When wikis won't work I couldn't help but be intrigued by this draft posting on wikinews.org about a diner in a Buffalo restaurant who allegedly found a rubber glove in his sandwich. Yuck. The story interested me for reasons other than the weirdness of it, though.

For one thing, the draft has no names. Neither the customer nor the store manager is identified. There is also a nonsequitir at the end of the second paragraph referring to the restaurant's efforts to expand and tear down an old house in the process. I couldn't understand what this information had to do with an unpleasant dining experience.

Standard journalistic practice is to seek comment from both sides, so I called Pano's Restaurant and spoke to owner Pano Georgiadis. He was unaware of the Wikinews posting and vigorously denied that this incident had happened. He called it "fiction."

I wanted to contact the author to get his or her side of the story but the author is merely an IP address at Adelphia Communications, so that was a dead end. Adelphia does serve the Buffalo area.

I looked a little more into the reference to the restaurant's plan to demolish an old house as part of an expansion effort. There's a website about the house that explains some of its history and mentions Pano's expansion plans. It looks to me like this is a pretty contentious issue in that neighborhood.

So put two and two together and it starts to look like this "news story" may have been the work of a disgruntled neighbor who's pissed off at Pano's. That's just speculation, of course, but there's no way to find out since the author can't be reached. Anyone could have made the story "news," though, by simply changing a tag. Then it would have shown up on Wikinews's front page, right up there with the Saddam Hussein trial.

It's also interesting to noted that this story had been reviewed by other people. There had been 15 edits by four other people, who dutifully rewrote it, polished it and corrected grammar errors but never bothered to check its accuracy. Community journalism, in this case, was really community copy-editing.

The more I look at the Wikinews model, the less I like it as a mainstream information source. When it's good, it's very good, as I noted in an earlier analysis. I think it could be a great adjunct to existing news media - and some newspapers are experimenting with this - but the potential for damage through abuse or just plain ignorance is too high. There are certain journalistic disciplines that have to be enforced or the process just doesn't work.

BTW, I checked the LA Times, which launched a wiki in June, to see how it was coming along. It's been shut down "because a few readers were flooding the site with inappropriate material," a notice says.

The dark side of community journalism.  ¶ 9:01 AM 0 Comments

  A rant on rants Talking to a lot of people about community media lately, I notice one word that comes up often: fear. Part of it is fear of the unknown as in people don't really understand community media so they're afraid of it. But a more troubling issue is fear about the blogosphere as an arena for ambush and attack, a place where well-meaning people dare not tread for fear of their reputations.

I think this image is an embedded problem for the blogosphere that will hold back its potential as a socially acceptable medium for discussion and influence.

The First Amendment made my career possible and I wouldn't think of advocating against free speech. But free speech and responsible speech aren't the same thing. Bloggers don't have editors, professional societies or codes of ethics, nor do they want them. That makes it incumbent upon bloggers to create their own ethical standards. That's a tall order in a world that's growing as quickly as this one without any underlying governance principles.

What are we trying to achieve? If it is just to speak, we've got that. If we want to spout off, we can do that too. Will people listen? Well, there's no way to insure that but for most bloggers that isn't really the point. They're just digging on the freedom that the media provides.

But if we're going to take blogging to the next level, then it's up to the blogosphere to make itself a force that markets will want to listen to. We're off to a good start but there's still a long way to go.

It seems to me that blogging stands at a kind of turning point right now.

Down one path lies the road to places like Yahoo newsgroups and Usenet, which have degenerated into spam, chaos and character assassination. That's what happens when the crazies take over and the good people basically run screaming.

Down the other path is the innovation created by cable TV and community publishing. While there are certainly problems with both those media, there's no question they have created a richer information environment than the cartels they replaced. We are better off because of them.

A personal experience. A few years ago I had some brushes with a group called Team OS/2. It was a loose federation of users organized by some IBMers and sent out to evangelize OS/2 when it was still in a trench war with Windows. It was a good idea and I admired the group for its commitment. But over time Team OS/2 became less evangelical and more vigilante. Reporters and editors who criticized OS/2 were verbally ambushed and beaten by postings in newsgroups, forums and letters to the editor. If our crime was ignorance, then we were stupid. If we favored Windows, then we had been brainwashed. There was no middle ground with Team OS/2. And as the operating system slid further off the market share charts, Team OS/2's tactics became more desperate, pathetic and ugly.

