthy business practices, encouraging best practices, and speaking out against bad market behavior. I think it is a worthy mission. However, the questions remains: Does anybody really bother checking the BBB anymore?

The answer to that question needs to be provided by each individual business. Risley noted the following in his case:

[T]he normal “joe blow” on the street who doesn’t live their life on the Internet is probably not accustomed to long form sales letters. Internet businesses are unproven territory to these people. They look for signs that the business is legit and that they’re not going to take your money and run.

This is why I bothered with the BBB.

On the same day (June 3), I wrote a post in my Empoprise-MU music blog entitled Rolling Who? What about 131901319013190's opinion of the Spencer Pratt song?. In the post, I compared the immediate song reviews that you can get from a crowd to the reviews, possibly delayed, that you can get from music experts (e.g. Robert Hilburn).

And there are countless other examples of this. If you have a Ford car, do you dare to go anywhere other than a Ford dealer to get an oil change? Can a company run its business on open source software? Does the state of California have too many ballot propositions?

In these and many other cases, we can't decide whether we should trust the wisdom of the crowds, or the wisdom of a selection process. Those who argue for the latter would say that I should check with an authoritative source before doing business with David Risley, I should seek someone employed as a music journalist to evaluate music, I'd better take my car to the dealer that's certified to maintain it, I'd better buy software from a company that screens its employees, and I should trust the elected legislature to make decisions on my behalf.

In short, there are times that we seek something like the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval. And yes, the Good Housekeeping Seal still exists. But even the Good Housekeeping Seal has limits:

EXCLUSIONS This policy does not extend to the following products and services, even if advertised in the magazine: insurance; financial/investment services and products; realty (including housing of any kind); franchise operations; automotive and camping vehicles; public transportation; travel facilities and hotels; catalogs and merchandise portfolios; "Shopping by Mail" items; premiums and prizes; schools, summer camps, and similar organizations; contraceptives, prescribed drugs, and medical procedures, facilities, and some devices (including cosmetic ones); alcoholic beverages; services (such as cleaning and repair services and Internet access providers); unbranded food products and branded deli foods not sold in individual packages; products sold only to the trade; self-diagnostic devices; diet plans; contact lenses; fire alarms and suppressants; carbon monoxide detectors; home security systems and devices; infant/toddler car seats and restraints; swim aids, flotation devices, and pool toys; and institutional advertisements.

Which is why David Risley didn't get the Good Housekeeping Seal. But I would gladly have given him the Empoprises Non-Slimy Internet Entrepreneur Award.

But I don't think he'd want it.

Empoprise-BI News - 7 June 2009

Empoprise-BI News

The news letter for Empoprise-BI - An Empoprises vertical information service for business news.

Welcome to Empoprise-BI News

Hello again! We're still making news, or at least reporting it. Hope you're enjoying the read, and if you have any ideas or suggestions, contact me via the Disqus comments or email my Gmail account ("empoprises").

Behind the Scenes

In the last newsletter I talked about a couple of the interesting FriendFeed groups that I've created, but I haven't talked about the cool one yet - my Natural User Interface FriendFeed group at the http://friendfeed.com/natural-user-interface URL. I started it for selfish reasons - a co-worker happened to mention some of the new user interface work that was going on, and I created the group to track some of this stuff. But there have been some interesting things going on as of late, including Project Natal and Windows 7 Touch, so I'm glad that it's there. Like most of my groups, the Natural User Interface group includes some auto-populating feeds, plus whatever stuff I (and you) choose to share in there).

Special Features

You'll notice that I like to write about small businesses. That's because I've worked for a few of them. Fresh out of college, I spent several years working for Logic eXtension Resources, which was then located in Rancho Cucamonga, California. The business has changed significantly since I initially joined, and the firm itself (and its employees) have moved across the country to South Carolina, but they remain one of the leading providers of educational testing software.

Upcoming

I'm excited about something that you'll see on the Empoprise-BI blog very soon. In a number of areas there's an ongoing debate about whether we should rely on experts, or whether we should rely on the wisdom of the crowdsourced masses. I'm exploring this topic in a forthcoming post, and I've already written a follow-up post on the topic that asks whether expertise in one area makes you trust a person in another area.

Rajeev Motwani was a famous mentor, but there are many mentors

All of us have had people who have positively influenced our lives - perhaps a teacher, perhaps a boss, perhaps someone else. Most of these positive influences remain unknown to the world at large, but a few of them become very well known, such as Rajeev Motwani, who passed away on June 5.

Om Malik talked about Motwani in a blog post. But before addressing why the world at large knew him, Malik address why Motwani was important to him:

Rajeev Motwani, one of the savviest angel investors in Silicon Valley, a Stanford professor and most importantly a close and personal friend passed away earlier today....Rajeev and I had been swapping emails, hoping to get together for a cup of coffee and discussions about technology. Alas, that shall never be....

I have known Rajeev, his wife Asha and their family for a long time. Rajeev, like me, was from New Delhi. In my professional career (and personal moments of crisis) Rajeev was only a phone call away, sharing his vast rolodex. Just like a true friend. Only a few weeks back, I had a simple Indian lunch in his house with his family. I am sure, I am not the only one who has benefited from his generosity of time and knowledge and his ability to create connections and help others.

If you want to know more about Rajeev Motwani, just Google his name.

Siriusly good times?

A BusinessWeek post ponders a hypothesis:

Satellite broadcaster Sirius XM Radio (SIRI) is highly dependent on GM and other carmakers for new subscribers, so is it in big trouble now, too?

Aaron Pressman of BusinessWeek references the opinion of Tyler Savery at SiriusBuzz.com (disclosure: Savery owns shares of Sirius XM), who doesn't necessarily see it that way. Excerpts:

Yes, GM is Sirius biggest supplier of subscribers, but they are also a huge expense to the company. Each subscriber requires an investment by Sirius XM radio. This investment, referred to as Subscriber Acquisition Cost, is an expense to the company in the short term, in hopes that that investment will pay for itself in the long term....So while a slowdown in sales will hurt the sub number, a slow down in production will mean less costs....

