A weblog devoted to tracking sites that don't understand the web:

"Don't Link to Us! links to sites that attempt to impose substantial restrictions on other sites that link to them. The Linking Policy for Don't Link to Us! precludes us from requesting permission to link to a site, and compels us to link directly to the targeted page (i.e., a 'deep link') rather than to a site's home page. Descriptions of sites' linking policies generally are accurate (though often not complete) at the time they are posted here but are likely to change over time. On occasion a web site will modify its linking policy in response to public ridicule. Perhaps their appearance in Don't Link to Us! will help encourage some of these sites to move forward into the 20th century."

2:34:02 PM •  • comment  

DPR at 9:07 AM [url]:

Scapegoating the wrong people

"Security czar" Richard Clarke points the finger of blame at the wrong people. He blames the users, software manufacturers, and designers of the Internet for its security risks. This "patriot" thinks that by loudly proclaiming a Big Lie, he can help create a secure infrastructure.

Since the NSA itself, in 1976-77, blocked a fully worked out end-to-end encryption approach created at MIT for TCP, we might want to point the finger elsewhere.

Perhaps at the government itself.

Quite a number of us who participated in the early Internet protocol design were from the computer security research side, and did our best to make the Internet architecture secure from the start. But the NSA (I am told) told DARPA that any attempt to introduce security mechanisms into TCP/IP's architecture would be viewed very negatively. (This happened at about the same time that Rivest, et al. received a mysterious threatening letter from a senior military official claiming that their work on the RSA cipher must be stopped immediately).

Despite this, the TCP and IP designers insured that the architecture of TCP and IP were such that end-to-end encryption and other crucial protections , along the lines of the banned proposals, could be introduced at any point. I know. I did a lot of this work.

And in fact, IPSEC was later invented along similar lines, as an option. But part of the difficulty with implementing IPSEC is that it is too late - popular fads such as NAT and stateful inspection firewalls have been deployed too widely. Firewalls (which provide faux security at best) make real security much harder to deploy, because they require that end-systems expose too much information in the clear. Truly secure protocols (even IPSEC) don't work very well with firewalls.

Later, in the '80's and '90's, when I was a VP at Lotus, my friend Ray Ozzie wanted to put end-to-end RSA encryption in Lotus Notes. Again the government required that the civilian users get a weakened form of encryption. And the government blocked PGP. And more recently, the government called for Lotus to introduce security holes in Lotus Notes that would weaken users' protection.

In one respect I agree with Mr. Clarke - it is important to have good security in the Internet. But as a representative of the gov't security community, he should stop pointing fingers, because the real finger needs to be pointed back at himself.

Many, many of the folks who worked on secure systems architectures in the '70's foresaw these vulnerabilities in the so-called "civilian sector" and called them to the attention of policymakers, and also urged solutions, only to have government interests block such proposals. I know, I did. And I still do, most recently arguing for a "cryptographic checksum" in SIP and other new protocols that allows end systems to detect unauthorized modifications to data in the middle of the network, and for use of encryption-based approaches in wireless networks to prevent selective disruption of civilian traffic by other civilians for personal gain or sabotage purposes.

It makes me more than a little angry to see a public figure who works for the government implicitly blaming the very people who pointed out the problem and tried to solve it.

The reason I don't work in the security field (despite my recognition of its importance, and my own early work in secure protocols) is that the governments (US and others) made it impossible to do good work. I'm sure that others who might have made contributions, or did make contributions, made the same career decisions. To do good work in the field when your own government opposes its use is quite discouraging. To see ideas that might benefit the public security blocked at every turn by military and corporate interests. Ask Ed Felten, Ross Anderson, Whit Diffie, Ron Rivest.

If Clarke would start taking responsibility for our own government's failure to take security of our information economy seriously, and ask for help, rather than blaming the victims, that would be a start. But he strikes me as the kind of "leader" who thinks that he can acquire loyalty by torturing his troops.
[SATN.org: Comments from Frankston, Reed, and Friends]

More insight from David Reed.

2:33:03 PM •  • comment  

KM Systems are to Treacle as Weblogs are to Honey..

It ain't easy to get and order knowledge.

Motivation is the key. Just ask KM pioneer Tomás de Torquemada, the first to combine the rack, thumbscrews, foot roasting and suffocation to get subjects to talk. You'd better have formal authority, claim KM regulars. Respondents from KM mailing lists wrote last month that executive sponsorship, management mandate, and top down support are prerequisite to KM project survival. It's like we're dishing out cod liver oil. You know it's good for you; take it or else.

In creeps bonehead KM.