My own Team OS/2 encounters prompted me to write an editorial that was probably the closest I ever came to flame mailing someone myself. It was a disturbing experience.

The blosophere is full of people who just want to rant, protest and puke all over the institutions and people they don't like. There's always going to be a certain amount of that behavior and that's fine. The challenge is to make those people the fringe. I believe that the real voice of this community lies in the leaders who are defining it: people like Dan Gillmor, Adam Curry and Dave Winer. They have a vision of the blogosphere as a kind of new manifestation of democratic speech, one in which thoughtful, rational and constructive voices rise above the noise and help the medium achieve its potential.

The only way we have to support their efforts is through our links. Linking is the currency of the blogosphere and it will choose the winners and losers. Ranters and flamers will always have their place (hopefully in a corner :-)) but I hope they aren't rewarded with clicks and links. Choose the people whose opinions you value and reward them with your time because they're the future of this new medium.  ¶ 1:51 PM 0 Comments

  In-line blogger comments Google has introduced Blogger Web Comments for Firefox, a plug-in for the Mozilla browser that embeds links to blog commentary right in the frame of a webpage. The feature appears as a small icon in the lower right-hand corner. Click on it and get a summary of what bloggers are saying about that page. This is a great tool for business marketers who want to track what's being said in the blogosphere about their companies. In my tests, the utility didn't distinguish on dates very much but it did a good job of scouring both Blogger and non-Blogger sites for information and it presented them cleanly and fast. I presume a version for Internet Explorer is on the way.  ¶ 10:19 PM 2 Comments

  Corporate blogs gone bad A friend of mine, a very successful public relations professional, recently told me that many of her clients are now asking her about blogging because they believe it's a critical part of remaining competitive, that their clients are all doing it so they should be doing it too.

This came just after a chat with another friend whose boss started a blog because his superiors told him he had to. The problem is that the boss doesn't have time to maintain the blog so my friend is updating it for him.

Both situations are emblematic of what's wrong with corporate blogging today. Too many businesses are diving into blogging because they think it's a checklist item, that they need a blog because their competitors have one or because it's the "thing to do."

Those strategies - if you can call them that - are doomed to fail because blogging isn't about satisfying a competitive mandate; it's about having something to say.

That's what I told my friends. The culture of the blogosphere demands that people who blog should do so because they have a need to communicate that is unmet by traditional channels. It's not a checklist item. People who blog out of obligation or resignation will fail because they will bring no passion or commitment to the process. It's passion that makes blogging work.

I'm not denigrating the role of corporate PR. I think it's appropriate that PR should create and enforce corporate standards for disclosure in any communications, online or otherwise. Microsoft and Sun both have very active blog cultures, but they also have strict rules on accountability, insider information, forward-looking statements and other activities that tend to draw the attention of the SEC.

There are ways that even publicly held corporations can blog successfully, though. Look at Stonyfield Farms, the yogurt maker. Its four corporate blogs talk about child-rearing, organic farming, healthy kids and women's issues. They're successful because they touch a nerve with customers and don't necessarily involve promotion of Stonyfield products. You can get good information from these blogs about nutrition news and government programs without ever knowing or caring that it's a yogurt company that's providing the information.

This is the way corporate blogging should develop, I think. The topics should be selected because they resonate with customers who have similar values and interests, not because they promote a product. The corporate marketing strategy of the '00s is all about this kind of "soft" selling because it promotes a brand without shoving it down the customer's throat. Blogs are a way to pick up smart and interesting people within a company and showcase them to the outside world in a way that makes their interests and values a part of the public's interests and values. It is, as Stonyfield's website says, "a chance for you to get inside Stonyfield and get to know us, and us to know you."

Smart companies increasingly will understand this.  ¶ 9:40 PM 1 Comments

  BtoB takes on Social Media I'm delighted to report that the editors at BtoB Magazine have relented to my ceaseless badgering and agreed to let me take on a monthly column about social media beginning in January.

