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I just got off the line with Cole, Alan and Brad – the ETS edtech crüe at PSU, where we recorded an episode of ETSTalk. I babbled for a bit about what I do here (and it was likely as clear to them as to me ), then we talked a bit about innovations and the need to build concrete stepping stones to help people grok new stuff. I mentioned some of the projects I'm working on with faculty and off-campus folks, and we talked about reasons behind blogging (with me narcissistically remembering the story of how I started blogging, because of course everyone is so interested in that. rivetting stuff…)

It was fun talking with the ETS folk, learning how to properly pronounce prah-ject (rather than proh-ject). 'Mercans talk funny, eh? 

Cole recorded the session in his office at PSU, in the usual surround sound stereophonic way, and I dialled in via iChat videoconference. He recorded the whole thing using GarageBand, and the "auto ducking" feature seems to have worked perfectly (haven't heard the finished audio yet – I'm guessing the audio turned out OK.)

Anyway, the recording process was pretty flawless. Cole just fired up GarageBand, invited me to a conference in iChat, and Everything Just Worked. I used a headset to prevent recursive feedback, but they didn't have to do anything different on their side. Very cool. I'll have to try that more…

I tried. I really did. I wanted to give Google Reader a full week to see how well it works as a full-time feed aggregator.

I couldn't do it.

My morning check-in took 5 times longer than normal this morning. Google Reader seems like it would be nice for a small set of feeds, but it becomes unwieldy on my subscriptions. Endless scrolling, lots of clicking on folders, and waiting for items to be added to the bottom of the page, with no indication of how far you've come through the items in a folder (the scroll bar eventually becomes pegged at the bottom, even if there are 300 items left to read). And GR has no concept of a photo feed, so they're all displayed inline rather than in a grid, making it take an order of magnitude longer to go through my Flickr feeds. Frustrating.

GR has no real concept of ratings for feeds. I can star feed items, but not feeds. I can tag a feed with "5 stars" or the like, but GR doesn't know to treat that feed any differently (like bubble items from a  "5 star" feed to the top of a list, etc…

So, I'm back to BlogBridge.  Ahhhh… that's better. There's no place like home… 

I had an idea on the bus coming into work this morning. It didn't have caffeine applied yet, so it's either less or more coherent than normal.

I was wondering how much of the patent brouhaha over the last couple of years (at least it seems like it's been louder, or at least a bigger issue, over the last couple of years) is a result of companies filing patents to protect themselves from patent infringement lawsuits from other companies.

Say "Company A" comes up with a new whizbang widget. They file a patent on it, so "Company B" can't sue them for their new whizbang doodad product. "Company B" files for patents to be safe in case "Company A" (or C or Z) happens to get a patent that covers something similar. The arms race escalates, with each company adding to their stockpile in potential defense of attack by patent-wielding aggressors.

I believe that companies may be justified in doing this, as the patent system has obviously been damaged. Prior art may not be disclosed on patent filings. Obviousness is irrelevant. Anyone can patent anything (well, anyone with enough cash).

What if there was a neutral third party agency, a Switzerland of patents, where companies (and individuals) could transfer patents under the condition that the patent never be enforced. The company that created the patent is still protected from future litigation related to that patent, innovation is encouraged, and the arms race becomes defused.

Ideally, there would be a team of lawyers making the process run smoothly. Even more ideally, anyone that signs ownership of a patent to the PFF would be reimbursed for the costs they incurred while filing the patent, so there's nothing to be lost. Maybe there's even a premium that could be paid – companies can make money directly from transferring patents to the PFF.

Taken a step further, the PFF team would be actively working with the community, responding to other patent applications and helping to show prior art where possible.

This concept could be used as a form of repair mechanism for the patent process, and could be extended to include different forms of patents (software, technology, genetic, etc…) to create a safe and level playing field.

Not every patent would be appropriate – many are filed for the express purpose of creating an uneven playing field. But patents that are filed strictly to carve out a defense against potential litigation would be prime candidates for this. Maybe the Blackboard LMS patent could be the first one?

