Liminal states

The Department of Homeland Security has released revised “Real ID” regulations — 284 pages long. While according to government jargon these are the “final” regulations, the first deadline for compliance has now been pushed back to December 31, 2009, so there’s still plenty of opportunity for Congress to act and change things.

Their press release now spins the system as “preventing document fraud”, and talks more about the costs of identity theft than it does about terrorism — pretty amusing in light of Privacy Rights Clearinghouse’s Real ID Act will increase exposure to identity theft. It also trumpets substantial cost savings, which it attributes primarily to revisions giving the states “greater flexibility in issuing licenses to older Americans”. Flexibility is a good thing, but it’ll be interesting to see what new holes they’ve introduced for terrorists and identity thieves to exploit.

I’ve blogged in the past on this issue on the Stop “Real ID” Now! blog, and will be updating it with links to analyses from the press and civil liberties organizations as they come out.

Howard Rheingold (author of The Virtual Community) has a new vlog up.  The first video does a great job in setting today’s high-bandwidth, visually immersive world in the context of online community, social networking, and activism over the late 20 years. From his intro post on Smartmobs:

It all started when I started thinking about updating A Slice of Life in My Virtual Community, which I wrote twenty years ago. It didn’t take long to realize that a description of how I spend my time online these days would be conveyed more effectively via video/screencast than plain text. Once I got rolling, I realized that it would take more than one episode to show how and why I spend time reading RSS, scanning blogs, blogging, gardening wikis, posting in virtual communities, Twittering, teaching, etc. So the first month or so will feature episodes of A (re)Slice of Life Online. However, once I started including my indoor and outdoor offices in the videos, it occurred to me that I ought to explain something about the parts of my life that haven’t been so visible to my readers — the painting, gardening, sculpting that are as important to me as the publishing activities that are most visible to others.

This mixing of different aspects of life is very characteristic of how I think of social networks as well — and something I’m trying to do in this blog, as I mix in psytrance, gender, and political activism  along with software engineering, security, and strategy.  Rheingold does it better, of course; ah well,  maybe in another 20 years I’ll be up to his level.

Worth checking out. 

Wikia‘s an open-source search engine that uses community feedback to improve search results, an approach referred to as ‘social search’, and they released their alpha version today. I briefly discuss the social networking aspects of this and my initial experiences on the Tales from the Net blog and linked out to some initial reviews and discussion. In South Korea, Naver dominates the market via a social search approach; when I was at Microsoft, I strongly lobbied for the company investing in this to complement its algorithmic approaches and try to leapfrog Google rather than catching up, so I’m a big believer in the possibilities if it’s done right.

There’s an interesting debate about Wikia’s intent to be transparent about its search algorithms and implementation: will this give the advantage to people trying to hack the system to put their site on top? Or — because the community as a whole and responsibly-behaving web site owners all have an interest in getting the users high-quality search results — will it instead create a system where search engine optimizers and marketers (SEOs/SEMs) are above-ground participants, and overall results are better? Hard to know … if Wikia starts to get some traction, with luck, we’ll find out.

I picked up this short paperback (by Keith Yamahsita and Sandra Spataro) because I was intrigued with its design; it turned out to be very interesting in general. Unstuck is billed as “a tool for yourself, your team, and your world”, and while most of the examples come from the corporate space, it’s just as valuable for non-profit or political groups.

All leaders, teams, and individuals who aspire to be great, get stuck. That said, not all individuals who get stuck are wiling to admit that they’re stuck…. When you’re truly reaching out to the world, trying new things, and living up to your potential — that’s when you’re most likely to get stuck, because you’re deeply challenging the status quo. Those of us who stay stuck, do so because we’re paralyzed by fear. We’ve learned that getting unstuck requires staring our fear in the face, and relentlessly leaning into it. Staring fear in the face, the challenge then is to find one sliver of opportunity to defeat that fear — and often, that breakthrough is our opening to getting unstuck. From there, it’s about systems thinking, systems thinking, systems thinking.

Indeed. The three sections of the book deal with admitting you’re stuck (or recognizing the symptoms), diagnosing why you’re stuck (getting at the root causes: being overwhelmed, exhausted, directionless, hopeless, battle-torn, worthless, and alone), and doing something about it.