This is good stuff because BtoB is a well-read and respected publication in the advertising and media profession with 45,000 paid subscribers, two-thirds of them marketers. The decision to give regular space to analysis of the world of blogs, wikis, podcasts and other community media is an important endorsement of how important those influencers have become to mainstream business.

I need your help. If you're a marketer or PR professional, please write or post here and tell me what you want to know about working with the blogosphere. If you're a blogger who regularly writes about businesses, tell me what information and support you need from them. Help me choose the best conferences on this topic and help me find the best bloggers and podcasts in this area.

With all due respect to my friends in high tech, I am particularly interested in hearing from people outside of the computer industry. We know that a lot of computer makers "get" social meda but they don't reflect the real world. Since 3/4 of BtoB's audience is non-tech, I'd like to hear more about their concerns so I can educate myself and target the column to a broader audience.

I'll post links to the column when it starts in mid-January. Please contribute your comments and ideas so the column reflects as wide a variety of topics as possible.  ¶ 4:38 PM 3 Comments

  Wiki quality check The science journal Nature performed a head-to-head comparison of Encyclopedia Britannica and Wikipedia and found that Britannica was only slightly more accurate than its online, community-edited counterpart.

The average science entry in Wikipedia had four errors to Britannica's three. What I found surprising was the Britannica had three errors on average to begin with. Didn't we used to pay thousands of dollars for bound copies of that reference work?

So if you're the publishers of Encyclopedia Britannica, how do you respond? Here's what the Britannica spokesman said: "It is not the case that errors creep in on an occasional basis or that a couple of articles are poorly written. There are lots of articles in that condition. They need a good editor."

Um, maybe so. But you charge $70/year for your service and Wikipedia is free. What's more, Wikipedia is less than five years old and is going to get better. Britannica's been around since 1768 and still has three errors per article.

The Britannica spokesman doth protest too much. Maybe a better approach would be to emphasize the superior quality of writing in Britannica (that's a structural weakness of wikis), the top-name authors and the links to other proprietary information within Britannica's reference source family. Attacking a free competitor that's almost as good as a paid service is dumb.

Oh, and Britannica just cut the price of the 32-volume encyclopedia set to $995 for the holidays. Such a value. If I'm Wikimedia founder Jimmy Wales, I'm already talking with O'Reilly about publishing a competitor.

What would you do if you were Britannica? Post your comments here.  ¶ 8:18 AM 0 Comments

  Seeing the world view I highly recommend that you download and listen to this podcast with Professor Thomas Barnett of the Center for Naval Warfare Studies at the U.S. Naval War College. It's nearly an hour long but worth every minute.

Barnett talks about global politics in the context of technology. He points to one of the most dramatic developments of the last 15 years: the reordering of global priorities from superpower confrontation to containment of individual madmen and the opportunity it presents for the U.S. economic and political model to become transcendent.

Barnett, who's written two influential books on the changing nature of global politics, notes that the issues facing governments and economies have changed dramatically in just a short time. As late as the mid '80s, the threat of nuclear annihalation was a very real force in our day-to-day lives. The end of the cold war erased that threat and refocused our attention on state-to-state conflict as epitomized by the war between Serbia and Croatia. But that threat has vanished, too, he argues. The only major major inter-state conflict in the world today is between Ethiopia and Eritrea. Today, the political priority has turned to containing madmen like Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden, who disrupt global stability through targeted attacks but who don't threaten the supremacy of market economies. This is an important and very positive change.

Barnett argues that the U.S. economic model has won and that means the political model is winning as well. About 2/3 of the world's population lives in countries that have bought into capitalism and these countries will be tied closely to the U.S. in the future. In fact, he suggests that Americans may actually have more in common with China and India than we do with Great Britain and France because those Asian countries are embracing free market economies over government protectionism. Opposition is weakening. The Taliban promises a return to the past, which is unappealing to most people. These dissonant forces will fade with time as the superiority of the global free trade model triumphs.

Where's the tech angle? Not where you'd expect. Barnett believes that Y2K was a watershed in global politics. The date-change phenomenon created a heightened sensitivity that global networks could be disrupted and global commerce compromised, he says. Whether Y2K was a real problem or not is almost unimportant. The fact is that it forced people to confront the possibility of a world without computer networks and that created awareness of the importance of connectedness to the global economy. That awareness convinced people that maintaining supply chains and business linkages between countries was vital their well-being. And that undermind the power of local dicators.

