Friday, January 30, 2009

She's Geeky Day 1 : Oh Ada, Wish You Could Have Been Here

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Day 1 of the She's Geeky (un)conference wrapped up with some wine to wind down the she geeks and a real treat- an Ada Lovelace biographical film which was a history lesson on Ada, who many call the "first programmer". Some of my notes/thoughts follow but overall all a great day and i am certainly looking forward to tomorrow!

On this first day, there were more then 50 sessions scheduled on a wide range of topics. I like many other, wanted to attended multiple sessions that might have been running at the same time so i tried to pick from a diverse 'track' in each time slot.

The first session i attended was titled "How to Build Credibility in a techy world when you are not techy" and a small group of us had a targeted and helpful discussion sharing our experiences. "techy' was mostly defined as hard core programming- because all of us around the table were techy to some level. Here are some notes from that session that i submitted as note taker (all session notes will be published on the she's geeky site):
---first show what your strenghts & values are- (e.g. understanding the user while they understand the code)
-----define how you will be working together
----volunteer to help them with specific aspects of their role that they might not be 'good at' or like. for example helping them with business/admin things
----share recognition with the team early on, praise

-Build Alliances and Allies
-----become an advocate outside of the the core group for them - interdepartemental/executive
----focus on your soft skills value-- what are the people issues to understanding
---give them ownership----you need them for specific things identify and give them ownership
--***Find one person on the team that can be your 'internal' contact and ally, someone you can go to to help you understand things that you might not understand and be able to ask 'offline'

--Somtimes it is 'not' personal to you but 'personal' to them as to the attitude they have towards you- try to understand what is going on- stress in their life?personal family issues? scared that they can't do something ? ask
---Help them ***Sleep Better at Night*** ;-)
--Remain the Calm Pillar when stress situations arise.

--we tend to put out there right away what we "lack"- how do you go about being honest but confident of what you can bring to the table?
---Executive sponsership- find it and cherish it- use it to your advantage

---** Make sure you understand "What is in it for Them?"
The second session, which i helped lead was on "Making Information Accessible" - the leader of that session is a technical writer and had one of the best lines i have heard about technical manuals: "manuals have no plots or surprise endings"- as we discussed some of the challenges of different types of content. We spent some time talking about the value of meta data, unstructured and structured data, chunking, journalism and publishing, citizen journalism and the production of content through social networking tools like Twitter (a question gets asked, gets answered but it is findable again? where is all this content going and how can we access ?)[I was introduced to Tweetake]

A tasty lunch of Indian cuisine allow some of us to catch up and for me to type of my session notes as a dutifiul note taker!

The third session i attended lead by IdaRose Sylvester and Susan Mernit on "Transparency & Identity Online and Offline" in a packed room- with many personal stories and questions for those who have (or have had at one point) a more transparent online indentity lead to interesting observations about transparency Offline in our Online world (yes i wrote that backwards on purpose because that is what i found to be the most interesting was the discussion on how we live our offline different because of our online "transparency" or lack of). Here are some notes i took from that session:

Session Introduction by IdaRose and Susan
-What does it Mean?
-- How much do you tell/share on line?
--What moral issues?
--What about your employers?
-- What are your privacy, safety concerns
--How much is too much to share?
--What kind of rules do you make for yourself?
--How you manage your own transparency?

Using different personalities/personas on line- discussion around 'handles' and branding- separating from real name

-- Prefessional - (word combination of personal/professional) - combined worlds of professional and personal online identity-
----who wants to know who you are when they find you? discussed that it could be your customer,your employer, coworkers, your friends/family, strangers
---long term concerns---what you say now can affect you later- how do you think about those events? e.g. sharing medical stories that might affect the way a future employee thinks of you.
---the "ugly side" of putting identity access stuff out there e.g. "spam" created by adding yourself to services, etc.

--Having your identity being out there-->>>someone talked about how since the 70s they have been using the same 'handle'- hundreds of username/password= having to change and create a new identity would lose a lot and is not manageable

---discussion around what happens when you are forced to change your identity - someone shared a story about how they went about trying to erase things associated with their real name . from contacting google to remove things (they have a form you can submit requests) from their indexes to contacting web content owners. but the bottom line? things that are out there will never never disappear!!

