Ecosystem, or Curated Manure?

Okay, I’ve officially had it with this year’s buzzwords.  You know which ones.

Ecosystem

Curated.

At first ecosystem was kind of cute.  It sounded so green and organized.  Who could argue against anything prefixed with eco? 

Facebook is a social disease

I understand how computer viruses got their name.  It’s appropriate.  Little evil, invasive things that wreak major havoc on a system.

I’ve come to the conclusion that Facebook is such a bug, of the social variety.  I’ve never had direct relations with the service, don’t intend to, but still feel contaminated. 

America Offline: fall of a walled gardener

This is a Tale of Two Internets, with a vivid beginning but no clear ending yet.

Technophiles of my ancient generation fondly ruminate over the early glory days of wide network communications, when there were basically two modes:  ARPANET, and Bulletin Board Systems (BBS).  As many know the former was a US government-sponsored networking project that was originally closed to the general public, while the latter was a collective prototype Internet rooted in normal telephony infrastructure and was easily accessible by anyone with the right equipment.

But something curious happened over time.

Cloudy days for data, Part 3 (conclusion)

After a bit of a delay I’m going to wrap up this series tonight.  In the last segment, I finished up describing the struggle between file independence and data management, ending with the usefulness of metadata and touching on Cory Doctorow’s dissension on that topic.

I’d rather that readers take some time to read Doctorow’s interesting thesis than for me to repeat too much of the content here, but suffice to say he pokes seven disturbing holes into what he terms “meta-utopia” and as I said previously it isn’t easy to disregard his points.  The most troublesome to me concerns the problem of crafting agnostic, universal schemas, which tend to be two-dimensional and thus create difficulties for diverse parties trying to arrive at design consensus.  Doctorow correctly points out that data sets and needs tend to be richer than that, extending easily into three dimensions (my extrapolation) in order to properly define any object.  Just as databases are better than flat files, data cubes are better still– and there has been work along those lines with XML.

Doctorow ends on a somewhat promising note by admitting that, flaws and all, metadata is still useful.  It’s just that those choosing to rely on it as part of any information management or publishing solution need to be aware of the pitfalls going in (his article should be part of the solution design requirements in my opinion).

James Strock and Modern Leadership

I recently attended a meeting of our local chapter of the American Society for Quality (ASQ) and as is often the case I was inspired by the guest speaker, this time a gentleman named James Strock.  His presentation was on 21st century leadership and how it does differ from the skills and experience required, say, centuries ago.

I jotted down some notes and I’ll share them here as bullet points rather than write up an entire treatise on his work.  However, some of the speculation is my interpretation/extrapolation and not necessarily what the speaker said verbatim:

Ovi: door to the developing world?

One of my biggest frustrations on the internet is the disconnect between services I use.  Various accounts each require individual logins which translates to a maintenance headache.  Microsoft tried to alleviate this years ago with Passport IDs, but wary users begged off of a solution proposed by a monolithic corporation.  More recently, OpenID shows promise but really only solves the login part of the equation.

Enter Ovi (Finnish for “door”), the semi-integrated smorgasbord of web services under construction by global phone giant Nokia.  The goal is a seamless experience where members can thread their way through photo uploads, music downloads and related online experiences without the hassle of multiple accounts.  Integration has been rough, as demonstrated by one recent hiccup, but unfortunately such can be the growing pains of a Frankenstein product assembled from mostly purchased parts.