[D]ealerships have been on news cast after news cast stating that the deals on GM brand cars will be attractive. This could actually serve to boost GM sales in the short term, and thus the impact to sub numbers (from a GM standpoint) may not be as bleak as it would have been....

Now, more than ever before, the bottom line is what everyone is looking at. Fewer installations will help the bottom line because those 1 to 3 year SAC investments will be fewer. This keeps cash in the coffers of Sirius XM, and that, in this economy, is a good thing.

Not sure if the market agrees. In the last month, SIRI's high was $0.53 on May 6. The June 5 price was $0.34, down from $0.35 on June 1.

Read the whole Sirius Buzz piece here.

Perhaps Chinese censorship IS bad for Chinese business. But what about Singapore?

On Tuesday I wrote a post entitled Why the Chinese aren't tweeting about the Hummer purchase, which observed that ironically, Chinese people were unable to tweet about a Chinese firm's purchase of Hummer. Why not? Because Twitter was blocked in China in an effort to minimize in-country disruptions as the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre approached. In a subsequent comment to the post, I observed:

[T]here's the starry-eyed idealist in me that believes that business benefits when there is a free flow of communication between businesspeople, but the fact that some businesses have done well in totalitarian governments indicates to me that my idealism may be misplaced.

Perhaps not. BusinessWeek links to a telecomasia.net post by Robert Clark that states that China may have harmed its business prospects:

All of this matters to the telecom and internet industries – not just because they are central to the whole system of censorship. They are – and direct control over them is crucial to the survival of one-party rule.

But it also means that China cannot permit the growth of an open and competitive telecom industry. It refuses to allow private or – in breach of its WTO commitments - foreign players into the market.

But Clark observes that these artifical controls on China's telecom industry also affect China's participation in the world market:

China Mobile’s sole foray abroad has been to buy the smallest and weakest player in Pakistan. Its political stunt in trying to buy into Taiwan is now an embarrassment.

Seven years after 3G was launched worldwide, Chinese consumers are today only just getting access to high-speed mobile services, while their government has spent billions on the TD-SCDMA boondoggle.

Read the rest of Clark's thoughts here. And BusinessWeek's Bruce Einhorn goes further:

And what’s true for the telecom industry is true for other Chinese industries deemed too sensitive for foreigners to touch. Compare China’s entertainment industry, for instance, to Bollywood to see another example of the government dooming its own companies to second-rate status by refusing to loosen its grip.

Are Clark and Einhorn right? Because if they are, then one would expect that Chinese business problems resulting from Chinese censorship would be paralleled by similar Singapore business problems resulting from Singapore censorship. In a 2007 post, I linked to a Reuters article on the Singapore Media Development Authority rap video:

It hopes the rap video will showcase its potential to be "a vibrant media city".

But critics say this ambition does not rhyme with Singapore's regular censorship of films and theatre and the many defamation lawsuits its government have launched against foreign media.

Well, if Bollywood is better than China, then maybe Indian rappers are better than Singapore rappers.



More to the point of social media, I linked to this Cherian George post:

More intriguing is whether social networking platforms would get around the PER's current restrictions on using e-mail to spread campaign messages. The regulations allow parties to mail to their own mailing lists, but parties can't encourage chain letters: an e-mail is not supposed to invite readers to pass it on to all their friends. This prohibition limits the powerful viral potential of e-mail communication.

And as for Singapore in 2009, this March 20 story is amusing:

It’s amusing to see the Singapore newspapers have not run the complete BBC interview with Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong. The broadsheet Straits Times and the freesheet Today have not published the last question asked in the interview, which can be heard in a five-and-a-half-minute audio clip on the BBC World Service website.

The interviewer said: “Finally, Prime Minister, I read that you are apparently the highest paid head of government in the world. Your salary is about four or five times what President Obama gets. Are you worth all that money?”

PM Lee laughed and said: “I am not comparing myself and I don’t look at these rankings.We go on a system which is open, honest, transparent...."

Transparent. Yet the Singapore publications wouldn't print this question and this answer. So in the future, which publication will you reference? I don't have access to a printed coyp [5:22 PM - OR, FOR THAT MATTER, A PRINTED COPY] of the Straits Times, but the truncated online version certainly doesn't discuss salary. But it does include this statement in the comments:

Warning: Any user who posts offensive or irrelevant comments will be banned from this Discussion Board.

The title of the Straits Times online article? "Govt will buffer impact."

Indeed they will.

How did YOU get into the technology business?

Frieze with line from Tennyson, Engineering Faculty, Birmingham University by Felix O (sludgegulper) used under a Creative Commons License

For my readers who have graduated from college and are now in the working world, and are working in some type of technological field, take a moment and ask yourself, "How did I get here?"

In my case, probably the most important factor that got me where I am today was a first-year physics class that I took in Reed College. Not that I'm a Nobel Prize-winning physicist or anything, but for part of the year our physics lab consisted of Pascal programming on a Unix computer. This experience opened up many opportunities to me in future years - not in programming, but primarily in support and marketing functions.

My story, however, pales in comparison to James Johnson's story. If you read my Empoprise-IE blog on the Inland Empire, you may have seen me reference Johnson from time to time. But his post May 35. Why I do what I do. is a very powerful post. I encourage you to read the entire thing, but I'll give you a little snippet of it.

One day I received an invitation (think WAY before email) from IBM to come and see their new technology called “Ultimedia”. I made arrangements to go to see what this was all about. The presentation consisted of a computer attached to a laser disc player displaying on a very large monitor. The presenter started in about how he could access different parts of the laser disc in a random fashion to make a presentation and teach. I was interested in what he was demonstrating – the beginnings of technolust – and I started thinking about how this could be used in the classroom, I was working at a college by the way.

The laser disc contained various pieces of information about Tennyson’s epic poem, Ulysses. The entire poem was available, with dissertations and explanations by literature professors and experts. Different Shakespearian actors would recite the poem in various tones and intonations. All the while, I kept thinking how cool this was.