Barnett uses terms like "open source" and "operating system" to describe characteristics of the global economy. If you're a techie who wants to understand the value of your work on a macro level, I recommend listening to this podcast.  ¶ 6:34 PM 0 Comments

  Prankster unmasked A Tennessee man has admitted to posting a spurious biography of veteran editor John Siegenthaler, Sr. on Wikipedia.org. I described the incident in a post about a week ago. There's a story about the admission here. Apparently, there was no harm intended. The story said the prankster changed the entry to play a trick on a co-worker, although why he chose Mr. Siegenthaler to be the victim isn't explained. Wikipedia got a lot of grief over the incident and event went so far as to tighten its submission rules to prevent a recurrence.  ¶ 8:54 AM 0 Comments

  Wiki Power
In the hours after a series of explosions rocked an oil storage facility north or London this morning, the place to turn for the most comprehensive coverage of the incident was not CNN, not NYTimes.com, not even the venerable Times of London.

It was Wikinews, a free news source written by hundreds of volunteers from around the globe.

Wikinews carried the first news of the explosions at 6:21 a.m. GMT, about 20 minutes after the incident occurred. In the eight hours following the blasts, the website's account was updated more than 150 times by more than 15 contributors, most from the U.K. By 2 p.m. GMT, the site had posted detailed information about the intensity of the explosions, their location, injury reports, likely causes and contact information for people who were affected.

Equally significant, the site linked to eight stories from other news sources, several photos of the explosion and more than 20 other sources of information on the region, the British petroleum industry and oil pipelines.

Wikinews is a new project by Wikimedia Foundation, a nonprofit group dedicated to supporting the dissemination of free information, principally through Wikis. The group is essentially replicating the reference section of a library through community publishing. It has about 10 reference projects in the works.

As a news wonk, I'm fascinated by Wikinews and what it does and doesn't do better than traditional media. Comparing the Wikinews account to others by CNN and the Associated Press, I was struck by Wikinews' focus on report the facts of the incident rather than providing context. For example, both the Times and CNN noted near the top of their stories that Great Britain has been on alert for terrorist attacks since the recent subway bombings in London while Wikinews made no mention of terrorism fears at all. The mainstream news organization also took pains to quote eyewitnesses and government and industry officials in their stories. Wikinews provided no such information, although it's fair to say that many of the contributors to Wikinews were eyewitnesses themselves. In general, I thought the mainstream media did a better job on reporting the context and the human tragedy of the event while Wikinews was more effective at reporting the facts and linking to other sources of information.

A lot of the discussion around Wikinews has focused on whether community journalism could come to replace traditional media. At this point, it appears that both have their place. Wikinews "reporters" don't have access to the official information channels that the mainstream media do. Community journalism also doesn't lend itself to contextual reporting because there's no professional editor overseeing the coverage. There is value to having that one person at the top who can package and prioritize information coming in from multiple sources.

However, Wikinews did an outstanding job in this case of serving as a nexis point for coverage of the event. No other coverage that I saw even came close to linking to the variety of information sources that could fill out a reader's understanding of the story. This is where community journalism excels. It is news as a collection of facts, supplemented by exhaustive references. In many ways, it's the essence of journalism as the "first draft of history."

Dan Gillmor, by the way, has done a lot of thinking about this topic as he works to launch a company around the citizen journalism idea. You can read about it on his blog.  ¶ 9:32 AM 0 Comments

  Yahoo rolls out Answers Yahoo's got an interesting new service called Yahoo Answers that just launched this week. It's a very simple but potentially powerful community concept. Members post questions and answer questions. That's all there is to it. There's a points system but the points aren't redeemable for anything. It's more a bragging rights thing.

Browsing the categories, there's a chaotic mix of stuff, ranging from questions that can't be answered ("Is there a God?") to very specific topics like the best hotels in Milan. I tried posting a question about cameras and got two useful responses within a couple of hours.

