It's time to close this chapter of my blog and begin the next one. Here I'd just like to thank Steve Gillmor for bringing me to InfoWorld on a mission to explore the blog medium and to reinvent publishing. And I'd like to thank InfoWorld for granting me extraordinary freedom to pursue that mission. I think I've used that freedom well, and made good progress in the right direction. But along the way my interests broadened beyond InfoWorld's enterprise IT charter, and I began to overstay my welcome. Take a look at this page for example. Scroll to the bottom and you will see that one of these things is not like the other. A video of a lawnmower? What's up with that?

To me it's all part of a pattern. I use commonly-available technologies in unexpected ways to tell stories that make connections, distill experience, and transmit knowledge. Jay Cross nailed the reason on his blog the other day: I'm "infected with Stewart Brand's memes." Of course, most of us who hang out on the leading edge of technology are similarly infected. So I wind up preaching to the choir. That's fine, and I'll keep on doing it so long as we all find it worthwhile, but I also aim to connect with a lot of people on the trailing edge, many of whom have yet to subscribe to an RSS feed, publish a professionally-oriented blog, or compose a new service by stitching URLs together. I hope that Microsoft will help me to take these ideas to the world in a big way to the benefit of all concerned. According to the comment thread attached to my announcement, many of you agree. So, let's do the experiment.

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As a first experiment I grabbed the DCStat reported-crime feed for November, sucked it into Excel 2003, consolidated incidents by day, pivoted them on type of offense (homicide, burglary), and exported them back out as a CSV (comma-separated value) file that Swivel could import. [Full story at InfoWorld.com]

I imported the same data into Dabble DB where it's very easy to use grouping and filtering to make views like this one. Again the point is that the views are sharable on the web. Also, in this case, invited collaborators can tweak them.

Going through this exercise, I was struck by the distance between DCStat's namespace-rich XML formats and the CSV format that web apps like Swivel and Dabble DB want to read and write. I happen to know how to use the XML Maps feature of Excel 2003 to shred an XML file but I doubt many Excel users have ever done that. To enable ordinary citizens to explore this data, DCStat might want to offer a common-denominator CSV format in addition to the XML flavors.

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Sean McGrath's latest column puts an AJAX spin on the age-old struggle between the human-accessible and machine-accessible aspects of software:

Making an application easier to use almost always means making better use of the users ability to see; to hear; to click buttons; to access drop down menus and so on. Unfortunately, computers themselves cannot see or hear. This results in a most unfortunate inverse relationship. Namely, the more visual and interactive and compelling an application is from a user interface perspective, the harder it is to make said application do its thing without human intervention. [Sean McGrath: AJAX and the hidden cost of ease of use]

Now in fairness, I cheated by using the AJAX interface to emit a sample HTTP transaction that contained a lot of stuff I could not easily have fabricated from scratch. That's why it'll take a much smarter bear than me to incorporate my hack into libgmail. Still, if I'd wanted to plow through Gmail's obfuscated JavaScript source code, I might have been able to intercept and repurpose the method driving the HTTP transaction.

For these two reasons -- the transparency of the HTTP pipeline, and the accessibility of the JavaScript object model -- I think that AJAX is inherently more automatable than conventional GUI apps ever have been.

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At the ICA conference in September I had a great talk with Edwin Bruce, who's responsible for New Zealand's e-government initiatives. Among many other things, he pointed out that New Zealand has an opportunity to do some interesting things with moderated second-level domains under the .nz top-level domain. There are five such domains now: .govt.nz (government), .mil.nz (military), .iwi.nz (Maori), .parliament.nz, (parliament) and .cri.nz (Crown Research Institute).

Because New Zealand's country-code top-level domain (ccTLD), .nz, is much more tightly controlled than, say, .us, New Zealand's moderated 2nd-level namespace is analogous to ICANN's notion of sponsored/chartered top-level namespace. If you're a bank or a law office today in New Zealand, you'll probably register under the unmoderated 2nd-level domain .co.nz. Edwin envisions aligning the existing regulatory apparatus for banking and law with corresponding moderated 2nd-level domains: .bank.nz, .law.nz.

This wouldn't be an option in the US, at least not under our ccTLD. For example, .law.us is currently held by Neustar, but .bank.us is owned by Vishal Ved, 9335 Lee Highway, #1213, Fairfax, AL. So if we wanted a system like the one Edwin proposes, we'd need to do it under a new TLD.

I'm sure that's unlikely for all sorts of reasons, and what Edwin proposes isn't even happening yet in New Zealand where it pretty easily could. But it would be interesting to see this model tried there. Are there other ccTLDs where it's farther along?

Comments

Reading through the comments attached to yesterday's announcement made it clear that I left a few critical questions unasked and unanswered. Rather than continue that thread here, I'm transplanting it to a new incarnation of my ancient personal website. It used to be udell.roninhouse.com. Now it's jonudell.net, where I display my past record for inspection, and this blog for new thoughts and dialogue. I hope you'll join me there because during my sabbatical, from Dec 15 to Jan 15, I'll be laying the foundations for what I want to do next, and I'll appreciate all the help I can get.

For my last week here, I'll stick to InfoWorld-related knitting. But I can't resist pointing out my favorite of all the heart-warming reactions that poured in following yesterday's announcement. It's a 3-second video from Andy Rush, one of the switched-on instructional technologists I met at the University of Mary Washington back in May. Andy, you made my day!

For today's podcast I decided to interview myself about my upcoming new gig. It's a short episode, under six minutes, and the transcript follows.

Note: I actually meant to push this to the server later today, to synchronize with a message that will be forthcoming from Jeff Sandquist. But a mis-click on my part pushed it sooner, which means Jeff will be a bit surprised when he wakes up. Trust me, though, this is something I've been thinking carefully about for a long time, and it's very real.

Q: Your new job is with Microsoft?

A: That's right. My last day at InfoWorld will be Friday Dec 15. On Jan 15, after a month-long sabbatical, I'll become a Microsoft employee. My official title will be Evangelist, and I'll report to Jeff Sandquist. He's the leader of the team that creates Channel 9 and Channel 10, websites that feature blogs, videos, screencasts, and podcasts for Microsoft-oriented developers.

Q: What will your role be?

A: The details aren't nailed down, but in broad terms I've proposed to Microsoft that I continue to function pretty much as I do now. That means blogging, podcasting, and screencasting on topics that I think are interesting and important; it means doing the kinds of lightweight and agile R&D that I've always done; and it means brokering connections among people, software, information, and ideas -- again, as I've always done.

Q: Why are you doing this?

A: I'm often described as a leading-edge alpha geek, and that's fair. I am, and probably always will be, a member of that club. But I'm also increasingly interested in reaching out to the mainstream of society.

For those of us in the club, it's a golden age. With computers and networks and information systems we can invent new things almost as fast as we can think them up. But we're leaving a lot of folks behind. And I'm not just talking about the digital divide that separates the Internet haves from the have-nots. Even among the haves, the ideas and tools and methods that some of us take for granted haven't really put down roots in the mainstream.

Over the years I've evangelized a bunch of things to the alpha-geek crowd: Internet groupware, blogging, syndication, tagging, web architecture, lightweight integration, microformats, structured search, screencasting, dynamic languages, geographic mapping, random-access audio, and more. There's a purpose behind all this, and Doug Engelbart saw it very clearly a long time ago. The augmentation of human capability in these sorts of ways isn't just some kind of geek chic. It's nothing less than a survival issue for our species. We face some really serious challenges. The only way we're going to be able to tackle them is to figure out how to work together in shared information spaces. I've chosen to align myself with Microsoft because I think it has the scale, the resources, and the business incentive to help me empower a lot of people to learn how to do that.

Q: Why now?

A: At the Emerging Technology Conference in March, Microsoft's incoming chief software architect, Ray Ozzie, showed how LiveClipboard, the 21st-century version of the Windows clipboard, could enable collaborative sharing of information, and creative recombination of services, across all operating systems, web applications, and desktop applications.

Kim Cameron, Microsoft's identity architect, is taking a similar approach in the domain of identity, privacy, and the control of personal information.

Jean Paoli, Microsoft's Office XML architect, continues to pursue his lifelong dream of empowering millions of people to create and use smarter documents.

Jim Hugunin, who created both Jython and IronPython, is making my favorite open source scripting language, Python, a first-class citizen of the .NET platform.

J.J. Allaire is creating a blog-writing tool that will enable millions of people to publish data that's reusable and intelligently searchable.

Bottom line: This isn't your father's -- or maybe your older brother's or sister's -- Microsoft. Initiatives like these matter, they're solidly in line with my own agenda, they're being pursued in very open ways, and I want to help move them forward.

