WebSitesOfNote

Google HTML Analysis: " Google Code: Web Authoring Statistics: Google parsed a billion Web pages and pulled some stats out of the HTML. We can now add to this data. In December 2005 we did an analysis of a sample of slightly over a billion documents, extracting information about popular class names, elements, attributes, and related metadata. The results we found are available below. We hope this is of use! Some random notes: The most common META tags specified: keywords description robots generator (thanks, FrontPage) author The BODY tag is a huge repository of non-CSS badness (bgcolor, margin, link, etc.) Very few people put an “id” on the BODY tag. I do this for pages that directly relate to an identifiable object in the system, so that I can make per-object CSS changes, if necessary (having ‘id=”object_232”’ on your BODY tag is handy like you wouldn’t believe). Very few people use COLGROUP. People should use it more. Most popular class names for elements: footer menu title small text Google notes that these class names map “very well to the elements being proposed in HTML5.” They single out GoLive for crappy HTML: GoLive’s footprints are all over the Web. A scary number of pages use <table gridx=”” gridy=”” showgridx=”” showgridy=”“>, not "

Google HTML Analysis: " Google Code: Web Authoring Statistics: Google parsed a billion Web pages and pulled some stats out of the HTML. We can now add to this data. In December 2005 we did an analysis of a sample of slightly over a billion documents, extracting information about popular class names, elements, attributes, and related metadata. The results we found are available below. We hope this is of use! Some random notes: The most common META tags specified: keywords description robots generator (thanks, FrontPage) author The BODY tag is a huge repository of non-CSS badness (bgcolor, margin, link, etc.) Very few people put an “id” on the BODY tag. I do this for pages that directly relate to an identifiable object in the system, so that I can make per-object CSS changes, if necessary (having ‘id=”object_232”’ on your BODY tag is handy like you wouldn’t believe). Very few people use COLGROUP. People should use it more. Most popular class names for elements: footer menu title small text Google notes that these class names map “very well to the elements being proposed in HTML5.” They single out GoLive for crappy HTML: GoLive’s footprints are all over the Web. A scary number of pages use

Google HTML Analysis: " Google Code: Web Authoring Statistics: Google parsed a billion Web pages and pulled some stats out of the HTML. We can now add to this data. In December 2005 we did an analysis of a sample of slightly over a billion documents, extracting information about popular class names, elements, attributes, and related metadata. The results we found are available below. We hope this is of use! Some random notes: The most common META tags specified: keywords description robots generator (thanks, FrontPage) author The BODY tag is a huge repository of non-CSS badness (bgcolor, margin, link, etc.) Very few people put an “id” on the BODY tag. I do this for pages that directly relate to an identifiable object in the system, so that I can make per-object CSS changes, if necessary (having ‘id=”object_232”’ on your BODY tag is handy like you wouldn’t believe). Very few people use COLGROUP. People should use it more. Most popular class names for elements: footer menu title small text Google notes that these class names map “very well to the elements being proposed in HTML5.” They single out GoLive for crappy HTML: GoLive’s footprints are all over the Web. A scary number of pages use

Disappearing telephony: "I’m just stepping back a minute to think about what Emerging Telephony actually is. You might have seen my earlier musings on the different philosophical underpinnings of “Western” telephony and “Eastern” thought. In an oversimplified nutshell, the Western approach puts the individual in the centre of the universe. The Eastern idea is to put the group in the middle. I see “conversation” as being the shadow of a group. So future telephony may look quite different from PSTN-style calling and even philosophical cousins like Skype. We don’t put groups or conversations at the centre of our “Voice 2.0” telephony experience. This could provide a philosophical problem to all the VCs and geeks here at ETel. Here’s a concrete example. Teens are group-centric. They need to belong, get group affirmation. They send a zillion SMS messages to wring a group experience out of the technology they have. But imagine if members of the group could see when other members of the group are in a conversation (IM or voice). Then you can (virtually) walk up and try to join in. It requires some digital social gestures that mimic a conversation pause and turning to allow the new person into the ring. Hey! Telephony is supposed to be a substiute for “being there”. This is the kind of “presence” experience that today"

Tom Lynch: Review: On Bullshit: "grahame lent me his copy of Harry Frankfurt's On Bullshit last week after (football|soccer), and I read it a couple of nights ago. As it is very short it only takes about an hour to wander through.Frankfurt defines bullshit more precisely than before: as communication that is distinguished from truth or lies by the fact that its truth value is of no concern to the communicator. It may still have a purpose - it probably does - but its purpose is unconnected to putting forward a truth or carrying off a deception.It's a cute concept because it gives you a third way of considering the material you read and hear: instead of saying 'that person is lying' or saying 'that person is telling the truth' you can say 'that person is stating propositions to a purpose that is unrelated to their truth.'The book is a major disappointment. After coming up with a good idea Frankfurt does nothing much with it. He writes as if conscious of this, waffling enough to beg the reflexive question 'is this book bullshit by its own definition?' Ironic self-reference is one of several copout speculative devices by which he extends the text. Another is asking rhetorical questions which are never answered, such as 'is there more bullshit nowadays than there was at earlier times?'The redefinition of 'bullshit' works and fits compatibly with the ordinary uses of the ter"

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The Venture Capitalist Wishlist: " By popular demand (okay, two people asked me to do it), here are the top ten ways to attract the interest of venture capitalists. There's no guarantee that if you do these ten things that you'll raise millions of dollars, but this wishlist will get you in the game. Before you even start addressing the hard stuff, never ask a venture capitalist to sign a non-disclosure agreement (NDA). They never do. This is because at any given moment, they are looking at three or four similar deals. They're not about to create legal issues because they sign a NDA and then fund another, similar company--thereby making the paranoid entrepreneur believe the venture capitalist stole his idea. If you even ask them to sign one, you might as well tattoo “I'm clueless!” on your forehead. Build a real business. This seems like a “duhism,” but few entrepreneurs do it. Most entrepreneurs focus on quick flips to an IPO or acquisition. Don't get me wrong: venture capitalists aren't necessarily good guys who want to make meaning and change the world. It's just that we've noticed that entrepreneurs who make meaning and change the world usually also make money. Nothing is more seductive to venture capitalists than a company that they can easily imagine having a big impact on the world. Get an intro. Venture capitalists are lazy people. We d"

The Ritual of the Streetcorner -- Brin's exercise in humility.: "I am finding the row over Intelligent Design vs Evolution fascinating and you are encouraged to continue it in comments here. Still, I think it’s important to answer one interlocutor who seemed to be replicating the old argument for cynicism. In essence, it is always some variant on: “A cynic is an optimist who has snapped out of it and realized how awful people are.”One of the great cliches of all time. Heck, I’ve used it myself.This is one of those shibboleths that I am resigned to having to face several times a year, for the rest of my life. Almost as much my trademark as CITOKATE... and based on similar underlying premises. I think many you have heard me (contrarian to all cliches) respond to this one with --”What is a cynic who snaps out of it even FARTHER? Enough to realize that, despite the gruesomely stupid, self-delusional and abysmally corrupt aspects of human nature... things are getting phenomenally better. And have been for some time? I mean, which is more amazing? That the Enlightenment is under threat from a collusive cabal of conniving aristocrats, imperialists and extremist nutjobs? Or the fact that this routine and utterly predictable alliance, which ruled every other urban culture for 4,000 years has been staved off repeatedly, till now,"

OMG, I Got Toogled! :-): "Toogle.  (hat tip: Paul Kedrosky)"