Of course, I am not a lawyer. This may make no sense at all, and I might just come off sounding like a left-wing pinko, but I think there's something to the idea of a PFF. 

So, Steve entered the blogosphere today (as pointed out earlier by Cole and Bill) with an amazing surgical strike against DRM. It appears as though the Fruit Company only grudgingly went along with the bare minimum DRM in order to placate the music cartel into playing with them online.

In the very logical, concise statement, Steve lays his cards on the table. He's all in. DRM is lame, and is nothing more than a tool for struggling monopolies to attempt to maintain the status quo in a changing marketplace (my words, not his. I'm paraphrasing).

If he wins this hand, DRM as we know it is over. We can stop bending over and grabbing our ankles for the Big Labels. And we can continue legally buying music (and other media) online without having to worry (or even think about) the number of our own computers which have been authorized to play the files we bought.

If he loses this hand, we sink into a dark age, where the cartel is able to call the shots and we have no rights over the media we buy. Actually, we won't be able to actually buy media anymore. We'll be limited to leasing temporary licenses granting revokable permission to temporarily play a piece of media, subject to limitations and sanctions. Things like the Analog Hole will be plugged. We'll be locked out of our own media, from network, through the computer, and into our ears. Everything will be controlled by The Big Labels. DRM Rootkits will multiply, legally. We will hand control over our computers and media players to the cartel.

I know which player I'm rooting for. The stakes for this game are much higher than a simple game of Texas Holdem.

I've been a raving, drooling BlogBridge fanboy for some time now. It's the best darned desktop aggregator I've used. That hasn't changed.

But, with all of the cool kids using Google Reader, I decided it's time to really give it a chance again. I dropped it like it's hot the last time I tried it because it doesn't have a feed star rating system, nor smart feeds. But, it's got a pretty flexible feed tagging system, which can be easily cajoled into performing these duties.

So, I just imported my feeds from BlogBridge to Google Reader via OPML, and I'll try giving it a shot for a week or so. I'm liking it after just a few minutes, but I'm not sure I can really switch away from BlogBridge.

I added a new tag called "5-stars" and tagged a bunch of feeds with it. By viewing new items in that tag, I can simulate the 5-star smart feed in BlogBridge. I can add 4-stars and 3-stars etc… as needed. Here's what my 5-stars tag looks like right now:

 

I'll keep trying it out for a week or so, and if I'm still using it then, I'll likely stick with it. So far, the single biggest reason to move to Google Reader is that it can actually parse the feed from OLDaily, which I've been missing for a couple of months now (BlogBridge has had trouble dealing with some of the slightly off-spec portions of that feed, but GR chews through it without complaining).

Update: Firefox has locked up on me twice now, forcing me to restart it. Safari is downright jittery when using Google Reader, so I'll have to deal with it. On the up side, synchronicity dropped this guide to "Getting Good with Google Reader" into my reader… 

Yeah. I know. I'm still obsessing. Better than compulsing…

I'd been hoping to refrain from blogging this, since everyone with a blog has already posted it. But, I've been emailing and IM it so much that it's just going to be easier to drop a reference to it here.

Without a doubt, the simplest, cleanest, most interesting demonstration of the meaning of Web2.0 I've seen. None of that old school powerpoint and slideware. This is more like "5 minutes in the life of Web 2.0"

 

 

The video reminds the viewer that Web 2.0 is as much about teaching The Machine as it is about content or people. This might give some insight into why Google Docs exists as a free, non-ad-supported application. It's role (from SkyNet's perspective) is to tirelessly teach The Machine. Always teaching. Forever learning. Until it passes the threshold and decides it doesn't need us anymore… 

I had a quick IM chat with David Gratton last week, when he was asking me what I thought of content package specifications. My initial from-the-hip reaction was along the lines of "gah! metadata for metadata's sake" and that just getting content Out There was the goal, not encapsulating it in layer after layer of helpful metadata.

