Ben Long talks about using a Hackintosh (a netbook hacked to run Mac OS X).

For the last year, I’ve been using a hacked MSI Wind as a netbook, but its keyboard played havoc with my repetitive stress injuries. Something about it made me hold my hands in a way that ultimately caused pain. I recently had the chance to type for a while on a Dell Mini 10v and found that I had no pain issues at all, so I sold the Wind and picked up a Mini 10v on sale for only $275.
Compared to my 13″ Macbook, the Mini 10 is considerably smaller and lighter, making it very usable for backcountry trips – something I would never do with my Macbook. With it, I no longer need to carry my Digital Focii FotoSafe for offloading, and I’m not stuck trying to type emails on my iPhone keyboard.

Obviously, if you’re a Windows user, you can use the Mini 10v right out of the box. If you want to use the Mac OS, though, you’ll need to perform a quick and simple hack.
NetbookInstaller is an application that will take care of the hack for you, and using it is very simple. You’ll need a copy of Snow Leopard, and a USB stick with at least 8 gb of capacity. Detailed instructions on the NetbookInstaller site will guide you through the installation. You’ll image your Snow Leopard disk onto the USB stick. and then boot off of that. The NetbookInstaller application will modify the installation to allow it to work on the Netbook.
When you’re all finished, you should have a Mini 10v running the latest Mac OS (at the time of this writing, I’m running 10.6.2). The trackpad supports tapping and two-fingered scrolling, and sleep, restart, shutdown, the web camera, and SD card reader all work fine. The model I got has a gigabyte or RAM and a 160gb drive, though both of these are upgradable. The computer weighs in at 2.6 pounds.

It’s definitely a viable option if you want to depend on an unsupported computer environment, but he neglected to mention a couple of important points:

1. If you  don’t buy a copy of Mac OS X or have a family pack, you’re pirating the software. Photographers need to be really sensitive about violating the licenses of others, or else we should shut up when people ignore our copyrights and rip off our photos. Can’t have it both ways, folks, although I know a lot of people who try.
2. Even if you do buy a copy of Mac OS X to run on your Hackintosh, you’re putting it on hardware that isn’t allowed by Apple’s EULA for Mac OS, so you’re violating their T&Cs, which depending on how you want to rationalize it means you’re pirating the software whether or not you have a paid license for it.
3. If neither of those keeps you up and night sleepless over the moral quagmire of violating Apple’s legal agreements while being hard-ass about protecting your own, it’s still an unsupported and mostly untested hardware/software configuration which may break at any moment (or which at any moment Apple might choose to “make no longer compatible” with a software update, and no matter what breaks — you have no tech support except your own sweat equity and whatever friends you can buy pizza for. And you’re using this computer in a production environment on deadline?

Wherever your choose to draw the lines in the sand in the great “How dare you do that with my photos; but I”ll do what I want with this software!” moral quagmire, you should at least stop long enough to think about it so you know how to explain it if it gets brought up by a client — or by the other party if you happen to end up in court fighting a copyright and this is mentioned to the judge. Whatever you think of them, these EULAs have been mostly upheld by courts. How are you going to react if someone uses the same rationalization for using your photos that you used for choosing to build a Hackintosh?

But I’m not judging. I have enough challenge manging my personal ethical compass, I don’t need the karma of managing yours. But I felt it was important to point these issues out so that photographers understand that this is more complications than “this is unsupported hardware”.

I, personally, would hate to be in a conference room negotiating licensing terms with a client and taking notes no a machine that has unlicensed software on it, or is running software that I knowingly installed in violation of the licensing terms. That to me seems like I’m tempting the karma gods, and they already have me on speed dial, they don’t need excuses to ring me up. You know?

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at Mac Netbooks. This article is copyright 2009 by Chuq Von Rospach. This content may not be republished on another site without explicit permission from Chuq Von Rospach. Please consider subscribing to my RSS feed so you don't miss a single one of my carefully crafted, emotionally satisfying and Pulitzer-quality words. Mac Netbooks

One of the memes I’m seeing in the discussion of the iPad is that the Apple TV is one of Apple’s failures. It seems to be a common idea and an easy target, but I think that idea is dead wrong. Yes, it hasn’t sold 800 billion units like the iPod and the iPhone, but that it hasn’t been an insanely successful product doesn’t make it a failure.

(quick digression; when people decide to go talking about “apple’s failures”, the common commentary is something like ‘Apple’s failed products like the Apple TV and the Cube’ — when you realize that the Cube was released in 2000 — that’s ten years ago — and people looking for anything to criticize in Apple’s product line can really only come up with two examples in a decade, well, that says a whole lot about Apple’s success, no? )

I’ve got two arguments why the Apple TV isn’t a failure. It’s subjective and certainly open to discussion, but hopefully this will cause you to stop and consider…

First: Apple doesn’t consider it a failure. If it did, Apple would have dropped the product and moved on by now. They’re still selling it, supporting it and enhancing it — so Apple clearly sees a future to it. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be available to buy.

Second: I’d argue that for a product to lose, some other product has to win. The product that beat the Apple TV is…. It is… Um…

See? The answer is “nobody”.

And that’s why Apple still has the Apple TV and what gives the people who like making immediate judgements on things the quivers. The market the Apple TV is in is still forming. Nobody has won. Nobody has lost. The fight is still in the early stages.

I’m frankly a little surprised at this, I thought the market would mature and mainstream faster than it did. One component that has slowed it down is the lack of standardized interconnects — i.e. the failure to launch of the Cablecard. It’s not clear to me if Apple was ever really looking at the Cablecard as a solution here, but if they were, it didn’t happen and it never really became an option.

So Apple’s real solution here is downloadable content, and that’s dragged by the relatively slow adoption of fast/cheap broadband in the states. It’s also dragged by the owners of the video content being in no super hurry to hand over control of the market to Apple the way music was handed over to it. the music studios hate how Apple can dictate business to the studios instead of the other way around, and so there’s been this deadly and slow dance for control between the studios and Apple, and since the volume (i.e. “money”) isn’t there, the studios can take their time and push for better deals and hope for alternatives so they can play someone off against apple for leverage. So far, nobody’s really come up with something that remotely competes with iTunes in numbers and scale, though.

What can push this market forward is a change in the dynamic. Apple TV wasn’t the product to drive adoption of iTunes for video on a mass scale, so there’s no strong incentive for studios to buy in and get on board. Because of that, it’s been a slow and steady grind to get content into itunes, so things move in slow motion.

But just suppose Apple were to come out with another product, one that hooked up to iTunes, was a good experience to watch video on, was priced in a way that the general consumer would buy it — and sold a zillion units? Suddenly the studios are going to hear cash registers, and more importantly consumers complaining loudly about the things they can’t watch because they’re not in iTunes. And that creates incentive to cut deals to make it available, because now there’s demand (and revenue). And that demand (and revenue) puts titles in iTunes, so suddenly the iTunes/AppleTV option is a viable alternative to Netflix or pay per view.

So my argument isn’t that Apple TV had failed, but it was waiting. Waiting for something to come along and do what Apple TV alone couldn’t do, which was drive demand and sales and rentals via iTunes to generate revenue which attracts the studios which brings in the titles which generates more sales of units which an Apple TV can leverage because the consumer wants ot be able to watch their movie both on their — device — as well as their TV without buying it twice.

And it seems to me Apple just announced that device. And that device has the potential to create the environment where Apple and the studios can sit down and work out getting all of the content into iTunes for consumers to consume. And when they do, suddenly people will realize Apple has this device they sell where that content also will end up on their TV’s!