--Biometrics- the idea of your digtial identity life pulse
--various people talked about their experiences when they got stalked , or harassed- sometimes to the point that they had to completely remove their online identity and start again

---Discussion on how you create a synonymous identities- not using your legal name for everything you do online as well as offline
--discussed how to do that offline, eg, conferences where you might not want to be identified by your real name- but you need to pay by credit cards etc. using paypal,

--Advice to everyone- buy your name as a domain name if you haven't already!
--remember when you buy something whois directory will display your personal info- how transparent will you be?
--Someone mentioned a new service called Nombray that allows you to buy your name as a domain and automatically creating an online identity http://www.nombray.com/ --Discussed grabbing your name when any new service is create. pros- someone else doesn't get your username/ cons- too many services to remember
--Discussion around the importance of picking secure passwords as you create multiple identities

--Make sure you put a disclaimer about what you write on your blog so it is clear to you employer, readers and anyone that might come across it- but other services (twitter,facebook etc) don't make that as easy.

--We are human so sometimes we talk trash-but today we need to be extra careful- are you saying and doing anything that you can't take the hit for online OR offline?

--Think of it in a simple way- what if everything you ever wrote ended up on the front page of the New York Times- you need to make that a standard- don't make public what you would not want appearing there.

--A certain amount of transparency is good because people are becoming more and more transparent both on and offline today it is easier/safer/better established boundaries- but think long term

--discussion around kids creating indenties online-
---how do you help your kids brand themselves online? the identity they are creating now may be with them for the rest of their lives
---teenagers are not aware of the fact that all the do online will be online basically forever and they can't hide from it.
--parents who are familiar with these issues should make an effort to educate the other parents in the neighborhood because typically not every parent is connected
The forth session i attended was titled Democratizing Data - and we learned about an upcoming book titled (perhaps?) "Democratizing Data". With the new government administration, comes an advocacy for a more transparent government, but what does that mean in the real world and can it be applied to the corporate enterprise data as well? The theory is that by democratizing data—-allowing you to access and use any (and all) data--government and enterprises can leverage lessons learned from the Web 2.0 world to build networks and communities based on trust, openness, and empowerment. Creating mashup applications out of automated structured data feeds will improve worker efficiency, transparency, and stimulate mass collaboration. The discussion focused on the theme of the book, making government data accessible and participatory and we discussed other types of data (e.g. medical records). We also briefly touched on resources for getting access to specific types of data (Infochimp, Freebase).

After i tweeted that i was in that session, kind words via a retweet from one of the co-authors of the book, David Stephenson poped up "RT @danielabarbosa: we are discussing Democratizing Data here at #ShesGeeky 1,000 blessings be upon you and your sisterhood"...

By the last session of the day i was feeling the need to geek out- a "for real" geek out and earlier in the day i had talked to Marilyn Davis after she had introduced herself in the morning as being someone that wanted to help women who wanted to learn how to program (yeah i am never going to give my dream up of learning in depth programming!). Marilyn put on the board a session on Python a programming language that i have been wanting to learn more about so i figured this would be a great opportunity. After some projector issues, we finally got to see some of the basic principles of programming in Python- a quick download on my computer and now i am setup to do the basic tutorial when i get a chance (i saw some Ruby sessions on tomorrow's agenda that i think i am going to attend as well - so then i suspect i should be able to decided which one i want to dedicate more time to goof around with).

goodnight ladies..and geek on my friends!


Photo|Flickr|Liz Henry (She's Geeky Attendee and blogging sessions as well)

Monday, January 26, 2009

Enterprise Finding with the Semantic Web

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Very similar to the possible benefits of the Semantic Web in what i like to call the research 'finding' environment in corporate enterprises and perhaps one of the most illustrative examples of the value of the Semantic Web i have seen in a while, this post titled Semantic Web in Education by Jason Ohler a professor of Educational Technology and Distance Learning at the University of Alaska paints a illustrative picture of some of the values end-users/consumers can derive from the Semantic Web. Flip it from an education research environment that Olhler is addressing to an enterprise finding environment and you have an interesting use case for why enterprises should look closely at the promise of the semantic web.

