Notes for 12/4/2005

I know I have become soft compared to when I used to live in Inuvik, but man is it ever cold out today! I could really handle a vacation to somewhere tropical right about now.

  • I gotta say as far as remix albums go, Britney’s new one is pretty damn good. I especially like the new track, “And Then We Kiss”, which is a Junkie XL remix. Speaking of music, Lindsay Lohan’s new album is a much better effort than her last, I’m quite enjoying it.
  • I finished reading Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity Is Near this week. I won’t say too much as I intend to write a proper review, but it is an absolutely fascinating book and I really enjoyed it! I have also started reading Freakonomics, and the first chapter was very intriguing. I also like that the authors maintain an active blog on the book’s website.
  • As promised I spent a little more time playing with Dave Slusher’s AmigoFish. While I’m not blown away yet, it works fairly well. I really wish there was a way to eliminate podcasts that don’t publish very often. When I look at the predictions AmigoFish generates, I want to see podcasts that publish often, not once a month! I assume the algorithm would catch on to this eventually, but there should be a way to explicitly say “give me only frequently published podcasts!”
  • I spent most of yesterday working with Visual Studio 2005 – learning the subtle differences, testing out conversions of old projects, looking at the designers, etc. I must say, I am falling fast and hard for VS2005 and .NET 2.0 (if I can say such a thing about a technology that is). I’m really impressed with almost everything! (It runs a little slow, but I guess my computer is getting pretty old.)
  • Ah more music stuff! Ever hear of the band 10 Years? They are fast becoming my new favorite band. Their album is amazing! Unfortunately, they don’t have any upcoming Canadian tour dates.
  • This past week saw the Conservatives offer to lower the GST here in Canada. Any predictions on what the upcoming week will bring? I hope there’s a similarly outlandish idea – makes for a good blog entry!
  • As you are undoubtedly aware by now, I changed the colors of my site this week. Thanks for all the feedback! I may change it again for Xmas…we’ll see.

The Economist on Canada

Post ImageOne of the most interesting effects of a Canadian election is that in the weeks leading up to the big vote, there is an abundance of American commentary on our country. Most of the time it feels like we’re ignored by the American media, at least as far as politics are concerned, and The Economist admits as much in it’s latest print issue cover story (reg req’d):

Enormous though it is, Canada is all too easily overlooked. It may be the world’s second-biggest country by area, one of its dozen largest economies and a founding member of the G7 club of rich countries. But much of its vast land is frozen waste. Nearly all of its 32.2m people cling to a narrow belt along its border with the United States. Since it is a peaceful, prosperous-dare one say provincial?-sort of place, it rarely makes much of a splash in the world.

Doesn’t that sound like a place you’d want to live? I suppose it’s true however, much of our land really is frozen – not so sure about it being a waste though. The article goes on to outline two reasons that the United States and the rest of the world should pay more attention to Canada:

  1. “Canada, and especially its west, is one of the great storehouses of the commodities that the world needs in ever greater quantities-something China has recently noticed. New techniques mean that the tar sands of Alberta can be turned into oil at an ever-falling cost. That in turn means that Canada now claims the world’s second-largest oil reserves (behind only Saudi Arabia), in addition to a cornucopia of minerals and ten times more fresh water per head than the United States.”
  2. “The second reason to watch Canada, as The Economist has argued before, is that it is a healthy rival to the American way. To the “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” of the American Declaration of Independence, Canada replied with “peace, order and good government” in its founding charter.”

I don’t think I could have come up with a reason any more American than those. The threat of oil, and another country with something comparable to “the American dream.” Sounds like something straight out of the Whitehouse. The article then spends a few paragraphs discussing adscam and our political parties, before concluding:

For all of Canada’s abiding strengths, more of the same politics may not be good enough. The booming west—Alberta especially—feels ignored in Ottawa. Another independence vote in Quebec may be no more than a couple of years away. Keeping Canada cool, calm and collected is starting to look a lot harder than it did only a couple of years ago.

I can’t really argue with that, things are indeed starting to get interesting. The latest issue of the Economist, entitled “Canada’s wintry election,” includes at least five other articles on Canada and our upcoming election, so if you’re into reading all of the analysis (I’m starting to…) you might want to pick it up. You can also buy a PDF of the Survey of Canada.

Read: The Economist

Wikipedia Under Fire

Wikipedia is without a doubt one of my favorite websites. Even though I have only ever made one or two contributions to Wikipedia, I find the site invaluable for research. The vast amount of information immediately available is hard to overlook for research of any sort (there are 848,598 English language articles as of this post). If you have a question about something, you can probably find the answer at Wikipedia.