The last section is the longest with 40+ brief ideas for getting unstuck. The practicality and concreteness of these ideas is why I agree with the authors that the book really is a tool: “build a living lab”, “build a haven for radical thinking”, “start with the control points of the systme”, “write a headline from the future”, “make your brand a manifestation of your company’s purpose”, “be careful about which mode you are in”, “give the movement a name”, and “take over the tv station” are just a few examples. There’s also a lot of attention to network-centric thinking and diversity, including specifically calling out how younger employees are often marginalized. I’ve employed most of these techniques at various times (for example, I described a proposal for working on culture by focusing on internal communications as “putting the dissidents in charge of the communication ministry”) and they work well; along with Bob Sutton’s Weird Ideas that Work, this is the best collection I’ve seen.

The navigation through the third part of the book is interesting. Going through the section linearly presents techniques in an order that seems fairly random to me; charts in the identify the paths that correspond to each of the “serious seven” root causes; and most of the pages have one to three links to other pages. For example, on the page for “hold a summit”, there are links called “take to the airwaves” (pointing to “take over the tv station), “what will be the name of the event?” (pointing to “give the movement a name”), and “what will the headlines say?” (pointing to “write a headline from the future”). Particularly since the text of the links is different from the title of the target, it feels like a very wiki-esque organization to me; the excellent graphic design makes it feel very natural, and quite usable, in dead tree form as well.

Strongly recomended.

Catherine Holahan reports in BusinessWeek.com that

In a move that would mark the end of a digital music era, Sony BMG Music Entertainment is finalizing plans to sell songs without the copyright protection software that has long restricted the use of music downloaded from the Internet, BusinessWeek.com has learned. Sony BMG, a joint venture of Sony (SNE) and Bertelsmann, will make at least part of its collection available without so-called digital rights management, or DRM, software some time in the first quarter, according to people familiar with the matter.

Well, okay, it’s not quite abandoning DRM, but it’s a big step — and aligns Sony with Warner, EMI, and Vivendi, who all moved in this direction in 2007. The article’s got some good quotes by the usual suspects, including Edward Bronfam Jr. of Warner admitting that many people have said they could and should have done this long ago, and Rob Enderle highlighting how the labels attachment to DRM inadvertantly handed their power over to Apple.

Sony has been experimenting with DRM-free songs for about six months. The company began giving away DRM-free promotional downloads for recording artists that sell less than 100,000 units, and at least one artist gained mainstream exposure through the effort. “A lot of these tests have led people to believe that maybe this works,” says a Sony BMG executive who asked not to be identified.

No … ya think?????

As somebody who lobbied Microsoft for years to shift their DRM stance (I wrote a “BillG ThinkWeek paper” a few years ago called Why Microsoft should abandon consumer DRM) it’s great to see this shift — and it’s exciting to see companies like Amazon and eMusic take advantage of the opportunities, although of course Microsoft has so many natural advantages in this area that it’s not too late for them.

And as a consumer who doesn’t buy any DRM’ed music, all I can say is “yay”. No word yet on whether this means the RIAA will stop suing their customers, but it’s definite progress.

Update on January 11: Sony’s gotten more specific about their plans; David Kravetz has an update on Wired’s Threat level blog.

Sometimes I described the Ad Astra (Analysis and Development of Awesome STRAtegies) work at Microsoft as a sitcom on network TV — most explicitly when we had a “wrap party” at the May Mashup. In this worldview, the Ad Astra narrative is something along the lines of …

Building on the small audience success of Pogo, and the cult fave Project Fabulous, Ad Astra “starring Jon Pincus” started as a late-season* miniseries produced by McKinsey on the butterfly network, and got picked up by the post-merger entity OSMG for the summer and next year. Unfortunately the showrunner who had put the deal together left; and the cancelling of the ensemble-cast Google Compete Executive Workgroup supporting series meant that the solid lead-in we had expected didn’t materialize. So despite steadily-increasing ratings (helped by my role as a recurring guest character on the popular but stuck-in-a-rut Litebulb), unique and valuable demographics, fabulous guest stars like John Sweeney and Kathy Cramer, and great reviews, the network announced in January that it would not be renewing Ad Astra for the next season.

Hmm, well, potentially a reality TV show, or a soap opera, would be a slightly better analogy than a sitcom. You get the idea though. Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter/Tune in Tomorrow meets a collaborative version of The Apprentice.

