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Wednesday, August 14, 2002 |
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"Sir, were there reasonable alternatives at the time?"
Having recently found his voice, Ray Ozzie is also finding that he has a lot to say -- both on his his blog and elsewhere. In an article today on news.com, he concludes:
Someday, some shareholder is going to lose quite a bit of money because an electronic message was "sniffed," or "spoofed." Someone's health or financial records are going to get into the wrong hands. A design will be compromised; someone will get hurt.
And at that point, network television cameras are going to be focused on a lawyer who's asking a company executive, or a government official, "Sir, were there reasonable alternatives at the time?"
(Also today, on his blog, Ray cites Charles Mann's extraordinary Atlantic Monthly piece on Bruce Schneier, which I mentioned here a couple of weeks ago, and which is now -- happily -- online. It's crucial for more people, and especially non-geeks, to understand Schneier's philosophical transformation and current thinking.)
For me, the most salient fact about Ray's career is that he has chosen to tilt at not just one windmill, but two: collaboration and security. We tend to preach both but practice neither. Partly that's because we care less about these things than we say we do and believe we should. Do you communicate with coworkers as often and as well as you'd like? (If not, why not?) Do you switch from your cordless phone to a landline when ordering a pizza with a debit card? (If not, why not?)
Partly, though, it's a matter of architecture. The path of least resistance rarely coincides with the path of highest value, but given the right architecture, it can. As Ray has discovered, blogging represents an architectural solution to some longstanding problems that have plagued public online discussion. Groove, likewise, aims for an architectural solution to secure collaboration. Since "security" and "collaboration" are contradictory and almost mutually exclusive from IT's perspective, that's quite a challenge. But it's inescapable.
Cyberspace is not really borderless. More accurately, it's resolving into sets of discrete, sometimes overlapping, sometimes concentric spaces. In these spaces, people and documents gather for moments, days, or years. Requirements for confidentiality run the gamut. Public and semi-public spaces need to advertise their existence, in order to promote awareness globally or within various groups. Private spaces need to be, well, private. Everywhere, strong identity (or at least strong pseudonymity) should be a given.
Weblogs don't yet offer an architectural solution to secure semi-public collaboration. Wrapping SSL and passwords around your blog can work, but the administrative hassles involved push this option far off the path of least resistance. Groove-style "always-on" and "complacency-immune" security sounds appealing, but it's not a solution yet either. It works by invitation only, and that cuts across the grain of blogging which thrives on linking and serendipitous discovery:
A collection of weblogs isn't just a pool of documents. It's also a knowledge network, where at each node human intelligence performs the routing function. The network's architecture is publish/subscribe. Its protocol is RSS (Rich Site Summary), a simple, powerful, and popular application of XML. Bloggers tune into other bloggers' RSS channels; they select and react to items flowing through those channels; they post items that also flow out on their own RSS channels. It's a kind of Krebs cycle where the input is individual thought and the output is group awareness. [Google and weblogs: best hope for KM]
So what's the architectural solution that will make the cells of this awareness network semi-permeable in the appropriate ways? Perhaps translucency is part of the answer. I'm not smart enough to see the endgame here. But I'm sure glad to see that Ray's on the case!
1:59:54 PM 
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Contacting me: High-tech PR in the age of blogs
In June I met Mark O'Neill, CTO of Vordel, at the Web Services Edge conference. Today Mark sent me a pointer to his new blog. As you can see by glancing at my channelroll, I've subscribed to Mark's blog.
Six months ago I said we were reaching critical mass. Now I'm sure that's true, and I think the time is right for an essay I wrote then, but shelved, on how blogs will change high-tech PR.
Here's how it used to work, and still mostly does. A PR firm sends out an email blast to a bunch of tech journalists, announcing that a tech company's CTO will be speaking at an upcoming conference. Then come the follow-ups: "Did you get our message?" "Will you be attending the show?" "Can we arrange a time for you to speak with our CTO?" These follow-ups have earned the unflattering term flak. Like every tech journalist, I'm on the receiving end of a lot of this stuff. I've always understood why it was necessary, but was always frustrated by the inefficiency of the procedure. It was never clear how to change the equation, until now.
It happens that I've met Mark, and what Vordel does (web services security) is of interest to me, and although I won't be in SF on Sept 5 for the event Mark mentions in his blog, we'll undoubtedly be in touch. But quite often, I won't know the principal, or the company. What I hoped would start to happen, and am now certain will happen, is something like this:
Hi, I'm XXX, [CTO|Architect|Product Manager] for YYY which does ZZZ. I have started a weblog that describes what we do, how we do it, and why it matters. If this information is useful and relevant, our RSS feed can be found here. Thanks!
The PR folks at YYY now have a couple of ways to gauge the effect of this probe. The access logs for XXX's blog will show whether or not it provoked a clickthrough. They'll also show whether the RSS feed was hit, and if so, whether it continues to be hit on a regular basis.
If the journalist's blog runs in transparent mode (i.e., reveals its subscribed feeds as I do with my channelroll), things get even more interesting. The PR folk have a much clearer idea of what the journalist really follows than they can get from, say, MediaMap. If I tell MediaMap that I follow "networking" or "security," what does that mean, really? By exposing the RSS channels that have passed my filters and become part of my daily inbound feed, I am helping others who would like to become part of that feed understand what my filters are. And I'm helping myself by attracting related channels that ought to be part of my feed.
The larger themes at work here were stated first and best in the Cluetrain Manifesto. As a tech journalist, my work revolves around conversations with those of you who are continually inventing the stuff. (We're usually on the same wavelength because, in the modest ways appropriate to my interests and skills, I'm inventing stuff too.) As more of you begin to speak directly in weblogs, in your own voices, our conversations (both public and private) will deepen. There will be more context. I'll know where you're coming from, and why, and how you got where you are, and we can jump straight to the really interesting bit: where you're going (and why). Our conversations will inform and improve the quality of what ends up in the print version of InfoWorld. They'll enhance your web mindshare. And -- not coincidentally -- they'll be a lot of fun.
10:39:48 AM
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© Copyright 2002 Jon Udell.
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