Q: Are you selling out, joining the Evil Empire, and turning your back on principles you've always championed?

A: Wait until the evidence is in, then decide for yourself. I've been in this game for a long time. I think my record of pragmatism and agnosticism speaks for itself, but sometimes I like to recall what Tim O'Reilly said in his foreword to my 1999 book on Internet groupware:

All too often, people wear their technology affiliations on their sleeve (or perhaps on their t-shirts), much as people did with chariot racing in ancient Rome. Whether you use NT or Linux, whether you program in Perl or Java or Visual Basic - these are marks of difference and the basis for suspicion. Jon stands above this fragmented world like a giant. He has only one software religion: what works.

Q: Will you be a blogger? An analyst? A developer? An educator? A multimedia producer?

A: All of the above. The title "evangelist" doesn't quite capture that whole range of activities, but these are the things I do, and plan to continue doing.

Q: Will you become Microsoft's next Robert Scoble?

A: The way I see it, Robert played a key role in a grand experiment to make Microsoft's development processes more transparent. Channels 9 and 10, and the hundreds of Microsoft blogs throughout the organization, are evidence that the experiment is succeeding.

I've proposed a different experiment. I'll continue to be a channel for alpha geeks. But I also want to become a channel for a whole lot of civilians in the mainstream. And above all, I want to build bridges between these two groups.

Q: Will you continue to use Firefox, Gmail, and OS X?

A: Sure. I'll also continue to use Microsoft technologies as I always have, and I'll keep on pushing the boundaries of cross-pollination and interoperability. The most powerful mashups don't just mix code and data, they mix cultures. I hope this will be an opportunity for me to do that in a way that benefits everybody.

Comments

The solution I cobbled together speaks volumes about the fundamental openness of Web applications. To find out how Gmail creates a distribution list, I logged in, created a list interactively using Gmail's form, and captured the resulting HTTP transaction using one of the handiest tools in my Web developer's kit, Firefox's LiveHTTPHeaders extension.

The next step was to replay that transaction outside of the browser. I rearranged its elements -- an URL, a chunk of HTTP POST data, and a set of HTTP headers including a cookie packed with crucial name/value pairs -- as a command-line invocation of another of the handiest tools in my kit: curl. [Full story at InfoWorld.com]

In this week's column, I discuss how the ability to capture and replay HTTP traffic enabled me to discover and exploit an implicit Gmail API. But there's a general principle underlying this hack, and it seems to me that after all these years we've barely begun to exploit it.

Consider the scenario described in this item, for example. I would love to be able to recapture the sequence of HTTP transactions behind a particularly interesting search scenario, but I never logged them. In the comment thread, aristus notes that one solution is a Firefox plugin called slogger, which I've used on and off since, let's see, tap, tap, tap, October 2004.

I haven't used slogger for a while because it quit working for me on OS X a while ago, and I haven't been able to resurrect it since. But slogger notwithstanding, there's a much deeper and more general thing that ought to be happening on every web-enabled system. It ought to be trivial to attach an observer and/or filter to HTTP pipelines. Among other things, it could shovel data into a search engine so that I could instantly recall a remembered transaction by search term, by date, or by site.

I mentioned this on a recent call with the folks reponsible for Vista's desktop search. When they mentioned extensible "protocol handlers" I got really excited, imagining a general mechanism for echoing HTTP (or SMTP) traffic through a search indexer. It turned out that isn't what they meant. They were talking about supporting file formats, not protocols. But I've always thought echoing HTTP or SMTP traffic through a searcher is a great idea, and I still do.

HTTP intermediaries are also an incredible untapped resource for developers and testers of software running in environments that range from plain old HTML-over-HTTP to formal XML web services. For the latter domain, the folks (disclosure: my friends) at Mindreef are doing really interesting work based on the ability to capture and replay SOAP packets.

I've long envisioned a general-purpose ipchains-like capability, for all operating systems, that would make it trivial to attach observers, filters, and transformers to bread-and-butter protocols like HTTP and SMTP. Is it just me, or is this a gigantic missed opportunity?

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Google got there first, but we're still in the early innings of this game. Google's office apps, while collaboratively adept, are functionally lame. Microsoft's apps are adept and lame in precisely the opposite ways. Everyone needs to converge on solutions that deliver the best of both. [Full story at InfoWorld.com]

In last week's email I received a leading indicator of GDoc/GSheet adoption which, because I neglected to ask permission to quote, I'll anonymize:

Just read your column on G-docs. We started using them around the office for convenience and they've taken off. We found the version control, collaboration and invite system outweighed the limited feature set. For the most part, they have the very basic functionality covered. We still use Excel for many things, but Google Spreadsheets is making a dent in our enterprise use. My clients have adopted it too. Helps when working with teams in China, Europe and the US.

My boyfriend and I use one to keep track of our bills at home. Just easier than sorting it out over email.

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Last night an old friend who runs a small software company confessed a secret. When he and his staff answer technical questions for clients, they are often "only" searching Google. At one point, he even asked a client: "Do you really want us to search Google for you at $100/hour?" Yes, in fact they did. My friend thought that was crazy. I suggested that it's not as crazy as it sounds. Effective search depends on reservoirs of tacit knowledge and unconscious skill. Some people possess much deeper reservoirs, and/or can tap into them more effectively, than others. That makes them valuable.

Lately, though, I'm less inclined to accept that some people are natural information hounds, and others aren't, and that's just the way of it. Innate talent clearly plays a role, but so does learned skill. What the learnable component of effective search may be, though, is very unclear. So I've begun to reflect on, and document, my own search habits in order to try to discover what it is that I've actually learned how to do.

Here's an example from an item back in August:

I knew the title of the talk I wanted to cite: The (Real) State of the Union: Atlantic Monthly Panel. But it took a while to find it on the site. My search strategy went like so:

query	outcome
state union	fail
state of the union	fail
"state of the union"	fail
atlantic	succeed

Should've let Google do it, maybe, but in any case I found my way to the home page for the event. I was seeking two facts. First, the name of the woman whose 9-minute segment of the hour-and-a-half panel impressed me. Second, the timecodes for that segment. The event page provides neither.

It wasn't easy to find the speaker's name. Here was the search strategy:

action	outcome
listen to podcast intro	partial success (sounds like Shannon Branley or Brantley or Bradlee, with the Numerica Foundation)
google query: shannon branlee	fail
google query: numerica foundation	fail
google query: ted halstead (also mentioned in connection with the foundation)	partial success (refine query to New America Foundation)
google query: new america foundation	partial success (found the organization)
new america foundation query: shannon	success (it's Shannon Brownlee)

You can see some patterns emerging from the fog: exact phrase search, the lateral maneuver from Shannon Branlee to Ted Halstead. There are a lot more of these patterns needing to be codified, but first we need to collect more examples of articulated search strategies. So I plan to catalog mine here and would love to be able to find yours here.

Admittedly it's hard to capture these examples. We're always in a hurry to find what we're looking for, and when we do, the strategy that we hauled up from the unconscious depths sinks right back down. But if we could capture and share some of these examples, it'd be really useful.

A while ago I ran into a beautiful example that I failed to capture, and now I'm kicking myself. It went something like this:

Next time something like that happens, you can bet that I'll freeze-dry the example and pin it down in my collection box.

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My guest for this week's podcast is John Wilkin. He's the director of the University of Michigan Library's technology department, and coordinator of the library's joint digitization project with Google. It's been two years since Google began partnering with the University of Michigan and with other libraries, including Harvard and the New York Public Library. In this conversation we talk about the UM's earlier (and still-ongoing) efforts to digitize its 7-million-volume library, about how the partnership with Google has radically accelerated that process, and about what this is all going to mean for libraries, for publishers, for Google, and for all us.

Web resources mentioned in the podcast include:

• JSTOR, a Mellon Foundation project chartered to "build a reliable and comprehensive digital archive of important scholarly journal literature"
• Making of America, "a digital library of primary sources in American social history from the antebellum period through reconstruction"
• The Michigan Digitization Project, and in particular the contract between UM and Google
• Distributed Proofreaders, which "provides a web-based method of easing the proofreading work associated with the digitization of Public Domain books into Project Gutenberg e-books"

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The November episode of The Screening Room features PowerSchool, Pearson School Systems' popular student information system (SIS). I'm joined by Pearson's Paul Smith and by Sharlene Karbowski, an IT administrator with the Westside school district in Omaha, Nebraska, where PowerSchool has been running since 2001.

If you're a teacher, student, or parent in a school system that uses PowerSchool, or another SIS, you already know how these systems work and why they're valuable. But if your school system hasn't yet deployed an SIS, this screencast will serve as a useful introduction to the genre.