It takes someone with the throw weight of Yahoo to make this work. I wish them luck.  ¶ 9:13 AM 0 Comments

  Spyware epidemic Check out this article, Who Profits from Security Holes?, by Benjamin Edelman, a Harvard Ph.D. candidate who specializes in practices and economics of spyware. As a test, he used a fresh copy of Windows XP to visit a single web page (he didn't say which) and logged what spyware was installed on his computer. At least 16 programs were installed that he could identify and probably more than his spyware detector didn't find. There's a link to a screen-shot video of the experiment. It's a pretty alarming scene.

Edelman takes aim in particular at 180 Solutions, a spyware maker that's been openly lobbying lately to improve the image of so called "search marketing" vendors (that's one of many euphemisms this group uses). 180 Solutions drapes itself in the cloak of legitimacy by claiming that distributes only permission-based programs. However, Edelman finds that 180 is as bad as anyone at installing spyware without the user's permission. This guy has done his homework.  ¶ 10:35 AM 0 Comments

  The Neopets addiction Wired has an interesting story on Neopets, the online fantasy world that kids can't get enough of. My daughter was seriously into this community for a long time, though she's since graduated to more mature things. What always impressed me about Neopets is that it's a pure grass-roots phenomenon. Without benefit of a TV show, comic book or any "traditional" media support, Neopets has grown to 2.2 billion page views a month and more than 20 million users. Neopets-branded merchandise sells in Target stores. This is a complete Web phenomenon, Web 2.0 before there was a term for Web 2.0.

What's particularly amazing is that the average user spends 6.5 hours per month on Neopets. It is the ultimate sticky site.

The Wired piece does find controversy in a concept the Neopets makers call "immersive advertising." Activity areas on the site are increasingly designed by sponsors who pepper the scenery with product placements. There's debate over whether kids who are already coping with obesity should earn points by watching cereal commercials but I suspect this is no different than the infomercials kids watch on TV these days.  ¶ 8:50 AM 0 Comments

  Next generation mapping Microsoft is releasing the beta of Windows Live Local on Thursday at noon EST. Located at http://local.live.com, the service offers a supposedly higher quality service than Google Maps by integrating photos taken from low-flying airplanes of major US metro areas. In theory, you should be able to pinpoint locations much more accurately with Live Local than with Google Maps. You can then get detailed driving instructions without having the exact address.

This is an exciting time for search. I'm looking forward to Microsoft and Google facing off for supremacy in this area. We users are bound to be the big winners.  ¶ 11:38 PM 0 Comments

  Phish story

Network World has a story today about a phishing exploit that was so realistic that even Ebay's anti-spoofing team believed it was authentic. The blogger who first reported the incident says that he reported the suspicous e-mail to Ebay but was brushed off, even though there were several characteristics of the message that just didn't make sense. That's a pretty depressing commentary on the state of phishing, considering that Ebay is probably the most exploited domain the phishing world. I'm sure just about everyone has seen a convincing come-hither message purportedly from Ebay that really referenced a server in Eastern Europe somewhere.

I think 2006 will be the year that phishing takes center stage in the media coverage of computer security. It was all about spyware this year, but spyware is a slippery and often hard-to-define concept. Phishing, at least, you can understand. Unfortunately, phishing is also one of the most effective identity theft tactics there is. I was personally taken in by a phishing attack several years ago before I realized my mistake and had to scramble to change my Ebay password. And I'm presumably a lot more savvy about this stuff than the average user.

If phishers are good enough to fool even the trained investigators at Ebay, I think we're in for a long year of creative and effective attacks.  ¶ 9:43 PM 2 Comments

  Word of the year Editors at the New Oxford American Dictionary have selected "podcast" as their word of the year. Runners up were "bird flu," "persistent vegetative state" and "trans fat." Not exactly great company :-).

It seems an appopriate choice, though. This has been the year the MP3 player transitioned from gadget to necessity, at least for tech-savvy commuters. Podcasts are proliferating like rabbits right now and, while I don't expect most of them to live very long, the trend has clearly taken hold. The MP3 player is a legitimate new communications platform, perhaps the first one in 10 years (I'd say the cell phone was the last new platform). That's something to celebrate because new platforms invariably create create a launchpad for innovation. For example, there's a new company that will specialize in transcribing podcasts and selling ads against the transcriptions. It's just the beginning, folks.  ¶ 3:42 PM 0 Comments

  It had to happen Leave it to Playboy to put its own brand on podcasting. The company has announced "bodcasts," promising to deliver "free audio programs every weekday, including 'Ask Hef Anything,' 'Joke of the Day,' delivered by a Playboy model, as well as video advice from sexy Cyber Girls.