Called “the self-organizing, self-repairing, hyperaddictive library of the future” by Wired Magazine in March of 2005, Wikipedia has enjoyed much success. The Wired article is just one of many mainstream media articles praising the site, and there are many thousands if not millions of bloggers and others who use and recommend Wikipedia each and every day. The New York Times offers some numbers describing Wikipedia’s success:

The whole nonprofit enterprise began in January 2001, the brainchild of Jimmy Wales, 39, a former futures and options trader who lives in St. Petersburg, Fla. He said he had hoped to advance the promise of the Internet as a place for sharing information.

It has, by most measures, been a spectacular success. Wikipedia is now the biggest encyclopedia in the history of the world. As of Friday, it was receiving 2.5 billion page views a month, and offering at least 1,000 articles in 82 languages. The number of articles, already close to two million, is growing by 7 percent a month. And Mr. Wales said that traffic doubles every four months.

Lately though, despite all of the success and impressive usage numbers, cracks have started to appear. Two questions, both of which have been asked before, have once again been brought into the spotlight – just how reliable is the information found on Wikipedia, and where is the accountability?

Consider what happened to John Seigenthaler Sr.:

ACCORDING to Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, John Seigenthaler Sr. is 78 years old and the former editor of The Tennessean in Nashville. But is that information, or anything else in Mr. Seigenthaler’s biography, true?

The question arises because Mr. Seigenthaler recently read about himself on Wikipedia and was shocked to learn that he “was thought to have been directly involved in the Kennedy assassinations of both John and his brother Bobby.”

If any assassination was going on, Mr. Seigenthaler (who is 78 and did edit The Tennessean) wrote last week in an op-ed article in USA Today, it was of his character.

Whoever added that false information to the article did so anonymously, so beyond publicly stating the truth, Mr. Seigenthaler really had no recourse. So there’s the issue of false information, and how to stop people from entering it. Wikipedia works on the premise that mistakes are caught by later contributors, and regular users who monitor changes. Clearly, that doesn’t always work.

If reliability and accountability weren’t enough, how about ethics? Should you edit the entry for something you were involved in? The question was raised earlier this week when Adam Curry attempted to make some changes to the entry for Podcasting. Dave Winer explains:

Now after reading about the Seigenthaler affair, and revelations about Adam Curry’s rewriting of the podcasting history — the bigger problem is that Wikipedia is so often considered authoritative. That must stop now, surely. Every fact in there must be considered partisan, written by someone with a confict of interest. Further, we need to determine what authority means in the age of Internet scholarship. And we need to take a step back and ask if we really want the participants in history to write and rewrite the history. Isn’t there a place in this century for historians, non-participants who observe and report on the events?

Dave makes some very good points. Upon first reading his entry, I though the question of historians and third-party observers was very obvious and a simple way to resolve these kinds of issues. The more I thought about it though, the less sure I felt. Requiring historians and non-participants to write the entries simply because that’s the way we’ve always done it may not be the best way to move forward. Thanks to Wikipedia and the web in general, we have the ability to turn the conventional wisdom “the winners write the history books” completely upside down. By editing websites like Wikipedia as events are taking place (such as the creation of podcasting) do we not have a better chance of capturing a more realistic view of history? If all sides of an issue can enter their views, do we not have a more accurate and complete entry? Of course, we unfortunately need to deal with flame wars in many of these cases, but maybe that will change as the process matures.

The issues I mentioned above are currently getting a lot of attention, and are pretty natural in the evolution of a system like Wikipedia. I don’t think anyone should be surprised that questions of reliability, accountability and ethics are being asked. And if you really stop and think, you’ll probably realize that the solution to all of these problems has been around for a very long time. As with all websites on the Internet, it is up to the reader to use his or her best judgement in evaluating the accuracy and relevancy of the informaton on a web page. Searching the information available at Wikipedia should be no different than searching the information available in Google – reader/searcher/user beware.

Zoey 101 and Jamie Lynn Spears

Post ImageI don’t watch a lot of TV, and definitely not on Saturdays (except for hockey of course) but for whatever reason I turned the old tube on this morning and started flipping through the channels. I’m also pretty picky when it comes to cartoons – I think the cartoons on TV these days are crap compared to when I was a kid (most people probably think the same thing about their childhood cartoons though I suppose). So I avoided the cartoons. Eventually I flipped all the way to channel 45, which is listed as TFCP (no clue what station it is) and discovered what appeared to be some sort of junior high comedy. I ended up watching most of it, mainly because the lead actress looked so familiar; I just couldn’t put a name to the face.