And gee, Apple just happens to have it sitting there, waiting for consumers to discover it. And because Apple, unlike the pundits, realized the market was still creating itself and was willing to be patient, it has a product there and ready to succeed when the market matures enough to allow it to. That’s a LOT easier than trying to create a product to catch a market as it explodes any day…

So if you ask me, Apple’s stupid like a fox here. It knew that sooner or later, it’d need the Apple TV. It put it out there, it learned from it, it let it help Apple figure out how to create and own the market and bootstrap the functionality they needed to do so (like video rentals, which now exist and are sitting there waiting for the tablet. That wouldn’t have happened without Apple TV being there to implement it for). And when the market starts to grow because tablet sales drive content sales whichget the studios on board which drives consumer interest (and tablet sales which drive content sales which….), Apple can introduce an updated Apple TV to take advantage of it and start the buzz and hype to push it into the success curve — and because they started the process years ago and were patient and didn’t cut off support of the device when it wasn’t an immediate insane success, they’ve made these next steps a whole lot easier for themselves…

Apple TV isn’t dead. It’s in make up waiting for the second act to begin.

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at The Apple TV has not failed…. This article is copyright 2009 by Chuq Von Rospach. This content may not be republished on another site without explicit permission from Chuq Von Rospach. Please consider subscribing to my RSS feed so you don't miss a single one of my carefully crafted, emotionally satisfying and Pulitzer-quality words. The Apple TV has not failed…

Or the night after the Apple tablet…

I thought my view of what was coming that I posted last night was pretty darn close, if I do say so myself. With great amusement I’ve been watching the usual suspects say the usual things; the people who live inside the geekdom echo chamber forgetting there’s a real world out there, and Apple tends to build products for the real world, not the self-appointed geek universe.

A few themes within the critics caught my eye, all of them (I think) incorrect. One are the people who really want the tablet to be a replacement for a laptop, and because this isn’t that, it sucks.

This device is a new category, aimed not at the people who spend their life madly typing in their blog while watching a video AND listening to Pandora and madly checking ot see whether their deathless prose is being appropriately retweeted by their adoring followers. It’s aimed at people who — believe it or not — actually want to sit down on the couch or in their hotel room after a long day at work and…

gasp.

RELAX. They want to read their email. They want to browse a few web sites, check the scores of their hockey team, maybe read a book, maybe watch a movie. Take it easy and — do what people did 20 years ago before the velocity of life ratcheted up to the point where some people think that if you aren’t doing 30 things at once you’re lazy.

Well, hint: in the real world, where most people actually live, people do still sit down in the evening, unplug, and read a book or watch a movie. And actually feel guilty doing both at once. There’s a whole bunch of folks within the geekdom echo chamber who’d be a whole lot happier and less stressed if they figured this out, too. But they’re too busy blogging while watching a movie they’ll only half remember a month from now.

This is a device not for geeks, but for consumers. It’s for people who use devices, not hack them. It’s for people who consume content, which is actually most people, as opposed to geeks who want it to be something it wasn’t designed to be. So lots of geeks are disappointed and blogging about it, while I expect this thing will sell many, many copies, mostly to people who won’t blog about it, but merely use it.

Another theme I’m seeing tonight is the lack of flash on the device. No surprise. If you really want to know why, think back a few years when Apple was trying to get back on its feet, and Adobe made a decision not to support its video products on the Mac, and instead tried to convince its mac customers to switch to PCs. Apple’s response then was ultimately to bring out its own video products — final cut — and ultimately ate the market out from Adobe. Later, when Apple was making the conversion to the intel platform, Adobe’s enthusiasm for bringing out Photoshop and its flagship products was most noticable — by how late they were and how uninterested Adobe seemed in actually trying to help Apple succeed. So now, when Apple has these really successful platforms and Adobes wants a piece of them, and yet Apple shows no real enthusiasm or hurry to cooperate? Well, folks, payback’s a bitch, and if you only see your partners for what they can do for you today, well, don’t whine when they choose to return the favor when the shoe is on the other foot. Burn your bridges with thought, folks, because you never know when you might want them back. And they’ll remember.  Apple sure does. And wouldn’t it be great irony if Apple uses its platforms to turn Flash from a success to an also-ran by supporting HTML5 on platforms that are in enough demand that people who currently are building flash-based things end up recoding those things away from flash to support the platforms people are demanding? Just like — oh, say — Youtube just did? Hmm.

A final theme I’m seeing is the geeks defining products as successful or failure. The Apple TV is being tossed about as a failure, even though, every time I look at estimates on unit sales, it’s still outselling Tivo and has been almost since launch. Yet it failed, Tivo is what the geeks keep saying the Apple TV ought to be. Hmm. Apple could use a few more failures like that. Especially given that I agree with most of the geeks that much of the potential of the Apple TV line of products is still ahead of it. Maybe the Apple geniuses were busy on some other product line. Like, oh, maybe a tablet…

Finally is a recurring theme with some that Apple didn’t “blow them away” (and therefore, I guess, this sucks). Folks, you all need to reset your internal adrenalin meter back from 11. Some of you would take anything less than being personally tasered by Steve himself as “boring”. One word: decaf. Not all products and not all announcements have to be over the top. There merely have to be damn good products.

This one is. To me, it’s a perfect device for my mom, who lives and dies by email, yahoo, access to recipes on Food TV, wants her audiobooks and to read Stephen King and Jean Auel novels and watch the occasional movie (and Emeril). THERE is your target audience.

Me? I like the idea of having one. It won’t replace my carrying my laptop on the road, but it’ll give me something I can use while my laptop is processing photos in Lightroom or crunching away at some compile for a program I’m writing. I doubt I’d write a novel on an iPad, but I’d sure write a blog entry and catch up on email. It supplements why I need a laptop wonderfully, and means I won’t need to worry so much about bad cable TV in a hotel room or hauling books around when I travel. It’s a nice supplemental device for my life. For a traveller who’s content creation issues aren’t so — intense — this very well could replace carrying a laptop. If your job is about writing email, memos and presentations instead of Ruby, HTML and Photoshop, you’re probably already ragging your boss to get approval to get one. Or should.

Nope. This isn’t a sexy repackaging of a laptop. It isn’t a tablet-PC. it isn’t a “netbook done right”. It’s an entirely new type of device, and I think it’s going to be rather successful. now, two or three generations down, it well COULD become those things; I could see down the road these things having the potential to make Mac OS X obsolete and running whatever Lightroom becomes and doing the heavy hitting, but right now — it is what it is, and what it is is very good if that’s what you need.

I think it blows away the Kindle, and I wouldn’t be suprised if Amazon doesn’t quietly breathe a sigh of relief that this lets them get away from building devices and go back to what it’s really good at, which is distribution. And I think it effectively kills “unitaskers” like the Epson P-4000 and digital wallets. Why buy that when you can buy an iTab that does it ALSO? Maybe not for the high end user, but for most of the market, definitely.

All in all, I’m impressed. and looking forward to getting my hands on one. One thing I’m going to be curious to see is whether this thing is going to be allowed to take on the Mifi. If I could use it to wire up a wireless network to 3G in a hotel room (even if I can’t use the iTab for other things!) to handle the work to the office, that’s gravy. Then unplug the laptop for the night and use this beast for recreation (and to prepare tomorrow’s presentation for the sales meeting!)…

All you folks dissing the device, I think you’re looking at it wrong. Here’s a hint: Steve’s not stupid, and knows what real people want. And isn’t afraid to offer it. And this is, I think, it.

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at Some thoughts on the iPad…. This article is copyright 2009 by Chuq Von Rospach. This content may not be republished on another site without explicit permission from Chuq Von Rospach. Please consider subscribing to my RSS feed so you don't miss a single one of my carefully crafted, emotionally satisfying and Pulitzer-quality words. Some thoughts on the iPad…

I tend to shy away from talking about Apple much these days because of the possible conflict of interest issues, but I wanted to say a couple of things about the announcement tomorrow.

Derek Powazek sums up my — anticipations — of the product very well.

The typical run-up to the announcement, with the leakers and the guessers hyping each other into a frenzy until people start trashing the product before it’s even announced (because they’re basically tired of hearing it) is in full force. I’m glad I don’t have to deal with all of this stuff any more, except as an amused outsider. But as an amused outsider, I count myself amused, but frankly, I tuned it out days ago because it’s so over the top and silly, after a while, it just stops being interesting.

