Blogarithms

Ubiquity, a magazine and forum from the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) has just posted an interview with me conducted by John Gehl.

(Hear the MP3 version with additional commentary in beautiful monophonic audio.)

New Programs Last Week

Here are the programs we’ve published in the last week, ranked in increasing order of listener ratings.

• Joe Paiva – A Warriors Guide to Business Architecture (2.8) When thinking about the technology and the Department of Defense, what generally comes to mind are the technologies involved with fighting a war; weaponry, information gathering, and transportation, for example. Less obvious but no less important is the role of information technology. In this session from the SOA Executive Forum in November 2005, Major Joe Paiva discusses the implmentation of a Services Oriented Architecture in the Armed Forces.
• Todd Cochrane – Building a Podcast Network (2.8) Creating or joining a podcast network is an important decision. There are benefits such as an increased listening audience, and more revenue. But there are also downsides: dealing with conflicts, sharing the workload and the revenue. Todd Cochrane shares his experiences in running a podcast show and creating a podcast network to help you in considering all the pros and cons that come with being involved in a podcast network. He also outlines network alternatives that may work for you, and what he would do differently in the future.
• Joshua Spanogle – Isolation Ward (3.8) On BioTech Nation, Dr. Moira Gunn interviews Joshua Spanogle who tells us about his new thriller, "Isolation Ward." It’s a fully-formed biotech thriller — from the fudging of scientific data, to xenotransplantation, to bioethics and the lure of the big money in biotech.
• Can Open Source Stay Open? (3.9) Open source software and Web 2.O are changing computer and software economics. Tight, centralized control of intellectual property is under attack. Free, self- service access to code, content, and communities helps build new platforms, products, and services. Is rapid, free and open the future? Tim O’Reilly, Mitchell Baker, and Jonathan Schwartz discuss how open source innovation is changing the world.
• Suketu Mehta – Bombay (4.0) Award winning writer Suketu Mehta tells us that his home town of Bombay and other mega-cities foreshadow the future. Bombay juxtaposes hopeless poverty, crowding, and inequity with riches and a vitality that draws a flood of young immigrants from rural villages. Although Mehta paints a grim picture, he sees hope in the exercise of democracy by the poor and a culture where people help each other while expecting little from their government.
• Peter Cochrane – Emerging Telephony (4.3) As a major driver of global wealth, the advance of technology is paced by various forces including new discovery and human inertia. In this keynote, Peter Cochrane, the highly esteemed and engaging techno-futurist, delivers a fascinating analysis of change in our increasingly smart, networked world.
• Scott Anderson – Business Blogging (4.3) The blogosphere is changing how customers gather and consume information about the marketplace. Scott Anderson, Hewlett Packard’s Director of Enterprise Brand Communications took a huge step in bringing his company in line with the principles of open dialogue with its customers through the blogosphere. In this program Scott describes the experience and the challenges of evolving corporate communication beyond the static web and into the live web.
• Carol Dweck – The Psychology of Success (4.4) Dr. Moira Gunn speaks Dr. Carol Dweck, the Lewis and Virginia Eaton Professor of Psychology at Stanford University, a recognized world leader in the study of personality, and author of Mindset — The New Psychology of Success."

The O’Reilly Pick of the Week:

This week’s IT Conversations/O’Reilly Pick of the Week is from 2004:

• Online Advertising – Gnomedex 4.0 (3.3) Audio from Gnomedex 4.0: The Future of Online Advertising. How to make money from blogs and more from a panel of experts: Dave McClure, Jeff Barr, Henry Copeland, Bill Flitter, Gokul Rajaram and Mark Pincus.

We tried to pull off a video TWiT on Friday, but the Gods of travel conspired against us. Today, however, Leo Laporte was able to pull together a quorum and hosted a great show with me, John C. Dvorak and Patrick Norton. Hope you enjoy it.