Weblogs. Stupid. Disorganized. Unstructured. Incomplete. An English comp nightmare. Scattered. Ugly. Mixed with cat, baby, football, and politics stories.

A sticky mess.

But people blog. They just do.

Blogging is its own reward. It's like leaving candy around in kindergarten; they just pick it up, and start buzzing with it. Soon everyone is yelling for more.

Fun. Easy. Fast. Compelling.

Virtuous cycles of personal and collective behavior.  

The best exercise is the one you do. The best KM is the one people practice.

For all I know, klogging may address only ten percent of your KM goals. But try it. It is a critical ten percent. This wedge gets people owning their expertise, sharing it willingly, getting credit, getting feedback, being social about knowledge. How does this compare to any other tools you've ever introduced?

Klogs are a spoonful of honey.

[a klog apart]

Spot on. This is why weblogs are so critical to knowledge management success.

It's also why they'll  fight an uphill battle in most organizations; they don't fit in with anyone's power agenda. Simple and elegant doesn't help someone advance their organizational agenda. It also makes it more difficult to justify lots of technology consulting help.

Implementing k-logs can benefit from outside help. But the help needs to focus on nurturing the development of new work practices and voice. It must be oriented toward organizational behavior not technology features.

The entry costs are minimal. Where k-logs are likely to face the greatest risk is in the transition from new toy to routine practice. There will be a hump that individual k-loggers and organizations will need to get over. That is what will take energy and attention from whoever chooses to champion the idea in the organization.

2:16:21 PM •  • comment  

Powerpoint presentations. For those of you who didn't make it to my talks this week, you can at least download the Powerpoint [Column Two]

More useful KM resources

12:02:21 PM •  • comment  

Step-by-step to blogs in business. Blogroots devotes a whole chapter to Using Blogs in Business. This is the most comprehensive discussion I have seen of [Column Two]

I think I caught the Blogroots pointer somewhere else, but can't remember for sure. Easier to post this to be sure. Besides, consider it an example of blogs as a tool for triangulating good stuff.

12:01:47 PM •  • comment  

One of the facts of life for a state CIO is that much of the information you deal with has latlong coordinates associated with it (all the other records have social security numbers).  While I was in Colorado this week, I had an opportunity to spend a few hours talking with John Gage, the Chief Scientist at Sun. 

John showed me a piece of software called EarthViewer.  If you like maps, even a little, you'll love this program.  The program uses Keyhole satellite data to give you a view or anywhere on earth.  The software allows you to fly over the landscape.  Type in an address and you "fly" there in seconds.  I had fun going from where I grew up in Idaho to my brother's house in Virginia.  If the target point is in a metro zone, you can see things with 1m resolution.

Dave Lorenzini, the CEO of Keyhole, Inc, makers of EarthViewer, has been great in getting me hooked up and talking to our GIS folks.  We have data layers for everything.  Putting them in this system would allow police to fly over an area and become familiar with it, find manholes, utilities etc. and even enter buildings based on plans all as part of a simulation with real live data.  We could make it as detailed as we want.    In a disaster, you could take reconnaissance pictures of the area and then survey the damage area in as much detail as you like from a safe distance.  Of course, you could do those things before, but the EarthViewer makes it accessible to people without training in specialized GIS tools. 

11:56:25 AM •  • comment  

You Can't Outsource City Hall.

In this article in CIO Magazine, Tom Field says:

Outsourcing is a proven business strategy in the private sector, so why can't it work in City Hall?

The article proffers several opinions.  I have my own. 

First, many of the high-profile, failed outsourcing projects I'm aware of tried to outsource the whole thing.   Let's just outsource the whole IT department so we don't have to worry about it.  The problem is that IT is fundamental to business and the vendor may be great at delivering basic services and probably even application development, but they likely won't be great at adding value to agency mission (See my paper on Modular IT Organization).    That has to come from people who are part of the executive team and understand the business.  Sure, a consultant could get there, but not if they're viewed as a mere vendor of services. 

Second, outsourcing works best when its used to augment staff, rather than replace them outright.  I've seen more than one outsourcing contract that was done by people or organizations who really didn't understand the technology and were just praying that something good would happen.  If you've got an tech organization that's healthy, smart, and innovative, then augmenting them with some additional help is great.  If they don't know what's going on, you're just asking for the vendor and the state to be disappointed. 

[Windley's Enterprise Computing Weblog]

One smart CIO. I'm really enjoying the opportunity to watch Windley think out loud.

11:55:23 AM •  • comment  

JimCollins.com. Home page of the Good to Great author. I respect his commitment to scientific method. Debunking and defining the myths of management culture: leadership, staffing, strategy, metrics, core values, vision. Prescriptive, too.