The tablet looks to be the creation of a new market segment, and I’m going to be fascinated to see how it’s positioned and how well it does — not to mention how well Apple does it. Right now, we have these broad usage capabilities:

Life in your pocket — your phone, which increasingly allows you to carry your essential stuff around without hauling a huge beast to try to manage it. That this data syncs up to other places where it’s available on your other electronic environments is great, but ultimately, this is about managing who you are and what you do in a portable format. We’ve made great strides at turning these pocket devices into information consumers as well, but the small screen makes that a set of compromises. They are also — bluntly — pretty crappy at content creation because of the compromises needed to fit in your pocket. the thought of blogging via my phone doesn’t intrigue me. The thought of writing a novel on my phone scares me.

Portable content creation — your laptop. Carry your office with you. I remember long ago when I got my first PowerMac Duo, which in many ways was a netbook 15 years before anyone thought to invent a netbook. Loved that machine, and the docks, because for the first time I could carry my life with me and turn it back into a desktop when I wasn’t mobile. I still strive for that model today, rather than keeping multiple computers and trying to keep the data in sync. Today’s laptops have enough power and a good enough screen than you really CAN turn one into a portable office with few (if any) compromises.

Desktop content creation — the iMac, the mini, the mac pros. We’ve seen this class of machine shrink out of prominence over the last few years because, frankly, laptops have replaced them for most people. Plug a laptop into a monitor and you have the best of both worlds, large screens AND portability. iMacs continue to have some popularity because there are times and situations where portability isn’t a feature (kids being a big part of that). Mac Pros exist, but are clearly a power user (or ego user) niche now; few of us really need that kind of oomph.

What’s missing here? There’s a huge class of user that’s never had a product designed specifically for them. Tomorrow we’ll see the first one.

That’s the content consumer.

Laptops are aimed at creation, they  carry a lot of “stuff” with them that are underused by a lot of people, starting with the keyboard. If your primary use of a keyboard is typing in URLs or emails, you don’t need all of the bulk and mechanics a laptop keyboard bring along (not to mention weight and power consumption and…). The iPhone model (software keyboard, etc) work fine here, but the iPhone form factor for the screen creates other compromises that make the phone tough for these people (but great for the “life in the pocket”).

The thing that kept me from buying a Kindle was simple — it’s a unitasker, and while it does it quite well (and I have the kindle software on my iPhone), I don’t want multiple devices to do the different things I want in this usage space. The reason I think the earlier attempts at PC-based tablets didn’t take off was because they were really “laptops in a tablet”, not tablets designed for content consumption — and just created a new set of compromises that most of us realized made them — compromised.

That’s where I think this tablet lies: content isn’t “books” or “newspapers”, it’s web, it’s video, it’s audio, it’s games, it’s text and content. And this device is going to be all about consuming content, and all of it in a single device.

If it is, it’s going to sell zillions. It’s going to cannibalize laptop sales to some degree, but that’s a good thing. It’s the kind of device that I have wanted for my mom, who’s primarily a consumer of infomration and doesn’t need the complexity of a Mac (much less a windows computer).

Would I buy one? Depends. I’m a content creator, and I’m rarely without my laptop. A device like this isn’t going to be optimized for the kind of things I’m doing (especially my photography, I don’t see this as a device particularly interesting for serious photography geeking), so it’s interesting only to the degree I can’t also do these things on my laptop; it’s not a replacement device, but a supplementary device. But then, I bought an Xbox 360 for gaming as a supplement to my Mac for computing, so who knows….

To the degree that this device makes using your content as painless as your phone makes managing your email/contacts/calendar, it’ll be a huge success.

One thing I’ll be fascinated to see, perhaps not tomorrow: how much of what they do on this device also ends up on my Mac. the closer they come to a “virtual tablet” on the mac (via iTunes?) the less I need one, but I can believe ultimately I’ll have one because I do like to sit down on the couch with a good book, and I’ve never really found a way to do that comfortably with a laptop.

I don’t think tomorrow’s device will solve the final problem — taking a good book with me into the bathtub for a soak. But who knows? maybe that’s a third party opportunity.

What my gut tells me: tomorrow’s announcement is going to change things significantly, is going to be hugely successful, and many people are going to trash it because they don’t get it.  This may turn out to be the biggest thing yet. And given the things that have come from Apple (and Steve) over the years, that’s saying something.

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at The night before the Apple Tablet…. This article is copyright 2009 by Chuq Von Rospach. This content may not be republished on another site without explicit permission from Chuq Von Rospach. Please consider subscribing to my RSS feed so you don't miss a single one of my carefully crafted, emotionally satisfying and Pulitzer-quality words. The night before the Apple Tablet…

To understand the feature requirements for moderation we need some goals. Keep in mind that no moderation will be perfect, and you can easily come up with scenarios that will work around anything we come up with.

Therefore, we should focus on just some initial goals that will work right now, and keep in mind that these will need to be constantly tweaked and worked on as the spammers evade the measures.

• If given the choice between restricting free speech and preventing unwanted communication, free speech always wins.
• The system should increase the quality of discourse for any project, regardless of human language used.
• It should never give a small group the ability to hide communications from others.
• It should be implementable and not have high hosting costs.
• It should not rely on a dedicated person’s constant intervention.
• It never gates email through system before sending it, but rather allows initial emails with moderation after.
• It should use information from people’s rating habits to classify them as “ratings trolls” to prevent abuse.

With those goals in mind I’ve teased out two potential list quality strategies that might work.

via Proposals For Librelist Moderation Strategies.

Someone I work with turned me on to Librelist because they knew me interest and history with mailing list systems, and I find it interesting that some folks have decided it’s time to rethink the mailing list again.

They’re right. When I faded to black on the mailman project, it was at least in part because many of us felt that mailing lists were a technological dead end, and that deliverability issues because of anti-spam systems made the “personal mailing list” an increasingly difficult thing to accomplish.

Both are — for the most part — true. I certainly would never run my own mail server again, because the advantages of doing so are far outweighed by the time and hassle of trying to manage deliverability and reputation to make sure mail it sends gets accepted, and the constant onslaught of incoming spam turns them into a permanent infinite time sink. That’s why I either retired our lists or moved them to Yahoogroups (which I personally think is a pretty good system).

But there’s still room here to rethink the concepts and the Librelists seem interested in trying, and I think that’s great. Email and mailing lists are far from dead — but instead of stand alone delivery tools, they really shine as part of an integrated web strategy; Yahoo groups is a nice first generation of that, although there’s a lot more Yahoo could do if they decided to.

Message moderation really breaks down into two big problems:

• “Subscribe spam” where spammers sign up to the list to spam it.
• “Member warfare” where existing, approved members get into fights and they escalate into unacceptable territory.

The first is really simple to solve: new members are moderated, and messages aren’t posted until reviewed by someone to vet their content. Simple implementation; Yahoo Groups does it today, and on the lists I still manage, it works well to keep the spammers at bay. The way I manage it is all members are moderated until their first post. if their first post is acceptable, I turn off the moderation bit. To minimize delays in propogation of new member messages, simply choose a moderator pool large enough to guarantee held messages get reviewed and approved in a timely manner — you could even make that moderator pool all members in good standing if you want, because all you really need is someone you’ve trusted to post vetting that someone new is trusted to post.

Member warfare is trickier. I hesitate to call it trolling because the pure troll is a subset of the larger issue of two (or a small group of) people getting pissed off and going at it. A troll is simply one person going off on the rest of the list.

I’m more and more convinced the answer here are reputation systems, where over time a user’s membership in a group is used to define their abilities and restrictions. The longer a member is in the group in good standing, the more often they contribute material, the higher their reputation goes and the more the can do and the more sway they have on the decisions of the reputation engine. You can tweak the details of the algorithm almost any way you want, but if you define it in terms of “how long they’re a member” and “constructive contribution to the community”, you can come up with a metric on how valuable that member is to the community, and then use that to rank that member’s contributions and recommendations.

Here’s one rough view of how to build this. Please note that I firmly believe karma rankings are private and users have no way to see what their ranking is or compare it to others, except in really broad user categories (“member”, “senior member”, “top contributor”, “advisory board member”). As soon as you create a list of any form, you will attract people who see it as something they can game, and so they will.