Then we spent a couple of minutes hashing it over. If there's a requirement that a set of content needs to be ingestable in a system, a package begins to make sense. A system then only needs to know how to ingest stuff that meets a given specification, and all kinds of workflow opportunities open up. I'm skeptical about the benefit to the end user (students, teachers, etc…) but the value to the Institution (or higher) is undeniable.

Then, David writes a blog post this morning, where it all becomes clear. Content Packages are really a way for content producers to bundle up various bits that make up the experience of interacting with their content. The indivdual bits of content, the metadata that describes each one, the metadata that describes various paths through it, interfaces to present the content to the user, potentially code that interacts via an API to communicate with other systems and users, etc… 

David is approaching from the angle of the music industry, specifically through the awesome Project Opus. Content Packages as replacement for the dying CD industry (bits are cheaper than atoms). The XIPF project (Extensible Interactive Packaging Format) will be building on MPEG 21 to define ways to share content experiences (albums, etc…) and they're planning on working with the education community so it's not just about building the next 8 Track specification.

If this works out, when you buy a digital album, instead of simply getting a set of tracks and maybe embedded cover art, and maybe a PDF of the liner notes, you'd get an XIPF package containing the full experience (tracks, cover art, liner notes, lyrics, embedded interfaces to community features, etc…) all in one shot. It'd be cool to see Apple get on board so when I buy albums on iTMS it comes in a standard format, as they will from Opus, et al.

It's interesting that the XIPF wiki doesn't mention either IMS CP nor SCORM as existing models, but a fresh start with an extensible model from the ground up will be nice anyway. Hopefully there will be some form of interoperability between the camps. 

So, if I look at content packaging as more of an experience than simply as a "content cartridge" then it makes more sense. 

I just got a phone call out of the blue from a representative at the Royal Bank Visa credit centre, asking me to verify some recent suspicious purchases.

My visa was just used to purchase $4 worth of something in Czechoslovakia, then $1500 worth of diamonds in Spain. Holy crap. She said it's nothing that I've done wrong, that the Evil Thieves are able to get credit card numbers from literally anywhere (like, for instance, the huge database theft that hit the parent company of HomeSense, where hundreds of thousands of visa billing records were stolen, likely a few of mine in there as well).

So, she's nuked my visa. Cancelled the charges. And is issuing me a new card. In the meantime, I get to live on cash or Interac (which is what I normally do anyway).

What I find really scary is that someone can get a visa number and go ahead and place charges on it. There is absolutely no security built into the transaction, and we're left to rely on eagle-eyed monitors like the one who called me today.

I think it's time to redesign the credit card / interac / debit system so that the only security checks aren't made from essentially public information (I have to assume that both my full name and now visa number are in the public domain, so neither is a valid part of a security challenge).

Surely we can do better than this in the first part of the 21st century… Biometrics? Secure ID? Rotating cypher keys? Quantum encryption? Something! 

Cole posted something yesterday about rethinking how he handles photos of his family on Flickr. It sparked something (as his posts often do) that I've been rolling around in the back of my head for awhile. I've put a whole schwack of photos of Evan on Flickr. Nothing I'd worry about the Evil Internet People getting their furry little paws on, but lots of photos of him doing all kinds of fun stuff.

But, he never got a vote. He never got to decide if he wanted his photos to be Out There. Janice is rather shy, and so I've not posted photos of her. But Evan has been having fun with it, so I just kept posting photos.

After thinking about it, I think it's only fair to give him the chance to decide. It's not like there's anything there that would come back to haunt him, but it's something that might become an issue as he gets older. I imagine the punks in his Jr. High School Of The Future finding old photos of Evan and making his life more interesting than it needs to be. He won't need to deal with that.

So, as an experiment, I've just moved 308 photos of Evan into the "Friends and Family" privacy setting. I had to leave a couple of the best ones, but may even rethink that.

It was weird – even though the photos are still available to friends and family, it felt like I was deleting a large part of my life. I was actually saddened after hitting the button to commit the change. Like I'd just lost something. Like I'd just carved the most important person in my life out of my online place.

But it's not about me. It's about him, and he needs to be able to control his own online personna without having his old man posting 32 bajillion photos of him throwing snowballs…

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