Richard BF

Here’s a bunch of interesting stuff from the last few weeks. A wonderful article on the vicious cycle of illiberal democracy from the always fabulous Dave Pollard, the best blogger out there, by a country mile. Another NetGUI hybrid called Audioscrobbler to graph similarly genred bands based on real world Windows Media Player statistics. Iraq War documentary titled UNCOVERED released on DVD, 30000 of which were sent to MoveOn.org members, the same people who did the Mike Moore supported anti-Bush ads. A bunch of other neat stuff from boingboing (the second best blog out there): NASA’s sniffer, George Aldrich; finally making the world aware of MD5 flaws; handy Aramaic phrases; stereoscopic images of Disney rides. Here’s some cool weblog designs (thanks Nathan). And finally, word that Godzilla is retiring (from Slashdot)

Following on from back dating posts, Sbastien Paquet discusses The freedom to be yourself in public.

Perhaps this is the nature of the blogosphere, but what makes people want to publish intimate details of themselves for the whole world to see? Aside from close friends, who really cares whether someone went on a date last night? I don’t, but it does give me a mental picture of the person who does. I may however be interested in whether they just started a new job, who their friends are, or what their other beliefs are.

This mental picture I get of a weblog author then determines how I interpret what they write, and combined with their actual text, helps me decide whether they are worth listening to or thinking about. I think this is a common, and if not then unconscious, trait in most weblog consumers. What’s more, I’d love my reader client to document and update these mental pictures of people as I read their feeds, without having to go back and read their entire weblog archive.

There are obviously privacy concerns here, yet people still choose to publish a lot of personal details. Why? If anything, it could expose personal attributes which wouldn’t be immediately obvious to an employer from a CV or an interview, or it could help someone with harassment, robbery, deception (re Mitnik) or countless other uses. So why do it? The benefits must of course outweigh the risk, and you could assume the people unconciously do the numbers before posting, but I doubt it.

So how long before bloggers begin faking their online personalities, if they haven’t already? Is the John Doe Weblog you read each day, a real person? And if so, how does this change your interpretation of, or belief in what they write? Fictional weblogs are already starting to appear.

Most of the top bloggers are new to the world of celebrity, and many either don’t realise the amount of information they’re exposing about themselves, or they can’t see what negative implications it may have. I’m not saying it is all bad, it isn’t, but it is still a risk, and I think in many cases is never seriously considered until people are directly affected by it.

In a perfect world, we could all expose ourselves for the common good, but the intelligence and morals of the currently average blogger has unfortunately convinced us of this false nirvana of secure openness. If and when the non-blogging populous at large starts to get involved, we may see this openness start to decrease, to a point where it is fairly uncommon. Assuming of course that it isn’t one of the key premises of blogging. By then, we will already have a permanent record of the intimate details of various individuals. This is exactly what happened when bulletin boards first popped up in the 1980s, and many people got burned pretty bad then as well.

An orphan friend of mine recently traced her mother, based simply on her 35 year old birth certificate. In the space of three weeks, she had discovered her family tree, each family members’ hobbies, their likes and dislikes, where they work, their opinions, who their friends are and countless other facts. She initially used public election records, but was quickly overcome with information overload once she started searching the web. And this was without the help of any personal weblogs, which as we know are very much about to change the whole way we investigate individuals.

I have an unlisted home telephone number, because both my wife and I have had to deal with our own separate semi-celebrity issues in our past. In trialling both a personal and work weblog, I’ve had to question once again what information I give out about myself, and what guidlines I use to decide what I can and should not post. While I feel that I’ve reached a good balance, I still pause before each post, and reflect upon what is about to be added to the jigsaw that is the public picture of me. The open nature of the current blogosphere has given me some reassurances, but like I said, this may just be a false paradise.

Then again, perhaps the nature of the blogosphere means that none of this will be an issue. Bring it on!

(If you think that you rarely give out personal information about yourself, then think again. As an example, on face value this post doesn’t give much away, but from it alone you can deduce that I’m married, I’m hetrosexual, I’ve been a semi-celebrity in the past, I’m probably late 30s, I’m a technologist, I have technical skills or finances for a personal blog, I have a degree of intelligence, I use the Internet a lot, I have a friend who is female and originally orphaned, I have an unlisted telephone number, I am moderately protective of my personal information, I work for Synop, and I either read Sbastien Paquet, or I read someone else who does. What does your weblog give away?)

(Originally posted to Synop weblog.)

One of the great unwritten rules of blogging, is that you don’t back date your posts.

This is so ingrained in the blogging community, that I doubt most even consider that regadless of the stated publication date, any post they read could very easily have been written today, a month ago or a year ago.

For bloggers with a limited audience, or even better no audience, this would be a great way to immediately boost their credibility. Even top bloggers could back date their entries several years, so that regular readers wouldn’t immediately see them, but the results would appear in Google etc. Instant cred.

This raises quite a number of interesting questions, including:

• Is this inherent trust in publishing dates, simply an integral part of the weblog phenomenon?
• Are people already doctoring publishing dates, but the general public doesn’t realise it?
• Once this trust is exposed or the practice becomes more common, will this really start testing the supposed benefits of “personal publishing” over traditional media?
• Are there other unwritten laws, which may also have a positive or negative effect on the blogosphere?