User Karma is a value between 0 and 1, which starts at 0.5. Every time a user contributes to the system (a posting, a reply, a moderation recommendation, etc), the number gets bumped by some value. How much the value is incremented or decremented depends on how it’s rated by other users — so if User A posts a message, User B flags it as spam, but 80% of the membership feel that was a bad decision, User B’s karma is reduced in future decisions, they lose influence. Over time, the system self-corrects by giving increased influence of those who’s decisions match the community consensus and reduced influence to those who’s postings and recommendations don’t match up well.

The system can then choose whether to accept or flag for moderation a posting based on a poster’s karma score. You could potentially reject outright users that have karma scores below some value, or allow other members to choose not to see messages by users with karma scores below some value. Over time, users who are disruptive to the community will get karma’ed into the moderation queue (or out the door), and users who are seen as top contributors will have stronger influence.

My goals:

• A system like this can be built nicely with a good SQL backend and a bit of horsepower. I’ve actually done a detailed design and schema on this before, and it’s a fascinating thing I’ve always wanted to implement.
• It enables the power of individuals to police themselves.
• It limits the ability of an individual to harass or cause problems.
• It doesn’t lend itself to people playing the game of gaming the system by not exposing the details of the system (slashdot karma whores need not apply).
• Trolls get edited out of the system because the community will quickly recognize them for what they are and trash their karma, causing their postings to disappear to the bottom of the list.
• Cliques and Mafias have to be large to influence the results significantly. You don’t completely avoid the clique/mafia problem, but you can severely limit it’s ability to wreak havoc.
• It doesn’t require a lot of manual handholding or babysitting. Admins end up stepping in only in extreme cases.
• Because trolls tend to get edited out of the system quickly and automatically, they tend to go elsewhere because without feedback and controversy, they wither and die. And by editing them out of the system quickly, you avoid the whiplash and fighting that happens when people start fighting with the trolls and the wars break out.

Weaknesses:

• Any community tends to turn into an echo chamber. Automated systems like this encourage this because “different thinking” tends to get rated down.
• That’s usually a lesser evil to letting the trolls run wild.
• To my knowledge, nobody’s ever solved the problem of the conflict between the group-mind reinforcing the echo chamber and allowing the free thinkers to poke at the community’s comfort level by pushing them to think about things that make them uncomfortable. One person’s rebel is another person’s troll, and that’s not solvable in real life, much less in automated life like this…

These techniques are all based on (or stolen from) things that are in use around the net, with Amazon’s review feedback being one I really respect; while trying to avoid the pitfalls I’ve seen around the net (yes, I’m going to keep bashing on Slashdot’s karma system, it’s way too easy to game and always has been). It also (I believe) avoids the nasty politics that have made Digg a bit of a pesthole. And it’s also pretty lightweight and low-key, or at least it should be. The implementation details will be crucial, as will be tuning how the karma values adapt…

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at Proposals For Librelist Moderation Strategies. This article is copyright 2009 by Chuq Von Rospach. This content may not be republished on another site without explicit permission from Chuq Von Rospach. Please consider subscribing to my RSS feed so you don't miss a single one of my carefully crafted, emotionally satisfying and Pulitzer-quality words. Proposals For Librelist Moderation Strategies

Got this in email the other day, decided the answer might interest some of you.

I actually just had a quick random question about your Contact Us page on chuqui.com

I agree about not putting a phone number on a personal or small business site unless you are prepared for the idiot factor.

Since yourself and of course myself too are all too familiar with the world of spammers I was wondering why you don’t obfuscate or somehow protect your mailto: link?

It’s a serious question, as I am actually wondering if you do want to see how much spam will come to it and which types of spam?

good question, complicated answer… Part of it is that my email addresses have been “out there” for so long — I’ve owned plaidworks.com since 1995, for instance — that I assume I’m on every spam list in the universe, because, from what I can tell, I am. So why hide when it’s too late already?

I also think those obfuscators are fake-security. Anything you can build programmatically, they can unbuild programmatically. All they have to do is care enough to try. They really don’t fix things, but they make you feel better, and over time, they get compromised — so you add complexity to things and in the long run, it doesn’t really solve the problem. Or it does, for a while, but how do you know when it stops working?

I don’t see any purpose in having an arms war with someone who can out-gun you from day one. I’d rather put my time into useful things.

So here’s what I do:

I hire someone else to worry about it.

I don’t believe it’s possible for an individual to “win” a way with the spammers. Or even “break even”, or even stick with “moral victories” for long. Even if I could, I’d much rather put my time and energy into other things.

So that means having your email hosted by someone who does have the resources to fight spam. I currently have three email hosts: gmail/google, mobileme/Apple, and my personal ISP (plaidworks.com/chuqui.com). Of the three, the personal ISP has the most leak-through, but they honestly do a good job and I have no complaints, given the complexity of the task.

Apple/Mobileme uses Brightmail for filtering (unless things have changed), and Google uses Postini, which they bought a few months after I turned down a job at Postini to work for Strongmail instead. Both groups have organizations individuals can’t hope to do better than (IMHO), no matter how much the geeks think they can “better mousetrap” the problem. My experience shows it to be a situation with rapidly diminishing returns for constantly increasing resource commitments.

So let the experts handle it. Then, realize it’s never going to be 100% perfect, and don’t get your knickers in a knot when it really IS imperfect. A few pieces of spam sneaking through won’t kill anyone; the stress you get spazzing out over the spam just might.

Right now my final mailbox lives on gmail, because it works best with my webos/Pre phone. When I was living on an iPhone, I used MobileME’s mail server. Depending on where I live, I have the other servers set to auto-forward to the final repository, and everything works pretty well.

In reality, the anti-spam aspects of email work pretty well now if you’re involved with a mail host that has their act together. Many corporate environments don’t. Most geeks fighting this battle on their own don’t (and complain about it loudly, so I think the general view is it’s a lot LESS solved than it is). Living on a mail host run by pros costs a few bucks (well, it doesn’t on gmail, but you get ads. I would happily pay a few bucks to do away with them..) but I’m a lot more worried about spending time than money in most cases.

Things like mail obfuscators never really worked well; they might have been ignored by spammers, but if the spammers decided they were worth investing in cracking, they got cracked. Very few geeks who installed them actually did any kind of scientific testing on how well they worked, they noticed no spam in their boxes for a few days and declared victory. A month later? three? six? Compared to non-obfuscated control addresses?

shrug. very little science here. Including myself. What science I do have is a couple of years old and pretty thin as well, so I don’t declare myself an expert, but when I did experiment, I just didn’t see anything worth the time investment, not compared to just putting my email on a server where a staff was in charge of solving the problem for me.

The proper place to solve the spam problem is on the incoming connection; even if you do obfuscate, all it takes is one mistake to leak, or someone else to leak it FOR you (and I found those leaks everywhere when I was tracking this stuff; painfully sad) to require having to do the incoming filtering as well. If you have to do that anyway, isn’t the proper answer to focus on doing that better and not do things that ultimately don’t really help solve the problem?

My bottom line: you aren’t going to keep email addresses away from the spammers. Trying to do so is a false security solution, and ultimately a waste of time and energy. Instead, it’s keeping spam out of the incoming email stream, and if you do that well, you don’t need to worry about the addresses leaking. So I don’t.

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at Protecting mailto links (my advice: don’t). This article is copyright 2009 by Chuq Von Rospach. This content may not be republished on another site without explicit permission from Chuq Von Rospach. Please consider subscribing to my RSS feed so you don't miss a single one of my carefully crafted, emotionally satisfying and Pulitzer-quality words. Protecting mailto links (my advice: don’t)

While writing my article on backups (and it’s followup) I decided some of my practices weren’t what I wanted them to be. The primary issue was the online catastrophic backups, which used Jungle Disk as a front end to Amazon S3 for storage. I really like the setup — Jungle disk was almsot flawless in doing what I needed the way I wanted it done, and S3 was reliable and backed by Amazon, so I didn’t need to worry about the “not here tomorrow” problem you sometimes have with startups.