The off-the-charts January Mashup and “Gary Flake, Live at Sammamish” introduced the second half of the season — as well as some new characters — and on-site Mashup specials at the MVP Summit and MiX built a lot of energy. The attempted spinoff Project Venice didn’t get off the ground; on a more positive note, Mashups are big in in overseas market and several Ad Astrans got roles in IdeAgency (expected to be this year’s blockbuster) and other shows.

There was a serious opportunity underlying this analogy. The work Microsoft does and the scale it operates at is a lot more interesting than the scenarios for The Apprentice or most imaginable clones — and the stakes are a lot higher. The people involved are more interesting, generally far more appealing, and much much much more diverse. The artifacts they produce and many of thee challenges they face are a lot more relevant to real people’s lives. So once Ad Astra was at scale it could become possible to produce a network-quality TV series essentially by telling our stories, arranging the non-confidential narrative aspects of our work in interesting narrative arcs. Sure, some post-production would be needed; still, it certainly seems likely to be hugely less expensive the typical cost to produce a network series.

This same kind of cost advantage may well transfer to other kinds of video: direct-to-web, direct to DVD (where lots of other goodies can be included — “see the PowerPoint presentation they were working on!” and hints for effective PPTing), and perhaps even reused in the newly-emerging category of corporate role-playing games. And once you start thinking like this, there are other options as well, especially for Microsoft: a web-based series; content for Microsoft.com [for recruiting and highlighting Microsoft’s diversity] Technet, Channel 8/9/23, on10, MSN, internal use for TCN as a companion to “behind the code”; etc. etc.

What makes this so interesting is that if there are ways to monetize this cost advantage, it potentially means an entertaining, participative, appealing, diverse grassroots organization can be largely self-funding.

Oh well; it didn’t happen with Ad Astra … maybe next time.

Nobody bit when I pitched Ad Astra, so it’s now “on hiatus”. Of course in this world everybody knows that “on hiatus” is code for “looking opportunties to bring the brand back”**. So we did a few summer specials that came off great: “hey kids, let’s put on a show” (high concept: “oh no! the interns are here for the summer … and nobody scheduled a Mashup! can Channel 8, Windows Diversity, the MSR Intern program, and Popfly help the wacky Ad Astra crew save the day?”), the collaborative Harry Potter and the Future of ThinkWeeks.

We also did intriguing ultra-low-budget experiments with community-access media and political theater on the wiki, our blog, Litebulb, and Mini, with the expected extremely mixed reviews. On the way out, I made several cameos at the company meeting, was a “with special appearance by” in IdeAgency’s star-studded launch episode, and had a small part in their “girl on top/soul in the machine”, shot live on the floor in 34.

So it’s a golden opportunity for that classic TV holiday special. You know, the one where production costs are virtually zero because it’s mostly reused clips and stuff shot on one big party set, and various people show up and say hi and we get to hear about what they’re doing now — and their favorite moments from the last year. “A chance to say hi to old friends — and maybe make some new ones????” A few serious moments mixed in, and perhaps some manufactured tension (usually hinging on travel schedules or inadvertant misunderstandings), but basically happy and festive. And low production costs, did I mention that? I remember Queer Eye doing a particularly good one of these; it’s a high bar, but why not shoot for the stars?

An advantage of doing it on the web is that we don’t have to come up with ridiculous plot twists for why everybody’s in town. Oh yeah, and also it can be participative.

So for those of you who were part of Ad Astra — or were in its prequel Project Fabulous and sister series Pogo, or are friends and family, or were fans who never got a chance to get involved — if you get a few moments this holiday season …

Welcome to “A very special Ad Astra holiday!” Drop in, say hi, have some chocolate, eggnog and/or champagne, let us know what you’re up to … and maybe share a few of your favorite non-confidential moments from the Ad Astra experience!

No urgency here; I’ll leave this thread open at least through Epiphany***. Hopefully between now and then most people will have at least one moment when they either (a) need escape from doing technical support (b) want to demonstrate to a relative how easy it is to use Firefox/IE/Camino/the browser on somebody’s new phone or (c) are curious what other Ad Astrans are up to these days. Or all of the above, of course. So, if and when you get a chance, please get involved!

(no, i don’t know what these blank boxes are doing here. looks like a bug. sorry ’bout that.)