By way of full disclosure, my own school system is in the process of deploying PowerSchool but has postponed a planned rollout of the portals that enable teachers, parents, and students to access the system by way of the web. So for me, this screencast was opportunity to explore both the risks and the benefits of opening up those portals.

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By far the biggest conversation starter here, since I switched on comments a few months ago, has been Why can't Johnny download? In that item, I presented a little download assistant that can be used standalone or in combination with a target URL. It aims to provide a single context for two different uses of an URL:

1. To load a resource into your browser
2. To save a resource to your local disk

Although I talked in the original item about transmission of data by value (e.g., emailing an attachment) versus by reference (e.g., emailing an URL), the ensuing conversation helped me clarify that, while the distinction between those two modes is indeed a perennial source of confusion, my helper isn't really intended for end-to-end transfer. It's just tries to make the essential load/save duality of a hyperlink, which I take for granted, more understandable to folks who don't.

For example, I'm sometimes asked to "send" someone one of the various audio or video files I've posted to the web. Similarly my wife, who is an artist, is often asked to "send" someone one of the image files that she's posted to the web. To me, the obvious and natural thing to do in these cases is email an URL. But, particularly in my wife's case, the recipients are often unsatisifed by this response. She has more than once had to download one of these files, and then email it as an attachment, in order to satisfy the expectations of the recipient.

I think there are two (related) reasons why this happens. First, the procedure to open or save an URL transmitted in the body of an email message is nothing like the procedure to open or save an attachment. Second, the load/save duality of hyperlinks is just not well understood, period. What I'm looking for is a way to contextualize and document the open-or-save-via-URL procedure.

Let's look at an URL in the context of a web page:

http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/screenroom/dabble.mov

I take it for granted that I can a) click to load, or b) right-click to save. But this opportunity for dual use is not widely appreciated, partly because the semantics of right-click-to-save differ among browsers. With this contextualization of the target URL I'm trying to show that there are two things you can do with this URL, as well as explain how to do the second and less-obvious thing.

Of course it's hard (maybe impossible) to solve any problem in this domain without creating a new one. In this case, as several folks rightly pointed out, the contextualizing URL is an unwieldy thing that email clients are likely to mangle. Shortening it is an obvious solution which, in turn, creates yet another new problem.

A subtler problem is the very thing I've stated as a goal: to clarify the opportunity for dual use. Choice itself is sometimes the enemy. In a context where the intended use of an URL is to save the resource, not load it, should the latter choice simply be hidden? That's the purpose of a server-transmitted HTTP header like:

Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="dabble.mov"

When you request a download from, say, SourceForge, or YouSendIt, or many other services that are explicitly for downloading rather than loading/viewing resources, they use such a header to raise a Save As dialog box in your browser.

And yet...these services are rarely confident of their ability to hide the dual-use nature of the URL. Hence the familiar idiom:

If your download does not begin shortly, you can use this direct link.

Which link is, of course, the very thing whose dual-use nature was meant to be hidden.

There are valid arguments on all sides of this issue. The lively discussion attached to the earlier entry shows that it's far from settled, and not likely to be settled anytime soon.

It's interesting to speculate on the role of language here. Suppose that instead of this:

We'd always had this:

...where Action was any one of Save Target As or Save Link As or Download Linked File, but always the same one everywhere. We'll never know, and it's very unlikely that we'll ever be able to synchronize the terminology now, but this semantic muddle is clearly an ongoing problem.

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Imagine a future version of Amazon.com where the price for each product is reported in two different ways: as dollars (P1), and also as carbon-adjusted dollars (P2). Now consider a pair of competing products, A and B, under two different scenarios. In one scenario, A's P2 is lower than B's, but A's P1 is higher than B's. Some people will be willing to pay the higher P1 (i.e., more dollars) to reward A's lower P2 (i.e., less environmental impact), but most won't.

In the other scenario, however, A's P2 is still lower than B's, but its P1 is about the same. In other words, there's no penalty to the buyer for rewarding A's lower environmental impact. If the P2 data are available, it's a rational choice. [Full story at InfoWorld.com]

Several readers wrote to dispute the assumption that global warming is a real threat, and that one useful response would be to restructure manufacturing operations and supply chains in ways that reduce the amount of carbon we're pumping into the atmosphere. Fair enough. In fact, I should have broadened the argument because it does not depend on that assumption.

We can all agree, for example, on the need to reduce the economic and geopolitical instabilities resulting from our dependence on oil. From that perspective, the alternative pricing mechanism I'm proposing would be a way to reward suppliers who organize their supply chains in ways that reduce that dependency. Supermarkets, for example, use feel-good labels like "locally-grown," but they don't quantify what that means in terms of transportation miles saved. Reporting that number would help me evaluate the environmental benefit associated with paying more for local strawberries. More subtly, in the case of similarly-priced items -- say, strawberries from California versus Rhode Island -- it would enable me to prefer non-local sources that are relatively closer to home.

But is such measurement even possible? Brian Bartlett writes (email quoted with permission) thinks not:

Yes, we do call pollution, among many other things, externalities, but that does not mean we have enough data to predict the exact amount of an externality in, for instance, a supply chain let alone quantify them by dollar value. I came to this conclusion while examining the EuP regulation proposed for the European Union and what is required is statistically impossible to reliably measure or predict. Simply consider the case where one manufacturer in the supply chain for an item relies on two or more other suppliers. One has to know, at all times, exactly their contributions to the final product including transportation externalities for each to quantify the overall externality cost. I have yet to see industry ever accomplish that reliably. Not even the US military can accomplish it and they have tried. Another externality, transportation of product from warehouse to customer, be it business to business or business to customer, will vary radically by location, time of year, etc. Again, you can at best predict after the fact (hindsight is ever 20/20).

This is the same type of problem in information theory as to why a centralized, command economy will not work. There is always lag in measurements and statistical past does not always reliably predict statistical future, although it may help, somewhat. Models, especially predictive models, are a field I have been working in for over thirty years and both your presentation here, and EuP, are unworkable in the real world.

The European Union's forthcoming EuP (energy-using product) mandate was, by the way, characterized as a "coming regulatory storm" in a recent pair of columns by my colleague Ephraim Schwartz. Read it and weep, says Ephraim. So I did read, and did weep. No, that's not what I have in mind at all. So far as I can see, sticking a flowery eco-label on a product is about like sticking a "locally-grown" label on it. I may feel vaguely virtuous, but I have no additional data to inform my purchasing decision.

Some systems already report this kind of data. You can, for example, easily discover the route traveled by any FedEx package. That was an amazing feat when FedEx first accomplished it, and it's hardly routine even today. But as SOA goes mainstream it's something that gets easier for more companies to do.

The key point here is that nobody requires FedEx to report that data. It does so in order to gain competitive advantage. In a world where people are more conscious of environmental factors, and more likely to include them in purchasing decisions, reporting the numbers behind the feel-good label becomes a competitive strategy.

Comments

In a column last week, I wished for a simple screen-sharing solution that would Embrace Constraints and Do One Thing Well. Apparently I'm not the only one who feels those needs. Many folks responded with suggestions, both on my blog and in email.

The names of a few of the usual suspects came up: Acrobat Connect (formerly Macromedia Breeze), and GotoMeeting. But when I reviewed my correspondence, I counted no fewer than nine dark horses that I'd never heard of:

Beam2Present
BeamYourScreen
CrossLoop
GatherPlace
Glance
LiveLook
LogMeIn
ScreenShare
Yugma

Although I can scarcely begin to evaluate all these, there may be some value in reporting the list to those of you who might want to. Based on the length of this list, as well as the anecdotal feedback I've received, it seems fair to conclude that the attractor for all this entrepeneurial energy is a need that the incumbents still aren't satisfying.

Finally, a mea culpa. In the column I said:

I've used every screen-sharing system...

Comments

Most people, to this day, prefer to convey files using email attachments rather than URLs. Over the years I've tried, and mostly failed, to explain why and how to use the URL-oriented approach. Programmers do this naturally, because programmers know the difference between transmission of data by value and transmission of data by reference. But almost nobody else does.

I've long understood that part of the problem was that most people didn't have easy access to web storage, and weren't in a position to upload a file whose URL could then be transmitted as a convenient proxy for the file itself. But that's changing. Lately I'm seeing lots of people who can upload to web storage, using various methods that are easy for them to understand and apply. What's still not easy for most people to understand and apply, though, is the method of using an URL to accomplish file transfer.