Enter IMDB, one of the most useful sites to ever exist. I checked the TV listings to see that the show was called Zoey 101, and a quick IMDB search revealed that the lead actress was none other than Jamie Lynn Spears! Being a former hardcore Britney fan (she’s a little crazy now though, don’t you think?) it was no wonder that I recognized her! I’d never heard of the show before though; here’s the plot summary:

Pacific Coast Academy, an all boys boarding school is accepting female students for the first time since the school was established. Zoey’s (Jamie Lynn Spears) little brother Dustin (Paul Butcher) is currently a student there. Zoey decides to be one of the first girls to become a student at PCA. This is very exciting, but also very scary. Fitting in at a new school is hard enough, but going away to boarding school and living on your own when you’re only thirteen can get a little crazy, especially when the girls are heavily outnumbered by the boys…

After watching the little bit that I did, it’s clear that the show is targeted at tweens. That being said, it wasn’t that bad. Anyway, makes me wonder what Jamie Lynn will be up to next. Maybe she’ll do the Hilary Duff thing, and go from TV to music, movies and beyond. At some point Hilary will be too old for that audience, and she’ll need a replacement!

Read: IMDB

Malware and Web 2.0

For most of us, the Sober worm of 2003 is history. Painful history maybe, but history nonetheless. We’ve updated our virus scanners, checked and re-checked our firewalls, installed all the patches, etc. But just as in the biological world, mutations eventually make their presence known:

A variant of Sober known as Win32/Sober.Z@mm is pummeling servers at Hotmail and MSN with “unusually high mail load,” causing delays in e-mail delivery to Hotmail and MSN customers, said Brooke Richardson, MSN’s lead product manager. Richardson also indicated that Internet service providers besides Comcast may be having problems directing e-mail to Hotmail and MSN servers.

So in a way, Sober has returned, and it’s affecting MSN and Hotmail (though I personally haven’t noticed any problems). I think the return of the Sober worm has greater importance this time around though. When Sober wreaked havoc on servers in 2003, Web 2.0 (which I use in this post regardless of how accurate the term is) was but a glimmer in the future. Hosted services were still considered unready to take off. Now though, Web 2.0 is all the rage and hosted services are popping up everywhere.

So what happens in a few years when the vast majority of our data is stored online? Creating some sort of malicious software to target those data silos will become increasingly irresistable for those who write viruses, worms and the like. And that introduces a pretty big problem for users, and for those running the hosted services.

In a few years, all of my pictures will be on Flickr or something similar (in fact most of them already are). Many of my thoughts are online already on this blog (and millions of people use a central service like LiveJournal, MSN Spaces, Blogger, etc). Podcasts, video, documents and even more types of information will undoubtedly go online as the services become feasible and popular (and who knows what Windows Live and Office Live will mean). Combined with the data of millions of other people, this storage of my data is firstly a very juicy target, and secondly increasingly difficult to protect. All of that data needs to be proactively protected from attacks, it needs to be backed up in case of a successful attempt, and it really should be available all the time. And when the demand for sharing this information and data with other services on the rise (think APIs in the Web 2.0 world) security becomes somewhat more difficult.

Combined with the “mini bubble” we’re starting to see, in which corners will inevitably be cut in order to get products and services to market, I think malware will become increasingly more important. No longer will viruses and worms simply target websites, they will target our data. And don’t be fooled – a virus targeting the data on your local machine and distributed malware targeting the data of millions of users are two very different scenarios. If you lose the data on your local machine, you’re faced with a setback and the need to rebuild and move on. If the data of millions of users is made inaccessible, destroyed, or otherwise attacked, the people who own the data are affected, but so are countless businesses that rely on that data. It’s potentially much worse.

Granted, distributed technologies that are becoming more and more commonplace will help to alleviate some of the problems posed by malware of the future, but they can’t completely prevent outages or other negative effects. True also is the fact that platforms in general have matured and are more secure than in the past. However, the potential for major problems still exists.

Today, malware might make a website unavailable. Tomorrow, malware might make you (or at least the most important data which describes you) unavailable. Let’s hope those in the driver’s seat of the Web 2.0 era are considering security too, or we could be in for a very rough ride.

AmigoFish

Post ImageI first learned of Dave Slusher’s AmigoFish project while talking to him on the way back from the Portable Media Expo (Dickson, Dave and I were on the same flight to Denver). AmigoFish was in private testing for a while, and on Tuesday Dave took the wraps off:

It’s time that I announced the project I’ve been working on in my evenings and weekends. It is a collaborative filter for new media – podcasts and videoblogs mostly. Behold, the mighty AmigoFish! You can create an account, rate the things you care about and get predictions for other things you might like. I’ve been using it that way pretty much every day for the last month, and have found all kinds of new things to listen to. Try it out and let me know what you think. I’m not going to burden everyone with the “beta” or not nomenclature. It is a work in progress, much like everything like this.

I kinda like the idea of not using “beta” to describe the service. I took a quick look at the site today but haven’t really tested it out yet. I have heard many great things though, so if you’re looking for a slightly different way to find a podcast you might enjoy listening to, give AmigoFish a try.

Dave, I realize it’s a work in progress, but you need a logo or something!

Read: AmigoFish

Reducing GST?