Marc Canter, co-founder and initial funder of Ourmedia.org has posted his personal comments about the web site’s first year of operation. Although I have been an advisor to Ourmedia.org — my name appears as Audio scout, whatever that means — I’m not at all close to its innerworkings, and I consider both Marc and co-founder J.D. Lasica to be good friends. I’m not qualified to comment directly on Marc’s post with regard to Ourmedia.org, but I think he makes some very important points for similar sites including IT Conversations and The Conversations Network. So in response:

On volunteer labor. I agree wholeheartedly with Marc about the fact that you need to pay people if you want to get something done. You can’t depend on volunteers for important stuff, which is one reason why we now pay the postproduction team at The Conversations Network. We always have, in fact, starting with the distribution of the old Tip Jar from Day One, back on April 1, 2005. We can’t afford to pay a lot, but it’s in keeping with the importance of what we do. It’s not as critical as a the activities of a broadcast station or a newspaper when it comes to schedule, but it’s more important than “whenever.”

However (!) volunteers are an excellent way to gauge the passion behind a project, and some projects should indeed die if there aren’t enough passionate volunteers to make them happen. As we roll out our grassroots portion of The Conversations Network, we intend to pay for the development of the software (an infrastructure cost), but not for the producers, engineers and writers. If no one is interested in producing a particular program as a volunteer, that says a lot about its value to our listeners.

Federated IDs are the way to go. Absolutely true. In the new site for The Conversations Network, a disproportionate amout of code, time and debugging went into (and still goes into) the single-signon sytem that couples Wordpress, punBB and our custom code. Ugly stuff.

Make sure to make it clear what you expect from investing almost $100,000 into something. Absolutely the case. Perhaps the good news is that no one here had that kind of money to invest in The Conversations Network. Although I and the other managers are essentially working for free — which I admit is unrealistic in the long term — we’ve achieved financial stability for the medium term. We’re about to expand into three or four new channels in April, and the general guideline is that each of them has to be self-sustaining through underwritings, and by the end of this year, I expect those volunteer managers will become paid part-time contractors.

All of us in “new media,” particularly in the non-profit space have a lot to learn, and hopefully we can continue to share the experiences from our successes as well as from our mistakes and our failures.

We’re taping a video edition of the awesome Leo Laporte’s This Week in Tech on Friday night. Looks so far like me, Leo, John C. Dvorak and Robert Heron. Not sure who else from the usual TWiTs.

Got any topics you want me to take to the TWiTs, all of whom are much smarter and more tuned-in than I?

March 28 is now set as the date for our quarterly conference call with The Conversations Network Executive Producers, managers and Patron and Benefactor members. If you’d like to hear our plans and give your feedback directly to our staff and producers, now’s a great time to join the network.

Co-founder J.D. Lasica reports that after just one year, Ourmedia has 87,000 members and about 150,000 works of personal media that people have uploaded — video, audio, photos and more. They have also launched a preliminary Digital Media Learning Center and have ambitious plans for the rest of the site.

We’ve extended the deadline for the $50 early registration discount for the Podcast Academy at Boston University until April 1, 2006.

(Hear the MP3 version with additional commentary in beautiful monophonic audio.)

New Programs Last Week

Here are the programs we’ve published in the last week, ranked in increasing order of listener ratings.