Here's a typical scenario. In order to transmit a 50-megabyte image, audio, or video file, I upload it to the web and send somebody the URL -- e.g., http://myserver.com/50Meg.tiff. In the recipient's mail client, that URL will probably be rendered as clickable, but that's only appropriate for loading the referenced resource into a browser. It's not very useful for downloading the URL.

Why not? The method for downloading an URL is just not well understood by most people. Email clients provide context for understanding how to extract an attachment, but they provide none for understanding how to download an URL.

So, I've created a contextualizer, or helper, in the form of a little single-page application. Let's say I want to transmit, to you, the 50-megabyte video file dabble.flv, which exists on the web at http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/screenroom/dabble.flv. I combine the URL of the helper with the URL of the target file to create a context for downloading it. Try it and see what you think.

(The helper can also be used standalone -- that is, not combined with a target URL. In that case, the person being helped would have to paste in the URL.)

I hope that, next time I'm trying to transmit a big file by reference, or trying to enable someone else to do so, this will help break down the conceptual and procedural barriers that tend to get in the way. Please let me know if it works for you in those situations, and more importantly, if it doesn't work, why not. Likewise, please let me know if there's a version of this idea that's already successful in common use. Seems like such a thing should exist, but lots of simple things that should exist don't.

Comments

Joining me for today's podcast is Rajiv Gupta, CEO of Securent. His new company, which has been operating in stealth mode for a couple of years and just announced itself today, is focused on the thorny problem of fine-grained access control. In this conversation we discuss the role of XACML, the Extensible Access Control Markup Language, we talk about how to wrap or intercept legacy security policies in order to hoist them out of application logic and place them in the network where they belong, and we explore the relationship between fine-grained security which focuses on individual resources, and coarse-grained security which deals with users and roles.

Comments

Most web presentations of data are designed for passive viewing, not active analysis. For an example of what things could and should be like, check out episode 10 of The Screening Room. At the six-minute mark in that screencast about Dabble DB, a web database, Smallthought's Avi Bryant -- who is analyzing a set of data about investments -- wants to look at investments by U.S. state as a function of population. The current dataset includes states but not their populations. To add population data, Avi visits a website that lists states and populations, activates a JavaScript bookmarklet, and imports two columns from the HTML table on that web page. [Full story at InfoWorld.com]

In the same column, I referred to Doug Purdy's adventure in acquiring and using a list of Fortune 500 company names, and my web reformulation of an Edward Tufte data graphic. It's all compelling stuff, but there's something about Avi Bryant's maneuver that shouts Knowledge Navigator.

In this 90-second excerpt from the screencast, you can see how Avi hoists data right out of a web page and weaves it into a structured view.

So natural, so powerful. How can we not have this capability always and everywhere?

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Thanks to Denise Getts, a librarian assistant at the Tucker Free Library in Henniker, NH, there is now a LibraryLookup bookmarklet for Tucker's SageBrush InfoCentre catalog system. With the addition of SageBrush, there are now 20 different types of catalog systems supported by the bookmarklet generator.

When Denise first wrote to me about this, I told her that I couldn't suss out the URL-line query that would work for the SageBrush OPAC, so I suggested that she ask the vendor for help. The company responded, and now a problem has been solved not only for the patrons of the Tucker Free Library but for some unknowably larger set of SageBrush implementations in libraries around the world. Although Denise may not (yet) realize it, what she has done here is a perfect example of Wiring the Web.

Update: I just noticed on the Tucker Library's website that there's a program called New Hampshire downloadable audio books. Excellent! And my library participates. Most excellent!

I've said to several folks in the past week that it's a challenge to be aware of all of the new services coming online, and that I have to remind myself to visit sites I'm involved with in order to see what new services may have appeared.

Does this sound familiar? It should, it's another version of the RSS story. Rather than visiting a bunch of websites to discover what new services they've added, I should be subscribed to a "new services" feed at each site, and flow those into an aggregate "new services" feed.

I've recently discussed with a couple of folks how RSS, for all its momentum, has yet to cross the chasm. This example suggests another angle of attack. If I'm slapping my forehead for not knowing that the New Hampshire libraries have downloadable audio books, you can bet a bunch of people are in the same boat. We all hate missing out on a good deal, and we also hate scattershot email notifications. An aggregated "new services" feed neatly solves both those problems.

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A public radio producer called me the other day to discuss his idea for a story on the Internet's role in the recent US midterm election. The hook? He'd heard that Internet use on election day reached levels not seen since 9/11. That didn't ring true for me, though I did find one report that Internet Broadcasting, a publisher of TV-station websites, had its biggest day ever. As it turned out, the producer had based his idea on that same report.

Well, if the total amount of Internet use wouldn't be the story hook, I counter-proposed, perhaps the evolution in styles of Net use could be. Internet Broadcasting's banner day, for example, was Wolf Blitzer's Waterloo. The poor guy looked pathetic on CNN, pointing to computer-generated graphics and reading out the numbers. Who wouldn't want interactive graphics, more numbers, and above all on-demand access to our own state and local results? For years, it's true, people have been going online for that experience. But this election may have nailed TV's coffin in terms of data delivery.

Then there was the dizzying interplay among mainstream media, blogs, and online video on such issues as poll-watcher intimidation and e-voting glitches. In one case, amateur video flowed "upstream" when the New York Times mentioned a RedState.com item about a YouTube video that claimed to document intimidation of poll watchers in Philadelphia. In another case, pro video flowed "downstream" when BradBlog posted a segment from Lou Dobbs Tonight on e-voting problems.

In the end there was no "upstream" or "downstream", just a swirl of currents. Let's hop in the kayak and take a tour.

The Wall Street Journal sounded this theme:

When Americans go to vote tomorrow, a new breed of activist will be on guard, monitoring polling stations for everything from voting-machine glitches to long lines to registration snafus. [WSJ.com]

Michelle Malkin spun it thusly:

Behind the civic-minded facade are far Left radicals whose main concern is not in ensuring a fair election process--but in preemptively undermining and delegitimizing it.
...
Like I said yesterday, bring a camera if you can. [Michelle Malkin]

To help us answer questions about the use of cameras in polling places, she usefully cited the Center for Citizen Media's Election Day FAQ. In a followup, the Center noted:

When we asked for your questions, we never expected that 80% would be about taking photographs or videos at the polls. [Center for Citizen Media]

What did the followup guidance say about the Pennsylvania rules that applied to the poll-watching video-blogger in Philadelphia? Unfortunately, nothing conclusive.

The New York Times, meanwhile, twice mentioned the fact that RedState.com text-blogged the Philly video-blogger. First on Wednesday:

Erick Erickson, RedState's chief blogger, also included a report of poll watcher intimidation in Philadelphia, along with a link to a video on YouTube that appeared to show a certified poll observer (armed with a video camera) being blocked from a polling station. [New York Times]

(Oddly, the Times devoted almost as much space to its coverage of RedState.com as RedState.com did to either of its brief items on the incident. Even more oddly, neither of those seems to include the link to the video.)

Then today:

Right-leaning RedState.com reports alleged intimidation of poll-watchers in Philadelphia... [New York Times]

The comment thread attached to one of those RedState.com items included this exchange:

Q: What is your source for this? Philly.com is not reporting anything like this.

A: http://cbs3.com/local/local_story_311120726.html [RedState.com]

And here is the story cited by the commenter:

Officials said approximately a dozen claims were filed stating they were being interfered with as they entered the D and Clearfield polling place in Kensington.

In the 19th Ward, several complaints were filed regarding voters being told who to vote for.

The District Attorney's office and Philadelphia Police are looking into the accusations.

"We sent our District Attorney's detectives, the police department was also called and Federal, F.B.I. agents were called out as well to make sure that whatever was going on in East Division stop and that no voter was intimidated," said Philadelphia District Attorney Lynn Abraham. [CBS 3]

Whew. We really have stepped through the looking glass. It is strange (and disheartening) to see that the New York Times didn't particularly care whether there actually was poll-watcher (or voter) intimidation in Philly, but was fascinated that a "right-leaning" blog reported "alleged" intimidation, and that the allegation took the form of a YouTube video.

It is strange (and exhilarating) to realize that, with a bit of web search and navigation, we can so easily triangulate on that intimidation flap from a dozen different perspectives. We don't need to depend on the Times to deliver that story any more than we need to depend on Wolf Blitzer to recite our congressional results.

It may take another election or two before the strangeness wears off, and all this seems familiar and unremarkable. The sooner the better because, while it's true that we enjoy powerful new access to information about our political system, it's also true that we've barely scratched the surface.