And sometimes the cliches, perhaps slightly updated, really are the best wording. So, both in the time-honored tradition of holiday specials, and because it’s what I really mean, I’d like to wish everybody reading this a happy holiday season (now or whenever you choose to celebrate it), and to the extent they apply:

spiffy Saturnalia,

merry Christmas,

happy Hanukkah/chappy Chanukah,

kreative Kwanzaa,

psychadelic solstice,

and/or a happy new year

jon

* because many groups are in budget paralysis from May to August, Microsoft’s FY somewhat mirrors network TV seasons

** just like how in the music biz “broken up” is frequently synomyous with “available soon for a reunion tour”

*** not to be confused with the startup e-piphany.

 Originally posted December 20, 2007

Tales from the Net.

Stay tuned!

A poem by my brother. A few years ago, when I launched my web site achangeiscoming.net on new years day, I asked him for permission to post it to start things off on a good note. It worked well then … why change a winning recipe?

RESOLUTIONS
by
Gregory K. Pincus

Every year on New Year’s Day,
I grab myself a pen.
I write my resolutions down to look at now and then.

Two years ago, I’d written twelve.
I broke them all by June.
Last year I broke them faster still (the first of March at noon).

This isn’t great, I must admit,
But now I’ve got it solved.
And so, this year, on New Year’s Day, here’s what I have resolved:

Bug my dad, annoy my sis,
Distract my oldest brother.
Skip a chore, create a mess, and once ignore my mother,

Chew some gum, devour pie,
Eat burgers, fries, and cakes,
Teach my baby brother all the joys of chocolate shakes.

My resolutions could go on.
Instead, I’ll stop right here.
Just once I’d like to keep them all…
And this might be my year.

As TantraSF says:

Remember the days before the underground split into many different scenes and moved into nightclubs? Remember when you could hear trance, breaks, techno and downtempo in a big warehouse with an old school vibe? Remember back in the good old days? We do too, so this year Tantra is teaming up with Get Freaky, Know:Audio, the Ambient Mafia and Word of Mouth to present:

“NYE 2008, an underground resolution”

Liam and Dutch in the psytrance room!?!?! A happy new year indeed!

Thinking of you

Thoughts emerging from dreams,
In my mind as I wake:
Full of warmth and desire,
Bliss beginning the day.

Thoughts weaving together,
Through the whole afternoon:
Sun, chocolate, your smile,
Love … and feeling alive.

Thoughts of art and beauty,
In my mind late at night:
Memories,
Fantasies,
Dreams and visions of you.

The group blog THREAT LEVEL is one of my favorite things about wired, and Kevin Poulsen’s year-end roundup is a great example of why:

It was a year of soul searching at THREAT LEVEL, every day a fresh challenge to our fundamental beliefs and convictions: Alberto Gonzales made us pine for John Ashcroft; Google made us love roving surveillance cams; and Jammie Thomas’ internet spoofing defense was enough to make us secretly root for the RIAA.

As if that’s not enough, Kim Zetter’s combo of World’s Top Surveillance Societies (covering PrivacyInternational’s report) and FBI Building Vast Database of Iris, Face and Fingerprint Scans highlights why the US is classified as an “endemic surveillance” society along with China, Russia, the U.K. and others.   And Sarah Lai Stirland’s Will push polling become a factor in the early states? rounds up a bunch of stories on a popular social-engineering approach to electoral fraud.

Talk about an end-of-year bonanza!

Yeah, I don’t work there any more, and I’m practicing saying “they” instead of “we”, but I still think that Microsoft’s situation is extremely interesting from a strategy perspective. So as a companion to Mini’s What’s going well?, MSFTextrememakeover’s Will this dog ever hunt again, Joe Wilcox’s Definitive, unsolicited advice, Slashdot’s Microsoft’s biggest threat, and no doubt a jillion other posts, I figured I’d start up a thread specifically on the topic of opportunities for Microsoft in the upcoming year.

To kick things off, I’ve highlighted a few I think are particularly compelling: put the user truly in control of their information, make Live the best front end to the network-of-networks, and abandon DRM — it’s too late for that to help Vista, but think about the effects on Zune and Windows 7.0 “now DRM-free”. Discussion of those is welcome, as are other ideas. And please try to keep the focus on the opportunities; of course there are plenty of things wrong, but the threads elsewhere are already covering those.