The presenter began to end the presentation by saying, “that’s not all, look what I can do with this information.”

Read the rest.

So now that it's May 36th, why do YOU do what you do?

Find a global village, find myself a global village to live in

Rural ICT Center NenaSala by jaliyaj used under a Creative Commons License

I have lived in suburbs all my life, but I did have one set of relatives who lived in a small town which was, at the time, out in the middle of nowhere. (Since then, a freeway has been built within a few miles of the town.) Back in the 1960s and 1970s when I went there, the newspaper of record was a local county paper. But they had cable.

I thought back to this 1970s situation when I read Steven Hodson's Inquisitr piece. He notes, rightly, that we're paying so much attention to the big metropolitan papers that are in trouble that we're missing the story of the small papers that are in trouble.

When it comes to the news lifeblood of small town America not much attention is paid to when those town’s newspapers are forced to close their doors. As we rant and rave about the importance of journalism it is the small towns that feel the loss of their eyes and ears of what is happening locally.

Yet it's not as if the loss of a small-town paper cuts the residents completely off from any communication. In the same way that cable came out to the rural areas in the 1970s, Internet access is rolling out to the rural areas today. As websites and online content become geographically aware, it's possible for me to find online sources of information that pertain to Ontario, California. In the same way, people in small towns or rural areas can find sources of information that pertain to their areas. Maybe there aren't a million personal content providers in these areas, but it's still possible to get some information.

And for those of you in Clarke County, Virginia, there's always the blogs of the Clarke County Republicans and Democrats, http://www.clarkegop.blogspot.com/ and http://clarkecountydems.blogspot.com/. I'm sure they'll tell you something...

Rapid social response - small companies can do it too (Glen Ivy)

Earlier today, I had finished reading John Soat's article "Reputations at Risk" in my printed copy of InformationWeek. (An online version can be found here.) Soat's article talks about how companies can monitor their online reputations, and mentions the expected companies - Domino's, who had to terminate two bozo employees after they posted a YouTube video; Starbucks, with its My Starbucks idea initiative; the Motrin Moms; etc. They're all big companies, and many of them employ people for social media monitoring. Southwest Airlines, for example, has a six employee "emerging media group." (Now more than six people, according to Maine Business.)

After reading about all these big companies, I checked my email and saw that I had received a Disqus comment on an Empoprise-IE post on Glen Ivy that appeared this morning at 6:00 am.



Glen Ivy Hot Springs, that away by miheco used under a Creative Commons License

The comment was from "Jennifer S." of Glen Ivy Hot Springs, thanked me for my post, and alerted me and my readers to Glen Ivy's 150th anniversary in 2010.

It turns out that "Jennifer S." is Jennifer Steinhart, Glen Ivy's communications and public relations coordinator. And Steinhart is just part of Glen Ivy's social outreach, according to Juliane Ngan of the Business Press:

Employees blog, post on Facebook.com, or tweet on Twitter.com about the spa's newest services or latest promotions, and people are interested. Glen Ivy's blog sees an average of 76 unique visitors a day....

Their efforts to jump on the social networking bandwagon are fairly new. Communications and public relations coordinator Jennifer Steinhart and social media coordinator Kristen Koman work to keep the social networking sites updated throughout the day.

"We want to put a personal touch on our company and let our (guests) know we're there for them," Koman said.

In just a few short months, they have more than 300 followers on Twitter and another 300 fans on Facebook. The sites have enabled them to get the word out about anything and everything at the spa, from the daily specials to the latest on the March MUDness contest in Corona, and the Grotto contest at the day spa in Valencia.

More here.

Now I'll admit that most of my readers have no interest in a spa in Corona, California, or in its satellite day spas in Brea and elsewhere. But this shows that you don't have to be a large company, or a tech company, to use online tools to communicate with your customers and tech customer. Heck, mud is about as non-tech as you can get.

But if you are interested, here are some ways to connect to Glen Ivy:

Elevating Life Experience blog: http://glenivyspas.blogspot.com/

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Glen-Ivy/50658034134

Twitter: http://twitter.com/glenivyspas

YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/user/GlenIvyMarketing

Oh, and don't forget their telephone number: 1-888-453-6489 (GLEN-IVY). And they have mailing addresses. But it's probably best if you actually go there; the Glen Ivy experience cannot be savored in the virtual world.

On Acuracy and Misteaks

Recently I was reading something that a blogger wrote late one evening. In the post, the blogger made a mistake and assigned the wrong brand to the wrong manufacturer. What the blogger did was roughly the equivalent of talking about General Mills' Froot Loops, or Hewlett Packard's iPhone. Now when several people pointed the error out, the blogger promptly corrected it and acknowledged the error. (And it should be noted that the blogger noted that the topic in question was not within the blogger's area of expertise.)

People who wear glasses probably shouldn't throw stones. Yes, the preceding sentence was an intentional mistake, but I've certainly made enough unintentional mistakes of my own in my last five-plus years of blogging. Within the last day or so, I had to correct a post in which I had put the beginning tag "strong" and the ending tag "strong"...framing the word STRONG. Oops.

But my favorite mistake that I ever made was in a process document that I wrote for work. Bear in mind that process documents are intended to improve quality of work products, so it was somewhat embarrassing when I discovered that my contribution to the process document release notes included the so-called word "qualtiy."

Once upon a time, you could count on certain journalistic publications to be free from errors, either grammatical or spelling errors, or errors of fact. But those days are long gone. Perhaps they never existed; I'd better double-check that. Speaking of journalists, my favorite "error" was one committed by the New York Times in response to Robert Goddard:

The Times lambasted his research because "everybody knows" rockets won't travel in the vacuum of space, where there's nothing to push against. Goddard, the article claimed, "seems to lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools."

Some time later - actually, in July 1969 - a retraction was printed. In fairness to the Times, however, no one had actually demonstrated a rocket moving in space at the time of the original editorial, so that wasn't an error in the "Hewlett Packard iPhone" sense. (And who knows? If Hewlett Packard ever buys Apple, you could have a Hewlett Packard iPhone. Could anyone have imagined "Oracle WebLogic" a couple of years ago?)