Collins said in a recent interview that most business people join a church. The Church of Marketing. The Church of Finance. The Church of Strategy. and so on. In the process, you often take on the world view of your church. You frame problems with that view and you are perceived as coming from that church.

Collins wants to be from the Church of Questions, a place where asking the right question has enduring value. I'll take a good question over a great answer any time.

[a klog apart]

So obvious, yet so hard to do. Questions entail risk for both the questioner and the organization. That can be tough to overcome.

11:53:48 AM •  • comment  

The Rhetoric of Web Logs.

The Rhetoric of Web Logs

Meg Hourihan, one of the creators of Blogger, and the author of Megnut, wrote on essay for O'Reilly Network on "What We're Doing When We Blog." Meg makes a number of intelligent, accurate observations about the nature of web logs, including emphasizing their "commonality." She writes:

If we look beneath the content of web logs, we can observe the common ground all bloggers share—the format. The web log format provides a framework for our universal blog experiences, enabling the social interactions we associate with blogging. Without it, there is no differentiation between the myriad content produced for the Web.

Go read her excellent essay, then come back for my piffle, if you must.

Ms. Hourihan has begun to document the beginnings of a rhetoric of web logs. Now, lest you begin foaming at the mouth, at the use of "rhetoric" in reference to blogs, I would like to remind you that the true meaning of rhetoric is the art of persuasion using language, and that a rhetorician is a master of communication, using specific tools, techniques and methods.

Classical rhetorical theory divides the art of rhetoric into five parts (I'm cribbing wildly from Richard Lanham's excellent A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). The five parts of rhetoric are:

•  Invention
  
•  Arrangement
  
•  Style
  
•  Memory
  
•  Delivery
  

Though Classical rhetoricians were largely interested in the spoken word, as any writer will tell you, these divisions, or "steps" if you will, work quite well for modern writing, or even blogging.

Ms. Hourihan, in her anatomy, has neatly presented us with the various attributes of the second part of the blogging ars rhetorica, the arrangement.

•  The basic unit is the "post" rather than the paragraph or page.
  
•  Posts are listed in reverse chronological order, with the newest at the top of the page.
  
•  Posts are date-and-time stamped.
  
•  Posts contain links, often to primary sources.
  
•  Posts are archived, at regular intervals, often by virtue of the software used to create the formatted post and mount/upload it to a web server.
  
•  Posts are associated with a permalink, allowing them to be retrieved in isolation, from the archive.
  
•  Writers' email addresses are prominently featured, allowing immediate contact, and encouraging incorporation of emails into a post.
  

Much of the arrangment of a blog is taken care of by the wonderful tools, Radio, Blogger, MoveableType, that allow us to separate content, our words, from presentation. But the other parts of rhetoric are also slightly changed in blogs as well. Invention, for instance, relies in part on the role of the blogging and Internet community, since blogs depend on linking. Memory is moved largely outside the human cerebellum to silicon, as we utilize Google and other search engines, and bookmarks. Style is perhaps the least changed, since we are still using words and text, albeit presented on the flat-panel pixilelated LCD. Delivery is entirely changed from the format used by Cicero; we upload and the 'net disseminate for us. I'll probably post more about this as I come to grips with blogging rhetorical strategies.

[Instructional Technology]

One of the periodically intimidating aspects of blogging is the standard of excellent thinking you find yourself having to strive for.

10:29:21 AM •  • comment  

What about the Artists?.

What about the Artists?

I've already ranted about copyright, but it's time to rant some more. I'm perfectly willing to pay for a product I want, but there need to be some changes to the way recordings, especially digital recordings, are sold, and we need to insure consumer's rights to make personal copies of lawfully purchased recordings, and make sure that artists can directly distribute their performances via digital files, and internet broadcast, without needing expensive licensing arbitrage, and five or six adminstrative drones raiding the till.

I'd like to buy digital music files over the net, and from a kiosk at the mall. I'd also like to see the artists rights' respected, and I'd like to see them getting paid. I'd like to be able to explore the work of unfamiliar artists, by downloading digital music files, and by listening to Internet Radio. The RIAA doesn't want me to do any of those things, and so I'm boycotting the RIAA.

First of all, in case you've forgotten about it, or never read it, here's Courtney Love talking about the corrupt nature of the biz, and how the real pirates are involved in the recording industry. You really need to read the whole piece—it's intelligent, facutual and thought provoking. Ms. Love points out that "The system's set up so almost nobody gets paid," and talks about how "work for hire" with regard means that record companies, thanks to RIAA buying Congress, can own copyright in perpetuity. As she points out(the links are mine):

Last November, a Congressional aide named Mitch Glazier, with the support of the RIAA, added a "technical amendment" to a bill that defined recorded music as "works for hire" under the 1978 Copyright Act.