• Marty Ashby – The Future of Jazz (too late for ratings) The business of jazz music could borrow a page from NASCAR or professional poker according to Marty Ashby, the executive producer of MCG Jazz. Having produced numerous concerts and GRAMMY award winning albums, as well as being an accomplished musician himself, Ashby has a lifetime of experience to share. He sits down with host Tim Zak to reflect on his past and to offer some insight on the future of jazz, both as a business model and as a vital art form.
• Bill Strickland – Manchester Craftsmans Guild (too late for ratings) Bill Strickland is one of the world’s great social innovators. As head of both the Manchester Craftsmen’s Guild and the Bidwell Training Center, located on Pittsburgh’s gritty north side just down the street from where he grew up, Strickland has created a youth development and adult training center like no other, in approach and results. Over nearly 40 years, he has melded an environment surrounded by stunning art, the sounds of jazz, beautiful orchids, and brilliant architecture with programs that get kids into college and adults a job with a future.
• Simon Phipps – The Zen of Free (rated 2.6 by listeners) When people say "Open source is fine but how do you make money?" you know they haven’t grokked the Zen of Free. Simon Phipps, Chief Open Source Officer at Sun Microsystems, describes the "virtuous cycle" model of open source in this keynote from OSCON Europe 2005.
• Jeremy Allaire – Transforming Video Distribution (2.8) The internet is starting to completely transform the distribution of multimedia content, and it’s more than just delivering video over IP. At the 2005 Syndicate conference, Jeremy Allaire of Brightcove explains how using the internet is revolutionizing the distribution of video and multimedia products, creating a richer user experience and allowing producers greater freedom and reach for their products.
• Dan Gillmor – Citizen Journalism (2.8) What does the future hold for citizen journalism? In a world where media is democratized, many organizations have responded by increasingly trying to control the message and the dissemination of information. In this edition of Sound Policy with Denise Howell, Dan Gillmor reveals that the distinction between the mainstream journalist and the citizen journalist has become increasingly blurred by the act of journalism itself.
• Bernard-Henri Levy – Traveling America (3.8) Dr. Moira Gunn interviews French author and journalist Bernard-Henri Levy. He gives us a different perspective about ourselves when she speaks with him about his latest book, "American Vertigo — Traveling America in the Footsteps of Tocqueville."
• Lynn Foster and Larry Bock – Nanotechnology (3.8) On a special edition of BioTech Nation all about Nanotechnology, Dr. Moira Gunn speaks with Lynn Foster, the Emerging Technologies Director at Greenberg Traurig and Larry Bock, the Founder and Executive Chairman of Nanosys.
• Mary Meeker – Internet Trends (3.9) Mary Meeker’s signature fast-paced presentation from the 2005 Web 2.0 conference answers some crucial questions regarding the relationship between internet trends and global technology markets. In particular, she examines whether – and in which areas – the US is losing ground to other countries and which internet- related innovations will lead to areas of substantial growth in the next 10 years.
• Shyam Venkatesh – Nano-Tubes (4.0) Dr. Moira Gunn speaks with Shyam Venkatesh, the Director of Technology Partnering at NASA Ames Research Center. He tells us all the things you might do with a nano-tube.

The O’Reilly Pick of the Week:

This week’s IT Conversations/O’Reilly Pick of the Week is from 2004:

• Joe Trippi – Connected Politics Joe Trippi, the former campaign manager of the Howard Dean presidential campaign from Pop!Tech 2004. This is the third of four IT Conversations audio recordings from the session on Connected Politics.

I’d like to extend my apologies to the listeners of The Conversations Network and IT Conversations for some glitches in our audio programs over the past four weeks. On February 18 we launched ASM, our new automated show-assembly system that allows us to rebuild all of our audio programs from components on a nightly basis. New programs and series that were produced using ASM are coming out fine, but some of the earlier programs that were produced partially using the new tools and partially using traditional techniques have been plagued by occasional problems such as portions of shows that either don’t play back on certain players or that play back incorrectly such as at double speed.

If you encounter a problem, first go back to the IT Conversations web site and download the program again. It could well be that we’ve fixed the program since your first download. If it’s still not correct, please email me directly at doug@rds.com. I promise we’ll fix and publish the show promptly.

We’ve had an embargo on admitting new audio engineers into our apprenticeship program while we debugged our new automated show-assembly system. Now that that’s done and working well, we’re ready to ramp up our post-production volume as we plan for new channels in The Conversations Network next month.