IE to Support Native XMLHttpRequest object: "Sunava Dutta on the Internet Explorer team has written about their support for a Native XMLHTTPRequest object in IE 7. He writes I’m excited to mention that IE7 will support a scriptable native version of XMLHTTP. This can be instantiated using the same syntax across different browsers and decouples AJAX functionality from an ActiveX enabled environment. What is XMLHTTP? XMLHTTP was first introduced to the world as an ActiveX control in Internet Explorer 5.0. Over time, this object has been implemented by other browsing platforms, and is the cornerstone of “AJAX” web applications. The object allows web pages to send and receive XML (or other data) via the HTTP protocol. XMLHTTP makes it possible to create responsive web applications that do not require redownloading the entire page to display new data. Popular examples of AJAX applications include the Beta version of Windows Live Local, Microsoft Outlook Web Access, and Google’s GMail. Charting the changes: XMLHTTP in IE7 vs. IE6 In IE6 and below, XMLHTTP is implemented as an ActiveX object provided by MSXML. In IE7, XMLHTTP is now also exposed as a native script object. Users and organizations that choose to disable ActiveX controls can still use XMLHTTP based web applications. (Note that an organization may use Group Policy or IE Opti"

What's The Point of CSS-Based Layout Again?: "Can someone remind me again why moving away from table-based layout in favor of CSS layout is important? This isn't a bashing post; I 'get' how handy CSS is and I get that the whole world of the web is eventually going to all-CSS. I get that all-CSS sites use less bandwidth. I get it, I really do. Perhaps I'm ranting because I've had a very frustrating CSS morning. But that doesn't change the fact that even after working with CSS-based layout for a solid year now, I can STILL turn out a table-based design that does exactly what I want it to do faster than I can turn out a CSS design that does the same. It also doesn't change the fact that every important site I use on a regular basis is table-based. Amazon. CNN. Microsoft. Inc. Forbes. Even Google! It seems that the vast majority of the web is table-based, and the vast majority of the web appears to render just fine in either FF or IE. So as I bust my hump learning a whole new way of doing things, I have to wonder; if table-based layout is good enough for those huge players I just named, why isn't it good enough for the rest of us? I will continue to work with all-CSS layouts, but I have the distinct feeling that I'm doing it more because that's what everyone else is doing then because there are compelling benefits to doing so. And I don't li"

Companies are leaving money lying on the table: "Any time you have to deal with a company, you'll find dysfunctional performance. This isn't the company's fault particularly; they have to hire people because no other species is as capable. I think that everyone has had the experience of seeing people show through the corporate veil. People are, frankly, unreliable at best. This causes corporations to perform poorly. What would happen if a corporation took into account the whole person they were hiring? What if they considered each person as a whole person, with good points and bad points? What if they tried to make the person, not a better worker, but a better person? First, they would end up with happier workers. Frankly, you can pay happier workers less, so the company would save money there. They would also end up with people who were better, more capable workers. If a person's flaws get in the way of the job task, and the company can heal those flaws, then the person's labor would be more valuable to the company. The company would end up paying less for more. I have never heard of a company that tries to care for its workers in this manner. A company is considered enlightened if it buys health insurance for its workers. But what if the company helped its workers towards enlightenment?It seems to me like companies are leaving money lying on th"

Metadata Quality and Mapping Between Domain Languages: "One part of the XML vision that has always resonated with me is that it encourages people to build custom XML formats specific to their needs but allows them to map between languages using technologies like XSLT. However XML technologies like XSLT focus on mapping one kind of syntax for another. There is another school of thought from proponents of Semantic Web technologies like RDF, OWL, and DAML+OIL, etc that higher level mapping between the semantics of languages is a better approach.  In previous posts such as RDF, The Semantic Web and Perpetual Motion Machines and More on RDF, The Semantic Web and Perpetual Motion Machines I've disagreed with the thinking of Semantic Web proponents because in the real world you have to mess with both syntactical mappings and semantic mappings. A great example of this is shown in the post entitled On the Quality of Metadata... by Stefano Mazzocchi where he writes One thing we figured out a while ago is that merging two (or more) datasets with high quality metadata results in a new dataset with much lower quality metadata. The 'measure' of this quality is just subjective and perceptual, but it's a constant thing: everytime we showed this to people that cared about the data more than the software we were writing, they could not understand why we w"

Fear and airplanes: "Why do people rush to get onto long flights--even when the plane isn't full? It's not so they can get their carryons stowed... I notice that even people with no carryons push to get on. (then they push to get off, at the end). Even though they paid for the flight, it's not the flying they paid for. It's the getting there. And getting there means anxiety for some people. I think getting on and getting settled and not missing the flight no matter what are all steps that people take to reduce their anxiety. Just wondering if that might apply to what you sell..."

The A to Z of Programmer Predilictions: "Introduction There is a realization that comes with the accrual of software development experience across a reasonable number of organizations, and it is this: Though the names change, the problems remain the same. Traveling from project to project, from one organization to another, across disparate geographies, domains and technologies, I am repeatedly struck more by the similarities between the projects I work on than their differences. Scenes from one job seem to replay in the next one, only with a different set of actors. You might finish a gig in which you've seen a project flop due to inadequate consultation with end users, only to find your next project heading down the same path for exactly the same reason. And it generally doesn't matter how much you jump up and down and try and warn your new project team that you've seen the disastrous results of similar actions in the past. They will ignore you, insisting that their situation is somehow different. You will stand back and watch in horror as the whole scenario plays out as you knew it would, all the while unable to do anything more to prevent it. The IT contractor's career can be like some cruel matinee of 'Groundhog Day' - without the moral resolution at the end. But this technological déjà vu is not limited to technical scenarios - it extends to peop"

The pink pound: "Via Tim comes this report, claiming that gay men earn almost £10,000 a year - 38% - more than straight ones.I find this implausibly large. I suspect the gap is biased upwards because men who are confident enough to tell a market researcher that they are gay are disproportionately likely to be high earners; the causality between confidence and earnings probably runs both ways. There is more rigorous academic evidence on gays' pay here. The researchers have found that gays do indeed earn more than straights - just under 10% more. However, this is because gays are more likely to: work in London; have degrees; and work in large firms. On these counts, they should earn even more than they do - about 10% more, the research estimates.However, all this 'discrimination' is against gay men. Lesbians, they claim, have higher pay than straight women with similar characteristics.Maybe this suggests Tim's fundamental point is right. The 'discrimination' women face is a discrimination against those who have (or  are expected to have) children.  "

Subtlety, Subterfuge, and Silence: "Managers, wanna-be managers, and folks who want to understand managers simply need to read the 48 Laws of Power by Robert Green and Joost Elffers. I've purposely not done any background research on this document because my first reaction to this list was profound and I wanted to stare at that reaction. There's some pretty evil shit documented there as well as some basic truths about what managers are up do on a daily basis. I can't tell if the guys who wrote this are serious when they write 'Keep Others in Suspended Terror: Cultivate an Air of Unpredictability', but after several readings, yeah, I think they're serious. My problem with this list and how it relates to managers is that some many of the 'rules' involve psychological torture of those you're trying to lead and that strikes me as a good way further the intense knee-jerk reaction regarding managers. 'That guy is a power hungry jerk'. Still... Part of management is navigating your way through some tricky political jungles... Part of management is getting folks to comfortably bend in a uncomfortable direction. A good manager is a person who is playing to a strategy and isn't merely stumbling around squashing fires all day. Management is chess. When you're presented with a problem, you sometimes need to sit back and take a look at the board, figur"