In my case, partially because of my own errors, and possibly because of the errors of those surrounding me, I've grown accustomed to errors occuring, and perform an inner translation in my head to correct the information. So when someone that I know calls me "Lola," I respond without comment. This is a maturity that has come with age; in my younger years I used to delight in correcting the mistakes of others, sometimes harming myself in doing so.

So perhaps the old saying "Do as I say, not as I do" should be updated:

Do as I should have said, not as I actually said.

Quote of the day from Chris Brogan (on "community")

DSC_0007 by Andrew Feinberg used under a Creative Commons License

I've talked about communities in this blog before, most notably in my April 20 post, and I've been thinking about "community" a lot lately. So has Chris Brogan. In his June 3 Audience or Community post, Brogan offered up this nugget:

The only difference between an audience and a community is which direction the chairs are pointing.

More here, including Brogan's thoughts on what a community is.

How big is your laser gun?

What are the chances! by reeotch misk used under a Creative Commons License

In my continuing search for cool stuff, I've found another one via the Los Angeles Times - a big laser gun. How big? Big.

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory dedicated the world's largest laser system. The National Ignition Facility, with its 192 giant laser beams, fills up an entire 10-story building in Livermore, Calif.

OK, that's big. Needless to say, something that big has its own web page, https://lasers.llnl.gov/:

The world's largest and highest-energy laser was certified to operate by the U.S. Department of Energy on March 27, 2009. In 2010, NIF will focus the intense energy of 192 giant laser beams on a BB-sized target filled with hydrogen fuel — fusing, or igniting, the hydrogen atoms' nuclei in the world's first controlled thermonuclear reaction. This is the same fusion energy process that makes stars shine and provides the life-giving energy of the sun.

Well, let's hope that the laser gun keeps focused on that hydrogen. I wouldn't want it to be aimed at the Large Hadron Collider (which I haven't discussed since September 10, 2008, but which is, in the words of Chevy Chase, "still dead."

Software developers, give us tools so that we can use your applications as we wish

Tool Trader II by Meena Kadri (Meanest Indian) used under a Creative Commons License

I've previously discussed how I use Google Reader to view the entries in the lastfmfeeds FriendFeed room. This is a good example of how you can use various technology standards to view data in the format of your choice. In a June 2 post, Chris Brogan describes a more cumbersome way to view data in a style to your liking:

I want LinkedIn to improve its contact management. I have all kinds of contacts. I want to be able to slice and dice the information on-board. I don’t want to always have to export a CSV and then sort it myself.

More here.

In a comment to Brogan's post, Brad Schwarzenbach linked to a post at Tipping Point Labs that noted that frustrations with services can lead people to abandon the service altogether. The post, written by Andrew Davis, happens to reference Schwarzenbach's thoughts:

My friend Brad introduced me to what he calls the ‘What Now Factor.’ The What Now Factor is the length of time it takes the average user to join a new media channel, figure out the channel, then ask themselves: What Now?

For example, I joined MySpace. Nine months later I had tons of friends, a pretty active MySpace page, and I got bored. That’s when I asked myself: What Now? The answer: Facebook. In my world, I hit the What Now Factor in about nine months on MySpace.

While Davis mostly talks about Twitter (this was written after Her Oprahness joined the microblogging service), he mentions LinkedIn in passing:

How long do you think it will take you to get to the What Now factor on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn?

While Davis suggests a three-point plan of (1) analyzing how users employ a service, (2) adjusting and adapting quickly, and (3) encouraging quality content creators, I think that a more basic answer to the problem can be found by providing people with the tools that they need to do what they want to do.

When Mark Zuckerberg began thinking about ways for college students to connect to their friends, he didn't envision that Leslie would want to put me in handcuffs and take me to Sydney, Australia. But as the Facebook platform evolved, it included capabilities that let others add their own applications to Facebook - applications such as Kidnap. (And I'm not even going to mention Mafia Wars. Whoops, I just did.)

I can cite all sorts of software industry examples in which software was robust enough to handle a new use case that the software developers never envisioned. In some cases, the software developers reacted negatively, stating that "our software was not intended for that pupose." In other cases, the software developers reacted positively, and their software reached dizzying heights of success that they never envisioned.

While it's good for software developers to examine their users and work to meet user needs, there are times when it's best for the software developers to just give the users the tools to meet their own needs. Now one can argue that LinkedIn effectively did this by allowing Brogan to capture contact data in CSV format. But LinkedIn could do a better job here, or else it will end up like Monster or the local newspaper classifieds.

P.S. Leslie, I'm sending you to Rio! Again.

Puzzling over semantics as technology sizzles

Marius Ciortea went to a Lunch 2.0 last week in Silicon Valley. Afterwards, he noted that someone at the lunch was not familiar with the acronym "SEO" (search engine optimization).

Robert Scoble recently observed that some software developers make some assumptions about their users.

I went off to the Google Friend Connect page and started filling out the form. It said I had to load two files up to my server. One problem, though, I didn’t know how to do that.

Now I can hear you yelling at the screen “you need to FTP them up to your server.”

One problem: most people today have no idea what you just said. I forgot all about FTP back in 1996 and didn’t think I’d need to know about it again.

These serve as reminders - don't assume that everyone at an event knows all of the stuff that you know.

On Facebook, I shared my own story when Marius' tweet showed up there:

[O]ne teenager brought her boyfriend to a church choir, and the boyfriend had to ask what the Lord's Prayer was when we got to that part of the church service.

Now to the outside observer, I'm sure that things looked strange - why is a guy, standing in the church choir in a choir robe, unable to recite the Lord's Prayer from memory? (Luckily, it was printed in the hymnal, so that was pointed out to him so he could follow along.)