If you’d like to join The Conversations Network team as a part-time post-production audio engineer, and if you really do have the skills, experience and required software, just go to our volunteer signup page and tell us a bit about yourself. It won’t make your rich, but it’s pretty good beer money.

An important member Team ITC, Dorothy Yamamoto, has just been diagnosed with leukemia, and will be hospitalized at the UCLA Medical Center during her tests, chemotherapy and more for at least a month. Dorothy had been feeling week ever since having the flu late in 2005, and had undergone one test after another until getting this diagnosis. In fact, they still don’t know precisely which form of leukemia she has. That’s going to require some gnarly bone-marrow biopsies this week.

You may not know Dorothy by name, but you’d recognize her work, which includes The Conversations Network graphics and the logo for Leo Laporte’s This Week in Tech (TWiT) podcast. Dorothy is a brilliant designer and a huge supporter of The Conversations Network, TWiT and podcasting in general.

Dorothy, we’re all thinking of you and hoping for your rapid recovery.

(Hear the MP3 version with additional commentary in beautiful monophonic audio.)

New Programs Last Week

Here are the programs we’ve published in the last week, ranked in increasing order of listener ratings.

• Luther Ragin – Is Grantmaking Enough? (not enough votes to rate) Luther Ragin, Jr., Vice President of Investments for The F.B. Heron Foundation, explains how the mission-related investment approach can harness a foundation’s financial power to maximize its social return. From the Center for Social Innovation at Stanford.
• Mark Lynas – Global Warming (not enough votes to rate) Global climate change is seen by many as a hot political controversy. Journalist and author Mark Lynas argues that it is much more important than that. It is the whole of the human species versus the biosphere, requiring a collective species level response to resolve.
• Martinez Hewlett – Science and Theology (rated 3.3 by listeners) Dr. Moira Gunn speaks with Martinez Hewlett, professor emeritus, molecular biology at University of Arizona, and the author of "Evolution from Creation to New Creation — Conflict, Conversations and Convergence. He’s looking at the relationship between science and theology.
• Jaime Sguerra – SOA for Competitive Advantage (3.7) Adopting a service-oriented architecture (SOA) can provide both technical and competitive advantages for an organization. Jaime Sguerra gives details of both the benefits and the challenges for Guardian Life in its transition to an SOA implementation. Sguerra outlines key reasons for doing this and how Guardian chose to deal with the challenges of: multiple platform support; distributed IT organizations; and lack of alignment between IT and the business centers.
• Gary McGraw – Software Security (4.0) Security is not a feature – it’s a requirement for today’s software. According to Gary McGraw, the good news about software security is that we know how to do it, but the bad news is that we aren’t. In this interview with Sondra Schneider, Dr. McGraw describes how to build secure software and what the security challenges are for the software industry.
• Daniel Dennett – Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (4.2) Dr. Moira Gunn interviews Daniel Dennett, professor of philosophy at Tufts University and author of "Breaking the Spell — Religion as a Natural Phenomenon." He looks at the emergence of religion throughout natural history and asks us to bring in science to study it.
• Cory Doctorow – Europe’s Coming Broadcast Flag (4.7) As many American innovators are pleased with the defeat of the broadcast flag in the United States and move on to other concerns, the television and motion picture industries have turned their attention to Europe as the next battleground in the copyright and infringement war. The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Cory Doctorow calls on open source innovators in Europe to fight for their rights as well.
• Carolyn Porco – Explorer’s Club (4.8) Answers about the origin of living organisms, planets, entire galaxies, all from one robotic space expedition? Perhaps. Carolyn Porco, the Cassini Imaging Team Leader, presents imagery and insight from the Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn. In her talk, she takes the audience on a rapid fire, guided tour of Saturn’s rings and moons including the exciting discoveries of active geology, organic compounds, and surfaces that are "strangely Earth-like."

The O’Reilly Pick of the Week:

This week’s IT Conversations/O’Reilly Pick of the Week is from 2004:

• David Brin Debates Brad Templeton David Brin debates Brad Templeton on "The Costs and Benefits of Transparency: How Far, How Fast, How Fair?" From the Accelerationg Change 2004 conference.