All in good taste, of course. :-)  ¶ 2:58 PM 0 Comments

  Open source and the channel Judging by the traffic statistics, a lot of recent visitors to this blog are interested in open source software adoption and why it isn't proceeding faster in the corporate mainstream. For them, I'll point to John Terpstra's excellent three-part series on SearchOpenSource.com about his frustration in trying to buy a Linux-ready laptop at a major computer retailer. It's one of the best-read stories ever on the three-year-old SearchOpenSource.com site.

Terpstra documents how his efforts were frustrated by salespeople's unfamiliarity with Linux, the lack of commercial software and device drivers for Linux and the fact that the salespeople tended to be trained to sell only a Windows solution to buyers. He expresses frustration at a retailer's lack of awareness of open-source options and compares the process of buying a Windows PC to that of buying a Linux box. If you're an open-source fan, this column will make you see red. But it should also reveal some essential truths.

I'm not a big advocate of conspiracy theories in technology, so I don't think Microsoft has engaged in some kind of coordinated campaign to shut Linux out. I do think, however, that Microsoft has done an exceptional job of educating its channel to sell the Microsoft solution. This is one area in which the vendor has consistently excelled. And Microsoft has continued to invest in channel education even as it has solidified its monopoly on the desktop. Give the company credit: it has effectively shut out any option to Windows at the street level.

The lack of a dominant Linux advocate in the retail channel hurts the open-source cause in this case. Microsoft has the hearts and minds of retailers and there is no one with comparable throw weight in the open-source market to balance Redmond's efforts. If Linux is to be successful on the desktop, it must be because consumers demand it and because software makers write the applications and device drivers to support it. The latter is a chicken-and-egg problem. Software makers won't write the apps until the demand is there. And the demand won't materialize unti the apps are in place. In the meantime, we have an uneasy standoff.

BTW, the OSDL working group has just released a survey on Linux adoption on the desktop. The results reveal that desktop Linux users want the same thing as desktop Windows users: office productivity applications and device drivers. There is no particular bias for one platform over another as long as the platform delivers superior value for the dollar. Linux's challenge continues to be to convince application developers that it is a reasonable alternative to Windows without being able to deploy the massive marketing dollars that Microsoft brings to the task. Score one for Microsoft. It is exceptionally good at exploring Windows' advantage at the street level.  ¶ 7:17 PM 0 Comments

  Boston bloggers needed The Massachusetts Software Council wants to put together a panel on corporate blogging and is looking for prominent business people in the Boston area who maintain blogs. They don't have a clear fix on the topic just yet, but I expect it'll related to how businesses can understand the blogosphere and use blogs as communication devices. If you know someone who'd be a good speaker, please comment on this post or send me an e-mail. Thanks!  ¶ 11:45 AM 0 Comments

  Feeling worldly It's Sunday, so let's lighten it up a bit :-).

The best gadget I've purchased in a long time is a Garmin GPSMap 60C handheld global positioning receiver (about $300). I've always been fascinated by the idea that you could pinpoint your position on the planet to within a few feet but I didn't anticipate the value it would have in everyday life.

On a practical level, having a GPS in the car is saving me time and aggravation. I never get lost any more because I know almost immediately when I'm off track. I've also started experimenting with finding shorter routes to places I routinely visit, which has cut down on time and gas consumption. I can even plan longer trips by punching in coordinates before I leave and then following the route the unit calculates (you need to invest in special software for this). You can look up the coordinates to any address on the globe, BTW, at Maporama.com.

For recreation, the GPS opens a few new doors. I've started geocaching, which is kind of an online global scavenger hunt that has turned out to be way more fun than I thought it would be. Not only do my kids and I get a kick out of finding the secret treasure hidden in forests and cemeteries but the activity has taken me to nature preserves, walking trails and public parks that I didn't even know existed. I'll even take the GPS on the road with me and take a break for an hour here and there to geocache in another city. Such a geek I am...