Post ImageOne of the big stories in Canada today was Conservative Leader Stephen Harper’s pledge to reduce our GST from 7% to 5% if his party wins the election. The reduction would be 1% immediately, and another percent sometime within five years. Apparently, savings would be fairly good:

Canadians would have $4.5 billion put back in their pockets with the first reduction, said Harper. An average family of four earning $60,000 a year would pay about $400 less in taxes. The GST reduction would be a “tax cut you see every time you shop. No politician will be able to take it away without you noticing.”

Sounds good, but think about it for a second. Who does GST really affect? People who buy a lot of stuff beyond the basics (GST is not charged on basic groceries, most medical services, etc). Those are typically people who are already rich. So essentially, GST reduction helps those with lots of money. Personal income tax cuts in the lower income brackets, as the Liberals have suggested, help those with less money.

That being said, I agree with NDP Leader Jack Layton:

“Deep tax cuts right now are not what Canadians are looking for.”

Do I really care if GST is around after the election? I have lived most of my life with GST, and I have come to accept that it’s going to be there. Instead of giving that 7% back to me (or even part of it) I’d rather see the government do something meaningful with it. Of course that’s where it gets tricky, because what I think is useful may not be what someone else thinks is useful. For example, I wish we’d stop spending so much money on Africa, though there are lots of Canadian who would disagree with me.

The announcement today by Harper has “dirty” written all over it as far as I am concerned. Recall in 1993 the Liberals promised to abolish the GST and that didn’t happen. I don’t feel the Conservative promise is any more solid. How about announcing something more meaningful? A promise to cut GST is something I’d expect the day before the election to try and win the swing voters, not something you propose right away.

Read: CBC News

Podcasting Research Findings

Post ImageYou might recall that a little over a month ago I mentioned Peter Chen’s very promising survey of podcasters and the preliminary results. I remember getting the email about the final findings, but I must have overlooked it in the chaos that was my November (at least the first two weeks). From the abstract:

Based on a survey of 366 podcasters and videobloggers, this paper examines these emerging cultural practices from aspect of production, with specific interest in producer motivations, production methods, the relationship between formats, and audience numbers. The exploratory research findings – largely limited to English language producers – illustrates a number of interesting features about this area of activity.

I’d go out on a limb and posit that “podcasting” and “audioblogging” are generally accepted to be different practices, and I don’t think that “video podcasting” and “videoblogging” will be any different. That being said, the title of the research as “Podcasting and Videoblogging” is kind of off-putting. Is it really videoblogging, or is it actually video podcasting? It would make a difference if you’re really trying to compare the audio and video guys.

The findings are really quite interesting and basically make me long for even more research. Of course, too much research can be a bad thing in some cases too (today wine will save you, tomorrow it will kill you, etc). The frequency of production, gender, and age of producers are immediately the most interesting, but there is lots of data to grok.

Read: Peter Chen

2005 Canadian Blog Awards

Post ImageIt seems that I have been nominated for the 2005 Canadian Blog Awards in the category of Best Blog, according to my Dad, who has been nominated in the category of Best Photo Blog:

I have been lucky enough to be nominated for the 2005 Canadian Blog Awards in the category of Best Photo Blog. There are many derserving nominations there. Have a look at the awards and give me your vote as the Best Photo Blog if you think that I am deserving.

My son Mack (MasterMaq) has also been nominated in the category of Best Blog. Again, there are many worthy nominations in that category but I think that MasterMaq does an excellent job of giving information and his personal insight on just about anything. While you are over at the Canadian Blog Awards voting for me you might as well vote for him at the same time.

Round one voting is underway now, and round two voting is supposed to start on December 3rd. Even if you don’t want to vote, you should check out the site as you’ll probably discover a great blog you didn’t know existed.

Read: EclecticBlogs

Podcasting and Model Airplanes

Post ImageI have written quite a bit about what I call “Average Joe Podcasting“, or podcasting for normal people who don’t want to turn it into a business. I have also mentioned that I think the most common form of podcasting will indeed be this kind of hobby podcasting, not radio-style business podcasting. Unfortunately, it seems rare that someone else understands this, but today I found another person who does:

Rob Walch, a podcasting consultant and host of the popular 411 interview podcast, says he’s bombarded with questions from people looking to strike gold with podcasts. His advice? “I tell people that over 80% of podcasters will never even break even,” he says. “This is a hobby. You don’t expect to make money from flying model airplanes, and chances are you aren’t going to make money from podcasting.” Still, for trailblazers like Curry who are quickly forging links to one another, it won’t be for a lack of trying.

Well said, and in a way that I think a lot of people will be able to understand. Not that it’s bad for people like Curry to try and make some money from it, every industry needs that, I just feel that it won’t overshadow the rest of podcasting for very much longer.

Read: BusinessWeek