Two weeks ago we created the free Guest membership on The Conversations Network, and many of you have signed up to take advantage of it. And hundreds of you are stopping by the IT Conversations Forum to read messages every day. The only problem? Almost no one is bothering to leave a message of their own.

I know the Forums will eventually pick up steam and become popular, but we need your help. Did you hear an IT Conversations program this week that inspired you? Stop by and say so. Disagree with a guest, host or speaker? We want to hear that, too. You can also get there by clicking on the Discuss link on any progam’s deail page.

We’ve just added an affiliates page to The Conversations Network web site. The idea is sort of like “matching grants” in the public-radio world. If you, our loyal listeners, visit the affiliates page, click through to the affiliates’ web sites, and conduct any business, The Conversations Network receives a small payment. Whether or not you can afford to become a paying member of The Conversations Network, the affiliates page is another way you can help us keep user-supported audio on the ‘Net alive.

I was privileged to be part of the team on This Week in Tech today with Leo Laporte, Patrick Norton, Robert Heron, and John C. Dvorak. It’s a much better show than my last appearance, two weeks ago. (MP3)

We’re making some progress towards our goal of being able to capture and publish the slide presentations from conferences along with synchronized audio.

• We can’t use a scan-rate converter from the presenter’s laptop projector output, and then record in standard video. It looks awful.
• But we can now capture laptop output on a Mac or PC, and we can save it in a variety of formats such as MPEG-4. H.264, etc.
• We can do post-production using tools like FinalCut Pro.

The next question is what is the optimal release format for these videos? We can easily release them as QuickTime movie files, for example. They look great, but they’re still fairly large, on the order of hundreds of megabytes per hour. Any full-motion formats are wasteful, particularly given that these presentations are usually just still images, which don’t change for long periods of time.

Should we release as Flash/Shockwave files? They would be much smaller. Are they compatible with more playback devices and computers? And what tools exist to convert from full-motion video such as H.264 to Flash?

Adam Curry posted a classic edition of the Daily Source Code today in which he tells the story of his recent lawsuit against a Dutch tabloid’s editors. But more than that, he goes into a great deal of personal history as somone trying to do good while in the public eye. The lawsuit, by the way, was over unauthorized use of Adam’s photos posted on Flickr with a Creative Commons License. The program was enough to remind me that I’ve been wanting to post these thoughts about the misunderstandings of copyright and licensing.

As of 1976 (here in the U.S.) anything you write or publish is automatically covered by copyright law. No longer do you have to put that little © symbol on your works, although it does make it clear who the copyright holder is. You don’t need to register your copyighted works unless you want to litigate, and even registration can be deferred until that time. Copyright protects your rights and (supposedly, but no longer very well) the rights of the commons. The latter is an important subject, but not the one I want to address today. For the sake of this discussion, just consider the aspect of copyright that reserves for the copyright holder certain rights.

A license, on the other hand, is a granting to others some of those rights normally reserved for the copyright holder. A license never strengthens your rights to what you’ve created. If anything it weakens those rights by giving something to someone else. The Creative Commons licenses — and there are many varieties — are an attempt to clarify and simplify licensing, particularly in cases where the licensee is anonymous: a person or persons among the commons. A Creative Commons license grants certain rights to individuals or organizations without the copyright holder (the licensor) having a clue as to who those individuals or organizations might be. Creative Commons is a brilliant idea, not only because it allows granting of limited rights to the commons, but because the licenses are generally straightforward and don’t require lawyers or even phone calls to make clear what’s allowed and what isn’t.

Contrary to what Adam suggested, however, I don’t believe his case in The Netherlands is a test of the validity of the Creative Commons licenses. I haven’t read the judge’s opinion — it’s probably in Dutch anyway — but from Adam’s comments it seems to be just a copyright case. Again, the issue here is that a Creative Commons license does nothing to protect a copyright holder from illegal use of his/her intellectual property. If anything, Adam’s rights in his photos would have been more secure had he not opted to publish under a CC license.