"One vision of a well-developed semantic web includes a search feature that would return a multimedia report rather than a list of hits. The report would draw from many sources, including websites, articles from scientific repositories, chapters in textbooks, blog dialogue, speeches posted on YouTube, information stored on cell phones, gaming scenarios played out in virtual realities-anything appropriate that is accessible by the rules of Web 3.0. The report would consist of short sections that coalesce around knowledge areas that emerged naturally from your research, with keywords identified and listed conveniently off to one side as links.

The information in the report would be compared, contrasted, and collated in a basic way, presenting points of agreement and disagreement, and perhaps associating these with political positions or contrasting research. Because the web knows something about you, it also alerts you to local lectures on related topics, books you might want to read, TV programs available through your cable service, blog discussions you might find relevant, and even local groups you can contact that are also focused on this issue. Unlike a standard report, what you receive changes as the available information changes, and you might have wiki-like access to add to or edit it. And because you told your agent that this topic is a high priority, your cell phone will beep when a significant development occurs. After all, the semantic web will be highly inclusive, providing a common language for many kinds of media and technologies, including cell phones. The net result, ideally, is that you spend less time searching and sifting and more time absorbing, thinking, and participating."


Starting in February, Christine Connors and I will be conducting a three part Webinar titled 'Discover the Semantic Web' that will address some of these enterprise specific opportunities to leverage the Semantic Web.

Image|Flickr|AlexBarros

Monday, January 19, 2009

For Your Consideration: Planning for Enterprise 2.0 in 2009

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Mike Gotta, an analyst at Burton Group published a good post on the Social Computing Magazine site that i recommend enterprises who want to take advantage of '2.0' check out. Gathered from his own client interactions on the topic, the article titled 'Planning Considerations for Enterprise 2.0 in 2009' outlines a couple key topics and areas that business and IT decision makers should be aware of.

Specific items that caught my interest:

Communities & Social Networks: Think "Adoption", Not "Deployment"
- Since early 2007 i have used the term 'Change Management 2.0' when addressing this subject. Buying/building a 'Web 2.0' tool and installing it within your existing infrastructure does not guarantee success-there are a lot of adoption items like for example social and generational issues in your Enterprise that one needs to be prepared in advance to address in order to be successful.

Social Platforms: Managing The Gap - Gotta's point is that organizations that have selected specific "tools to fill gaps in existing collaboration and content platforms" and are now faced with products that have "grown into mini-suites". This brings up issues of not only multiple technology implementations but of course issues around putting together a successful long term strategy around information management and findability.

Enterprise RSS": It's A Middleware Decision - The recent piece on ReadWriteWeb titled 'R.I.P. Enterprise RSS' specifically including all 70+ comments and all of Marshall Kirkpatrick's updates after the initial post (ah the beauty of the Blog platform!) is certainly a recent must read on the topic of Enterprise RSS. Gotta's points are relevant including his statement that although we use the term "RSS" we should be focusing on Atom because RSS is a dead-end and architecturally deficient. Regardless, one thing that also must be addressed is how to incorporate the features and use cases of using feed syndication into the common non-technical users mindframes in the Enterprise space.

Social Analytics: Redefining Business Intelligence- I think there are two sides (if not more!) of the analytics discussion. One is the value an organization can gain from actually doing it and the second how employees in the future will be 'rated' in some sort or other by their interactions and contributions to the company, their partners and their clients. Mostly everything in the Enterprise needs to be measured, especially if it is eating up operational capital- so Enterprise 2.0 tools are no different, it is just that we do not know what to measure or how. Peter Reiser's work at Sun Microsystems around 'Community Equity' is an interesting early look at how a large company is implementing and adopting analytics as part of their collaboration platforms.

Other highlights that i am always interested in that Gota includes; digital life and digital work convergence specifically around identity, standards for integration and interoperability (he highlights specifically Microformats) and record management specifically as a long term issue that might sound boring compared to all the other things he highlights but as we all know creating data in the enterprise has very different compliance issues then the consumer space.

Gotta also highlights some vendors to keep an eye on as well as open source alternatives that Enterprises should look into.

Image|Flickr|spike55151

Tuesday, January 13, 2009

Blogging in the Global Library Community

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Librarians are no strangers to the blogging world and some of the earliest blogs i followed where indeed written by Librarians. The Librarian in Black blog by Sarah Houghton-Jan a Digital Futures Manager for the San José Public Library is definitely one that i have been keeping an eye on in a Library topic folder in my RSS reader over the years and always find interesting and valuable information.