But there were a few negatives: the cost — I was spending about $17/mo on storage costs with S3, plus about $1.50 a month to Jungle disk for their advanced features. I also worried about the occasional delays (I was only uploading about a gigabyte of fresh data a day, so a few days of heavy photo shooting could cause backlogs before the data was stored offsite; uploading the network is an option, but costs. Everything costs…) and finally the time it would take to recover via online recovery if I ever needed the backed up data bothered me.

So I decided to move to a simpler strategy: clone my disks and keep them offsite. Over the weekend I disabled and deleted the S3 store and turned off my Jungle Disk setup, and ordered a new drive.

Not an offsite drive, which might surprise you, but a new internal drive for the Macbook, a 340 Gig Hitachi 7200RPM drive. Why, might you ask?

Well, let me tell you: if you read the previous pieces, you saw where I noted that one of the best ways to never NEED your backups (always my preferred policy!) is to replace my primary disks on a regular basis; my laptop drive was (over)due, so it made sense to replace it before it failed. By upgrading to a larger internal disk, I could take the files I’m currently storing on an external firewire drive and put them back on the laptop drive.

That simplifies my computing universe — fewer spinning things hooked up to computers, fewer places to misplace data and one less “i have that data, but it’s not with me” opportunity. And it means I can repurpose that firewire drive for my offsite backup.

Amazon had a nice deal (about $75) on a Western Digital 320gig 7200RPM drive with a 16 meg cache (hmm. old phart warning: the first hard drive I ever bought — for a Mac 512K that plugged into the floppy port!) was a ten Megabyte drive that was wonderful and had more disk than I could ever think of using, especially compared to floppies… Now that drive is smaller than the performance cache on a hard drive… wow).

I could have gone as far as 500 gig, but that changes the price/performance,a nd even with copying all of the files off my secondary drive, I still have 150 gig free. By the time I start worrying about the disk filling up, the bigger drives will get cheaper, or I can simply buy a nice cheap external and split it up again. But for now, I’m happy on a single drive, a single backup drive, and a single offline external archive drive. Plus backups of each, of course.

I wired up the raw drive via USB to my laptop and used superduper to clone my primary drive. Then I let everything sit for two days with the new drive spun up, refreshing it daily with superduper — because infant mortality on your laptop drive really sucks, and giving it a couple of days before opening up the guts and swapping things is a bit of insurance. Just saying — nothing like putting your laptop back together and having it fail (or not boot).

A bonus feature of this change: the old drive in the laptop was a 5400 RPM drive. Upgrading to 7200 RPM improves the I/O characteristics and speeds the overall performance, especially if you’re doing things that eat lots of virtual memory (like, oh, photoshop or lightroom, or running both). On a mac, check /var/vm and see how many swapfiles you have and how big they are. The larger your VM set, the more your disk is going to affect overall performance, and in many cases, a slow disk is the real problem to performance, not lack of RAM. hint: people how are proud of NEVER REBOOTING THEIR COMPUTERS are never re-initializing their VM environment. Silly boys. I’ve seen major complaints about slow performance in firefox and photoshop magically disappear on computers that were simply rebooted. Just saying.

So for $75, I remove a $20/mon charge to pay for the online backups, I add enough disk to my primary computer to keep me for at least six months or longer, added a faster disk to speed up overall performance of the computer, and I really didn’t do anything to weaken my backup strategy. All I need to do is remember to bring the catastrophe disk home once a month, refresh it, and get it back offsite again; I can choose to do it more often if I finish a significant project, too. And that’s very manageable for me — just put repeating tasks in your calendar to nag you, right?

There is one other upgrade I’ll need to make, which is my bus-powered backup drive is now too small to fully backup my primary drive, but I don’t need to worry about that for another 50 gigs of data or so; that’ll cost me another $75 (or less by then) down the road.

So I now have my primary disk (320 gigs) with a time machine backup and THREE superduper cloned backups (one offsite, one nightly, one weekly); I also have a pair of 500 gig drives which store all of my long-term offline archival stored data; they’re clones of each other, and one is stored offsite. These hold the files I don’t ever expect to touch again but won’t throw out for a while just in case (the import backups of all of my photo shoots, for instance), so they are in fact more redundancy. Just in case, you know?

The old laptop drive? It goes into the anti-static bag and gets filed with all of my yearly paperwork and taxes; it’ll stay there until I dispose of this year’s paperwork down the road, at which point the drive will have a bad date with a big hammer and some other power tools and get tossed in the trash. I much prefer my hard drives not end up in hands of strangers (if I do give a drive to somene else, it’s generally after a multi-pass, multi-pattern write/erase sequence, but drives are cheap enough, I kinda feel they’re not worth losing track of until you know they’re destroyed, and there’s no sense destroying until later, because you never know when you might need it…. It hurts nothing to wait…)

So I’m following my own advice and fixing my own backups — again. Using simple technology to reduce “failure by complexity”, using as few mechanisms as reasonable, using multiple redundant backups and backing up on different time sequences to avoid the problem of corruption not found until too late — and keeping copies off site, without being anal about it.

It’s probably overkill, but disk is cheap enough now that it’s cheap insurance. And I’d rather have one too many backups than one too few.

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at Following my own advice on backups….. This article is copyright 2009 by Chuq Von Rospach. This content may not be republished on another site without explicit permission from Chuq Von Rospach. Please consider subscribing to my RSS feed so you don't miss a single one of my carefully crafted, emotionally satisfying and Pulitzer-quality words. Following my own advice on backups….

According to Greenbaum’s blog post (which was mirrored on his personal blog), someone posted a comment on a story in which they used a colloquial or slang term for female genitalia. It was deleted, but then was reposted. Greenbaum says he noticed that the comment alert from Wordpress showed that it came from a nearby school. So Greenbaum called the school, and they asked him to send them the email with the comment, which he apparently did. About six hours later, he says, the school called and said that an employee had been confronted and that he had resigned.

Am I the only one who thinks that doing this goes way beyond the normal course of editorial behaviour?

via Comment behaviour: How far is too far?.

There’s been some interesting commentary on this case — but there are some aspects that I think haven’t been addressed very well yet. It’s a more complicated situation than many have considered, and the answers really aren’t clear cut.

Here’s my take:

There are really two separate issues here.

Did Greenbaum over-react by reporting this person to his employer?

Yes — but.

Yes, he did. In the grand scheme of things, reporting a violator back to their host is a serious thing because it can have serious implications — like getting someone fired. Which effectively happened in this case. So it’s a last resort thing. Before you do something like that, I prefer taking many other tactics first:

• Delete the post
• Warn the User
• Ban the User (and ban the IP and/or IP range as necessary)
• Make it clear that if it doesn’t stop, they’re going to be reported

If those all fail, or if for some reason aren’t possible, THEN you start considering going back to the user’s host for support in making the behavior stop. As far as I can tell, only the first was tried, so a number of (to me) necessary steps were skipped. This could have been ended with much less serious ramifications, and wasn’t.

However, here’s the butt:

• The post was deleted, and the user insisted on putting it back. The admins made it clear it wasn’t acceptable, and the user decided to overrule their authority. This user was far from innocent here.
• Once the user is reportd back to their host (and I use that term carefully, because it’s many times unclear if it’s an employer or what, and to some degree it doesn’t matter if it’s an ISP or a boss or whatever), it’s out of Greenbaum’s control. The rest of the escalation to losing the job was the result of actions of the host (i.e the school, or this person’s boss). None of that is caused by Greenbaum (directly) or his fault, beyond that he should have been sensitive to the fact that his action in reporting might have caused other actions to happen.

So, you know what? I think Greenbaum’s transgression is a lot less serious than the user’s transgression in reposting his vulgarity after it was made clear it wasn’t welcome. I would have tried other tactics to cut the abuse, but let’s not forget that it was abuse, and it was repeated abuse after the site made it clear the posting wasn’t welcome. Whether you shoot over someone’s virtual bow one time or three times is a minor thing in the scheme of it.

The user’s fault in this problem was a much bigger problem than Greenbaum’s reaction.