I bet there's a similar situation for the Lunch 2.0 event. Perhaps the person attending the event was just starting to explore personal sharing on the web for the first time, and therefore never had reason to try to optimize searches, unlike someone who has been involved on the web for years and wants to ensure that his Empoprise-BI blog becomes well-known as a leading, individualized service for business news that offers a fresh perspective, as do all of my Empoprises blogs, such as my Empoprise-IE Inland Empire blog, my Empoprise-MU music blog, and my Empoprise-NTN NTN Buzztime blog.

I seem to have strayed from my original topic. So anyways, I'm sure all the Lunch 2.0 people were nice to the person asking about SEO, but these events serve as a reminder that when you give a presentation, you have to remember the person who is just walking into the room, and your topic, for the first time and is eager to learn more.

Don't call him/her a stupid newbie. Or I'll rm * -rf you from my lists.

Stupid translator tricks, and a look at Bing Translator

Years ago, back when I was very active in Yahoo, there was a fairly active Yahoo Group called "Silliness and Nonsense" that engaged in serious discussion of the issues of the day. Actually, we'd spend a good deal of our time taking English text, translating it to another language via Alta Vista, then translating it back into English. (Example.)

That translation activity popped into my head when I was reading this quote from Yusuf Mehdi, as reproduced by the Inquisitr:

So why did we pick Bing as the new brand name? We needed a brand that was as fresh and new as our approach. It needed to be like the product — optimized for the Internet. A name that was memorable, short, easy to spell, and that would function well as a URL around the world.

Well, part of the Bing empire is a Bing translator, which appears under the URL http://www.microsofttranslator.com/. It's not as thorough as a certain other free translator that's available - for example, it doesn't support Finnish - but it does support Japanese, allowing me to translate Mehdi's statement from English to Japanese and back again. Here's what I got:

So why were we pick Bing, new brand name?? and a fresh brand tried a new approach was needed. It is necessary as the product — is optimization Internet. Name memorable, short, and easily as the URL slovn, and all over the world often features.

Ah, poetry. But I will give Bing Translator credit for stating something that other translators neglect to state:

Automatic translation can help you understand the gist of the translated text but is no substitute for a professional human translator.

And if I used a messenger program (frankly, I don't use any of them), I'd be curious to see how Windows Live Messenger's translation service worked:

Translation Bot for Windows Live Messenger. Simply add mtbot@hotmail.com to your contacts and invite Tbot to your conversations.

Perhaps I should take a more serious look at translation issues and how they affect business, but it's late.

Or, I was probably a matter of translation, that affect the business and how you need to look more seriously, but later.

When old fashioned products run into old fashioned crime (Archway)

I remember Archway cookies from my younger years, but I had forgotten about them. But they're still around - well, they WERE still around.

The New York Times details one long night in April 2008 during which Archway's finance director made a shocking discovery:

SITTING in his office late one evening in April last year, Keith Roberts, the director of finance for the Archway & Mother’s Cookie Company, stared in shocked silence at the numbers on his desk.

He knew things had been bad — daily reports he had been monitoring for six months showed that cookie sales at the company had been dismal.

But Roberts wasn't shocked by bad news - he was shocked by good news.

But the financial data he was looking at showed much more robust sales.

“Where on earth had all of these sales come from?” Mr. Roberts recalls thinking to himself.

Tired, but intrigued, he began digging through orders and shipping and inventory records until, well after midnight, he reached the conclusion that Archway, based in Battle Creek, Mich., was booking nonexistent sales.

In real times, the fraud wasn't that big - a few million dollars at most - but the Times notes that this was enough to push Archway into bankruptcy. But the Times derives another lesson from the scandal:

Archway’s collapse is a reminder of the apparent lengths to which some of the nation’s biggest banks went to do deals with private-equity firms during the recent buyout boom.

Wachovia...provided tens of millions of dollars in loans and lines of credit backed by assets to Archway despite the fact the company had not had a formal independent audit of its financial statements in three years.

For what it's worth, Wachovia is no more. Perhaps we can see why.

Too easy to steal, too easy to get caught

I conduct vanity searches via Google Reader, and I was surprised when an item came up in the search that looked familiar, yet not so familiar. The snippet that appeared in Google Reader started as follows:

Short Bio: John Bredehoft, based in Ontario, California, is a product marketing consultant...

Now I remember seeing those words a couple of days ago when they were posted by Louis Gray. I don't recall seeing them in something called Guilda Blog. But here they are.

The interesting part is that the brains behind guildfa.net didn't just steal Gray's content. They also stole all his links, including (most importantly) a link back to Gray's blog. I didn't see any ads or anything like that, but I did find this interesting little note at the bottom of the post:

Copyright © 2009 Guilda Blog

I don't think so, Monesa Azimi. Just watch whose copyright you mess with.

Why the Chinese aren't tweeting about the Hummer purchase

Twitter, for better or worse, is infiltrating businesses all over the world. So when a newsworthy event such as The Sichuan Tengzhong Heavy Industrial Machinery Company Ltd.'s purchase of General Motors' Hummer brand makes the news, you'd expect a ton of tweets about it. So what are the Chinese saying about the deal? Um, nothing:

It seems that as of today, the Chinese authorities have blocked internet access to Twitter, Flickr (Flickr reviews), Bing, Live.com, Hotmail.com and several other sites. Wordpress (WordPress reviews), YouTube (YouTube reviews), Blogger (blogger reviews) are also blocked.

According to early reports on Twitter (Twitter reviews) and on blogs it seems that the Chinese authorities want to quiet down the entire major social networking and social media part of the web ahead of the 20th anniversary of Tiananmen massacre on June 4th.

I'll be interested in hearing Shel Israel's reactions to this. He's already tweeting about it. And Shel has a personal interest in this; as I noted last summer, Israel was one of several participants in a China Business Network-sponsored visit to China. As he noted at the time, correcting an impression of mine:

The role the Chinese government has in this trip is granting a visa and stamping my passport. The China Business Network is New York-based and has no affiliation with the government.

Obviously the China Business Network is adversely affected by this, as are (of course) the Chinese people.

Then again, if you're a Twitter-hater, this is the ideal time to visit China, I guess...