Recently Sarah wrote a post on her blog that caught my attention about a new book published by LibWorld titled "Library Blogs Worldwide" in which she has written a chapter covering the United States Library blogging community (page 187).

The book was published via the Infobib LibWorld project and is available as a free download or a paperback from Lulu online publishers.

It offers thirty commentaries by local librarians on the state of library-related blogs in 29 countries! The forward by Walt Crawford provides a good summary of the volume and diversity that global library blogs offer.

In Sarah's chapter she asks the question "which came first, the librarian blog or the library blog?" She writes that the librarian did because they "began sharing information with each other and as more of us saw the power of the blogging medium, we began adopting the same techniques at work.". I agree with that answer and it probably mimics a lot of other industries and professions who have adopted blogging as part of their work 'duties' in the same manner.

Another good resource for comprehensive lists of blogs is the Blogging Libraries Wiki and an output of the LibWorld report is available from the LibWorld delicious account where they have tagged all the blogs mentioned in the book by country.

Sunday, January 11, 2009

Dicking Around Obliviously

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Maybe our parents' generation spent hours upon hours cruising around in their cars around the neighborhood oblivious to the unnecessary carbon emissions they were producing in order to be part of the 'gang' or driving door to door as salesman as part of their job that required the car as a 'vehicle' to get their work done, but today's Sunday's Times article Revealed: the environmental impact of Google searches raises some interesting data- that although we should of course question - is something that our digital generation should be paying attention to as we continue to live both our personal and work lives more and more online.

The premise:

Performing two Google searches from a desktop computer can generate about the same amount of carbon dioxide as boiling a kettle for a cup of tea...While millions of people tap into Google without considering the environment, a typical search generates about 7g of CO2 Boiling a kettle generates about 15g.

Nick Carr on his Rough Type blog writes so eloquently as usual:

"But this isn't really about Google, which is only supplying us with services that we want. It's about us. We may be obsessive about turning off the lights when we leave a room, but at the same time we may happily spend hours dicking around online, oblivious of the electricity lighting up our screen, heating our chip, and powering and cooling the data centers we're connected to. (It's true that in some cases Internet use may substitute for other activities, such as travel, that would consume more energy, but let's not kid ourselves: the vast majority of computer and Internet use represents additional energy consumption.) How many Twitterheads think about their electricity use before they tweet? Not many. How many bloggers think about it before they blog? Not this one."

i pronounce myself guilty as well - and picking up a book for the rest of the afternoon.

Image| Cruisin’ the Original: Woodward Avenue

Wednesday, January 07, 2009

Library of Congress Reports on Flickr Pilot

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[This post is cross-posted on the Synaptica Central Blog]

Last month the Library of Congress released their report on their ongoing Flickr project that i have been very interested in and have written about as the project progressed. From their blog post on the report:

"Only nine months into the Library of Congress’ pilot project placing Library photos on the Web site Flickr, the photos have drawn more than 10 million views, 7,166 comments and more than 67,000 tags, according to a new report from the project team overseeing the lively project."
“The popularity and impact of the pilot have been remarkable,” said Michelle Springer, project manager for digital initiatives in the Office of Strategic Initiatives, who said total views reached 10 million in October. The site is averaging 500,000 views a month, she said, adding that Flickr members have marked 79 percent of the photos as “favorites.”


A summary of some of the outcomes:
  • Increasing awareness of the digital photograph collection the Library of Congress (LC) has which has been available for years on the Library's website turning to not only an engaged audience but a lot of referral traffic to the Library's Website. "Feedback of this nature suggests that as a result of this project the Library is reaching new audiences—people who did not or could not find this material on our own site, and people who never thought to look here. "
  • Gain a Better Understanding of Social Tagging and Community Input (see below for more details)
  • Pilot helped the LC staff gain experience with Web 2.0 online interactions with 'patrons'

Since the beginning of the project i have been very interested in learning about some of the outcomes that the project would provide in regards to user tagging versus applied controlled vocabulary through traditional bibliographic cataloging. In the report the share that they used the Flickr API to do deeper analysis of the tagging that was done by the community (see pages 19-24 of the full report) based on nine categories that provided some interesting insight focused on issues commonly cited in comparisons of social tagging vs. assignement of controlled vocabulary terms(page 28). The categories analyzed were:

I. LC description-based (words copied from the Library-provided record): e.g., titles,
names, subjects, etc.

II. New descriptive words (words not present in the Library-provided description):
  • Place: e.g., cities, counties, countries, natural feature names
  • Format (physical characteristics of the original photos). Sample tags: LF, large format, black and white, bw, transparencies, glass plate
  • Photographic technique. Sample tags: shallow depth of field
  • Time period. Sample tags: wartime, WWII, 1912
  • Creator name: e.g., photographer’s name

III. New subject words (words not present in the Library-provided description):
  • Image (items seen in the image itself). Sample tags: cables, trees, apples, windows, hat, yellow
  • Associations/symbolism (phrases and slogans evoked by the image). Sample tags: Rosie the riveter, Norman Rockwell, We can do it!
  • Commentary (revealing the tagger’s value judgments). Sample tags: Sunday best,
  • proud, dapper, vintage.
  • Transcription (transcribing words found in items such as signs, posters, etc., within the photo)
  • Topic (terms that convey the topic of the photo). Sample tags: architecture, navy, baseball, story
  • Humor (tags intended to be humorous rather than descriptive) Sample tags: UFO, flying saucer
IV. Emotional/aesthetic responses: (personal reactions of the tagger). Sample tags: wow,
pretty, ugly, controversial

V. Personal knowledge/research (tags that could only have been added based on knowledge or research by the tagger, and that could not have been gleaned solely from the description provided or examination of the photo): For example, the tag murder used on a portrait of someone who was later murdered or tags added for the specific county when that information was not part of the description.

VI. Machine tags (added by the community not Library-supplied): e.g., geotags and Iconclass tags

VII. Variant forms (representing terms already tagged but in a different form, such as synonyms (e.g., WW2, WWII, World War II, worldwarii) or plural/singular differences (e.g., transparency/transparencies)

VIII. Foreign language (tags in foreign languages/scripts, whether they are translations of English-language tags, or new tags)

IX. Miscellaneous (tags that are not readily understood, that provide corrections to LC descriptions or to other taggers (e.g., not peaches), or tags later removed

Some of the Future Tag Analysis Interests (page 29) are also quite interesting such as actually incorporating popular concepts or variants into the LC's own controlled vocabularies (yeah something i advocate in the hybrid approach!), bringing the tags into the LC's search environment, populate bibliographic records with tags (although that have already added the Flickr URL to the "additional version available" field (MARC field 530) in some catalog records which leads users to the appropriate Flickr page that might provide historical information etc. on the image that is vaulable- see sample on page 36).

In the report they also share some of the experiences the staff learned from using Web2.0 tools in interacting with patrons that might be different from the traditional reference desk exchanges (page 37).

The good news? Skip to page 38 of the full report to see the recommendations and conculsions including details of headcount that is necessary for the program to continue and expand. But the report ends with the following good news:

"It should come as no surprise, then, that the Flickr team recommends that this experiment in Web 2.0 cease to be characterized as a pilot and evolve to an expanded involvement in this growing community (and other appropriate social networking opportunities that may arise) as resources permit. The benefits appear to far outweigh the costs and risks. "


The entire set of tags that have been applied can be seen alphabetically or as a tag cloud of the 150 most popular tags.

Many thanks to the Library of Congress staff for taking on this project and continuous sharing their progress through their blog and other resources (see Appendix C) and to the authors of the project report: Michelle Springer, Beth Dulabahn, Phil Michel, Barbara Natanson, David Reser, David Woodward, and Helena Zinkham!

I Needed 150 Million to Confirm My Thoughts

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Early this week prior to pressing 'publish' on my "Who gives a F? Florida, Facebook and 'Friends'" post i thought "am i going to sound ignorant that i didn't 'realize' how big and embedded Facebook is getting?". Well i got some positive feedback and agreement on flickr that others had only recently been noticing the same thing outside of their 'tech network' and today I felt even more vindicated when i saw the swoon of news on Techmeme triggered by Mark Zukerburg's annoucement that they have hit the 150million user mark.