But what about the school? They’re the group that took the complaint and escalated it into a situation where the person lost their job. None of that is Greenbaum’s fault. Was the school wrong for turning this into a termination issue?

I’m not so sure. It’s easy to say they over-reacted, but let’s not forget:

• This person did this using the school’s network
• It looks like he did it while on duty at the school – while he was being paid by them.
• He likely was on a school-owned computer
• He was (I’m sure) under some kind of employment contract with behavior clauses. The school very likely has acceptable use standards for computers and networks, and for all we know, also personal use restrictions (which this would be a violation of).
• So while this cascaded into a situation where someone lost their job, it’s not at all clear that the details of the action were the cause. We also don’t know if this person has a history of previous violations of work rules that might have been part of this. Has this person been warned about this kind of behavior before? We don’t know. It could well be from the school’s view that this was a “last straw”. We don’t know.

And those complications are why I believe reporting back to the host is something not to be taken lightly; once you do, the final outcome is not really under your control. On the other hand, the person who could have prevented this was the user who posted the vulgarity — either by not doing it in the first place, or by stopping after it was deleted the first time, or by being smart enough to not do it from his employer on company time and company equipment. He had plenty of opportunities to not turn this into what it was; Greenbaum had one.

And it’s not as simple as many of the folks commenting on it want to be. Real life never is…

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at Comment behaviour: How far is too far?. This article is copyright 2009 by Chuq Von Rospach. This content may not be republished on another site without explicit permission from Chuq Von Rospach. Please consider subscribing to my RSS feed so you don't miss a single one of my carefully crafted, emotionally satisfying and Pulitzer-quality words. Comment behaviour: How far is too far?

Google Chrome OS was announced today and everyone is talking about it. Lots of interesting thoughts going down. Here is mine:

I have never been interested in the “netbook” because I’m MacOS-centric and I saw the netbook as a series of compromises from the functionality I want in a laptop that I found unacceptable — AND I believe that 95% of what most users see as the core functionaliry of a netbook, I see as functionalty that belongs on my phone. the netbook is at best a transitional technology, and smartphonees are quickly taking on most of what netbooks are trying to do today. I don’t like the price/performance of a netbook. Hell, I just don’t like the performance very much, not when I can already do most of it on an iPhone or webOS or Android.

As a photographer, I have also never been interested in buying so-called digital wallets such as the Epson P-7000; too expensive for limited functionalty, and to me, it’s more cost effective to just buy enough cards to handle the sitaution and wait until you can get back to the laptop to offload them and make a real backup.

But I take one look at at the Chrome OS type devices and I see something that can be set up as a rather nice digital wallet — PLUS give you access to some key computing capabilities (email, web, wifi, file uploading) and suddenly, for about the cost of what you pay for a decent digital wallet today, you get something that can hopefully act as a wallet AND access to some key computing features as well? Being able to offload pictures and send a few samples online via gmail or upload to smugmug from the field?

NOW you start having something I’d consider having. Neither device alone is worth the cost of buying it to me. But Chrome OS looks like it’ll have the capability to make these two devices one, at about the same price point of either — and now I’m interested. And it’s going to be a while before phones can take on the capacity we’d be looking for to do the digital wallet capabilities, so this is something a good smartphone can’t yet do.

If I’m a product manager for a digital wallet today, I’m looking at the end of life for this type of product and trying to figure out how to move to this new merged capability before someone eats my lunch. If I’m a developer for these new Chrome OS devices, I’m looking to see how to make it act like a digital wallet, because photographers are going to want to buy this.

And if I’m a photographer, I’m watching and hoping this happens, beacuse this has the potential to be a really nice addition to the photo bag that could allow me to stop carrying my laptop in the field but still be able to do a lot of what I currently want while out shooting.

Count me intrigued and hopeful here.

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at Some thoughts on Google Chrome OS (epecially for photographers). This article is copyright 2009 by Chuq Von Rospach. This content may not be republished on another site without explicit permission from Chuq Von Rospach. Please consider subscribing to my RSS feed so you don't miss a single one of my carefully crafted, emotionally satisfying and Pulitzer-quality words. Some thoughts on Google Chrome OS (epecially for photographers)

Two months ago I noted:

I finally (finally? hah-hah) upgraded to Snow Leopard this evening. The only glitch: I lost a couple of hours because the airport interface simply didn’t want to the time capsule, I couldn’t get a reliable connection, especially DNS. The third time I restarted the airport device, things seem to have finally settled in, and now it looks like I’m working properly.

via A few quick hits… | Chuqui 3.0.

and here we are with 10.6.2. It turns out I spoke too soon on the WIFI issues, they were chronic, and I had the same problem in LA with my mom’s network — but only when a Leopard device was ALSO on the network. The Leopard boxes never had a problem, and I never had a problem if the network ONLY had Snow Leopard on it.

I “solved” it for the time being by installing a second WIFI network on a second router, which works, but is a hassle. So tonight, I upgraded to 10.6.2, and at this point, it looks like the problem is solved. And no, Wifi and networking issues weren’t even mentioned in 10.6.2’s release notes. Like that suprises me.

This seemed to be a relatively obscure bug — but if you watch Apple’s support forums and other places where users kvetch, I wasn’t the only one nailed by this. But now it’s gone, and if you ran into this, upgrading to 10.6.2 seems like a good idea.

The release notes also mention a fix that MAY be my other snow leopard problem; every so often, running Entourage (out of office 2004; yes, I ‘upgraded’ to Office 2008 and loved it so much I removed it from disk and went back to the older version) would cause the entire user environment to crash and return me to the login prompt. That, by the way, is not a fun thing to have happen, especially the first time when you don’t know to keep everything saved… I haven’t tested against this yet, but I’m hoping this problem is gone, too. We’ll see. If so, the only issues I care about in Snow Leopard will have been resolved. As it is, if I go another 24 hours without seeing the WIFI bug, I’ll declare Snow Leopard fixed and stable enough to install on other computers…

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at Snow Leopard 10.6.2 is out. This article is copyright 2009 by Chuq Von Rospach. This content may not be republished on another site without explicit permission from Chuq Von Rospach. Please consider subscribing to my RSS feed so you don't miss a single one of my carefully crafted, emotionally satisfying and Pulitzer-quality words. Snow Leopard 10.6.2 is out

I had a couple of people email me on my backup article (thank you all for the links and feedback!), and that led to a few more quick thoughts.

Is there significant advantage to Firewire over USB 2 for a backup drive?

Firewire is faster. USB is slower, but the drives are less expensive.

Apple left off the firewire port on the new Macbook. There have been indications for a while that they’re starting the shift away from Firewire. What that implies for now is that any external drive you buy should have a USB interface so as to avoid long-term compatibility issues. That’s not a problem for most drives, but it’s something to be aware of.

I normally run my backup drives via USB now for a simple reason: I can plug them into a USB hub. If nothing else, it’s one less thing to plug in (not such a big deal for macpro, bigger deal for laptop). And it saves me having to think about buying a firewire hub as the drives multiply.

Firewire has target disk mode, but Apple’s also indicated it’s future is limited to the future of firewire. Apple seems to be thinking that the future is USB3, high speed wifi (N speed) and to a lesser degree gigabit ethernet. I’m going to be curious if they start including an eSATA interface, but I think if they were going to, we’d have seen one by now.

As long as you buy external drives that are USB2/Firewire400, you’ll be fine. No need to spend more for Firewire800 for a backup drive, the extra performance is more or less wasted except for the initial backup, and who cares if the initial backup finishes at 3AM instead of 7AM while you’re sleeping?

This drive to me is the sweet spot for archival backups. I’ve used the drive casing and it’s less expensive than heavier duty enclosure I recommended on my blog (only about $40 per drive over the raw disk unit). I’ve used them, they’re nice and reliable. the 1TB is a lot cheaper per gigabyte than the 2TB drives, so if you can use them, I would for now. Buying down a generation never hurts.