Here's a crazy idea. I checked www.phila.gov to see what Philadelphia District Attorney Lynn Abraham's team concluded about alleged intimidation. Of course I found nothing there about that investigation, or indeed any investigation. But why not? Why should we depend on reporters and bloggers to dredge up this information? It's public information; we fund the activities that produce it; we should expect to get it through the web and directly from the source.

Last summer I wrote about Washington DC's extraordinary experiment in digital democracy and transparent government. So far as I can tell, that story is still a sleeper, both inside and outside the Beltway, for the old media and the new. I'm waiting for everyone to wake up and notice. After that, I'll be waiting for everyone to stop noticing and take it for granted. That'll be a great non-story.

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Jim Russell is a geographer, social theorist, and would-be social entrepeneur who blogs at Burgh Diaspora. In today's podcast we discuss his analysis of ways to organize Pittsburgh's diaspora -- the informal network of ex-Pittsburghers scattered around the world. Why might that matter? Jim's thesis, which I find fascinating, is that the "distance trust" embodied in that kind of network can have important social and economic effects not only for Pittsburgh, but for local and regional populations everywhere in this era of pervasive mobility and telecommunications.

A key point of reference for our conversation is Richard Florida's notion of the geography of the creative class. Florida wrote a book on the subject, and ITConversations has a podcast of his talk at PopTech 2004.

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Like the Car Talk Puzzler, the Friday podcast needs to take a break, now and then, to recharge its batteries. It will return next week. Meanwhile, if you're looking for some audio brain food and haven't yet tuned into The Long Now Foundation's monthly Seminars On Long-term Thinking, I highly recommend them. So far I've listened to about half the series and, while they're all worthwhile, Stephen Lansing's Perfect Order: A Thousand Years in Bali has made the biggest impression on me. It's about politics, religion, complexity, cellular automata, irrigation, pest control, sustainable agriculture, social networks, technology transfer, self-organizing systems, and -- of course, since it's a Long Now talk -- time.

There's one thing I wish screensharing systems would do well: screensharing. I watch a lot of demos projected to my computer. It's always a struggle, both for the presenter and for me. Windows or Mac? IE or Firefox? Who has the latest version of the client? Who's the host? Which application is shared? Can you see my screen?

While we answer these questions, the first five or ten minutes of every meeting swirl down the drain. I've used every screensharing system and, from this perspective, they're roughly the same. None performs its basic function simply and well. All are determined to add whiteboards, chat, and filing systems. In principle these are useful features. In practice, for most people most of the time, they're just not usable. [Full story at InfoWorld.com]

Several readers have pointed out, in email, that Glance delivers the "do one thing well" experience. Having just tried it, I agree. The VNC-based projector is for Windows-only, but anyone can connect using VNC's Java viewer. It's nicely done. For companies doing lots of demos, the $120/month corporate rate is reasonable. At $50/month, though, the personal rate is too pricey for occasional ad-hoc use.

Other readers ask: Why not just use VNC directly? I do, all the time, but most civilians don't control their own firewalls and so VNC is a non-starter for them. Which leads me to a question of my own: Are there free or less-expensive solutions for firewalled VNC projectors?

Update: Glance founder/CEO Rich Baker reports:

Our initial version used VNC's engine inside a wrapper. We built a proxy that allowed the engine to connect using our call model, added tunneling, multipoint, etc., and eventually changed out the VNC engine as well. So today's Glance service runs entirely on our own code base.

Glance sessions still start using TCP on VNC's 5500 port. Failing that, it automatically tunnels HTTP to port 80. If a guest on a PC doesn't have Java (or has a version of Java that has a nasty bug or is slow (Microsoft's old JVM) or is damaged in some way), Glance automatically pushes a tiny ActiveX viewer or an executable viewer. This allows us to connect to nearly any PC. Macs come with a great version of Java. Likewise, most Linux folks have a Java-enabled browser. So we can connect to nearly anyone.

Our goal is to keep the UI spare and the footprint light. We are adding some capabilities in the near future, hopefully without compromising simplicity.

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On Monday I visited Nuance for an update on the company's speech recognition products and initiatives. Two years ago, my screencast on Dragon NaturallySpeaking 8 demonstrated what was then the state of the art in automatic dictation. Dragon has for years been asymptotically approaching the point at which dictation becomes routine and general-purpose. For most of us, it hasn't yet reached that point. I didn't upgrade to the latest version 9 because, despite improvements, I didn't think it would yet cross my threshold for routine use. Nuance's demo of Dragon 9 confirmed that hunch.

Peter Mahoney, Nuance's marketing VP, showed me how he uses Dragon 9 for dictation. When he read a prepared statement, the results were perfect. Then I handed him a copy of Newsweek and asked him to read from a random article. The results were still very good. True, the Arabic names in the story had to be spelled out. But that wouldn't be the case if those names were common in your domain of discourse. And training Dragon to absorb specialized vocabulary is both easy and effective.

The real problem, at least for me, lies elsewhere. And the test I gave Peter yielded a stunning example of it. At one point he read:

...it's rarely so simple...

Dragon wrote:

...it's really so simple...

Because Dragon works so hard to produce plausible results, this class of error resists casual proofreading. In this case, you would have to read very carefully to notice that Dragon had reversed the intended meaning of the sentence. For me, anyway, the cost of finding and fixing these kinds of subtle errors outweighs the benefit of routine dictation, at least when a keyboard is available.

Keyboards aren't always available, though, and that fact made the second part of the demo a real eye-opener. Check out this 55-second video of Peter dictating to his Treo:

In case you can't play this video, it shows two examples of speech recognition. First Peter dictates a brief memo, and uses his voice to change "LaGuardia" to "Logan". Then he speaks the query "Eastern equine encephalitis" to Google and reviews the results. Very cool!

How do you shoehorn Dragon onto a mobile gadget? You don't. There's only a small client that relays recorded audio to a server and receives recognized text. This kind of mobile dictation should be available as a carrier-provided service, for the popular handheld operating systems, sometime next year. I'll be curious to see who uses it, and how.

In our follow-on discussion we talked about how Nuance's software is being used in the automotive realm. Cars themselves offer a growing range of voice-controllable functions: temperature, navigation. Passengers' Bluetooth-equipped gadgets paired to cars' audio I/O systems are another emerging domain for voice control.

What about those us who drive older cars and use older cellphones? I think there's still all kinds of untapped opportunity. For example, while driving I'd love to be able to speak questions like these and hear the answers:

How many new emails from Jill in the last 4 hours?

What are the subject headers?

Can you read the message entitled "New panelist for your session"?

Given the kind of client/server architecture that Nuance has developed, even my lowly LG VX4400 should be able to handle a protocol like this. The magic would all be in cloud, where the speech recognizer and my mail server would consummate a service-oriented marriage.

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The October episode of The Screening Room features Dabble DB, a web-based workgroup database that, in the style of 37Signals, focuses on simplicity and embraces constraints. Dabble doesn't aim to do full-blown database application development, or sophisticated query, or heavy transactions. Its mission, instead, is to enable teams to easily manage and flexibly evolve modest (say, 30- to 50-megabyte) quantities of structured data.

As underscored by today's announcement of Google's JotSpot acquisition, there's a growing interest in flexible, user-friendly, web-based data management for teams. An instance of something like Dabble, parked somewhere in the cloud, can be a compelling alternative to that tired old method of data-oriented collaboration, namely emailing Excel attachments. And the trend toward commodity server virtualization means that those instances can scale the way they need to: out (i.e., more) rather than up (i.e., bigger).

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Reading Edward Tufte's latest opus, Beautiful Evidence, I stopped on page 176 to consider his redesign of a table of data about cancer survival rates, shown (in part) here. As you can see, it's a stack of sparklines, each decorated with data labels. In Tufte's online forum you can find the original table, the redesign, and an assortment of PowerPoint manglings of the data.

As is often the case when reading Tufte, I asked myself two questions:

1. How might this redesign work more interactively on the web?
2. How can more people be empowered to do such redesigns, for print and for the web?

One answer to the first question is this web interpretation of Tufte's redesign (code). Here I've borrowed part of Joe Gregorio's sparklines kit and used it to generate one data graphic (e.g. Prostate.png) for each disease. I've also wrapped these images in a linked set of four HTML files, sorted by 5-, 10-, 15-, and 20-year survival rates.

This version sacrifices some of the typographic elegance of the original in exchange for some of the benefits of the web: interactivity (you can review different sortings), data availability (the data are included in the HTML files).

The second question is much, much harder. There's nothing earthshaking about what I've done here. But most people won't attempt any data visualization that isn't supported in the standard chart kits. For starters, there's a conceptual obstacle. You've got to have the idea in the first place. I got the idea from Tufte, but Tufte's brain doesn't scale very well. I can't directly apply it to novel situations.