I especially like John Furrier's take of why Facebook is being quickly adopted by all types of web users:
"Simply put: they broker transactions from finding lost friends, staying in touch with existing friends, making new friends, to finding and buying products and services."

And of course the last part of that statement is the money maker on the table.

Image|Flickr|Mathew Field

Tuesday, January 06, 2009

Where All the She Geeks Will Gather Together on January 30-31: She's Geeky (un)conference

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Last year i was not able to attend the first She's Geeky conference event but remember reading and hearing about how great the sessions and the event was so when Kaliya Hamlin reached out to me this year and asked me if i would be interested in helping with organize the event i jumped at the chance.

A couple months ago a couple of us who wanted to help organize the event got together to start working on logistics (Kaliya and Laurie Ray are doing all the heavy lifting) and as we were introducing ourselves i explained my interest in the She's Geeky event as follows:

When i first moved to the bay area i wanted to be involved in the tech scene - but was certainly intimidated not only is it very male dominated they are also programmers and hard core geeks - something that i got over by just diving in using the will power and skills i have learned in being in male dominated corporate environments over the last 15 years. But while i think i have managed to make the best of the fact that i am not a programmer and not male by establishing myself in various communities it might not be as easy for other women- so an environment like the She's Geeky event is needed plus i have no doubt that there are hundred's of cool she geeks that i might never get a chance to meet otherwise!

So here are the basics for the event:

The event takes place January 30-31 (Friday-Saturday) at the the awesome Computer History Museum in Mountain View. There is also a pre-event social hour on the evening of the 29th in Mountain View and on Friday night we will show the Ada Lovelace movie the Museum has before heading out to dinner.

On Friday the 30th the doors will open at 8am with breakfast and espresso. and then the Agenda making will begin. If you have never been to an unconference event here is how it works:
  • At the beginning of the day, we create the agenda. (you can however add suggested topics in advance here as well)
  • Everyone meets in one room and posts topics they would like to present, see or discuss. This creates a rich assortment of agenda items and makes for an exciting day of learning. There is a PDF called 'unconferencing' that explains how to prepare for an unconference.
  • From there, we go to separate areas or rooms assigned to each topic.
  • The session can be a presentation, inquiry about a question or discussion about an issue or technical field.
  • One participant volunteers to record the proceedings.
  • The notes from each session are collected in the newsroom, then a book is compiled with all the notes from the conference and distributed to everyone who attended.

So what is the main purpose of the She's Geeky event?:
  1. Exchange skills and learn from women in different fields of technology.
  2. Provide a forum for discussion of issues affecting women in technical fields.
  3. Connect the generations of women working in or interested in technology, from those in middle school to the pioneers of the industry who may be elders in their 70’s.
  4. Connect women in technology, computing, entrepreneurship, funding, hardware, open source, nonprofit and any other technical or “geeky” field.

What should you plan on getting out of the event if you come out and participate:
  1. Build relationships and even partnerships across disciplines.
  2. Learn something new from other geeky women.
  3. Find answers to the questions that matter to you.
  4. Consider business issues related to the technology industry.
  5. Be exposed to new ideas for making and keeping technology relevant.
Ok - interested but have questions? feel free to contact me or send a note to info@shesgeeky.org otherwise you can register here http://shesgeeky.org/sg/register/

If you are plan on going and want to advertise the fact on your site or blog, please use these images:



Here is the official invitation that you can download and send to others that might be interested:
Shes Geeky Poster




She you there Geek Girls!!

You can also find us here:
Facebook Group
Event Page on Facebook
Join the LinkedIn Group
Follow us on Twitter @shesgeeky

Monday, January 05, 2009

Demand That the Services You Use On the Web Give You Data Portability in a Secure Way

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Lots of chatter today about Twitter's Monday Morning Madness via Techmeme because over the last 78 hours multiple Twitter users were compromised multiple times, first with a Phishing scam and then an actual compromise of some high profile accounts (including Obama's twitter account).

Elias Bizannes a fellow colleague in the DataPortability Project has written a very well thought out and detailed post over on the official DataPortability Blog titled "Time To Criminalize The Password Anti-pattern" that i recommend you read to understand the issue and the recommended solutions that Twitter among many other sites you are probably using should follow.