Subtlety, Subterfuge, and Silence: "Managers, wanna-be managers, and folks who want to understand managers simply need to read the 48 Laws of Power by Robert Green and Joost Elffers. I've purposely not done any background research on this document because my first reaction to this list was profound and I wanted to stare at that reaction. There's some pretty evil shit documented there as well as some basic truths about what managers are up do on a daily basis. I can't tell if the guys who wrote this are serious when they write 'Keep Others in Suspended Terror: Cultivate an Air of Unpredictability', but after several readings, yeah, I think they're serious. My problem with this list and how it relates to managers is that some many of the 'rules' involve psychological torture of those you're trying to lead and that strikes me as a good way further the intense knee-jerk reaction regarding managers. 'That guy is a power hungry jerk'. Still... Part of management is navigating your way through some tricky political jungles... Part of management is getting folks to comfortably bend in a uncomfortable direction. A good manager is a person who is playing to a strategy and isn't merely stumbling around squashing fires all day. Management is chess. When you're presented with a problem, you sometimes need to sit back and take a look at the board, figur"

Subtlety, Subterfuge, and Silence: "Managers, wanna-be managers, and folks who want to understand managers simply need to read the 48 Laws of Power by Robert Green and Joost Elffers. I've purposely not done any background research on this document because my first reaction to this list was profound and I wanted to stare at that reaction. There's some pretty evil shit documented there as well as some basic truths about what managers are up do on a daily basis. I can't tell if the guys who wrote this are serious when they write 'Keep Others in Suspended Terror: Cultivate an Air of Unpredictability', but after several readings, yeah, I think they're serious. My problem with this list and how it relates to managers is that some many of the 'rules' involve psychological torture of those you're trying to lead and that strikes me as a good way further the intense knee-jerk reaction regarding managers. 'That guy is a power hungry jerk'. Still... Part of management is navigating your way through some tricky political jungles... Part of management is getting folks to comfortably bend in a uncomfortable direction. A good manager is a person who is playing to a strategy and isn't merely stumbling around squashing fires all day. Management is chess. When you're presented with a problem, you sometimes need to sit back and take a look at the board, figur"

Subtlety, Subterfuge, and Silence: "Managers, wanna-be managers, and folks who want to understand managers simply need to read the 48 Laws of Power by Robert Green and Joost Elffers. I've purposely not done any background research on this document because my first reaction to this list was profound and I wanted to stare at that reaction. There's some pretty evil shit documented there as well as some basic truths about what managers are up do on a daily basis. I can't tell if the guys who wrote this are serious when they write 'Keep Others in Suspended Terror: Cultivate an Air of Unpredictability', but after several readings, yeah, I think they're serious. My problem with this list and how it relates to managers is that some many of the 'rules' involve psychological torture of those you're trying to lead and that strikes me as a good way further the intense knee-jerk reaction regarding managers. 'That guy is a power hungry jerk'. Still... Part of management is navigating your way through some tricky political jungles... Part of management is getting folks to comfortably bend in a uncomfortable direction. A good manager is a person who is playing to a strategy and isn't merely stumbling around squashing fires all day. Management is chess. When you're presented with a problem, you sometimes need to sit back and take a look at the board, figur"

In most environments, spending time creating metadata (data about other data, that is) is pretty much considered a pain your manager makes you go thru. There are few rare exceptions: environments where people like to write metadata, it's their passion and they normally enjoy doing it and, you can hear it coming, they normally do a good/better job at it.

I work in one of these environments (a library) and I work with other ones (for example, museums or other educational institutions) and one thing that always comes up is "the quality of their metadata".

This leads to interesting sentences I've heard like "I envy you, the libraries have much better metadata than museums" or "I've found a typo in your collection. - Yeah, we know, we still have a lot of cleanup work to do" (after spending an hour telling me how great their dataset was).

I couldn't figure out a pattern between all people talking about metadata, but I felt deep in my guts there was something connecting all of them together, until very recently when Ben (who finally joined our team! yey!) and I started discussing this.

One thing we figured out a while ago is that merging two (or more) datasets with high quality metadata results in a new dataset with much lower quality metadata. The "measure" of this quality is just subjective and perceptual, but it's a constant thing: everytime we showed this to people that cared about the data more than the software we were writing, they could not understand why we were so excited about such a system, where clearly the data was so much poorer than what they were expecting.

We use the usual "this is just a prototype and the data mappings were done without much thinking" kind of excuse, just to calm them down, but now that I'm tasked to "do it better this time", I'm starting to feel a little weird because it might well be that we hit a general rule, one that is not a function on how much thinking you put in the data mappings or ontology crosswalks, and talking to Ben helped me understand why.

First, let's start noting that there is no practical and objective definition of metadata quality, yet there are patterns that do emerge. For example, at the most superficial level, coherence is considered a sign of good care and (here all the metadata lovers would agree) good care is what it takes for metadata to be good. Therefore, lack of coherence indicates lack of good care, which automatically resolves in bad metadata.

Note how the is nothing but a syllogism, yet, it's something that, rationally or not, comes up all the time.

This is very important. Why? Well, suppose you have two metadatasets, each of them very coherent and well polished about, say, music. The first encodes Artist names as "Beatles, The" or "Lennon, John", while the second encodes them as "The Beatles" and "John Lennon". Both datasets, independently, are very coherent: there is only one way to spell an artist/band name, but when the two are merged and the ontology crosswalk/map is done (either implicitly or explicitly), the result is that some songs will now be associated with "Beatles, The" and others with "The Beatles".

The result of merging two high quality datasets is, in general, another dataset with a higher "quantity" but a lower "quality" and, as you can see, the ontological crosswalks or mappings were done "right", where for "right" I mean that both sides of the ontological equation would have approved that "The Beatles" or "Beatles, The" are the band name that is associated with that song.

At this point, the fellow semantic web developers would say "pfff, of course you are running into trouble, you haven't used the same URI" and the fellow librarians would say "pff, of course, you haven't mapped them to a controlled vocabulary of artist names, what did you expect?".. deep inside, they are saying the same thing: you need to further link your metadata references "The Beatles" or "Beatles, The" to a common, hopefully globally unique identifier. The librarian shakes the semantic web advocate's hand, nodding vehemently and they are happy campers.

I'm left implementing the task, which normally consist in calling a web service somewhere that returns you the identifier for that particular string. Of course, this is a blind process (and mostly based on string distances of some sort) so you can safely blame it on them if something goes wrong and "Yesterday" ends up being written by "Bangles, The". I could just stop thinking and do the work, but what if such thesauri don't exist?

I put my semantic web hat on and think that "author" could be treated as a weak inverse functional property of a song, meaning that, if, by chance there is a single overlap in the song title in the two datasets (say "Yesterday" was authored by both "Beatles, The" and "The Beatles") then I can infer a "candidate equivalence" between "Beatles, The" and "The Beatles", without knowing anything else.

This weak inverse functional property and the resulting "candidate equivalence" is clearly not Description Logics and therefore not part of OWL, but it's a step forward: the cycle is completed by placing a human being in front of the screen and showing her all the "candidate equivalences" with two buttons "yes/no" and she can decide whether or not these two make sense. The software does the boring and easibly computable rest of the work.

Why weak inverse functional property? well, mostly because it is entirely possible that two groups have written a song with the same title. Yet, most of the time this is not the case.