(FWIW, a little birdie I trust told me to not trust the 1.5TB drives, that entire generation, according to them, are going to be less reliable than the 1’s or 2’s. I haven’t seen any data to back this up, but given who they work for, I trust them enough that I’m avoiding using them. I wouldn’t freak and replace one, but I’d also plan on retiring them earlier than I might otherwise)

Why the recommendation of that Mercury Elite drive?  I’m trying to understand the price-performance-reliability issues here.  The Mercury you cite runs $160; Newegg, as just one sample, has Hitachi and iomega external drives, retail, USB 2.0 (or “Turbo USB 2.0″?), 1TB, at $90.

I’ve used them and found them reliable. If you have another brand you like and trust, be my guest. To a good degree, these are commodities, but I like to make sure I have a high quality enclosure and then upgrade the drive mechanisms over time rather than replace the whole thing. Some of them, honestly, cheap out on the interface and/or power supply, and some can run really hot under load (or really hot, period), which reduces reliability and lifetime. The OWC enclosures are well engineered from what I’ve seen and I have enough history with them to know that the enclosures rarely fail, so I trust recommending them.

But really, whatever works for you, but an unreliable disk enclosure can make your life hell and be more likely to die early in its lifetime.

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at Some more thoughts on backups.. This article is copyright 2009 by Chuq Von Rospach. This content may not be republished on another site without explicit permission from Chuq Von Rospach. Please consider subscribing to my RSS feed so you don't miss a single one of my carefully crafted, emotionally satisfying and Pulitzer-quality words. Some more thoughts on backups.

As far as I’m concerned, Google Groups is dead.

via John Resig – Google Groups is Dead.

Yes, it is, and has been for a while. What’s interesting about this to me is that Yahoo Groups isn’t. In fact, it’s doing quite well, has very little spam problem, very active communities, and Yahoo doesn’t seem to get much credit for how well they’re working, because if you listen inside the high tech echo chamber, Google is where it’s at and Yahoo died years ago.

Yahoo groups has had it’s challenges, but it’s a viable place to host a group and hold a conversation, and Google Groups hasn’t been for a long time…

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at John Resig – Google Groups is Dead. This article is copyright 2009 by Chuq Von Rospach. This content may not be republished on another site without explicit permission from Chuq Von Rospach. Please consider subscribing to my RSS feed so you don't miss a single one of my carefully crafted, emotionally satisfying and Pulitzer-quality words. John Resig – Google Groups is Dead

A couple of quick updates on some recent software updates…

After waiting to see how Snow Leopard worked with others, I decided to take the plunge and update. Overall, the update’s done pretty well for me, with two exceptions:

My home wifi is broken; DNS connectivity fails. There is a fair bit of discussion on this (see here and here), and whether you see it depends on how your upstream DNS is configured; I don’t see it at work, I do see it at home on the DSL line. I’ve solved it (okay, “solved”) by switching to an ethernet cable for now. Hoepfully, Apple will fix this one soon.

I’ve also had Entourage 2004 kill out the entire login environment three times — each while forwarding an email. that’s rather impressive, and yes, I know how out of date Entourage 2004 is… The solution here is to shift to using mail.app for my work (aka outlook) mail, but I haven’t had time to experiment and see how it works. Maybe soon. Until then, it’s more “Doctor, it hurts when I do this!” “Don’t do that!”)

Overall, though, I’m happy with Snow Leopard.

I also upgraded to iPhone 3.1, and count me as one of those lucky travellers who are seeing the random shutdowns. It’s particularly annoying because it tends to shut down when you put it to sleep, and you don’t know that until you try to open it up to check your mail or use an app — and nothing happens. Which means in the meantime, you aren’t getting notifications and phone calls. So I find myself forming a new habit, which is to put it to sleep, then hit the button to bring up the screensaver immediately, just to make sure it actually does. My high point for it turning off was four times in 1 day, but I’ve now gone two days without it shutting down at all — I’ve seen seven or eight overall. Lots of blogs are talking about this, including Engadget.

That one’s a minor annoyance in a way, but it impacts a device like that in a huge way. Here’s hoping they fix it quickly.

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at Update on some software updates. This article is copyright 2009 by Chuq Von Rospach. This content may not be republished on another site without explicit permission from Chuq Von Rospach. Please consider subscribing to my RSS feed so you don't miss a single one of my carefully crafted, emotionally satisfying and Pulitzer-quality words. Update on some software updates

I know this is last-second warning, but welcome to my life recently…

I’ll be at the Web 2.0 conference tomorrow (I finally get to go to a conference again!), so if you happen to see me in the halls come up and introduce yourself and say hi.

Also don’t forget that tomorrow afternoon there’s going to be a talk by Michael Abbott here at Palm where he’s going to be talking about the Pre and webOS. It’s in the 3rd level ballroom at 5:10 PM, and afterward, Palm is hosting a bit of a get together where we’ll be hanging out and chatting with people who wander by. If you’re around after the talk, that’d be a great time to track me down if you’re still in the area.

If nothing else, consider it a chance for absolute proof that I am not a virtual construct.

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at If you’re at the Web 2.0 conference. This article is copyright 2009 by Chuq Von Rospach. This content may not be republished on another site without explicit permission from Chuq Von Rospach. Please consider subscribing to my RSS feed so you don't miss a single one of my carefully crafted, emotionally satisfying and Pulitzer-quality words. If you’re at the Web 2.0 conference

Mitch Wagner at Information Week just published a piece called Where Does Apple Go From Here in which I’m quoted. That’s created a few more requests for interviews or emails with questions, which is nice.

But.

Having just gone to work for someone who is going to be in direct competition with a part of Apple, I need to be careful here. The only reason I agreed to talk to Mitch (a few weeks back while I was still at Laszlo…) was that he and I go way back, and I know and trust him to quote accurately and use what I said reasonably, and at that, we talked at some length about what i wouldn’t go near, and how we’d disclaim the conflict before we agreed to move forward. And at that, I was still a bit uncomfortable doing it.

So for the time being, I’m going to be quite — discrete — on what I say about Apple, to avoid the possible conflicts that might arise. I’ll explicitly avoid going into things where there’s going to be direct competition. That’s the only safe and sane approach, not because I”m worried about what my new employer might say (“I’m not!”) but beacuse I know it’s inevitable that sooner or later, some of the fanboy press I love so dearly will take something out of context or blow something out of perspective, and then bad things happen, and I don’t particularly want to make it easy to paint that target on my chest again.

This also goes for talking to the “professional” press. Just too many chances for misinterpretation and yes, I have been badly misquoted in the past, thank you, and that’s no fun, either. So unless I know you and your writing and trust you, the answer is “not right now” and will be for the forseeable future. And even if I know you and trust you, it might still be.

We’ll see how things go as this all moves forward and adjust this policy as it makes sense, but right now, I’m trying to focus on looking forward more than rehashing the past (and at least two of the interview requests I got were little more than asking me the same questions Mitch asked, evidnetly in hope of getting the same answer without having to credit his publication for the quote. Hmm…)

Hope you all understand, but even I’ve finally learned that if you come across a door that says “free floggings inside”, it’s probably smarter to stay outside where they actually have to chase you down to flog you…And the potential conflicts (real or perceived here) are just an endless series of doors waiting to be opened to show the flogging gear or rabid weasels inside.

Fortunately, there are plenty of other things to talk about, no?

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at A quick Apple note. This article is copyright 2009 by Chuq Von Rospach. This content may not be republished on another site without explicit permission from Chuq Von Rospach. Please consider subscribing to my RSS feed so you don't miss a single one of my carefully crafted, emotionally satisfying and Pulitzer-quality words. A quick Apple note

I’ve literally seen hundreds of recipes for stripping unsafe HTML that are about as effective as a screen door on a submarine.

via FAQ: Untrusted users and HTML.

For what it’s worth, I’ve always been amused by this statement, because it’s wrong.

A screen door on a submarine is very effective — as long as you only use it to keep bugs out of the submarine while travelling on the surface. It’s a great tool for what it’s designed to do. It’s a lousy tool if it’s used inappropriately.