. . .
That subtle change in copyright law will add billions of dollars to record company bank accounts over the next few years&7mdash;billions of dollars that rightfully should have been paid to artists. A "work for hire" is now owned in perpetuity by the record company.

Next, I particularly want to point you to Janis Ian, yeah, that's right that Janis Ian. She makes some very good points about the "internet debacle," responding to the typical naive assertions about digital distribution as "thievery." Among other things:

Most consumers have no problem paying for entertainment. One has only to look at the success of Fictionwise.com and the few other websites offering books and music at reasonable prices to understand that. If the music industry had a shred of sense, they'd have addressed this problem seven years ago, when people like Michael Camp were trying to obtain legitimate licenses for music online. Instead, the industry-wide attitude was "It'll go away". That's the same attitude CBS Records had about rock 'n' roll when Mitch Miller was head of A&R. (And you wondered why they passed on The Beatles and The Rolling Stones.)

[Instructional Technology]

Good snapshot/summary.

10:26:07 AM •  • comment  

The Call of the Blog. A lot of malaise in Blogaria lately. Some complaining of bloggers’ block, some on-again-off-again, plenty wondering if blogging is what they need or want to be doing with their time. Others are noticing that blogging isn’t all cat pictures and... [Caveat Lector]

Which closes with this wise comment:

Blog however you want, whenever you want, as often or as seldom as you want. Use as much or as little of the technology as you care to. Adhere to common blogging formats or not, as you choose. Watch the big bloggers or not; pay attention to bloglomerations or not. If you feel you need permission to do any of these things, you’ve got mine, no questions asked, not least because I don’t believe you need it.

10:22:56 AM •  • comment  

Jeffrey Harrow keeps me on the bleeding edge.

Read or listen to his bi-weekly report to appreciate not just edge of change, but its velocity and accelleration.

[a klog apart]

Another new resource

9:57:25 AM •  • comment  

More content categorizers..

Information overload.

We cope but it isn't getting much better.

And sometimes finding what we're looking for is like a needle in a field of haystacks. Or a leaf in forest of trees.

Search alone is rarely enough to find what you need in very large data spaces. For example, Google search results and Monster candidate listings often return thousands of close hits. Matching engines efficiently apply criteria to a two-sided search (both employer and worker have demands to be met and supply ways to meet the others' demands).

Taxonomies are another approach. Yahoo! and Open Directory show the value of navigating through clumps and clusters of related sites. But you have your own data to mine. And creating a taxonomy by hand is expensive and slow. 

Enter taxonomy helpers. They do several things:

• Analyze source files: Suck metadata from your diverse resources (documents, web pages, emails, news feeds, etc.) into a common and comparable format
• Define clusters: Help define your topics and how the topics are related. This is compute and storage intense, so it is often done bit by bit. Starting with broad categories and refining and splitting them as they fill up.
• Categorize: Assign each resource into one or more categories in the taxonomy, typically using metadata.
• Serve: Manage a user experience for surfing or flying through the taxonomy.

Here's a roundup on some shipping categorizers.

First, I noted Quiver, a tool that recommends topics for human review and approval.

Back in April, eContent Magazine wrote a piece on Taxonomy's Role in Content Management.

Taxonomy technology greatly assists the sharing of enterprise knowledge. But don't expect to sit back and watch it go. Experts agree that those searching for an out-of-the-box solution shouldn't hold their breath. Count on adding a little elbow grease, but the results will be worth it.

They mentioned taxonomy vendors:

Autonomy creates and maintains outlines using pattern and cluster analysis. Separate components analyze documents for their content and categorize them to taxonomy branches and leaves.

Inxight Software's Categorizer filters, classifies and delivers content to users and corporate knowledge bases. It scales to millions of documents and thousands of topics in multiple languages. A sister product, MetaText Server elicits structured data from unstructured sources.   

Lotus Discovery Server extracts, analyzes, and categorizes structured and unstructured content to reveal the relationships between the information as well as the people, topics, and user activity in an organization.

Microsoft's SharePoint Portal Server has manual content categorization features.

Semio's SemioTagger autocategorizes content.

Sopheon autocategorizes content from multiple sources, including sources external to the enterprise.

They also pointed out taxonomy visualization sites.

Antarcti.ca uses cartography to map clusters of information spatially.

Inxight VizServer's Star Tree (shown here) and Table Lens help you to meaningfully surf large dataspaces.