Again, the semantic web people would tell you that you should never treat a literal as a URI, therefore, even if two songs have the same "title" literal might not necessarely be the same song.

So, here we are, with two datasets that we know contain music information, they have different identifiers for songs and for artists, different spellings for their literal labels and different format encodings of the music file (so that using file hashcodes as identifiers doesn't work). [yes, dear metadata lover, I know FRBR and I know it gets way worse than this, I'm just using this as an example, so, please, bear with me]

Independently, the two datasets are very coherent and a lot of time,money, energy was spent in them. Together and even assuming the ontology/schema crosswalks where done so that owners of the two datasets would agree (which is not a given at all, but let's assume that for now), they look and feel like a total mess together (especially when browing them with a faceted browser like Longwell)

The standard solution in the library/museum world is to map against a higher order taxonomy, something that brings order to the mix. But either no such a thing exists for that particular metadata field, or there is but it was incredibly expensive to make and to maintain and have a tendency, almost by definition, to become very hard to displace once you stick to one of them.

I'm naturally allergic to hard to diplace control hubs, but a well behaving license of use might make that vocabulary/web-service very appealing.

But I find it a little naive to think that we can solve the drop of metadata quality perception in dataset merging by always resorting to a higher level authority: this is exactly the platonic semantic cage that some people fear when they hear about the semantic web. It might work in those rare environments where people find such control necessary and, also, a little comforting, therefore they don't have a problem spending time and money on the cause of restoring the metadata quality of the mix, but it won't work at a global world-wide web scale.

And there is already evidence of that!

I need to give you a little background first. Years ago the "Open Archive Initiative" created something called "PMH" (protocol for metadata harvesting), it's a lightweight way to ask a web site to dump all its metadata content to you. Today, most people do the same with RSS (which has no protocol for metadata harvesting, you just keep polling it), but PMH is a little smarter (and not that more complex). DSpace implements OAI-PMH.

There is a registry of all the OAI-PMH archives and there are indexers/crawlers that consume that information (also Google Scholar does). Both OAI-PMH and DSpace were designed, originally, to work only with Dublin Core only, but OAI-PMH was later extended to support all kinds of metadata and DSpace was modified by a lot of institutions that use it to support some other metadata.

The registry contains a very interesting page: the list of distinct metadata schemas used by the 898 repositories currently contained in the registry (summing up to more than 6 million items). [Note how this is still an XML world, therefore schemas are identified by the URL location of the XMLSchema and not by the URI namespace used.]

A few things are worth noting:

The distribution follows a power law (I suspect this will be the same on the distribution use of RDF ontologies as well in the future: a few will be used a lot, a lot will be used rarely)
Dublin Core is way more fragmented out there than people want to ever admit (and there it goes your common denominator semantic cage)
Crosswalks between these fragmented and refined versions of Dublic Core would increase ontological overlap with minimal effort (here is where speaking of RDF instead of XML starts to become appealing, doing n^2 XSLT scripts gets a little out of hand pretty fast)
But how about the coherence/quality of the metadata found in these repositories? Individually, it is probably very high. Merged, it's probably feels no different than the web itself, which is why Google Scholar doesn't feel any smarter than Google itself (rather the opposite sometimes).

I find this discovery a little ironic: the semantic web, by adding more structure to the model but increasing the diversity at the ontological space might become even *more* messy than the current web, not less. Google built their empire on the tag, but at least there was an tag to work with that every HTML page contained! The RSS world is already starting to see that Babel happening: Apple, Yahoo, Google and Microsoft jumped on the bandwagon and started to add their own RSS extensions and I don't think Sam's validator is going to stop the distribution of the RSS variations from following a power law, it will just help making the distribution's slope higher, but that's about it.

So, are we doomed to turn the web into a babel of languages? and are we doomed to dilute the quality of pure data islands by simply mixing them together?

Luckily, no, not really.

What's missing is the feedback loop: a way for people to inject information back into the system that keeps the system stable. Mixing high quality metadata results in lower quality metadata, but the individual qualities are not lost, are just diluted. There needs to be additional information/energy injected in the system for the quality to return to its previous level (or higher!). This energy can be the one already condensed in the efforts made to create controlled vocabularies and mapping services, or can be distributed on a bunch of people united by common goals/interests and social practices that keep the system stable, trustful and socio-economically feasible.

Both the open source development model and the wikipedia development model are examples of such socio-economically feasible systems, althought they might not scale to the size we need/want for an entire semantic web.

The semantic web has a lot of people working on the technological guts, but very few on the social practices that might make it happen. I suspect this is going to change soon and solutions might come from unexpected places.

The security and productivity of farms: "Nick Szabo has a superb post about the interaction between historical agricultural productivity and security. Most obviously, security increases the incentive to invest so agricultural productivity will increase with security. But what determines security? Geographic factors are one possibility: ...two large islands which have been largely or entirely protected from invasion for hundreds of years, Japan and Britain, also had among the highest agricultural productivities per acre during that period as well as the greatest cultivation of even marginal arable lands.... Contrariwise, this theory predicts agricultural productivity will be lowest in unprotected continental regions. Indeed, interior continental regions easily reached by horse tended to be given over to much less productive nomadic grazing. Security constraints were probably what prevented any sort of crop from being grown. Security issues influence and can be influenced by a wide variety of other choices and institutions. Some crops will recover from a razing quicker than others, for example, so crop choice will be influenced by security. Primogeniture may have been an optimal institution to maintain economies of scale in land defense, as Adam Smith first discussed. Read the whole thing there is a dissertation or two here. "

Does Broadband Make You Less Secure?: " Is Obsolescence Good Computer Security?: Here’s an interesting conversation over at Slashdot. I was recently considering a switch from dial-up to something faster (either cable or DSL) but my friend recommended against it since he said I was more secure staying with Dial-Up. His argument was that my connection’s slowness and ‘not always on’ connection gave me better security since I was less of a target for many security threats. In my experience, this is absolutely true. I had a user who was on dialup until just a few months ago. I had gone to their house a couple of times to install software, and their machine was pristine. They switched to a cable modem, and their machine got crufted up inside of two weeks. Switching to broadband isn’t bad, but it is less secure. You just have to be ready for it — firewalls, antivirus, etc. You’re much more exposed when you’re always on."

Countering "Trusting Trust": "Way back in 1974, Paul Karger and Roger Schell discovered a devastating attack against computer systems. Ken Thompson described it in his classic 1984 speech, 'Reflections on Trusting Trust.' Basically, an attacker changes a compiler binary to produce malicious versions of some programs, INCLUDING ITSELF. Once this is done, the attack perpetuates, essentially undetectably. Thompson demonstrated the attack in a devastating way: he subverted a compiler of an experimental victim, allowing Thompson to log in as root without using a password. The victim never noticed the attack, even when they disassembled the binaries -- the compiler rigged the disassembler, too. This attack has long been part of the lore of computer security, and everyone knows that there's no defense. And that makes this paper by David A. Wheeler so interesting. It's 'Countering Trusting Trust through Diverse Double-Compiling,' and here's the abstract: An Air Force evaluation of Multics, and Ken Thompson's famous Turing award lecture 'Reflections on Trusting Trust,' showed that compilers can be subverted to insert malicious Trojan horses into critical software, including themselves. If this attack goes undetected, even complete analysis of a system's source code will not find the malicious code that is running, and methods for detecting this particular attack are not widely known. This "