Once you give a site your password to make your data portable from one site to another, that site now has your password forever and it's valid until you change it- even if the site claims they don't keep the password once they pull the data that you have 'authorized'- somewhere in some log file the password associated with our username is recorded and if someone wanted to get to it that probably could.

So before you use a service that is asking for your actual password to pull data, think about it and then demand that the service gives you data portability in a Secure Way by using open protocols like OAuth to secure authorization of data between services. (something that Twitter has come out and said they will be releasing in Beta this month)

This picture on Flickr by Richard Parmiter says it all: giving sites your password in order to pull data from one site to another is like loaning your underpants to strangers. Don't do it.

Sunday, January 04, 2009

Historical Note: 40th Anniversary of "Mother of all demos"

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Going through my thousands of unread items in my Google Reader lead me to this gem via a post in early December on CNET's Matter/Anti-Matter Blog titled the 40th Anniversary of "Mother of all demos" which points to Doug Engelbart's presentation to the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco on December 9, 1968 that i had not seen before. Called the 'Mother of all Demos' because in the 100 minute presentation Engelbart and his team show, in working form, for the very first time all of the following technologies:

* This was the public debut of the computer mouse
* Graphical user interface with point and click and menus
* Intermingling of text and graphics within a document, styling of text in a document
* Hypertext and linking between documents
* Remote collaboration plus videoconferencing

Hosted by the Science and Technology in the Making (STIM), project supported by a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation you can see the original video on this site in two versions, one that has been edited into 35 segments and reformatted as Flash streaming video clips with a brief abstract of the subject matter treated in each segment or the full 100 minute video (scroll to bottom of that page).

The Augmentation Research Center at Stanford Research Institute's project was focused on pursuing primarily these goals (that eventually became what we know as a personal computer:

1. Improve the Effectiveness with which individuals and organizations work at intellectual tasks.
2. Develop a system oriented discipline for designing the means by which greater effectiveness is achieved.

Here are some of the highlights that i found interesting:

  • They send the video transmission to the Menlo Park labs and show the audience the 'mouse' for the first time in a public forum
  • Just like any live demo (and yes we have all experienced it!) there are some hiccups, mistyped words and 'oops' moments
  • Review of user documentation online versus printing manuals
  • How they used direct messages (yes instant DMs!) to coordinate and plan the presentation itself
  • Collaboration features with a live audio-video window insert on the same screen!
  • Keyword weighting and power of keyword searching
  • Herman Miller Design was working with the lab on designing and building the control consoles,display consoles and chairs! Designing the modern office!
  • Love the way the filming is done with the live images projected and faded on the screens. The the filming of the presentation is better then some of the lecture series you see today online that struggle to get the screen online with the presenter!

Overall a good 100 minutes spent this morning.

Saturday, January 03, 2009

Who gives a F? Florida, Facebook and 'Friends'

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This holiday season we headed down to Florida to spend some time with the families both on the west and east coast of Florida. So we managed a couple of days on each coast which is usually just enough for me (i admit i am not a big fan of Florida often citing this great Bugs Bunny clip to compliment my feelings).



But none the less i know a lot of good people who live in Florida so i will let it be because that is not the point of my post~ The reason i am writing this post is that through the week we were there one of the things that i observed (as i remained mostly offline by choice) was the incessant mentioning of Facebook- and this was not in my Silicon Valley echo chamber so of course i took notice.

Now i have been on Facebook for a while, and have found it quite useful mostly around events but i have really never become a 'fan' of Facebook itself or its 'walled garden' strategies. Most recently i have been 'friended' by people who i went to high school/college/previous lives- and mostly i am kinda indifferent about it to tell you the truth. This afternoon i cleaned up my FB 'inbox' (so much noise!) and thought who would i like to connect with that i have not been in touch with over the years and i really could not think of anyone. call me indifferent and heartless if you care to...

So course i have read the articles about the growth of Facebook over the last year- and certainly did not doubt them- but rather chose to ignore the fact that Facebook has become a very mainstream social networking application- a social hub for many regardless of what age and demographic they are. So i think it is time for me to start paying more attention once again to Facebook again because you know my theory on consumers- the apps they use at home is what they want at work.

.....perhaps next time i go to Florida, people at the bar, supermarket, restaurant, and simply waiting in line will be talking about Twittering each other (i have no doubt that in many circles they already are!).