Then there's a logistical hurdle. You've got to be able to implement the idea. In my case, I was able to:

1. Understand that I could leverage Joe Gregorio's sparkline kit.
2. Acquire the kit, along with its supporting software.
3. Learn enough about the kit and its infrastructure to generate individual data images.
4. Combine those data images, using HTML and CSS, to achieve the effect I wanted.

Of course my brain doesn't scale either. This posting might give you a useful idea, but you can't apply my brain to your novel situations any more than I can apply Tufte's to mine.

Can web collaboration address these scaling problems? Maybe. We have lots of good of ingredients: social networks for images, code, and documentation. Time to get cooking!

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John Schneider, the CTO of AgileDelta and the driving force behind E4X, is now evangelizing Efficient XML, an alternate binary syntax for XML. In today's podcast we discuss the motivations for this proposed W3C standard, its theoretical foundations, and its uses.

There have been a various binary XML proposals in recent years. It's a controversial idea, and I haven't paid close attention to the discussion, but at a high level John's pitch sounds reasonable to me. If an alternate binary representation of XML can be managed under the covers, side-by-side with conventional XML in a way that's transparent to existing XML-aware tools and APIs, then a myriad of memory- or bandwidth-constrained devices and applications can leverage those familiar tools and APIs.

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Why isn't videoconferencing more compelling? When we say we want to look the other person in the eye, what we really want to do is read the microexpressions of the face. As Malcolm Gladwell points out in Blink, people adept at reading faces can literally read minds. And at a sufficient frame rate the visual channel can transmit those microexpressions. [Full story at InfoWorld.com]

Here's a 20-second snippet from Robert's video to give you a feel for how the Cisco system works:

At the crappy level of video quality shown here, or even at the level shown in Robert's original H.264 QuickTime clip, we can't judge the effect of Cisco's high definition video. We can, however, see how the layout of screens and desks creates a powerful illusion of circular seating. Cisco's astronomical price notwithstanding, though, the need for all participants to visit these specially-designed rooms limits this approach to special circumstances.

What could make ordinary iChat A/V or Skype videoconferencing more emotionally effective? It's natural to assume that high-definition video is a make-or-break requirement. But if what really matters is face-reading, is the ability to count the number of whiskers in a five-o'clock shadow as critical as we imagine?

Here's the critical passage from Malcolm Gladwell's 1992 New Yorker article, The Naked Face, which became the face-reading chapter of Blink:

Perhaps the most famous involuntary expression is what Ekman has dubbed the Duchenne smile, in honor of the nineteenth-century French neurologist Guillaume Duchenne, who first attempted to document the workings of the muscles of the face with the camera. If I ask you to smile, you'll flex your zygomatic major. By contrast, if you smile spontaneously, in the presence of genuine emotion, you'll not only flex your zygomatic but also tighten the orbicularis oculi, pars orbitalis, which is the muscle that encircles the eye. It is almost impossible to tighten the orbicularis oculi, pars lateralis, on demand, and it is equally difficult to stop it from tightening when we smile at something genuinely pleasurable. This kind of smile "does not obey the will," Duchenne wrote. "Its absence unmasks the false friend." When we experience a basic emotion, a corresponding message is automatically sent to the muscles of the face. That message may linger on the face for just a fraction of a second, or be detectable only if you attached electrical sensors to the face, but it's always there. [Malcolm Gladwell: The Naked Face]

The protagonist in this piece, psychologist Paul Ekman, mapped out his Facial Action Coding System back in the 1960s, using videotapes. He clearly didn't watch those tapes in high definition. He did, however, watch them at 30 frames per second.

What's the minimum framerate for face-reading? Is it possible that the 15fps typical of web-style video doesn't capture fleeting microexpressions but that 30fps does? If we traded resolution for framerate might low-end videoconferencing cross a threshold of effectiveness? I'd love to know if this experiment has been done, and if so what its outcome was.

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Writing on the coComment team blog, Stephanie Booth addresses the thorny question of comment ownership:

Do we consider it a problem that the commenter doesn't retain control over the comments he leaves on other people's blogs? For example, it has always bothered me that value-added comments of mine, scattered all over the blogosphere, could disappear any day at a whim of the blog owner. [coComment blog: Who owns your comments?]

Stephanie's item came to my attention because it's part of a blog-to-blog conversation that touches on items I've written before. Although she responded briefly to this item in a comment, which is trackable thanks to coComment, she used the coComment team blog to present the larger idea that it inspired. In that context she wasn't reacting to a single blog, but to a conversational cluster involving, among others, Paul Sergeant, Jerry Slezak, Ben Metcalfe, and me.

From my perspective as a blog author evaluating the reactions to my work, there are three ways to receive feedback. All are comparable in terms of the immediacy and completeness of that feedback.

First, del.icio.us shows me who's bookmarked my items, when, and with what tags and commentary.

Second, crawlers like Technorati and Google blog search round up the blog-to-blog conversations that touch my blog.

Third, my comment system offers another mode of feedback. If we grant that all three modes are forms of conversation, then it may be helpful to try to visualize things from the perspective of speakers and listeners.

As a speaker, I see this kind of step function:

ownership and
control of speech   -----------+                     +----------------------    (high)
                               |                     | +--------------------         
                               |                     | |        
                               | +-------------------|-+                           ^
                               | |                   |                             |
                               | |                   |          
effort and                     +---------------------+                               
potential impact   --------------+                                               (low)
                     
                   bookmarking -> in-blog commenting -> blog-to-blog conversation

When choosing where I want to be on the X axis, I think about ownership/control as well as effort/impact. When both matter, I choose the heavyweight option and write on my own blog. Bookmarking optimizes for low effort, which also means low impact, but sacrifices no control. The really interesting tradeoff is in the middle zone of in-blog commenting. Usually but not always, speech in that zone requires an intermediate amount of effort and can have an intermediate impact. That's useful in some circumstances, but there's no getting around the extreme sacrifice of ownership and control.

Now as a listener, without the help of something like coComment, I see this:

ability to hear     -----------+                     +----------------------    (high)
                               |                     | 
                               |                     |                             ^
                               |                     |                             |
                               +---------------------+                               
                                                                                 (low)
 
                   bookmarking -> in-blog commenting -> blog-to-blog conversation

On either end of the spectrum I can hear pretty well. In the middle I often can't. It's true that some comment systems (including the one I'm using here, WordPress) offer per-conversation RSS feeds, but it's a lot of overhead to actually use them.

When I listen with the help of coComment, that dip flattens out and I can hear the middle zone much better. But, while it's true that I might want to use the coComment RSS feeds to archive what's said in that middle zone, I don't own and can't control the speech that I choose to utter there.

How much do ownership and control matter? It depends. Maybe not much if an in-blog comment thread is a Wiki-like exercise in collaborative sense-making. Maybe a lot if the commentary is more debate-like, or if contributions tend toward the high end of the effort/impact continuum. In either case, you want to be able to hear as well as you possibly can.

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I'm starting to see more people catching on to the idea of embedding small screencasts directly into web pages. In this blog entry, for example, Pascal van Hecke uses the technique to illustrate a nice recipe for organizing what he calls loose MP3s -- that is, MP3 files that are linked from web pages you visit. The first half of the recipe involves a simple Greasemonkey script that rewrites the page you're on to include the same inline MP3 player that's used on del.icio.us pages like del.icio.us/tag/system:media:audio. To see the player in action, click one of the right-pointing blue arrows on that page.

The second half of the recipe involves using the tag this option that appears when you activate the player. As Pascal's screencast illustrates, del.icio.us will generate a podcast-style feed (i.e, an RSS feed with enclosures) for URLs that point to MP3s. His method, which I'm now using as well, is to preview an MP3 file using the inline player and, if it's interesting, bookmark it with the tag tolisten. Then you can use a podcatcher to subscribe to the generated feed, e.g.:

del.icio.us/judell/system:media:audio+tolisten

By the way, although Pascal's screencast suggests that you have to assign tags like system:media:audio or system:media:mp3 to make this work, it appears that del.icio.us will just infer those tags if the URL ends with an MP3 filename.

I found another nice example of embedded screencasting on the CoComment start page. It's just a little animated GIF that shows Firefox users how to drag the button that represents the bookmarklet to the toolbar. Here's one frame¹ from the animation:

You can see the animated version here.

The more complex procedure for IE users isn't illustrated in this way, but if it were, that would be more focused and effective for this purpose than my standalone Bookmarklets 101 tutorial.

Edward Tufte's mission statement for sparklines is: intense, simple, word-size graphics. In a similar vein, there's an emerging species of embedded screencasts for which the mission statement might be: intense, simple, active demonstrations.