Why stockholder elections are as effective as regular elections

Somewhere or another, you figure that people would figure out the disconnect. In national elections in the United States (and probably in other countries), people complain to no end about the poor politicians that serve us. Yet it's a rare instance in which an incumbent politician does not get re-elected. Because of our willingness to continue to re-elect the same people time and time again, we've set up artificial ways to kick them out such as term limits. Yet despite all of the things we can dream up, we end up with the same crowd running the show.

Compare this to the corporate situation, in which we complain about how corporations are run and how boards of directors rubber-stamp what the officers want to do and give the officers huge bonuses. You have Congressmen and Senators who deride those who run corporations, and the reason that they do it is because the public agrees. In essence, people think that the people who run the corporations are as bad as the politicians who run our country.

But guess what? Even though the stockholders have the power to turn the rascals out, they rarely if ever do.

Last week, both BusinessWeek and the New York Times reported on William Ackman's unsuccessful attempt to install an alternate slate of directors at Target's annual meeting. Ackman, who owns over 7% of Target's stock, stated that Target's current board was unrepresentative of the shareholders at large, since board members own less than 0.3% of the stock. And Ackman argued that in today's environment, a fresh perspective was needed on the board. The New York Times:

Since beginning the proxy fight in March, Mr. Ackman has argued that Target’s current board lacked relevant experience in the real estate, retail and credit card business.

Regarding real estate, it should be noted that Ackman previously proposed that Target place its land into a real estate investment trust.

BusinessWeek:

Despite his pleadings, shareholders disagreed with Ackman's contention that the board was insular and required fresh perspectives that could be supplied only by his slate of five candidates, which included former Starbucks (SBUX) Chief Executive Jim Donald, who helped build Wal-Mart's (WMT) grocery business, and Richard Vague, former CEO of credit-card firm First USA.

And for his efforts to offer a fresh perspective, Ackman has been directly or indirectly criticized as a troublemaker. Just as an unsuccessful politician urges people to rally around the flag and stay the course, Damien J. Park (quoted by the Times) indirectly criticized Ackman by noting that his activities were disruptive:

“I guarantee you that every single Target board discussion over the last six months has been about this proxy fight and not about setting the business strategy of the company.”

So don't cause any trouble; we know what we're doing.

Even if we don't.

Lisa's folder and your folder, part two

Folders by Phil (Flawka) used under a Creative Commons License

In my previous post, I looked at the revolutionary introduction of the folder concept to computer user interfaces in 1983, noting that the concept has pretty much remained unchanged over the past quarter century. To illustrate this, it's helpful to compare the standard computer folder with a real folder that you and I might use in the physical world.

There are certainly some similarities between virtual and physical folders. You can use both types of folders to store documents, and you can even use them to store other folders.

But there are some differences. The one advantage of a virtual folder is that if you drop it and turn it upside down, the contents of the folder aren't scattered all over the place. Unfortunately, the reason for this "advantage" is simple - you can't drop a folder like you would in real life. Oh, you can "drag and drop" a folder, but it's not really the same.

For one thing, your interaction with a virtual folder is two-dimensional, if not one-dimensional. In most cases, you grab a folder by putting an oval object in your hand, sliding it around on a two-dimensional surface, and moving your finger in a special way to "select" the folder. Now I'm not minimizing the importance of the mouse in computer user interface history, but when I have to dive into files in my filing cabinet, I'm not restricted to two-dimensional space or doing weird things with my finger.

But what of a touchscreen? you may ask. Frankly, it's not much better. If you have a touchscreen, then you don't have to put the oval object in your hand, but you still have to place your finger on a two-dimensional surface, perhaps tapping your finger or performing some other action to "select" the folder.

I don't know about you, but I don't deal with my file cabinet that way. I open the file cabinet and just grab the folder I want. I may grab it with my left hand, or I may grab it with my right hand. If it's big, I may grab it with both hands. Or maybe I might grab it with two fingers, or if I'm feeling particularly creative, I may grab it with my mouth, or take my shoes off and grab it with my feet.

I could spend hours describing all the limitations of virtual folders, but let me cite another example. Let's say I've selected/grabbed the folder, opened it, and am ready to look at the contents. If I'm using a virtual folder, I may get presented with a screen like this:



In my example here, I can sort the contents of the folder (in this case, other folders) by name, date modified, type, or tags. (If there's a way to sort folders by size in Windows Vista, I don't know it.) Now certainly the smarter people among you can argue that you can customize your operating system to include other sort parameters, but even if you do so, you are limited to a finite number of sort methods that can be represented in computer language.

Now in the real world (and perhaps in some intelligent user interface that I don't know about), you can sort the contents of a folder by any criteria that you can make up in your head. Perhaps I want to sort by the Dewey Decimal System, which means that I'd put the Bible studies in the 200s. And yes, I know that Windows Vista could allow me to do this by putting the appropriate tags on the folders, but that's just it - I have to tell the computer something, then I have to do the sort. Why not do it all in one step, without having to bother with all this "typing stuff into the computer" insanity?

And that illustrates the entire problem. To get a computer to do something, you have to describe the action in a logical way that the computer can understand.

There's got to be a better way.

Lisa's folder and your folder, part one

lisa-computer by Ballistik Coffee Boy (spaceageboy) used under a Creative Commons License

I previously ruminated on how the Project Natal advances that were announced earlier today might eventually find their way into business applications. In an effort to consider the need for some sprucing up in the business user interface category, I figured I'd drill down into something on our computers that is over a quarter century old - the folder.

You wouldn't have a folder without having a desktop metaphor. And the desktop metaphor is pretty old itself:

The desktop concept was invented in 70s by a group of researchers at Xerox’s high-end computer science lab in Palo Alto. Originally multiple windows used to compete for space on a screen that wasn’t much bigger than a sheet of paper. The breakthrough came when a researcher named Alan Kay began thinking of the screen as a desktop. "People in offices got around the same problem of too much paper and not enough room by piling pages on top of one another." Kay simply transferred this real world solution to the computer and overlapping windows were born. No-one looked back from there.