Travelers can download specialized maps of routes and locations around the globe to create a sort of digital TripTik. If you have a lousy sense of direction, you have to get one of these things. It will make your life so much easier.

I've been interested by commercial applications of GPS since I first noticed a unit being used as a range-finder on my golf cart years ago. GPS are already routinely used in fleet management applications. You can imagine why UPS would value this information but there are other cool ideas as well. A friend contacted me just the other day who works at a small company, Everyday Wireless, that specializes in tracking school buses. School administrators and nervous parents can pinpoint the location of a bus at any time and display it on a web page. Any parent who's stood in the cold with their child for 20 minutes waiting for a late bus can relate to this application. I've long wondered what would happen if you could shrink the size of a GPS receiver to something that could fit in a cell phone or a tooth. Imagine the uses of a technology that could track anything's position on earth to within a few feet. Imagine the abuses if privacy limitations weren't respected.

One more GPS-related item in my morning ramble: I listened to an interesting podcast of a presentation by Todd Young of Rosum Corp. This startup has figured out a way to use broadcast TV signals to pinpoint locations in dense urban areas or inside buildings where GPS doesn't work. I have no idea how effective this technology really is, but the founder of Rosum is one of the inventors of the GPS system. For sheer innovation, this idea is tough to beat.  ¶ 7:37 AM 0 Comments

  Character assassination USA Today had an interesting op-ed piece this week by a retired journalist who wrote about the experience of being libeled on Wikipedia and being unable to do anything about it. John Siegenthaler, Sr. said his bio (which no longer appears to be listed on Wikipedia) was spurious and riddled with factual errors. It said he spent 13 years in the Soviet Union, started one of the country's largest PR firms and - hold on to your hat - was once suspected of involvement in both Kennedy assissinations. All not true.

Siegenthaler tells of the tortuous process he endured to have the biography taken down and his frustration at being unable to identify the author of the spurious information, an ordeal made more difficult by the protections of the Communications Decency Act. The Wikipedia information was also picked up and reprinted without question by Reference.com and Answers.com.

Siegenthaler's experience is an anomaly, I'm sure, and the vast majority of information on Wikipedia is no doubt correct. But it is a stark reminder of the vulnerability of the Internet to misinformation. Wikipedia has gotten a lot of justifiable praise for creating a workable structure for community information gathering. The fact that the service works at all would have been fairly mind-boggling five years ago.

But the Siegenthaler story is a reminder of the vulnerability of the open-content model to manipulation. The Wikipedia disclaimer page includes a stark warning that "None of the authors, contributors, sponsors, administrators, sysops, or anyone else connected with Wikipedia in any way whatsoever can be responsible for the appearance of any inaccurate or libelous information or for your use of the information contained in or linked from these web pages." Kinda scary, huh?

We're entering what could be called the Age of Search, where information is freely available and, increasingly, freely editable. Google and other search engines will provide you with a rich list of facts but they do little to distinguish between the credible and the suspicious. In the Age of Search, critical thinking becomes a more vital skill than fact-finding. There's an interesting podcast interview with Vinod Khosla, venture capitalist and co-founder of Sun, that makes a case for this. Khosla observes that his children have come to regard information as a commodity that's easily available and freely shareable. The challenge for this new generation, though, is to exercise the critical thinking skills to separate good information from bad.

Google's technology doesn't do all that good a job of that. For example, a search on the phrase "How high is Mt. Everest?" turns up at least five different answers (it's generally recognized to be 29,035 ft.) . It's the searcher's job to figure out which response to believe.

The profusion of search technology only makes this more important. I think we're going to see an explosion of search options in the next few years. Perhaps there's an opportunity for someone to invent a critical search engine that contains an algorithm for evaluating the reliability of information.

Thanks for Peggy Rouse, editor of the reference site whatis.com, for alerting me to this story.  ¶ 8:02 AM 0 Comments

  Open source in the enterprise I attended a seminar this morning by The Massachusetts Software Council on Open Source & the Enterprise: Enterprise Adoption and it was the best $50 I've spent in a long time. Dan Bricklin moderated, which was a good reason to attend right there. Dan's new passion is podcasting and he was recording the event for posting in the next week or two (keep an eye on his blog for details). I love Dan. He brings such energy and enthusiasm to his work, running around with microphones and audio equipment, you almost forgot this guy is an industry legend and one of the smartest programmers in the world. But on to the subject at hand...