So remember, when you publish under any of the Creative Common’s licenses, you’re not providing yourself any additional protection. What you’re doing is granting rights to others.

Update: Looks like people who know more than I do about this (i.e., lawyers) may disagree. A post on Groklaw entitled Creative Commons License Upheld by Dutch Court translates the Dutch ruling. Still, I don’t think this was a legitimate challenge of a CC license. No specific provisions were attacked.

A great book, Podcast Solutions by Michael Geoghegan and Dan Klass, is now being carried in Apple’s stores. What a terrific endorsement! (Disclaimer: I was the Technical Reviewer for this book.)

(Hear the MP3 version with additional commentary in beautiful monophonic audio.)

New Programs Last Week

Here are the programs we’ve published in the last week, ranked in increasing order of listener ratings.

• Andy Brown – Adopting SOA at Merrill Lynch (rated 3.2 by our listeners) SOA is "the next big thing" and although everyone uses the term SOA, everyone means something different. For Andy Brown of Merrill Lynch, it is a framework architecture and a way of thinking. At the InfoWorld SOA Executive Forum, he argues that "SOA provides an integrated architecture that empowers us to deliver client focused solutions," and explains how Merrill Lynch is leveraging the power of SOA.
• Rickard Oste – Food Chemistry (3.2) On this week’s BioTech Nation, Dr. Moira Gunn speaks with Dr. Rickard Oste, professor of Food Chemistry at Lund University. He tells us how to turn oats into oak milk. You don’t just add water — that would be gruel. You’ve got to know your food chemistry!
• Paul Levine – The Architecture of Participation (3.5) The "architecture of participation" is a key theme in the evolution of location- enabled services. Paul Levine – General Manager of Local for Yahoo! – reveals how his company is encouraging users, merchants, developers, and publishers to participate in Yahoo!’s local services and contribute to a grand strategy of expanding the sum of human knowledge.
• Larry’s World – Mashups (3.5) Mashups are a good example of what some Internet insiders are calling "Web 2.0," a relatively undefined term that sort of means something like the Web serving as a platform with sites that take advantage of — among other things — user supplied content. The best place to find mashups is at programmableweb.com which currently lists more than 450 mashups, 50 of which are classifies as "popular." Larry Magid speaks with three mashup site pioneers.
• Timothy Zahn – The Star Wars Novels (3.8) Dr. Moira Gunn interviews sci-fi writer Timothy Zahn, author of "Star Wars — Outbound Flight." He talks about writing the official Star Wars novels and tells us what it’s like to see the occasional inclusion of his work in the Star Wars movies.
• Ludo Oelrich – A Public-Private Partnership that Works (4.0) Ludo Oelrich is the Director of "Moving the World" a partnership between TNT and World Food Program. Speaking at the Effective Disruption Management Seminar convened by the Stanford Graduate School of Business last September he explains how the benefits of this association play out both ways.
• Nic Dunlop – Finding the Khmer Rouge (4.4) Moira also speaks with author and photojournalist Nic Dunlop, author of "The Lost Executioner — A Journey to the Heart of the Killing Fields." He sought out and found the head of the notorious Khmer Rouge secret police, and he tells us how it happened.

The O’Reilly Pick of the Week:

This week’s IT Conversations/O’Reilly Pick of the Week is from 2004:

• Janine Benyus – Bio Mimicry Biomimicry: It’s the conscious emulation of life’s genius. Janine Benyus is a life sciences writer and author of six books, including her latest — Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature. In Biomimicry, she names an emerging science that seeks sustainable solutions by mimicking nature’s designs and processes (e.g., solar cells that mimic leaves, agriculture that looks like a prairie, business that runs like a redwood forest).