Where Eugenics Goes Wrong: The Implications of Comparative Advantage, by Bryan Caplan: "Almost no one wants to be called a 'eugenicist.' It's a term of abuse. But if you go back to the origin of the term, it basically amounts to the following two claims: Claim #1: One of the main causes - if not the main cause - of economic, cultural, and other forms of success is genetic. Claim #2: Policy-makers can make their societies more successful by improving the quality of their societies' genes. For instance, the famous eugenicist Karl Pearson maintained that Britain should only admit immigrants who 'raised the average': What is definitely clear, however, is that our own Jewish boys do not form from the standpoint of intelligence a group markedly superior to our natives. But that is the sole condition under which we are prepared to admit that immigration should be allowed. These days, there is massive empirical support for Claim #1. For primers, see here and here. The result is that people who fear Pearson-like policies engage in a lot of silly ad hominem attacks on defenders of Claim #1. And on the other hand, some defenders of Claim #1 are happy to follow in Pearson's footsteps by advocating policies inspired by Claim #2. The problem, however, is that Claim #2 simply does not follow from Claim #1. Even if genetics explained ALL differences i"

Where Eugenics Goes Wrong: The Implications of Comparative Advantage, by Bryan Caplan: "Almost no one wants to be called a 'eugenicist.' It's a term of abuse. But if you go back to the origin of the term, it basically amounts to the following two claims: Claim #1: One of the main causes - if not the main cause - of economic, cultural, and other forms of success is genetic. Claim #2: Policy-makers can make their societies more successful by improving the quality of their societies' genes. For instance, the famous eugenicist Karl Pearson maintained that Britain should only admit immigrants who 'raised the average': What is definitely clear, however, is that our own Jewish boys do not form from the standpoint of intelligence a group markedly superior to our natives. But that is the sole condition under which we are prepared to admit that immigration should be allowed. These days, there is massive empirical support for Claim #1. For primers, see here and here. The result is that people who fear Pearson-like policies engage in a lot of silly ad hominem attacks on defenders of Claim #1. And on the other hand, some defenders of Claim #1 are happy to follow in Pearson's footsteps by advocating policies inspired by Claim #2. The problem, however, is that Claim #2 simply does not follow from Claim #1. Even if genetics explained ALL differences i"

Understanding the funnel: " I've been talking about funnels for almost ten years, but realized I hadn't blogged on this... so here goes. Traditional marketing divides the world into two groups:prospectsandcustomers Customers are traditionally undervalued, and prospects are all treated the same. As marketing got more sophisticated, some prospects ended up being treated a little differently than others. Someone reading Field & Stream, for example, is a more valuable prospect to a bullet company than someone reading Bass Fisherman. Missing from this demographically-based analysis is the idea that people can change. They change their posture, their attention and their attitude. And as the knowledge they receive increases, their value as a prospect changes as well. I think marketers always knew this, but they haven't been able to do much about it. Until now. The Google funnel is easily measured and if you're marketing anything to anyone, you need to understand it (this idea is so powerful it's now built in to Google's free web analytics program, Urchin). Imagine someone out there, surfing on the web. He is a prospect of your fishing bait company in that one day, he might become a customer. He's at the top of the funnel. Now, he types 'bass' into Google. Through that action, he has self-identified as a better prospect. He's moved down the funnel and become more valuable to"

Marking the Close: "In the mutual fund world, there is a practice known as “marking the close”. The SEC defines marking the close, which is illegal, as 'attempting to influence the closing price of a stock by executing purchase or sale orders at or near the close of the market.' Right before the close of trading, at the end of the quarter when they have to publish performance numbers, funds will place buy orders on stocks that they already own. That will cause the price of their stocks to rise and thus make the performance of their funds look better than they otherwise would. Four researchers, led by Mark Carhart, co-head of quantitative strategies at Goldman Sachs Asset Management, have collected overwhelming evidence that mutual funds have engaged in this illegal behavior for years and they published it in the April 2002 issue of the Journal of Finance under the title “Leaning for the Tape: Evidence of Gaming Behavior in Equity Mutual Funds”. Evidence suggesting that mutual funds are marking the close comes from the percentage of them that beat the market averages on the final trading days of each calendar quarter. For example, the researchers found that on the last trading days of the calendar quarters between July 1993 and June 1999, some two-thirds of all domestic equity funds beat the S&P 500 -- about"

Comic for 22 Jan 2006

Google Video and Privacy: "Last week Google introduced its video service, which lets users download free or paid-for videos. The service’s design is distinctive in many ways, not all of them desirable. One of the distinctive features is a DRM (anti-infringement) mechanism which is applied if the copyright owner asks for it. Today I want to discuss the design of Google Video’s DRM, and especially its privacy implications. First, some preliminaries. Google’s DRM, like everybody else’s, can be defeated without great difficulty. Like all DRM schemes that rely on encrypting files, it is vulnerable to capture of the decrypted file, or to capture of the keying information, either of which will let an adversary rip the video into unprotected form. My guess is that Google’s decision to use DRM was driven by the insistence of copyright owners, not by any illusion that the DRM would stop infringement. The Google DRM system works by trying to tether every protected file to a Google account, so that the account’s username and password has to be entered every time the file is viewed. From the user’s point of view, this has its pros and cons. On the one hand, an honest user can view his video on any Windows PC anywhere; all he has to do is move the file and then enter his username and password on the new machine. On the other hand, the system wor"

Random Java Trivia: "When does the following code not throw a NullPointerException? MyClass obj = null; obj.doSomething(); "

This one came up on the Apple java-dev mailing-list the other day. The answer (in case you haven’t guessed) is: when doSomething() is a static method of MyClass.
It’s pretty obvious when you think about it. The doSomething() method call gets compiled into an invokestatic bytecode. invokestatic doesn’t need an object reference on the stack, so after compilation the obj variable isn’t even being doesn’t even need to be referenced any more, let alone dereferenced.
This sort of language trivia is unlikely to be useful to anyone not just about to go into a certification exam, or entirely the wrong kind of programmer interview. It’s just one of those mildly interesting edge-cases, like what happens when you throw null, or the maximum number of parameters you can pass to a method, or how to change the value of a constant string.

The Laffer Curve, Before Art Laffer Discovered It: "David Hume had the right idea in 1756. Exorbitant taxes, like extreme necessity, destroy industry by producing despair; and even before they reach this pitch, they raise the wages of the labourer and manufacturer, and heighten the price of all commodities. An attentive disinterested legislature will observe the point when the emolument ceases, and the prejudice begins. But as the contrary character is much more common, ’tis to be feared that taxes all over Eurpoe are multiplying to such a degree as will entirely crush all art and industry; tho’ perhaps, their first increase, together with other circumstances, might have contributed to the growth of these advantages. That’s an excerpt from Hume’s essay Of Taxes, cited in Jude Wanniski’s excellent book The Way the World Works (1978) and quoted by me today for no apparent reason."

Inequality and Innovation, by Arnold Kling: "David Wessel writes, the best minds in labor economics differ on whether the 1990s and early 2000s are best seen as a continuation of the 1980s inequality trend (Harvard's Mr. Katz) or an end to it (Berkeley's David Card.) The answer matters. Mr. Card and like-minded scholars say: The superstars are still big winners. But in the rest of the labor market, the widening of inequality in the 1980s reflected a one-time change in attitudes and rules, and isn't going to get wider. Don't blame technology; it was at least as pervasive in the 1990s.I personally would place my bet on innovation as the source of inequality. I had lunch today with Robin Hanson, who pointed out that really important innovations will substitute for brains rather than for muscle. As he put it, a purely mechanical innovation can substitute for capital in manufacturing, meaning a small share of a fraction of output. But something that can substitute for a human brain--now that would be a big deal. He predicted really dramatic inequalities if we ever found good substitutes for human brains, because if producers don't need your human brain any more, your bargaining power is sort of hosed. Hmmm...maybe we are very early along that path, hence the rise in inequality. Just a thought."