The takeaways I got from listening to Nick Gall, who's a Distinguished Analyst at Gartner, and speakers from Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Massachusetts and Fidelity Investments is that open source software (OSS) has clearly turned the corner in the enterprise and is now seated at the table with the software elite. Noting that open source represents the transition of power from the vendor to the user, Gall predicted that OSS will nearly quadruple as a percentage of software spending over the next four years. While that's still a relatively small percentage (Gartner's actual forecasts are under embargo until next Wednesday), it's a huge dollar amount when you factor in the growth in overall software spending during the same period.

Gall sees the action shifting quickly from infrastructure markets where the LAMP stack is already well-established into applications. Business programs like SugarCRM, Asterisk, OpenOffice and Compiere are beginning to make their presence felt and even in the infrastructure area, newcomers like mySQL and JBoss are challenging the proprietary leaders. Helping this trend is the move by companies like Sun and IBM to put large libraries of proprietary code under the GNU General Public License, thereby presenting new competition to the market leaders. Gall pointed out that these gestures aren't necessarily altruistic: open-sourcing is an alternative to supporting old code and gives second-tier vendors a chance to disrupt markets where they couldn't achieve dominance.

Gall sees OSS making greater inroads in new applications than as legacy replacements. At the same time, the software industry will undergo a transition from its current dependence on licensing fees to reliance on service and support revenue. This is already happening, he noted, as many software companies now get as much revenue from service as from sales.

Revenue declines can be partially offset by lower costs. In fact, Gall said, "By 2010, software companies that don’t incorporate OSS into offered solutions risk becoming uncompetitive due to the cost of in-house engineering. " Wow. Talk about making it to the big leagues.

The business model for open-source vendors certainly is different. These companies spend less on development because much of that work is done in the community. They also spend less on distribution, since trial downloads are the way the software spreads. These companies have a leaner business model and, at least for now, get closer to their customers, according to the two Fidelity speakers at the event. Those speakers - Mike Askew and Charles Pickelhaupt - agreed that open-source suppliers tend to be more accommodating of their needs and more responsive to their requests.

Much of the discussion centered around the GPL, which is undergoing its first major revision in nearly 15 years. Speakers agreed that the current GPL has too many vagaries and loopholes to make it completely enterprise-friendly. The language makes enterprise users nervous, for example, that proprietary enhancements that they make to a program covered by GPL may have to be disclosed to the world, thereby negating their value. There's also lingering concern over SCO's campaign last year to recover license fees from Linux users, including some enterprises. Gall said the concerns are real. Until the license issues get hashed out in court - and ultimately by the Supremes - users have every right to be cautious, he said.

Speakers largely agreed that a lot of the old myths about OSS are precisely that: myths. The community support model is responsive and effective, they said. The quality of most mainstream OSS applications is at least as good as that of their commercial counterparts and you don't need a highly skilled team of programmers to make open source work. Independent service providers are rushing in quickly to fill that void.

Fidelity's story is especially interesting. The company first adopted an open-source development platform, TKL, in 1995. In fact, that TKL program once accounted for almost 10% of the trading action on the NYSE, said Mike Askew, an executive in Fidelity's Center for Applied Technology. It has since been rewritten with more modern technologies, including Java. Fidelity uses more than a dozen open-source applications in production, including Apache, Tomcat, Axis, Eclipse and Jetspeed-2. And, in keeping with Gall's prediction about the growth of open-source business applications, is looking at BIRT and OpenOffice as alternatives to mainstream business products.

Fidelity has an open mind about all things open source but does put candidates through the wringer. Open-source alternatives to existing applications must demonstrate comparable functionality and go before a review board that sets standards for certification, support and maintenance.

Though open source is an exciting new opportunity, the wild-west nature of the market is still an irritation to some users. Fidelity VP Charles Pickelhaupt noted that his firm has counted 58 different variations of open-source licenses. And code revision cycles that can lead to daily builds can make version control a chore. Nevertheless, Fidelity is charging ahead. Not only is OSS comparable to proprietary alternatives in most cases, "Many people think it's superior," he said.  ¶ 2:38 PM 2 Comments