FrackIM is instant messaging bot (using XMPP) that  Bob Wyman  recently revealed.  It tickles one of my long time interests – forward chaining on the Internet; e.g. how are updates propagated from where they occur to those who are interested.  The problem is fraught challenges.  How to make it private is one.  For example nobody ought to know I’m interested in follow updates about <redacted>, or that I’m currently in the market for <redacted>.    Avoiding the forming of one or only a few hubs is extremely hard.  And then all then engineering is fun.

The hubs are fascinating.  Imagine there is a single hub, and every update about everything is sent thru that hub.  If you were that hub you could see all kinds of things.  Well we sort of have a hub like that already.  Some years ago the blog community gin’d up a way to push notifications about updates to hubs.  A second generation approach to that problem emerged after a while, that goes by the unwieldy but amusing name PubSubHubbub.  Publishers send notifications to the hub and subscribers get (or pull) notifications from the hub.

FrackIM is a demo of Bob calls prospective search.  It allows you to set up various search patterns and then when something “goes by” it will immediately send you an notice about it.  I hear you asking, “‘Goes by’ where?”    Imagine that it goes by in a chat room.  And who is in this chat room – well everybody who is pushing updates to PubSubHubbub.  So roughly you can listen in on everything that’s happening.  This is not quite true because the FrackIM demo is only listening to a small subset of the total traffic; that’s configurable in the source though.  FrackIM can to this because Google has services available do prospective search on that traffic; in actually FrackIM is a thin overlay on that functionality.  That’s a fine example of the kind of services I long ago described as likely to emerge in the big cloud operating systems.

If you’d like to play with FrackIM then you just add frackIM@appspot.com to one  your xmpp (jabber, gtalk, etc.)  IM accounts; and then type: “/help”.  Then if you want to get updates about energy type: “/subscribe energy”.  Of course if you don’t subscribe to anything it’s pretty quiet, in fact I assume it’s totally quiet.  If you want it be noisier then try subscribing to a common word: “/subscribe a”, (though I think it’s actually subscribe to the letter a).  FYI I’m currently subscribed to #huh, meet you there.

John Dickerson is on the campaign trail and he’s fallen into a nostalgic funk.  Back in the good old days it was more fun, or at least funny.  So he writes about the how humorless the GOP candidates are.

Wit, ah wit.

Good fun making up insta-theories(tm) for this.  I wonder if the PR industry has determined that the majority of the target audience things wits are twits?  No doubt campaign consultants fear spontaneity so much they suppress all wit.  Individuals have their preferred subspecies of wit, Dickerson likes wit, maybe these guys all prefer sarcasm or slapstick.  And then maybe Jon Steward locked up the supply of good comedy writers?

Presumably there are two or more faces on each candidate.  The face he shows on national television, the one he shows off the record on the press bus, the one he shows when pressing the flesh with the voters on the streets, etc. etc.    And no doubt they can be more witty in some of these contexts than others.  John would appear to be telling us that these guys aren’t even witty on the press bus.

Let us not forget.  Accusing the loser of being humorless, angry, and depressed is a cheap, but effective, shot.

Over the last few months I’ve been entertaining the question: How exactly does a country exit a currency union?  (Have I mentioned that 99 times out of a hundred harboring ideas about how to reform the currency system is a sign of mental illness?)

You need to act quickly.  Otherwise you get a bank run.  As long as the liquid assets are in bank accounts swapping them from the old to the new currency is a straight forward procedure.  Same for your bonds, loans, contracts, etc.  If the liquid assets are in people’s wallets it’s more tedious to swap in the new currency.  I doubt it’s effective to announce that the old currency is no longer legal tender.  But, since it’s likely that your purpose in exiting a currency union is to regain control over the money supply.

Let’s assume your exiting the union because your economy is being forced into a depression because you lost control over you money supply.  In that case you probably want to flood the market to increase the money supply.  So you can push a lot of your new currency into the system; and gain some traction due to the way bad money drives out good.