Why do words beginning with "home" get treated as URLs?: "Vitaly from the Suggestion Box asked (with grammatical editing), Could you explain why Windows starts the web browser if the file name passed to ShellExecute starts with 'home'. First thing to note is that this URL-ization happens only after the ShellExecuteEx function has tried all the other possible interpretations. If a file named 'homestar' is found in the current directory or on the PATH or in the App Paths, then that file will be chosen, as you would expect. Only when the ShellExecuteEx function is about to give up does it try to 'do what you mean'. What you're seeing is autocorrection kicking in yet again. If you go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\URL\Prefixes, you can see the various autocorrection rules that ShellExecute consults when it can't figure out what you are trying to do. For example, if the thing you typed begins with 'www', it will stick 'http://' in front and try again. This is why you can just type 'www.microsoft.com' into the Run dialog instead of having to type the cumbersome 'http://www.microsoft.com'. Most of the autocorrection rules are pretty self-evident. Something beginning with 'ftp' is probably an FTP site. Something beginning with 'www' is probably a web site. But why are strings beginning with 'home' "

JavaScript as a real language: "My new job will take me much further into JavaScript than I have gone in the past, even though I am not the JavaScript guy. I mentioned some time ago that JavaScript is underestimated, but I still have not learned (much less internalized) all of those lessons. Alex Russell gives some fundamental principles of JavaScript (which he erroneously calls idioms) which would go a long way toward modernizing my approach to the language. These days there are many powerful JavaScript libraries available. They are great either as a toolkit to use in web apps, or as advanced textbooks in how JavaScript can be used. Here's a sampling: prototype provides an AJAX framework and lots of other JavaScript utilities. It is often used as a foundation by other libraries in this list. Behaviour lets you add JavaScript handlers to elements using CSS syntax rather than onClick attributes. script.aculo.us provides lots of cool functionality like visual effects, autocompletion, and drag and drop. Rico provides AJAX, visual effects, and drag and drop. Dojo is a large library providing many features, enough that it is available in different subsets ('Editions'). Included are AJAX, visual effects, and rich text editing. jQuery provides CSS and XPath selectors for accessing elements, among other tools. For a more complete list, check out Saddam Azad's JavaScript librarie"

The Zen of Business Plans: " In my day job, I not only hear a lot of PowerPoint pitches, but I also read a lot of business plans. The PowerPoint pitches explain my Ménière's disease, but the business plans explain my recent need for reading glasses. One of my goals for blogging is to reduce the external factors that are causing the degradation of my body, so this entry's topic is the zen of business plans. Write for all the right reasons. Most people write business plans to attract investors, and while this is necessary to raise money, most venture capitalists have made a “gut level” go/no go decision during the PowerPoint pitch. Receiving (and possibly reading) the business plan is a mechanical step in due diligence. The more relevant and important reason to write is a business plan, whether you are raising money or not, is to force the management team to solidify the objectives (what), strategies (how), and tactics (when, where, who). Even if you have all the capital in the world, you should still write a business plan. Indeed, especially if you have all the capital in the world because too much capital is worse than too little. Make it a solo effort. While creation of the business plan should be a group effort involving all the principal players in the company, the actual writing of the business plan--literally sitting down at a "

How Would Two-Tier Internet Work?: "The word is out now that residential ISPs like BellSouth want to provide a kind of two-tier Internet service, where ordinary Internet services get one level of performance, and preferred sites or services, presumably including the ISPs’ own services, get better performance. It’s clear why ISPs want to do this: they want to charge big web sites for the privilege of getting preferred service. I should say up front that although the two-tier network is sometimes explained as if there were two tiers of network infrastructure, the obvious and efficient implementation in practice would be to have a single fast network, and to impose deliberate delay or bandwidth throttling on non-preferred traffic. Whether ISPs should be allowed to do this is an important policy question, often called the network neutrality issue. It’s a harder issue than advocates on either side admit. Regular readers know that I’ve been circling around this issue for a while, without diving into its core. My reason for shying away from the main issue is simply that I haven’t figured it out yet. Today I’ll continue circling. Let’s think about the practical aspects of how an ISP would present the two-tier Internet to customers. There are basically two options, I think. Either the ISP can create a special area for preferred sites, or it can let sites keep "

Liberty Increases Security: "From the Scientific American essay 'Murdercide: Science unravels the myth of suicide bombers': Another method [of reducing terrorism], says Princeton University economist Alan B. Krueger, is to increase the civil liberties of the countries that breed terrorist groups. In an analysis of State Department data on terrorism, Krueger discovered that 'countries like Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, which have spawned relatively many terrorists, are economically well off yet lacking in civil liberties. Poor countries with a tradition of protecting civil liberties are unlikely to spawn suicide terrorists. Evidently, the freedom to assemble and protest peacefully without interference from the government goes a long way to providing an alternative to terrorism.' Let freedom ring. This seems obvious to me. Found on John Quarterman's blog."

Doing Big Things with Lightweight Architecture: "Quite a few folks are beginnning to realize that most big websites, including Yahoo!, Google and Amazon.com, run on lightweight architecture. To define lightweight architecture, it is helpful to define its opposite:Heavyweight architecture means you are running complicated infrastructure software like J2EE with complicated API's on a small cluster of expensive SMP machines.Lightweight architecture means you are running straightforward, open source software stacks with service oriented API's on large clusters of commodity machines.There are four common ways of achieving a lightweight architecture. Three of them are open source solutions, and the fourth is Microsoft's attempt: LAMP - As many of you know LAMP is my favorite lightweight stack.LAMP runs a vast majority of the massively scalable websites out there, and is also the favorite deployment stack for most of the 'Web 2.0' crowd, including Friendster, Facebook, MySpace, and Flickr. Both IBM and Oracle announced support for PHP in 2005, and there has been an upswing of enterprise adoption of the LAMP stack. Open Source Java - A lot of Java developers are moving away from full blown J2EE to lightweight Java, which includes Tomcat, Spring, and Hibernate, among other open source Java projects. There are some big websites running this architecture, including E*TRADE and EBay. Lightwe"

Scholarly Beliefs and Folk Beliefs, by Arnold Kling: "In my latest essay, I meditate on the topic. Regardless of the state of scholarly belief about Keynes, folk Keynesianism is dominant. For example, most people believe that we should worry about whether 'the consumer' will spend freely. Everyone fears that if consumers tighten their belts then this will 'weaken' the economy. This concern with the mood of consumers is not in the original Keynes. Instead, Keynes himself focused more on business investment as a determinant of economic fluctuations. The idea that the economy needs consumer profligacy is not nearly as entrenched among scholars as it is among journalists, politicians, and other citizens. In fact, there is a strong case to be made that we would be better off if we had less consumer spending and more saving. I probably spoke too strongly. The 'paradox of thrift' is in fact part of the original Keynes. So it is not quite fair to say that concern with consumer spending is purely an artifact of folk Keynesianism."

