Category: Technology

IMPORTANT UPDATE AT BOTTOM:

Ever since I got my first GEnie e-mail account back in the early 1990s, I've been a keener when it comes to exploring new Internet applications and social media tools. A new one I'm fiddling with is called paper.li . Paper.li purports to generate an online newspaper of sorts but the content comes from links posted to Twitter by those you follow on Twitter. (If you're not up on Twitter, I'm afraid you're just going to have to poke around elsewhere to find out how that works.)

As I'm actually in the newspaper business, I think it's possible that it's easy to get confused about who or what produces what paper.li calls The David Akin Daily. For example, I had a colleague at the Calgary Sun earlier this week why The David Akin Daily was linking to a story by its competitor The Calgary Herald and not to its version of the same story. Here's the answer: Though it's called The David Akin Daily, I, like every other paper.li user, have no control over what actually appears on the “daily” that carries my name. No Sun Media editors or reporters vet the content or are involved in its production. The content is completely produced by an automated software robot that simply culls through all the links posted to Twitter by those I follow on Twitter and then it generates a content page from that.

So why use this thing? The short answer is: Beats me. But I'm going to continue to fiddle with it because I find with most social media applications that either my users or followers figure out how they want me to use it; I figure out how it can help me as a professional newsgatherer or reporter; or the application evolves into new and useful ways. I remember at one point I was so down on Twitter I was ready to quit it. And now look at me …

Paper.li, incidentally, is “an alpha” application which is the geek way of saying it's still in the highly experimental, not-ready-for-prime-time phase of development. And indeed, it tends to plagued by delays and frequent outages.

So far, I've had a few of my Twitter gang e-mail me to say they think it's neat.

But, for me, the key disclaimer (and one I wish paper.li would publish) that I'd like to put on the record is that I have zero responsibility for the content going out on The David Akin Daily other than the fact that I signed up for an account there and lend my name to the publication! That might be a problem down the road — and if it is, that'll be it for The David Akin Daily — but for now, I'm willing to give this new service a shot.

Keen, as always to hear your thoughts …

 

UPDATE – OCT. 19, 2010

The confusion factor that I mentioned in the original post — that many people assume that, because my name is on this “daily” that I have some ability to control its content — has now outweighed the usefulness of the service. Some of those I follow tweeted links to stories about the Russell Williams trial and so, photos from the trial and other content from that I think aren't appropriate unless presented in a highly contextualized format (i.e. not by a software robot) sealed the deal but too often content was going out under my name that I found was presented without context. So, I'm bailing on paper.li . Good luck with the service but it's not for me.

 

I'm sure he doesn't remember me but I was rather impressed meeting and listening to Jonathan Zittrain years ago when I was a technology reporter and was lucky enough to have an employer that would send me from time to time to meet some of tech's leading lights in Boston, Silicon Valley and elsewhere.

Politics has been my full-time beat for the last five years but I continue to follow, as I'm able, what Jonathan and other influential thinkers/writers in the tech space are up to (Incomplete list of others I try to keep up with: Accordion Guy, John Markoff, Dave Farber, Oxblood Ruffin, Michael Geist, Tara Calishain, David Weinberger, Mathew Ingram, David Isenberg, Mark Evans, Bill St. Arnaud …)

I give that as context as I point you to this blog post by Emily Brill hosted at The Daily Beast. Emily notes that Zittrain, who has been an influential critic of Apple Computer Inc., has received donations towards his work and the work of the Berkman Center at Harvard, which he co-founded, from Apple's competitors. Emily's piece is “this close” to sounding like sour grapes. She did not get a research job she wanted at Berkman but — kudos to her — she disclosed that fact in the piece. But while she discloses her potential bias, she reports that there was no disclosure when Microsoft picked up the tab for free lunches for Berkman seminar attendees. That's not right.

These are not insignificant observations. Even where there is no actual conflict-of-interest, the perception that there may be a conflict-of-interest is something that is to be avoided among journalists, academics, and others who are in the business of getting by on their wits. It's one reason I have had this disclaimer/explanation on my blog for several years now.

And it might be a good reason why the Berkman Center might want to be as upfront as possible about all of its funding sources.

UPDATE: A few hours after posting this, I received the following note from Larry D. Kramer, the Dean of Stanford Law School, who provides some more information on this issue:

To say that Professor Zittrain's class at Stanford was funded by a “special grant” from Microsoft is highly misleading. The class was an experimental and unusual arrangement that involved bringing Harvard students to Stanford for a special three-week joint class. It was arranged long before the grant from Microsoft was even in the works. The grant, in turn, was secured with room for discretionary uses and with no mention of the Zittrain class. We subsequently decided that we could use some of these resources to fund Zittrain's class, which was within its general terms. But while we did, as a courtesy, let Microsoft know later that we had used a portion of their grant for this purpose, we did not seek their permission. Nor did we inform either Professor Zittrain or the class of the source of funding, as it was irrelevant under the circumstances. Dinners for the three weeks were catered because to fit the course into this short time frame required meeting for many hours each evening, including through the dinner hours.