¹ Note to my future self, and others needing to learn (or remember) how to extract one frame from an animated GIF using ImageMagick:

convert animated.gif[0] frame0.gif

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Cricket Liu joins me for today's podcast. He's known for his popular books on DNS infrastructure, and as VP of Architecture at Infoblox has recently led an effort to identify and correct DNS security vulnerabilities.

In this conversation we discussed that work, and the related tool called Cricket Liu's DNS Advisor. But I began by asking him why it might or might not be a good idea to extend DNS in ways that identify humans rather than machines.

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Writing in this week's InfoWorld, Ephraim Schwartz says:

Google and its competitors are fighting for market share because, now, market share in and of itself means success. From now on, "the next big thing" will not mean great technology; it will mean whichever online entity can come up with the most "viewers."

If that means the content is at the bottom of the intelligence barrel, you won't hear investors complaining and you will see a lot of copycats. But what you won't see are inventive twenty-somethings putting their skills toward coming up with innovative technology to change our lives.

IWM: Are you offering staffers any incentives to blog?

Quittner: We're doing something that is novel for Time Inc. Our bloggers will be directly remunerated on the basis of their traffic. They'll be paid a modest CPM. Time Inc. will sell advertising on the individual blogs. So the bloggers will get to participate in the revenue they generate. [I Want Media: Josh Quittner: 'Everybody Wants to Be a Blogger']

Sounds great, right? Yes and no. The meritocratic impulse is terrific. But when dollars are attached only to the quantity of readers, listeners, and viewers, with no consideration given to their quality, the outcomes are predictable. Sensationalism will trump reason. "Content producers" will lie awake at night inventing new forms of astroturfing. We will race to the bottom.

The excruciating irony is that we are now, for the first time, in a position to do what media have always aspired to do. We can create durable relationships with subscribers (remember them?); we can progressively find out about our readers, listeners, and viewers; we can describe them to advertisers in ways that will support better "content" and better advertising. But that would require innovation which, as Ephraim quite rightly points out, is drowning in the rising tide.

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The blogosphere has been pretty quiet about yesterday's first official podcast of This American Life. My guess is that nobody wants to jinx this long-awaited and happy state of affairs.

In early June, I was one of a number of folks who noticed that the show's website had switched audio formats from Real to MP3, and who interpreted that move as a tacit endorsement of do-it-yourself podcatching. On June 20, I published and then retracted a takedown request from TAL's web wrangler, Elizabeth Meister. In the flurry of ensuing conversation, here are some quotes that stand out:

Jared Benedict:

Contrary to posts on Boing Boing and elsewhere, Jon Udell and I did not receive a "nastygram" or formal ceast and desist letter. Rather we received friendly emails from Ms. Meister, This American Life's webmaster, making a request to take down the hyperlinks and RSS feeds, or she'd regrettably have to get lawyers involved.

While Ms. Meister did miss the mark by accusing us of copyright infringement without a clear understanding of what we were actually doing, or what copyright law allows, she was trying to be polite and friendly which I appreciate.

To be clear, I was not storing or making any copies of their work, I was simply providing links to publicly accessible MP3's hosted on This American Life's own servers. It is my position that hyperlinking to publicly accessible MP3's is perfectly legal (see Ticketmaster v. Tickets.com) and fundamental to the existence of the web.

While I am confident that I am breaking no law, I am respecting TAL wishes by taking down the podcast and archive page which points to their MP3's. This American Life has decided to take the bizarre approach to Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) by asking nicely... which I suppose is better than using some Windows only Microsoft Media Player DRM or Sony Rootkit DRM.

Nick Carr:

Now, Jon Udell is an honorable guy, and I'm sure he doesn't think of downloading those files as an act of thievery in any way, shape or form. But what kind of strange logic leads someone to say that "although the archive page at This American Life still says that you can't download files, it's not true anymore." That's like saying that if I go out to the supermarket and leave my front door unlocked, then it's ok to come into my house and steal my china. Just because something's not locked up doesn't mean you can help yourself to it.

David Berlind:

Context really doesn't matter. If the URL exists, you must acquit. Otherwise, if you're putting MP3 files on the Web and you don't want someone pointing to them from the contexts of their choice, then, instead of sending takedown notices to that someone, take down the content itself. That way, nobody will point to it.

A Typical Joe:

I'm a fan of This American Life; I never listen to it.

This was and remains a complex affair. Along with Jared Benedict and many others, I believe that use and recontextualization are fundamental to the web. But just because you can use and recontextualize doesn't mean you always should. So I withdrew a blog posting for the first and only time, and I regretted the grief I caused Elizabeth Meister and TAL.

But I went further than that. Like Typical Joe (quoted above), TAL became the favorite show that I never listened to. Many others did, on MP3 players, ignoring TAL's extraordinary "DRM by asking nicely" stance. But for me that option became as unappealing as Audible or iTunes downloads, or Real streams. So I've not heard TAL since June, and I'm greatly looking forward to Episode 203.

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Today's screencast is a follow-on to last week's column and blog entry about how corporations are colonizing Second Life, and about what the real advantages of 3D simulation might or might not be. In that column I reacted to an upcoming Sun event which was held on October 10 (video clip). On that same day, I was invited to the Greater IBM Virtual Block Party.

Here's my 3-minute video report on IBM's event:

Both the column and this video report are a tad snarky, but I mean no disrespect either to Sun or to IBM. It's no mean feat to pull off virtual events like these, and hats off to both companies for their execution. As the long-anticipated wave of 3D technology finally begins to crest, though, I do want to provoke some discussion about gratuitous versus useful applications of the third dimension. In the IBM event, I found myself in a breakout session chatting with strangers about a topic whose premise I disagreed with. That would be unproductive enough in the real world. Because we lacked a synchronous voice channel, real identities, and sufficient emotional bandwidth, it felt even less productive here.

Being in-world doesn't mean anything, in and of itself, just like being on the web doesn't. And just as a lot of our intuitions about what to do on the web turned out to be not very helpful, so will a lot of our intuitions about what to do in 3D space.

While I was waiting for that screencast to render I ran into another example of the same kind of thing on the Google Earth Blog. The campaign against the coal industry's landscape-desecrating practice of mountaintop removal has used video, Flickr, and Google Earth to make its point. Of the three methods, I found Google Earth least compelling. In this brief clip, for example, the most prominent 3D artifacts are the Brobdingnagian flagpoles with half-mast flags stuck into Lilluputian mountains. It's what Edward Tufte would call chartjunk, executed in 3D.

Are there non-gratuitous uses of 3D for social interaction and data visualization? Of course. But we're going to have to work hard, really hard, to find them.

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Mark Ericson, director of SOA product strategy for BlueNote Networks, joins me for this week's podcast on the subject of VoIP/SOA convergence. When Mark talks about communications-enabling business processes, he doesn't just mean processes talking to one another, but also processes communicating with people -- and coordinating the communication among people. We've dreamed about unified communications forever, and for the most part we're still dreaming, but we'll get there one of these days. When we do, we'll wonder how we ever got along without the service-oriented integration of voice and data that BlueNote envisions.

Towards the end of our conversation we discuss Skype, and Mark suggests an interesting rationale for eBay's acquisition of it. As more and more high-value transactions flow through eBay, the level of trust between buyer and seller becomes increasingly critical. If you can recruit voice or video channels in the context of a transaction, you can strengthen that trust relationship. It's a great explanation that I hadn't heard before, and that I think is spot on.

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When Doug Kaye announced the availability of The Levelator, I hoped it would spare me the worst drudgery of podcast production. After recording and postprocessing my next Friday podcast this morning, I'm convinced that it will.

Here's the deal, from my perspective as an audio newbie now plunged into the deep end. As my podcasting method has evolved, I've settled into two modes of editing. In one mode, I refine the content of the recording. That involves fine-grained internal editing -- trimming out excessive ums, uhs, and pauses -- as well as coarse-grained edits that remove less interesting passages in order to focus on the most essential parts of the conversation. Applying both methods typically reduces the final product to somewhere between 70% and 90% of the original length and, in my opinion, sharpens the result in a way that's well worth the investment of time. I've always enjoyed this kind of editing in the textual realm, and it turns out that I enjoy it in the audio realm as well.

The other mode involves the purely technical work of taming sometimes-noisy phone lines and evening out audio levels. As I've become more sensitive to audio quality, I've found myself spending more and more time on the leveling process. It's not only needed to balance the caller and the callee. There can be a ton of loudness variation just within the caller's track. When you start fiddling with that, you're on a slippery slope that leads straight into a pit of drudgery.