What is wrong with Bolivia?: "James Surowiecki writes: Neoliberalism failed in Bolivia because a macroeconomic checklist is not enough to make an economy work. Incorporating a new business in Bolivia, for instance, takes fifty-nine days, entails fifteen separate procedures, and costs twice as much as the average person earns in a year. So, according to a recent World Bank study, most of Bolivia’s businesses remain “informal,” which means that they have no legal protection, and limited access to credit markets. Corruption is rampant—a survey in 2000 found that it was a greater problem in Bolivia than in about ninety-five per cent of other countries surveyed. And the state bureaucracy has been more interested in patronage and clientelism than in good policy. Even if Bolivia got the big picture right, it got the details all wrong. And it’s increasingly clear that when it comes to development God really is in the details. A country’s history, institutions, and power structures have a profound impact on whether reform can work. "

Failures count more than Successes

FAILURES COUNT MORE THAN SUCCESSES
Stuart Cheshire, August 1996.

User-experience is defined by the times when a computer doesn'twork,
not by the times when it does.

When a device is functioning correctly, the details of it'soperation
are almost invisible to the user, and that is the way itshould be.
It's only when it goes wrong that the device forces itselfstrongly
into the user's awareness.

This means that the quality of the software and user interface
forhandling failures is just as important, if not more important than
thecode for the normal (successful) case.

Most software authors concentrate on the behaviour of the
programwhen it is working properly, because the software is supposed
toperform some task, and the programmer is concerned with making
itperform that task quickly, efficiently, elegantly. What happens
whensomething goes wrong (like the disk fills up) is rarely a
priority.Once something has gone wrong we're looking at a case where,
in asense, the program has already failed. It's not going to be able
tocomplete it's task now (for no fault of it's own) so the exact
mannerin which it fails hardly matters.

The programmer is still busy working on improving the performanceand
getting the bugs out of the correctly-functioning cases. Whydevote
time to working on a case where we _know_ there's no wayfor the
program to finish the task? In computer game terms, that caseis
already "game over", and no amount of programming work is going
tochange that and seize victory out of defeat. In an ideal world,
thatcase should _never_ happen anyway, so it would be stupid to
wastetime working on it, wouldn't it? What really matters is all
thatelegant efficient code that's executing in the common case.

The problem is, the user doesn't see it that way. In normal use,
thecomputer is correctly executing millions of instructions every
second.Disks seek, interrupts interrupt, network packets fly across
theworld, and progress continues smoothly. The user is no more
impressedby all these little successes than they are impressed every
time aspark plug in their car engine fires correctly. The user is not
evenaware of of all these little successes. They are completely
invisible,which is the way it should be.

The only time a typical motorist takes a good detailed look attheir
car engine is when it's not working, and it's the same withcomputer
software. When something goes wrong is precisely the timewhen a piece
of software leaps up from invisibleness in the backgroundand forces
the user to pay close attention to it. That's the momentwhen the
software is under the closest scrutiny, and it's usually thepart of
the user interface where least effort has been spent.

One image that appears in my mind is that completing a real
worldtask is kind of like having to get from one side of a swamp to
theother. Lots of hazzards and pitfalls lurk in the swamp that
separatesus from our goal. Software is the bridge that gets us from
where weare to where we want to be.

A lot of software is like a six-inch wide polished chrome beamacross
the swamp. It snakes smoothly across the swamp, taking theshortest
possible path around the rocks and trees and other obstacles,gleaming
impressively in the sun. It has no direction signs or crashbarriers to
marr its elegant simplicity or distract the user as theyspeed across
on their motorbike.

The author of the software proudly demonstrates how, on hismotorbike
with its 2.5 litre engine, he can cross the swamp in 17seconds. That's
great. All of the software has been developed andtested to achieve
that goal quickly, efficiently, elegantly.

The problem is, when a new user first gets hold of this softwarethey
make some mistake. They type some incorrect command, or they failto
configure some setting correctly before executing some othercommand,
and they miss a turn and fail to keep the motorcycle on thebeam. The
beautiful chrome beam is still gleaming impressively in thesun, but
the user can't even see it because they're lying face down inthe mud.
The fact that they could have completed the task in 17seconds is
little consolation if it takes them several hours to getout of the
mud. Sure, after a few times the user might learn to makeevery turn
perfectly, but the first few times they use the softwarethey have a
very unpleasant experience with it.

We need a bridge across the swamp that's a little bit wider, andhas
crash barriers so that even when you make a mistake you are
guidedback onto the right path, instead of being allowed to plunge
face-firstinto the swamp.

We recently had an experience like this setting up an ISDN
bridge.After several hours of trouble-shooting on the telephone with
SUN'snetwork administrators we finally got it working. It turned out
thatthere had been five or six different things that were wrong, but
forevery one the message was the same: "Connection Failed". First,
thephone number it was programmed to dial was wrong. SUN's
networkadministrators could see that there was no call coming in, but
all wesaw was "Connection Failed". After we corrected the phone number
SUN'snetwork administrators could see that there was now a call coming
in,but all we saw was "Connection Failed". SUN's network
administratorsdiscovered that they had made a typo in the list of
usernames at theirend, so they corrected that. Now they could see
that a call coming inand the username was being recognised, but all
we saw was "ConnectionFailed". This went on for several hours until
each individual problemhad been fixed, and finally we were able to
connect.

At every stage the ISDN bridge told us only that it wasn't
working(which we could tell ourselves pretty easily anyway). It
didn't saywhy it wasn't working. It didn't say what parts of the
connectionprocess _had_ worked correctly. It didn't tell us what we
mightdo to fix the problem. We couldn't even tell if the ISDN line
thatPacific Bell had installed was connected properly, because the
ISDNbridge didn't give any indication of whether or not it was
detectingthe ISDN equivalent of a "dial tone".

Now it's finally working I'm sure it will continue to work fine
andwe'll not give it a second thought, but those hours struggling to
getit set up were a nightmare. There's no way we could have done it
withoutoutside help, and we're networking experts.

All this is not the programmers fault alone. Programmers implement
whattheir written specifications say they should implement, and
softwarespecifications always go into great detail about what the
software issupposed to _do_, and rarely make any mention of how it
should fail.Failures are regarded as, well, failures, so what more is
there to sayabout them, except that they shouldn't happen?

Well, failures do happen, and how they are handled may be the
mostimportant aspect of defining the quality of a human being's
interactionwith a computer.
-------------------------

Never Ending Story: "I was on the phone with a customer today. A junior executive in a large household name company. Just as we were running out of time, he commented that every agile project he'd seen had suffered from a fundamental problem - it had never ended. It had just run and run and run. I didn't have time to really quiz him on this statement and it took me a while to realize what was wrong. Conformance to plan, big planning up-front, deterministic rather than adaptive project management provides a nice clean governance story! How? First some background. Our market research tells us that governance in the industry is pretty poor. A good governance definition involves a means to allocate and re-allocate resources effectively. Readers of my book and other work will know that I define good governance as a means to optimize the return on investors funds (or tax payers dollars). Hence, there is a big gap between where I'd like to see us get and where we are now. So, back to that agile issue. You can ship. And ship. And ship it again. Just relentless release after release. Every iteration more and more functionality. More and more value. Release! Value delivery. Customer satisfaction. Release again. More value! More satisfaction! Release with relentless monotony that you can set your calendar by it. But you know what? It doesn't provide a good governance story (bas"

UK Judge: Who needs software patents?: "Glyn Moody writes 'CNet has a surprising story about a seminar given by a top judge at the U.K.'s Court of Appeal who specializes in intellectual-property law. According to the article, he has 'questioned whether software patents should be granted, and has criticized the U.S. for allowing 'anything under the sun' to be patented.' Is the tide turning?'"

