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.