Exerpts from an interesting and slightly disturbing essay in World Affairs Journal by Ethan Gutman;

Before 1999, Falun Gong practitioners hadn't systematically used the Internet as an organizing tool. But now that they were isolated, fragmented, and searching for a way to organize and change government policy, they jumped online, employing code words, avoiding specifics, communicating in short bursts. But like a cat listening to mice squeak in a pitch-black house, the 'Internet Spying' section of the 6-10 Office could find their exact location. What emerged was a comprehensive database of people's personal information — including 6-10's Falun Gong lists — and a wraparound surveillance system that was quickly distributed to other provinces. The Chinese authorities called it the Golden Shield.”

I also talked to Chen Yonglin, who was a Chinese diplomat based at the Sydney consulate until 2005, when he suddenly requested protection from the Australian government. We met in a private home in the suburbs eighteen months later. Careful and media-savvy, Chen began by authenticating his point that there were a thousand or more Chinese agents on Australian soil and then went on to explain that the vast majority were employed not to go after military technology, but to monitor Falun Gong and other dissidents in the Chinese communities of Melbourne and Sydney.

Judging from the witnesses I interviewed in the United States, Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom, these sorts of Chinese infiltration activities never met with any particular governmental or intelligence-operational resistance in the West. It was as if the battle for the Chinese diaspora had already been ceded. In the United States in particular, the intelligence community was clearly distracted by terrorism, and pacified by occasional Chinese military and intelligence cooperation on terrorist networks, even if the information given was sketchy and unclassifiable.

…

While I don’t use Gmail, Yahoo’s lawyers recently informed me that there had been a “rare” and “unusual” security breach into my e-mail account. That is consistent with the smash-and-grab of files in my car while I was interviewing Falun Gong practitioners in Montreal, and the questioning and forced deportation of my research assistant when he tried to enter Hong Kong. He was recently on a tour bus in Montreal with Falun Gong members who discovered that their tires had been carefully slashed to induce blowouts when the bus had reached highway speed.

[Read the whole piece]

While the nation turned towards the Vancouver 2010 Games, the federal Conservative government was busily cranking out one press release after another announcing spending for this project or that project often in this riding or that riding. At Canwest News Service, we try to track these spending announcements as they're made. As a result, we can present this summary data for the month of February.

By our count, the combined output of federal government departments was 426 press releases that contained news of one spending commitment or another. The combined federal portion of all those spending commitments was $2.71 billion. That spending might happen in this year or over the next few years. The point, for us, is that a politician stood up to take some political credit, via a press release, for the allocation of some federal funds.

We then manually try to figure out if the bulk of that spending will occur in tne riding or several and, if it's in one riding, which party holds that riding. Sometimes, the spending is for a national program that will benefit a wide variety of ridings across the country. Sometimes, its spending that will benefit a regional group — all farmers in Saskatchewan, for example — and that, too, is noted in our database as benefitting multiple ridings. A small group of announcements will benefit several ridings but all those ridings belong to one party. For example: A spending program for Alberta cattle farmers will benefit, in our judgement, only Conservative ridings in Alberta. The lone non-Conservative seat, is held by NDP MP Linda Duncan in downtown Edmonton, a riding which, for this example, we judge to have no or very few cattle farmers.

So, with that preamble, here's the breakdown of those spending announcements by party:

• There were 163 announcements totalling $380.3 million in February where the spending will be solely in Conservative ridings.
• Ridings held by Liberals were the target of 83 spending announcements, totalling $75.5 million.
• NDP ridings will see $75 million in spending. That was spread out over 47 releases.
• The government made 29 releases containing $43.8 million in spending commitments in ridings held by the Bloc Quebecois.
• The balance — 104 releases with $2.1 billion — where national or regional programs that benefit several ridings or were impossible to rack to a specific riding.

Some other notes:

• The biggest single spending commitment was made by Transport Minister John Baird on Feb. 25. He announced that Ottawa would spend $1.5 billion over five years to improve Canada's air transportation security system.
• The smallest announcement by dollar value was made by Saskatchewan Conservative MP Maurice Vellacott who, on Feb. 16, announced a federal grant of $3,000 so that repairs could be made to the arena in Marcelllin, SK.

Note: I 'tweet' each spending announcement as I find it and you can see each of those tweets by following @ottawaspends on Twitter or checking out the ottawaspends Twitter account via your Web browser. Be sure to read the details and syntax on the #ottawaspends project.

I write about politics now for a living but for a decade, beginning slightly before the dot-com boom that started with Netscape's IPO, I was a technology reporter. Though tech reporters for most daily newspapers could not avoid the financial/stock market aspect of the business, my favourite stories were ones that looked at new ways human beings were interacting with technology. The bet of those kinds of reports were stories about "inflection points", where it seemed clear that this development or that one had clearly changed the way everyday people were able to computer and communicate. 