Never Ending Story: "I was on the phone with a customer today. A junior executive in a large household name company. Just as we were running out of time, he commented that every agile project he'd seen had suffered from a fundamental problem - it had never ended. It had just run and run and run. I didn't have time to really quiz him on this statement and it took me a while to realize what was wrong. Conformance to plan, big planning up-front, deterministic rather than adaptive project management provides a nice clean governance story! How? First some background. Our market research tells us that governance in the industry is pretty poor. A good governance definition involves a means to allocate and re-allocate resources effectively. Readers of my book and other work will know that I define good governance as a means to optimize the return on investors funds (or tax payers dollars). Hence, there is a big gap between where I'd like to see us get and where we are now. So, back to that agile issue. You can ship. And ship. And ship it again. Just relentless release after release. Every iteration more and more functionality. More and more value. Release! Value delivery. Customer satisfaction. Release again. More value! More satisfaction! Release with relentless monotony that you can set your calendar by it. But you know what? It doesn't provide a good governance story (bas"

The Art of Branding: " In honor of the recent Macworld Expo and the upcoming Super Bowl (the two great branding exercises of every new year; one much more fruitful than the other), this blog entry is about the art of branding. My assumptions are that you don't have infinite resources and that you do have a great product (see an earlier post called “Guy's Golden Touch”). If you do have infinite resource and don't have a great product, there's still hope, but you don't need to read this entry any further. Seize the high ground. Establish your brand on positive attributes like “making meaning,” “doing good,” “changing the world,” and “making people happy”--not doing in your competition. Think about it: when is the last time you bought a product to hurt a company's competition? (Other than maybe Macintosh users.) That's not why you spend your dollars. If you want to beat your competition, establish an uplifting brand, but don't try to establish a brand based on your silly desire to beat your competition. Create one message. It's hard enough to create and communicate one branding message; however, many companies try to establish more than one because they are afraid of being niched and want the “entire” market. “Our computer is for Fortune 500 companies. And, oh yes, it's also for c"

The Microsoft Way: "Dave Winer made the following insightful observation in a recent blog post Jeremy Zawodny, who works at Yahoo, says that Google is Yahoo 2.0. Very clever, and there's a lot of truth to it, but watch out, that's not a very good place to be. That's how Microsoft came to dominate the PC software industry. By shipping (following the analogy) WordPerfect 2.0 (and WordStar, MacWrite and Multimate) and dBASE 2.0 (by acquiring FoxBase) and Lotus 2.0 (also known as Excel). It's better to produce your own 2.0s, as Microsoft's vanquished competitors would likely tell you. Microsoft's corporate culture is very much about looking at an established market leader then building a competing product which is (i) integrated with a family of Microsoft products and (ii) fixes some of the weakneses in the competitors offerings. The company even came up with the buzzword Integrated Innovation to describe some of these aspects of its corporate strategy. Going further, one could argue that when Microsoft does try to push disruptive new ideas the lack of a competitor to focus on leads to floundering by the product teams involved. Projects such as WinFS, Netdocs and even Hailstorm can be cited as examples of projects that floundered due to the lack of a competitive focus. New employees to Microsoft are sometimes frustrated by this aspect of Microsoft"

Random Java Trivia: "When does the following code not throw a NullPointerException? MyClass obj = null; obj.doSomething(); (177 Words)"

top ten reasons why nobody reads your blog: " TOP TEN REASONS WHY NOBODY READS YOUR BLOG: 1. You're not a good-looking female who likes posting naked pictures of herself. Pretty damn obvious, if you ask me. [Not safe for work. You've been warned.] 2. There's nothing in it for them. Yeah, people really want to spend the short time they've been given on this Earth to find out what an unemployed managing consultant dork has to say. Dream on. 3. 'Passion' and 'Authority' are just buzzwords to you. Yeah, I've read the Cluetrain too. So has my pet canary. Get in line. 4. A secret cabal of A-Listers got together and decided that you should be excluded from the conversation. Yeah, they sit around sipping champagne, eating caviar and laughing about you. 5. You have nothing to say. The fact that you haven't figured this out yet surprises everyone. 6. You're not The Assimilated Negro. TAN is smart and funny. You are not. Get over it. 7. You didn't recently sell your company to AOL for $25 million. Somehow your eighth-grade English teacher managed to convince you that truth & beauty were more important to people than money & power. And you've been paying dearly for it ever since. 8. The very fact that you're whining about traffic makes people not want to read your blog. Instead it makes them want to emulate the champagne-swigging A-Listers currently mocking you. 9."

Davis Griffin: what a funny thing to see on a website: "Unable to Process AuthenticationParts of our system are currently unavailable.Normal hours of operation are currently 8am to 11pm EST weekdays and 9am to 1pm EST Saturdays.Access outside of these times may be restricted.We apologise for any inconvenience."

Davis Griffin: what a funny thing to see on a website: "Unable to Process AuthenticationParts of our system are currently unavailable.Normal hours of operation are currently 8am to 11pm EST weekdays and 9am to 1pm EST Saturdays.Access outside of these times may be restricted.We apologise for any inconvenience."

: "On the other hand, if you see a newbie ask a question of someone specific, and you know the answer, and you are not the person he or she asked, go ahead and answer it. Assume the person just wants the answer, not really from anyone in particular. If they complain that your name isn't Linus or Brian or Alice, you can tell them that's true, but the answer is still the right one. ';->'"

Loading... Updating... Perpetually... - Google Blogoscoped Forum
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FORUM
Loading... Updating... Perpetually...

Saturday, January 14, 2006
9 hours ago
The busses in my city all have GPS
transponders that report their position back to nextbus.com. As part
of their service, NextBus provides our bus stops with scrolling
digital marquee signs that update asynchronously, showing predicted
times for the busses next arrival at that stop. Unfortunately, these
signs almost never work. They are perpetually "Updating...". In fact,
they are Updating... even when it is clear that something is wrong and
they are broken. But we are given no indication of this, and thusly
the signs are practicaly worthless.

I have also found this unfortunate usability disaster with another
asynchronous technology: Google Reader. Frequently I will open Google
Reader and it will be "Loading..." for minutes on end. In fact,
forever. It becomes frustratingly obvious that something is wrong
with the service, but instead of a useful message, I am mislead into
believing that I should continue waiting and being patient.

This is a blatant perceptual lie. The service is not in fact
"Loading..." or "Updating...". It is Broken... But rather than admit
the fact by providing a useful error message, these services would
rather save face and claim that they are in fact doing something
useful for the customer.

I feel I've spent more than enough time Waiting... for things
that are Loading... and Updating... to realize that they are in fact,
not.

The ability to create an asynchronous, event-driven interface, if
anything, gives the service provider more responsibility and more
reasons for giving the user more information. I think most people
understand that when an hour glass on their computer turns for
several minutes on end, there is a good chance that the software has
a bug in it.
8 hours ago
I totally agree. Really.
There's nothing more frustration than having a word with three
dots behind it telling you to stay alert.

Updating this text... ;)
6 hours ago
Yes, I'm also perplexed by the
Google Reader error messages. When it says "loading" all you need to
do is click the refresh button and everything will be fine 99% of the
time.

The same goes for when you see the red error messages "whoops! an
error occurred." Click refresh and it's almost always fine.
5 hours ago
Brain, which city ??

4 hours ago
I agree that it's annoying,
but it's pervaded the internet pretty deeply; it's not just
google. firefox for instance does that in its tab names.

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