I got to thinking about how to do the switch quickly.  If anybody discovered that you were printing up fresh Drachmas it would trigger the bank run.  I’m greatly amused by the idea that creates an opportunity for some risk loving entrepreneur, let’s call him Bob.  Bob secretly prints up huge batch of replacement currency.  He transports it to the capital of the country and knocks on the door of the Treasury.  He explains: “If you decide you need to act, here’s my number – I’ve got just what you need.”  Even if Bob’s offer leaks it’s not the same signal to the market as the news that the Treasury has commissioned a new currency.

Then I found my self wondering, well, what might you do if you had the chance to redesign a currency from scratch?  None of these ideas seem likely; but they are fun.  For example you could decide that the entire credit/debit card system is stupid and nationalize it.  I consider it amazing that we have allowed private entities to tax a large percentage of all transaction.  For example you could decide that you wanted all transactions to be anonymous, or conversely that you wanted all of them to be public.  These choices all play into your tax system’s architecture.

None of these radical currency redesign ideas are likely given the need to act fast and in secret.  But then, just maybe Bob could figure out a way to sweeten his offer by bundling in one or more of these.  Which brings me to my most depressing thought.  Does Paypal have a team working on this?

More and more firms have cottoned onto a way to get expert talent almost for free.  How?  Running a contest and talk about community.  If you draw in the right talent you can also pump up brand awareness.

Here is a nice straight forward  critique, Moleskin running a contest to get a new logo,  of one attempt of this kind.  The author estimates that the firm will payout $7,000 dollars for 28,000 hours of designer-labor or 25 cents and hour.

The context matters.  Here is discussion of an almost identical contest, the Obama campaign’s contest for a new logo.    But in this case I agree with the author; the is contest is entirely appropriate.  And, the extremely small prize is symptomatic of that.

Here’s a third example contest, a trading firm looking for some C code.  This one is finished.  What stood out to me when I first saw this one was the care they had taken to assure they captured the IP rights and the limitation to students, so as to avoid the risk of conflicts arising from the contestant’s employment agreement:  “11. INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS: As between … and the Participant, the Participant transfers ownership of all intellectual and industrial property rights in and to the Entry that Participant had before submission, ….”

Actually there are entire firms who’s business model is running contests like these for their clients.

I wish we, expert talent that is, had a larger pool to techniques, regulation, and institutions it can use to undermine this pernicious activity.  For example in  the open source community licenses and project governance work together to temper the problem.  In standards bodies the patent pools and poison pills help a little.  Raising awareness helps.

Massachusetts has a nice GIS site.  Here is a land use map for some of the Boston area, click to enlarge; or see it in their viewer.

Much excitement, Wegman’s is opening a store in Northboro Massachusetts.  Wegman’s the archetype for the modern grocery store chain: gigantic, exhausting to browse (like a Home Depot or a Walmart), lots of signal value, lots of experience value; now quite as pretentious as WholeFoods, pricey.  It’s privately held, so the wealth of it’s owners is obscured.

“Wegmans has paid the lobbying firm of Patton Boggs $570,000 in fees to lobby on the estate tax in every year since 1998. In six of these years, the estate tax has been the sole issue on which Patton Boggs has lobbied on Wegmans’ behalf.” –  Spending Millions to Save Billions

That was written in 2006, so – at minimum – in those eight years they spend 4.5 millions dollars.

This store will bring the Wegmans into contact with another famous regional Grocery store: Market Basket/DeMoulas’.  The DeMoulas’ spend their free time  suing each other.

Surely somebody has repurposed that song from Camelot; “What do the simple folk do?”  for the 1%.

Here’s one of those b-school charts, this one about media reporting:

I the short days between when AI finally works and the Singularity clicks in we can imagine that metadata will tag all articles with this information.

I’ve only recently started reading Jay Rosen’s blog “Quote and Comment,” and I’m surprised that I like it. I generally find all the arguments about old/new media to be strangely pointless and hopelessly ill informed.

He draws our attention this wonderful Marshall McLuhan quote:

To start announcing your own preferences for old values when your world is collapsing and everything is changing at a furious pitch: this is not the act of a serious person. It is frivolous, fatuous. If you were to knock on the door of one of these critics and say “Sir, there are flames leaping out of your roof, your house is burning,” under these conditions he would then say to you, “That’s a very interesting point of view. Personally, I couldn’t disagree with you more.”