The history of Apple Inc., as you may know, is filled with these inflection points: The mouse as a pointing device; the graphical user interface built into early Apple operating systems; PostScript that allowed a user to print you-name-it in any font on just about any printer. (Apple commercialized and popularized all three of those developments, they were initially all developed and researched at the Xerox PARC facility in Silicon Valley)

I think Apple hit another inflection last week with the release of its iPad, that super-thin tablet that lets a user view, annotate and share content on a 20-cm hi-def digital display.

So what's the inflection point? I think this is the computing device that is aimed purely at digital consumers. The iPad is not the machine you will use or want to use if you are a musician, a journalist, an author, an architect, or a graphic designer. Creators need, first of all, input devices beyond a 'soft' keyboard. They need a mouse, a tablet, a keyboard, MIDI inputs and so on. Creators need computer horsepower and massive amounts of storage and memory attached to their CPU. The iPad is not built for those looking for terabytes of storage and gigabytes of RAM. And that's just ine.

Publishers and creators will — and should — continue to use desktops and laptops to create digital content.

But it seems to me — and I missed Steve Jobs' speech on this as I was in Davos, Switzerland covering the visit of the Canadian prime minister to that conference – that the iPad is for the millions upon millions of consumers who write e-mails, sometimes with an attached photo, and might want to be able to share a link about something they've seen or read on Facebook, Twitter, or Google Reader. The iPad is custom-designed for that digital consumer.

The iPad is not, however, a device for producing content. Professional content creators — and count me in among that group — will continue to rely on what is now old-fashioned technology as the most efficient way to created the content that we hope millions of iPad users will download. (It just dawned on me that the keyboard — as an input device using an inked ribbon on paper or using pixels on my screen must be as old as the cathode ray tube inside TVs, that is to say, coming on 50 years. And while the CRT appears to be giving way to cheaper an better LCD, plasma, and LED displays, the good, ol' keyboard seems a little more difficult to replace. Don't you think?)

That old-fashioned technology — old-fashioned being something that had its genesis in the 1960s or earlier — includes the keyboard, mouse, RAID storage, and so on. Until we get computers that with advanced haptic technology that can also understand your voice commands with ease (a la Star Trek), I think it's going to be tough to do better than the current laptop and desktop computers.

But Apple's iPad does take things in a new direction for those who have no interest or inclination in doing little more than posting the odd 30-second QuickTime clip or sharing a dozen or so pictures from a family vacation. In fact, if Apple is successful, its new gadget may encourage people to explore and consumer all sorts of new digital content — from newspapers to books from the iBookStore to  3-D sculpture. And if the iPad can help spur new demand for digital content, that can only be good news for those of use who create digital content.

UPDATE:

iPhone app developer Ethan Nicholas makes a parallel point in this post, “Why My Mom's Next Computer is Going to Be an iPad”. Ethan's mom, if I read him correctly, is more interested in consuming digital content than creating it.

“The iPad is perfect for her. It does exactly what she needs. It will let her watch movies and listen to music and read books on long flights. It will make using a computer fun instead of an annoying chore.

But it also won’t allow her to install umpteen news and weather gadgets that start up on boot and slow her computer to a crawl. It won’t suddenly forget how to talk to a network, or get so confused by all of the software installs and uninstalls that you finally have to break down and reinstall the system from scratch. In other words, my mother’s next computer is going to be an iPad, and I dream of the day when I can finally throw off the oppressive chains of being the one guy in the family who knows how to actually keep a computer working.

Tags: apple, ipad, digital content

You may have no idea what MySQL and that's o.k. but, if you're a heavy Internet user, you're probably surfing through a lot of Web sites that are powered by MySQL, a relational database program that is a very handy, helpful bit of free, open-source code. Now, the stewards behind MySQL believe that MySQL is under threat from Oracle, the world's second biggest software company. Oracle is buying Sun Microsystems and Sun 'owns' some of intellectual property used to create MySQL and Oracle, which makes its living selling closed-source, proprietary database programs, is perceived as less than interested in seeing MySQL prosper. Oracle has responded to these concerns. You may want to take a quick minute to review the following — it landed in my inbox today — and click through on the links for more information.

Of course, I welcome your comments on this as to the perceived threat by Oracle to MySQL:

Hi!

I am contacting you because you have in the past shown interest in MySQL and from that I assume you are interested in the future well-being of MySQL.

Now you have a unique opportunity to make a difference. By signing the petition at http://www.helpmysql.org you can help affect the future of MySQL as an Open Source database.

You can find more information of this on my latest blog post at: http://monty-says.blogspot.com/2009/12/help-keep-internet-free.html

Help us spread the world about this petition! http://www.helpmysql.org is available in 18 languages and every vote is important, independent of from where in the world it comes! If you know people that are using MySQL, please contact them and ensure they also sign the petition!

Regards,
Monty
Creator of MySQL