Optimal Usability, from which the above quote was taken, goes on to say

Part of the reason for the staying power of this particular interface metaphor was that it was extendible. It is not a huge mental leap to incorporate other familiar office concepts such as a trash can and files.

Fast-forward a few years, and you'll find that two guys named Dan Keller and Frank Ludolph are working on some new ideas for the desktop metaphor. Their employer was a company that was then known as Apple Computer. Their project was a project that would render the Apple II obsolete and revolutionize computing - the Lisa. When the Lisa computer debuted in 1983, Gregg Williams of BYTE Magazine explained some of the new concepts, including something called the folder:

When you turn on the Lisa system, the screen is empty except for the presence of several icons.

While you read this, I suggest that you carry yourself back to that time, a time in which screen resolutions were expressed in terms such as 80 x 24 (the number of characters that could fit on a line, multiplied by the number of lines). Words such as "icons" were strange to most of us - frankly, in early 1983, I had decided that perhaps I DIDN'T want to type my 100+ page undergraduate thesis on my typewriter, and perhaps I'd better learn some macros for nroff to make the process easier. So bear this in mind as you read BYTE's description of this strange new interface.

The Lisa computer depends on the metaphor that the video display is a desktop, while the icons are objects on the desktop. Each peripheral connected to the Lisa (floppy and hard disks, printers, and other peripherals connected by interface cards) is represented on the desktop by either an icon (if it is not in use) or a rectangular area called a window (if it is available for use).

Here's this other new idea - the window. Now people in certain areas had run across windows before, but I certainly hadn't run across the concept yet, and wouldn't encounter it for a couple of years until Lisa's successor, the Macintosh, came on the scene. Back to BYTE.

The Lisa computer normally replaces the conventional file directory with a collection of objects displayed in the window of the associated mass-storage device. Each file is represented by an object of some sort - usually a report, a tool, or a document - and objects can be grouped together in folders, which are also treated as objects....

The folder was the new concept introduced by the Lisa team - as far as I can tell, no one had put a folder on a user interface before. BYTE describes how the folder works, again introducing the relatively new concept of opening an object to see its contents:

An example of the Lisa file system will illustrate how useful this metaphor is. From a cleaned-up desktop with nothing but icons on the right of the screen, I use the mouse to point to the Profile (hard disk) icon and click the mouse button twice; this has the effect of “opening” the Profile and displaying its contents. The Profile icon changes to a white silhouette and its original black-on-white shape expands to a window named “Profile.”...To view and then work with the contents of the Tools folder, I put the cursor on the folder and click the mouse button twice. The icon expands, leaving a gray silhouette and a window named “Tools”....The symbols on the margin of each window are points from which the cursor can direct several operations on the window. For example, when the cursor points to the small folder icon in the upper left-hand corner of the Tools window and the mouse button is clicked twice, the folder “closes” and the video display reverts to the image it had before the folder was opened.

This whole idea of folders, which not only involved opening and closing folders, but putting items into folders (including other folders) and taking them out, obviously influenced user environments well beyond the Lisa, and well beyond Apple. Chances are you're using an operating system, or perhaps even a cellular phone, which supports the folder concept.

A concept which has remained pretty much unchanged for the last quarter century.

To be continued...

How the French go green - 3rd generation biofuels from household waste

In a never-ending attempt to find new ways to fuel our world - something that Steven Hodson has noted is necessary for our technological society to survive - we've been trying all sorts of "alternative" fuels. Ethanol was supposed to be our great savior, but unfortunately the increased demand for ethanol moves production away from other things that we need, like food. There aren't people competing for trash, unless you count reality TV show producers, so if we can produce energy from trash, this is a good thing. John Gaynard found a page, apparently machine-translated, that describes French efforts in this area.

In [France] was first inaugurated global platform for producing fuel from algae cross. Plants, grown in an artificial basin, are fed with carbon dioxide from the fermentation of household waste.

Séché Environnement Group inaugurated last week at Vigeant, common in southern region of the Vienne department of France Poitou-Charentes, the first global platform for production of biofuels based on algae....

I was able to find another English-language report on the project:

Located in Vigeant, the plant will produce fuel from micro algae. As a first step, it will produce 4 500 liters per hectare from 30 tonnes of dry biomass. Eventually, 20 000 liters of ethanol per hectare are expected....

This project, presented by the region as the first pilot site in industrial-size open "to" third-generation fuel "is a collaboration between Séché Environment, Renewable Carbon Valagro SEM and lecentre Studies and Utilization of Algae (CEVA).

I hadn't run across references to third-generation fuel before, but Craig Rubens helpfully tried to define the generations:

First-generation biofuels rely on food crops as their feedstock. Corn, soy, palm and sugarcane all have readily accessible sugars, starches and oils....The problems with first-generation biofuels are numerous and well-documented in the media, ranging from net energy losses to greenhouse gas emissions to increased food prices....

Second-generation biofuels use lignocellulosic biomass as feedstock, among them dedicated biofuel crops like switchgrass and agricultural residue such as corn stalks. Using specially designed microorganisms, the feedstock’s tough cellulose is broken down into sugar and then fermented....

Rather than improving the fuel-making process, third-generation biofuels seek to improve the feedstock. Designing oilier crops, for example, could greatly boost yield. Scientists have designed poplar trees with lower lignin content to make them easier to process.

If you can't, or won't, go to France, you can see something kinda sorta similar in Henderson, Nevada. It doesn't produce energy, but it does produce something that we need even more than energy - water:

Another popular attraction on the grounds [of the Ethel M. Chocolate Factory is] the "Living Machine". This is where live bacteria, algae, protozoa, snails, and fish are used in a cutting-edge wastewater-treatment facility to recycle 100 percent of the water from the factory so that it can be reused in the manufacturing process at the factory. Don't forget: this is the desert and water is a rare and expensive commodity. This machine uses no chemicals and is able to recycle 32,000 gallons of water each day, which is then used in landscaping as well.