Exactly right.  The arguments in the old media about old and new media are exactly of that kind.  It must be exhausting to be modern media critic; to spending your days standing on that doorway having that conversation.

I haven’t read that much of Jay’s stuff yet.  But one idea he toys with is that the media must to stop pretending to be dispassionate observers.  They need to let go of the what I think he calls “the view from nowhere.”  My imaginary tagging AI might do this for you – it might tag a report so you can know the presumptions and constraints of the reporter.  That, for example he has deep intimate relationships with the institution he is reporting on and that these constrain his ability to be entirely transparent about what he knows; or – on the contrary – that he is an outsider likely to lack appreciation of the complex trade-offs the institution’s members are living within and thus likely to take cheap shots at their necessary hypocrisies.    Or that the reporter is deeply invested in the current group consensus and often acts as a guardian of that consensus; e.g. that his primary loyalty is to his role and stature within that dominate consensus.

Of course we could imagine that something else, something other than my imaginary AI, might take responsibility for this tagging.  Obviously there are lots of possibilities: ratings agency, a media critic (like Jay), the reporter himself, the blog sphere, … the possibilities are endless.

There is money in this.  Everybody is slowly waking up to the commercial value in having increasingly accurate profiles of your counter parties.  I have no doubt PR firms would pay a pretty penny for accurate profiles of the various entities in the media they must handle.  And our AI tech is good enough already  that it can do a pretty good job of this.  Sadly, and typically, it is probably easier to make money on this by computing the profiles and selling them to a limited audience v.s. – say – Google doing it and then tagging everything.

This reminds me of an incident from back in the 80s.  At the time there was an active small catalog industry.  Once or twice a week the mailman would bring around another catalog full of stuff my household might want.  Google used to have an awesomely fun search engine for scanned versions of these (toy) catalogs, they shut it down a decade ago; I assume  small catalog industry shrank and moved online.

The mid-sized businesses that sent out these catalogs purchased mailing lists from vendors who had built models of each household/zipcode/region/etc.  At some point a company, I think it was Lotus, brought out a product who’s intent was to empower smaller businesses to do this.  The product came with a CD, and the CD had a simple profile for lots and lots of addresses.  The idea being that the small business man would filter out a small targeted mailing list and send his catalog to those folks.

This was perfectly straight forward evolution in the technology of targeted marketing.  It’s an information industry, so costs plummet.  In information industries, what a big firm can afford usually quickly becomes something a small firm can afford.

What happened to this product?  Outrage!  People had no idea that this was going on, and they got very very angry.  There was a little feeding frenzy in the press, and the vendor quickly withdrew the product.  But of course, that did not stop the practice.  It only left it in the shadows.  To this day the targeted marketing industry still demands a veil of secrecy.  The functional benefits of the “view from nowhere” voice as used in the media seems quite analogous; it provides a veil.  I am not unsympathetic to the need for such compartmentalization.

I had more trouble than I expected finding a video of Obama’s speech last night; so here it is:

1. Part 1
2. Part 2
3. Part 3

Feeling playful about true names.

Ben Hyde – Playfulness and the Art of Getting Stuff Wrong from Ignite Cardiff on Vimeo.

The distribution of wealth creates a curious dynamic, a few producers garner all the profits but often a long tail of small producers continues to exist.  Denialists like to jump up and down and point as this long tail of marginal small producers.  An interesting example of this is the craft beer movement.  In this  interesting essay the author states that the entire craft brewing industry accounts for only 4% of beer sales.  So the brewery industry is extremely concentrated, with 96% of the sales in going to only ten producers, and 92% to the top five.

But here is an amusing thought.  This chart taken from that essay.  It shows (on the right) the industries with the highest concentration.

So.  Could eBay, etsy, Amazon, etc.  target these industries – where presumably there are monopoly profits to be captured?    Home vulcanization!

FYI – The best essay ever written on the topic of craft breweries is Daniel Davis’ “The  Christmas Sermon“.