Blogging is still far from maturing, contrary to the many years some bloggers have put into developing the “community”. Until big business stops watching and starts selling, and people start to test the key unwritten principles of the current blogosphere, blogging will remain a geek niche, regardless of how often it is referred to in the I.T. press.

Until that time, the small players need to stop flattering themselves with minor advances in features and APIs, and start crossing the distributed content chasm.

(Originally posted to Synop weblog.)

Here’s a pair of rainbow lorikeets which regularly visit our back verandah. They’re a couple of cuties.

This is a photo of the possum which lives in our backyard. Another frame from a MiniDV, I wish I had a digital still camera. Every few days, this possum finds a way into our house, and starts eating through our bread. I caught it the other day, hanging from a brick wall, with a chunk the size of my fist missing from a loaf of bread. In a world of destruction and extinction, this little guy reminds me why animal protection is important. As if I needed bloody reminding…

A regular dump of interesting sites I came across over the past few weeks: 10 billion trillion trillion carat diamond (heart of a star); Skype, Kazaa’s P2P phone company; Cowboy suing U.S. government for being asked by his ID for no reason; world’s first Open Source Movie project; Ghost Plates spray to obscure license plates from police RADAR; IN DEFENSE OF RADICAL ENVIRONMENTALISM: A VIRTUAL CONVERSATION; Wired 20 page spread on Googlemania; Ethnography in NPD Research, How “applied ethnography” can improve your NPD research process; Electroluminescent purse-liners, your purse will never be dark again; British Pathe archive, 3500 hours of historical video footage and over 12 million still photographs; Media Chest, sharing your DVDs, CDs and books with friends; Video of guy falling asleep at the wheel.

Getting back to community organisations from a few days ago…

Regardless of the highly toxic mix of individuals, one of the main problems of managing a co-operative or community organisation, is the inexperience of the management, and their need to continually relearn lessons. Lessons which in many cases were only just learned a year or so ago, by the previous management. This cannot be particularly conducive to streamlining the operation of the organisation, and considering that most groups struggle for financial survival anyway, it is a wonder that they still exist at all.

Another related problem is that many of these “managers” have only experienced the social side of the other managers of the organisation, and suffer what I call the “me too” effect. Several years ago, a member of an organisation I was involved with, who had no management or business experience, was placed in an important management position, along side other more experienced people. Their experience on the board consisted of simply arguing about issues which anyone with even a small amount of management experience, wouldn’t even question. Because they saw the confident way others acted, ignorant of their professional experience, this person tried to act the same way, but made all the wrong decisions. It was a waste of their talent, which lay in other non-management areas of the organisation, and bogged the other managers down with petty and time wasting infighting.

Currently, at another group I’m involved with, there is a pending purchase request for various bits of computer equipment, valued at around the $1000 mark. Unfortunately, the purchase request was put in before a quote was obtained (inexperience again), making approval difficult at best. When called upon to provide a quote (after several weeks of refusing), the value was actually much less (~70%) than the original request, and the specification of the equipment was completely wrong for the purpose it was being bought.

This then descended into arguments about who the “expert” was who put together the specification, with half the management saying they were an expert, and half saying they weren’t. This ended with a rather detailed and amusing week long argument about what the rules of the organisation say about chorums and approvals for purchases. In the end, the fight was more about getting the badly specced purchase approved, than whether it was a complete waste of money for the task at hand. That is to say, you wouldn’t buy a Holden Commodore because a Commodore driver who had jumped the odd gutter, had told you it would be best for off road driving.

Coming back to the management side of the issue, perhaps the following “out of the box” idea would be a better way of addressing the problem.

The terms “board” and “director” should be replaced with “committee” and “committee member” or “member representative”. In some community groups, these quite corporate terms (board & director) are used to describe the management, and in many cases, this seems to fuel egos. A recent amusing quote: “NO ONE – has the right to go over the heads of the board. Aren’t we the ones running the show?!”

Experienced professional company directors and managers should then be approached for pro bono directorships on a “board”, which meets every few months. Their role would be to observe and make recommendations to the committee members. The committee members would in some ways be accountable to the board. Currently, managers in community organisations tend to be accountable to nobody except themselves.

The result is that the management are closer to the ground than they have been in the past, more in contact with the membership of the organisation, and are supposedly more able to act with better guidance than they did before.

This also partially syncs with the recent Power to the Edge (thank you Nathan for the link) methodologies of the U.S. military, where basically command and control, in conjunction with senior personnel, are moved much closer to the edge of the organisation. They are then provided with information they need to better perform the tasks for which they are ultimately accountable.

Goodbye ivory towers, long approval chains and pseudo-directors with egotist tendencies. Hello warm and fuzzy feeling, making correct decisions, and helping to push the community group forward.

It is amusing, yet sad, to think that all over the world, community organisations spend a majority of their management time either arguing over petty rule interpretations, or making stupid mistakes which any professional manager would spot a mile away. Assuming that community groups aren’t just there as playpens or training grounds for would be managers, there must be a better way.

For a small protest, even the EFF and Lawrence Lessig got in on the act.

Four Australians handcuffed and locked up while trying to board a flight in New Jersey. (from SMH)

After questioning the men over a five-hour period, police released them without charge. They resumed their holiday, but had to pay for a taxi to the home of a relative in New York that night, and forfeited the cost of a night’s accommodation in Orlando. They estimate the changed arrangements cost them $US245 ($318).

A collection of animals discovered buried in the map of the London Underground. (from boingboing)