In a talk given at the Podcast Academy, Daniel Steinberg noted that the normalization function in audio editors like Audacity and Audition "doesn't do what you think it does." I guess I'm not the only one who assumed, incorrectly, that normalization's job was even out loudness variation. But apparently it doesn't. It levels off peaks, but doesn't raise up valleys.

Levelator does do what many people expect normalization to do. It brings the valleys up close to the peaks. It's going to spare me a ton of the kind of editing drudgery that I'd outsource to an assistant if I could. And it's going to enable me to focus on doing the kind of editing that I wouldn't outsource even if I could. (Well, I'd outsource the fine-grained internal editing, but not the coarse-grained editing.)

The credit for this excellent hack goes to GigaVox engineers Bruce and Malcolm Sharpe. Here's part of the backstory from Doug's blog:

Bruce, with help from his son, Malcolm, had proven that he knew how to tackle these problems in ways that no one else anywhere in the audio/software industry has done to date. So I asked him, "Bruce, do you you think you can write a leveler that corrects for medium-term variations in loudness instead of the short-term and long-term variatons processed by compressor/limiters and normalizers, respectively?" Bruce and Malcolm took on the challenge, and eight months later we began testing The Levelator.

I've been a professional audio engineer longer than I've been in the computer industry -- that's a long time -- and believe me, there's nothing else like this out there. I guarantee it will blow you away or double your money back. (Oh wait, it's free. I forgot.) We previewed it for 100 people at Podcast Academy 4 today, and they were unanimously impressed. You will be, too.

Indeed I am. If, as Doug says, nothing like this has been done before, then why not? My guess is that it's one of those innovations that can only come from folks who straddle two worlds. There aren't many folks who can comfortably straddle software and audio, just as there aren't many who can comfortably straddle data and voice networking. That kind of dual citizenship is incredibly valuable.

Update: It's a small world indeed. Turns out that Bruce Sharpe was CTO at SoftQuad and now heads up the XMetal group at Blast Radius. Podcasting tools are just his hobby, he says. Here's his bio from the XML 2002 conference.

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3D richness notwithstanding, Second Life is fundamentally social too. I can't wait to see what the business world will make of it, or of systems like it, once the PR novelty wears off. How about this for a practical application of simulation and role-play: an island where IT administrators and their clueless users trade places. Or where programmers and their business sponsors switch roles. That'd be edutaining. [Full story at InfoWorld]

3D simulation obviously helps you think about the location and movement of people and things. More subtly, the projection of self into avatar creates the possibility of simulated social interaction. I've noted before that John Lester's project, Brigadoon, helps people with Asperger's Syndrome become more fluent in their performance of social rituals, while practicing in a safe environment. So much of our interaction nowadays is disembodied: just voice, or just text. How effectively we'll be able to be embodied in avatars, and how those embodiments will change our ways of interacting for better and worse, are questions that we'll soon begin to answer.

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A couple of weeks ago I began using WordPress as a loosely-coupled comment engine. This morning I wrote the glue code that fetches the comments collected there and displays them here. It was straightforward because WordPress supplies a general feed that tells me if any item has updated, and a per-item feed that gives me the comments for that item.

I've been proceeding slowly because I wanted to make sure that I liked using the services I'm acquiring from WordPress. They include:

• Full and per-item feeds
• An effective, easy-to-use spam filter
• An effective, easy-to-use moderation queue
• A comment form that accepts HTML judiciously, applying strong filtering

Now that I've satisfied myself that these services meet my needs, I'm stitching them in. But I'm still rather loosely coupled to WordPress. Comments are just written out to JavaScript files included here. Any process can write those files, and can assemble them from any comment engine that provides the necessary integration hooks.

I was hoping to also gain the services of the WYSIWYG editor that's used in the main WordPress writing interface. But I forgot that the comment engine doesn't use that editor. Which, in fact, helps to illustrate the point of this exercise. If another engine with competitive capabilities adds WYSIWYG comment writing, I'm in a position to switch to it.

Meanwhile, Tim Bray has been refining his new comment engine which, like his blog-publishing system, is a from-scratch effort. There are no value judgements to be made as between his energetic approach and my lazy one. Tim wanted comments, and used the opportunity to teach himself Ruby. I wanted comments, and used the opportunity to try an integration experiment. We both got the job done and learned useful things along the way.

Like Tim, I've gone years without comments, which raises the question: "Why now?" For him, the example of Jonathan Schwartz showed that the amount of interaction would manageable, and that the quality of it would be high. For me, there's a different reason. Blogging, at first, was highly interactive, yet in a loosely-coupled way that I found really compelling. It has surprised me to see how effectively the search and bookmarking services are able to assemble the virtual conversations formed when people link to other people. I came to believe that, ideally, people should publish their own words in their own online spaces, and syndicate them elsewhere as needed, rather than publish their own words directly into other people's spaces. And for a while, that seemed to work pretty well.

What changed? First, after the initial flush of blogging excitement wore off for many people, the level of cross-blog interactivity dropped off. Second, after the advent of TechMeme, things became less interactive -- or anyway, that's how it felt to me.

I've always valued interactivity, and hoped to achieve it in a syndicated way. But when that method stopped working as well as it had, I started to feel isolated, so I've gone back to a traditional comment system in order to reconnect.

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As has become my custom, I used HTML Slidy to make the presentation I gave at the Paris SOA Forum last Thursday. I've argued that since web standards can support everything a presentation needs to do, the only obstacle is the perennial lack of decent web-oriented authoring tools. But my recent experiences remind me that there's another obstacle: we still have no standard compound document format for the web.

An HTML Slidy presentation is a collection of files: a single main XHTML file, a JavaScript file, one or more CSS files, and one or more media files which can be images and, in my case, sometimes also movies. It runs identically from a local disk using the file: protocol and from the web using HTTP. But for an event, the host usually wants to receive your presentation and load it onto their machine. And the zip-transfer-unzip dance is more friction than anyone needs or wants.

I can think of two possible approaches.

1. Use the web's native compound document features. You're probably wondering: "What compound document features?" Sadly, although it's been supported ever since Netscape's mail and news clients back in the day, this idea never gained traction. In Practical Internet Groupware I quoted this from RFC 2557:

In order to transfer a complete HTML multimedia document in a single e-mail message, it is necessary to: a) aggregate a text/html root resource and all of the subsidiary resources it references into a single composite message structure, and b) define a means by which URIs in the text/html root can reference subsidiary resources within that composite message structure.

2. Use ZIP or JAR, à la OpenOffice or the Java runtime. But browsers don't work directly with these archives, and web servers don't either, and there's approximately zero chance that will change.

At the moment, neither of these approaches seems to have a future in the realm of web technology. But as the AJAX juggernaut rolls along, it's going to keep reminding us that we still don't have a standard notion of a web compound document. We could sure use one.

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Joining me for today's podcast is the programmer-turned-writer Ellen Ullman. I recently reread her 1995 book, Close to the Machine: Technophilia and its Discontents, and found it as compelling today as it was then.

Ellen likes to say that programmers create systems in their own image and according to their own desires. They were among the first to experience the lifestyle that we all take for granted now: asynchronous, machine-mediated, always on. In this conversation we talked about how this way of life affects software, individuals, and society, both for better and worse.

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MTurk was invented to solve Amazon's own data-cleansing problems. Now that third parties are building MTurk-enabled businesses, they're facing different problems that spawn new requirements. In an interview following his talk, I asked Jeff Bezos about the tension between satisfying internal and external requirements. That's a good problem to have, Bezos said. And he's right. Anyone can repackage internal services and try to sell them. Evolving those services into broadly useful products is both a harder challenge and a greater opportunity. [Full story at InfoWorld.com]

I'm in Paris this week for the IDG France SOA Forum. Thanks to all the recent Amazon fireworks, I'll have plenty to talk about.

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When Belgian children turn 12, they'll receive a smartcard and a reader from the government. Americans would regard this program as an Orwellian intrusion. For Belgians, it's a way to help protect kids without necessarily compromising their privacy. One of the first uses of the youth eIDs will be to prove age to age-restricted websites. How that's done is a matter of choice, but there's no technical requirement to fully disclose identity and a strong cultural preference not to. Kids will only need only prove (by authenticating to the card) that they are citizens, and prove (by selectively disclosing their birthdate) that they meet the age requirement. [Full story at InfoWorld.com]

Last time I had dinner with Phil Windley, we compared driver's licenses: his from Utah, mine from New Hampshire. On a recent trip to Guadalajara for the ICA conference, delegates from Belgium and Malta showed me their national ID cards. Someone could write a fascinating cross-cultural study based on identity documents: what information they do or don't contain, how the