TheBrain Technologies
www.thebrain.com

Now eWeek reviews three more products in this space:

• Applied Semantics' Auto-Categorizer 1.1
• Interwoven's Metatagger 3.0
• Thunderstone Software's Texis Categorizer 4.1.

eWeek's overview of the comparison findings is worth reading as is their eVal Scorecard: Content Categorization. Note they used very small record sets, the low thousands. Even a small company will organize hundreds of thousands of records, if not millions.

One last note. Standards in this area are few and rarely implemented. These few are RDF (Resource Description Framework), DAML (DARPA Agent Markup Language), and DAML+ OIL (Ontology Inference Layer).

Now where should I categorize this post?

[a klog apart]

An excellent overview and summary. These are critical issues to managing KM problems at scale.

9:54:38 AM •  • comment  

Radio Free Blogistan - PEP (Personal Expression Project). This sounds like what I would like to have. I would like to be able to access control what goes in my blog. Some stuff for family, some for friends, some for work, some for the public etc. Still digging!For several years now I've been slowly spec'ing out an ideal personal publishing platform for posting a peck of pickled peppers.... Uh, sorry. No, actually I mean a system with a well designed content database at the core and a great deal of flexibility both in how to submit content (client, web, email, handheld, wireless?) and an equal degree of flexibility about how to stream or syndicate the content out. [Roland Tanglao's Weblog]

Until I can get one of these, my Radio weblog will have to do (and it's doing OK).

9:47:48 AM •  • comment  

Frank Field on control freaks:

"Geoff Edgers reports in today's Boston Globe [PDF] that market economics even seem to effect the record industry.

The most remarkable part of this article is the response of the RIAA to the fact that record stores are reducing their CD prices to get customers into the store. A Globe chart (not given online) shows that the average suggested retail price of CDs was $21.50 in 1983 (the introduction of the CD), dropping rather steadily to $12.50 in 1990 and trending slowly back up to $14.02 in 2000 (sourced from the RIAA). The fact that local stores are discovering that they need to offer product at $9.99 to get people into stores, however, leads the RIAA to this position:

But Hilary Rosen, chief executive officer of the RIAA, said that it's unfair to expect record companies to cut costs. She says people who steal music by downloading soundfiles or burning discs illegally are responsible for sales drops.

'In the age of $150 sneakers, $12 movie prices and $40 video games, I'm just unsympathetic,' Rosen says. 'At any price in the $10 to $18 range, CDs are a great value.'

But, there's another feature of her position that screams for consideration - 'it's unfair to expect record companies to cut costs.' Really!?! Every other industry looks upon cost-cutting as the standard - a day to day practice. There are plenty of industries where cost saving - continuous improvement - is the centerpiece of operations. Yet the RIAA, confronted with technological challenges that have been commonplace since the invention of the player piano, refuses to acknowledge that cost might have something to do with their declining performance in the face of these challenges. Rather than exploring new business models, it's all about modifying law and regulations within the industry, and calling for dramatic changes in industries outside of their traditional purview - computer technology.

And worse, they've managed to convince a large fraction of the population that their position is reasonable. For anyone who's read Courtney Does the Math, and looks at  [PDF] the implications of her numbers has to ask about the costs of promotion - and wonder, for example, why killing webcasting seems to be the objective of the RIAA.

As far as I can see, it comes down to a simple fact - the record companies are control freaks, pure and simple. Somehow, they have managed (along with the movie industry) to convince us that their monopoly control should be perfect, unassailable by advancing technology and guaranteed by the state. And worse, our government representatives see that their role is to employ the instruments of public policy to maintain their control.

It's time for a change. And it's up to us to bring it about." [FurdLog]

[The Shifted Librarian]

There is a fascinating organizaitonal case study waiting to be written about all of this. Alan Kay likes to say that "point of view is worth 80 IQ points" (and I like to quote him on it regularly). What Alan doesn't mention is whether there is a + or - sign in front of the 80.

If you assume for a moment that all the parties here are neither stupid nor evil, then you need to explore how their organizational perspectives color and filter their view of the world. Further, you need to consider how the radically different world views of artist and economist collide as well. For that you might want to take a look at Peter Block's excellent new book, The Answer to How Is Yes: Acting On What Matters.

9:40:00 AM •  • comment  

Traction vs. Radio -- Not Exclusionary. Paul Kulchenko of toolbox makes some good additions to my quick-and-dirty overview "Radio vs. [Blunt Force Trauma]

More on Traction and an interesting new weblog to boot. I'm going to be visiting the folks at Traction on Monday, so I should have something to add to the conversation sometime next week.

8:56:21 AM •  • comment