The business implications of Project Natal

As I previously mentioned, I've started a "natural user interface" group on FriendFeed, which you can find at http://friendfeed.com/natural-user-interface. Here's a peek into the group right (updated as things change).



While it's neat to see really kewl stuff here and there, the one thought that has been in the back of my mind has been, "Can these user interface advances be applied in a business context?"

Earlier today word spread across the tubes about a Microsoft announcement regarding "Project Natal," a new interface for the XBox 360 that should appear next year. Here's what the Seattle Times had to say about it:

Microsoft revealed a motion-sensing gadget for the Xbox 360 that it said will change the future of entertainment....

Code-named Project Natal, the device is a horizontal bar about nine inches wide and stuffed with cameras, depth sensors and array microphones.

It can detect the voices and motions of people nearby, so they can interact with an Xbox and games just by talking and moving their bodies.

James Games (no, not the place in Upland - by the way, I know the Upland James) links this to another Microsoft initiative:

(It is a bit like Microsoft’s Surface, but without the Surface).

Microsoft's announcement was made in advance of the Electronic Entertainment Expo over in Los Angeles. But I originally discovered this via a share by FriendFeed user digitalsoup (Alex), who shared this YouTube video.



As you can see from the video, Project Natal attempts to remove hardware devices that we normally use to communicate with computers, and instead allows us to use our hands, feet, and other parts of our bodies to communicate. If you think about it, a "control x" or even a mouse click is not a natural movement, and (at least theoretically) a Project Natal-like interface supports more natural movements.

But here's the question that interests me - how long will it take to transfer this technology from the game console to the corporate computer? Now this goes above and beyond Microsoft's announced plans to move the XBox 360 into movies, television and social networking. I'm talking about Microsoft server operating systems running on computers that don't need mice.

Your thoughts? How can a Project Natal-like interface help you to do your job better?

[9:50 PM - I SUBSEQUENTLY MUSED ON LISA'S FOLDER AND YOUR FOLDER.]

Testing if I installed AddThis correctly

This is a test.

A familiar face joins Conan tonight

In a few hours, Conan O'Brien will tape his first Tonight Show. And the New York Times notes that an old friend will join O'Brien:

His old friend Andy Richter will swing into the opening announcement, intoning for the first time the words “The Tonight Show With Conan O’Brien,” and the star will stand behind the curtains of his stylish new set feeling the thrill run up his (extra-long) spine.

Richter had been on Conan's original show for several years, but the Los Angeles Times describes what happened next:

After seven years of being on the show, I got itchy. I have a philosophy that if you enjoy good fortune, rather than sit there and say, "Oh, that's fine, this amount is good enough for me," you should try and push it. You should see how much you can stretch your good fortune. And I was curious.

Curious enough to try "Andy Richter Controls the Universe" and other projects, but now he's joined Conan in El-Lay. And his wife didn't need much convincing when Richter told her of the opportunity.

It's not a difficult thing to go to your wife and say, "Honey, I've just been presented with a way to get a regular paycheck."

The North American auto industry, North American governments, and ruminations on Franklin D. Roosevelt

I don't have any stunning insights on the latest auto news from the last 24 hours - Chrysler has cleared an apparent final hurdle to get OUT of bankruptcy, just as General Motors is preparing to go IN to bankruptcy, again with a relatively quick re-emergence. Apparently Rush Limbaugh will have something on his radio show later today in which he asks for a Supreme Court nominee who has "empathy" for the poor GM bondholders, but that's not surprising - Limbaugh probably wants the U.S. Olympic team to lose in 2010 because Obama is president.

But it does make you think about the unprecedented steps that Barack Obama, George W. Bush, the U.S. Congress, Stephen Harper, and the Canadian Parliament have taken over the last several months, in which the U.S. and Canadian governments now own/will own significant stakes in multi-billion dollar North American businesses. This is more commonplace in Europe, in which major companies are often partially owned by national governments, but it's a relatively new phenomenon here, at least at this scale.

The common refrain - and in fact one that I've used at times - is that this is an undesirable outcome, but it's better than the other outcomes. Truthfully, does anyone see an alternative in which General Motors could have stayed away from liquidation without U.S./Canadian government participation? Even Bill Gates and Warren Buffett couldn't have saved the auto industry.

Which leads me to FDR. I'll probably dig into this a little more deeply later, but Roosevelt was known to argue that he was truly a conservative, and that the unprecedented steps that he took were taken in order to prevent an even more drastic alternative as envisioned by Norman Thomas and others.

Now I know it's common to paint FDR, Obama, and even (in some circles) Dubya as wild-eyed liberals, but perhaps they're more conservative than we think. And if anyone wonders whether Roosevelt is truly the ultimate liberal darling, just ask the Japanese Americans.

Perhaps I'll pursue these thoughts at a later time, but I wanted to stick a few thoughts out there now.

Comments?

Arguing over semantics as technology changes

Old TV and 15 inch monitor by Alpha (avlxyz) used under a Creative Commons License

When I bought my new home computer recently, I discovered that the monitor has HDTV connections. I'm not using them at the moment, but I could.

One night last week, I insisted on using our main TV in the family room so that I could watch a DVR'ed copy of the Champions League match between Barcelona and Manchester United. Because I was using that TV, my daughter went to the living room and watched TV. Or, to be more accurate, she watched a TV show. She was NOT watching TV; let's be very clear on that.

Now many of you realize that I'm making a ridiculous distinction. But that is the very distinction that is being made by Hulu, as Peter Kafka notes:

Note how [Hulu] describes [its Desktop application]: “A lean-back viewing experience for your personal computer” that will work on Macs and PCs with “standard Windows Media Center or Apple remote controls”....

Kafka notes that at the time he was writing this post, he was in a room with

gorgeous 22″ and 30″ Mac displays that are much nicer than anything that sits in my cramped Brooklyn apartment. Hulu is saying that they’d be a-ok with me watchin Tina Fey and crew, via their service, on those monitors. But they don’t want me trying to get that show on an actual television.

To understand these arcane semantic distinctions, all you have to do is follow the money. More here.