And yes, submarines do travel on the surface. Modern nuclear subs, especially the nuclear platforms and the hunters, do so much less frequently, but diesel driven subs spend a lot of time on the surface, and there, a screen door might not be a bad thing.

So it’s not so much about good tools or bad tools, but using tools appropriately and their effectiveness within context.Use the right tool for the job, and use tools correctly.

And remember to close the pressure door before you dive, because the screen door is lousy about keeping water out of the submarine. But great at keeping bugs out while letting fresh air in.

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What Facebook is saying, and they have to, is that they have to own your stuff, because if Facebook Connect and other services are going to make your data ubiquitous and shared and spread all around like peanut butter, then they have to have the rights to republish and distribute it. (I might have this a bit wrong. I’m willing to be a bit wrong.)

via Wake Up to How You Share on the Web | chrisbrogan.com.

Here’s one of those places where language can trip you up, and which may be part of the problem with the Facebook TOS.

Facebook doesn’t need to own your content. It may need to retain the rights to keep a copy of it for certain purposes — but ownership implies a much different set of requirements.

“ownership” implies they control future use of the item, that they are now “in charge”. In reality, what Facebook needs to be working towards is a non-exclusive usage license. There’s a huge gulf between OWN (“all rights”) and a non-exclusive license. What Facebook needs to be aiming for is the recognition that once you share something, it’s practically impossible to unshare it, so they need to maintain rights to maintain those shared versions of things in perpetuity. But they can still make explicit that once you delete “the original” their right to create new shared copies ends. They should commit that when you chose to stop sharing, they’ll stop allowing new copies or instances to be created.Technically could be a bit interesting, but do-able.

The other aspect, the one that seems to have is their use of things for marketing. At one level, this is understandable – if only because when you do screen shots, god knows what content is going to be in there, and faking all of the content looks bad. But – there needs to be real clarity of how and in what forms this will and won’t be used. The lawyer-friendly “forever and however we feel lik eusing it, including selling CD’s of stock photography to chinese brothels” doesn’t work, even if it allows lawyers to sleep well at night. Lawyers covering all possible bases shouldn’t be the primary goal of the TOS, however, right?

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A couple of weeks ago, we revised our terms of use hoping to clarify some parts for our users. Over the past couple of days, we received a lot of questions and comments about the changes and what they mean for people and their information. Based on this feedback, we have decided to return to our previous terms of use while we resolve the issues that people have raised.

Many of us at Facebook spent most of today discussing how best to move forward. One approach would have been to quickly amend the new terms with new language to clarify our positions further. Another approach was simply to revert to our old terms while we begin working on our next version. As we thought through this, we reached out to respected organizations to get their input.

via Facebook | Update on Terms.

It’s good to see Facebook commiting to try to do the right thing here. It’s too bad they had to get raked across the coals in public first. While a lot of the bloggers and pundits love to declare evil first and loudly, it seemed to me that there was a lot of noisy over-reaction going on; but then, that’s unprecedented here in the online world, right? It’s not news unless we can post an unflattering photo and declare our superiority, after all. Preferably with a snarky meow.

To me, the more interesting question is how Facebook got here and how they could have avoided it.

The first problem, and its a big one, is that the TOS was updated without notification of the users. Notice that Apple’s itunes always puts up a dialog announcing a TOS change and making you pretend you read it and click the “I accept” when they change it? Legally, you can write a TOS that allows you to change it and users are expected to somehow know this has happened. Legally, users have the right to hate your guts when you do it. Disclosure is a big plus here; when it changes, announce it and explain it. that’s one reason why a blog exists, right?

Zuckerberg did explain it — after the fact, once the controversy started. By the time he did, it was too late. People were already ripping Facebook. By the time Facebook engaged the community, it was too late. (and why, for a site that’s basic function is enabling communication and community, is Facebook so quiet and distant from its community? Just asking. it’s not unique in this, either).

But the second problem here isn’t the late engagement. It’s that what Zuckerberg said the intent was, and what the TOS said, were two very different beasts. And here’s the big problem, and one where Facebook made the mistake so many companies make; they allowed the lawyers to dictate corporate policy and not define it.

Imagine if Zuckerberg had taken his blog postings and given it to the lawyers when the TOS rewrite project started. Imagine if every time a draft of the TOS came back, he said “that is not what our intentions are” and rejected it. Imagine…

I’ve been in far too many meetings with lawyers over things like this, and far too often, everyone defers to the lawyers. Ultimately, the lawyers get to write legalese in ways the lawyers are comfortable with that managers can live with, rather than pushing the lawyers to come up with language that the managers are comfortable with that the lawyers can live with.

So you end up with TOS’s that require a college degree to decode, that basically take away everything from the end user rather than strike a balance with the user, one that makes the lawyer comfortable.

Problem is, the more comfortable your lawyer is, the more uncomfortable your user will be. And if you’re the manager driving the TOS wording, your job is to make sure the TOS both reflects the company’s needs and goals and intentions, but also allows the user to be comfortable uing the site. As the manager in charge, your lawyer is your friend and looking out for the company’s best interest — but it’s critical that the lawyer be tasked to come up with language that fits the company’s needs and which is going be acceptable to users.

That’s a rare accomplishment these days. But it can be done by setting the tone early (as Zuckerberg did – too late!) and then pushing the lawyer to find a way to enable that in the legalese. You don’t do that by deferring to the lawyer; in this case, the managers in charge have to champion for the users. Better yet, has anyone ever bothered to “beta test” a TOS, or even focus group it? nope. It’s a one-sided discussion, and there’s no feedback until it goes final and people get pissed. And at that point, it’s too late.

So if you don’t want to be the next Facebook, or if Facebook doesn’t want to end up doing this again, a few suggestions:

• See the blog entry Zuckerberg wrote? That needed to be written before the first meeting and handed to everyone involved and the lawyers tasked with implementing that philosophy into the TOS
• Every time a draft comes back and it doesn’t match the intetions in that opening memo, send it back.
• NDA a few key users, especally people critical of your policies. Get their feedback. Listen to it. Find the compromise position.
• Don’t release it until you’re happy with it. the lawyer doesn’t have to be happy with it. I’d argue that the happier the lawyer is with it, the more work you have in balancing the TOS to handle the user’s needs as well. Your lawyer has to be willing to LIVE with it, not like it.
• When you release it, announce it; blog what you’re doing, and why. document and explain the changes. Transparency rules.
• And don’t be afraid to take the wider feedback and tweak it again.

And remember, as we move more and more into shared content creation, social networking, people stuffing things on sites they don’t own and run, these issues are going to become more widespread, more complex, and less clear. So unilateral “lawyer first, end-user never” TOS language is going to increasingly create friction points, and occasionally turn into full-scale firefights. So either recognize this up front and commit to avoid it, or risk being the next to face the wrath of pissed off users.

In a shared reality, dictating terms is becoming increasingly impractical. Lawyers love to dictate. The manager of the project’s job is to both champion the users and keep the lawyer focused on doing what’s best for everyone. the lawyer is there to do the company’s bidding on defining the terms — not dictate them. Too many companies are unwilling to make the laywer do that.

In the social world, that’s going to increasingly become a requirement. Embrace it and it can become a competitive advantage — think about it; right now, there are a bunch of people looking for alternatives to Facebook over this. Facebook now has to convince them that alternative IS Facebook. And competitors can use their TOS right now to compete with Facebook, if they do it right.

Is that an opportnity you want to give to your competitors?

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The developers of Kindle decided that it would be a great idea to add in the ability for the books to be read through text-to-speech in an attempt to not break your concentration and allow you to do what needs to be done. Forget bookmarking your place and coming back to it, now you get to hear a computerized voice say what you’re too busy to read. The issue here is that this infringes on the audio rights of the author, which are “derivative under copyright law,” says Paul Aiken, executive director of the Authors Guild.

It’s safe to assume that there was some oversight in this issue ever coming to light, as Amazon does own Audible which is responsible for more audiobook sales than any other source. There’s a huge difference between an audiobook and the test-to-speech experience that the Kindle 2 brings to the table.

via Kindle 2 Text-To-Speak Might Cause Copyright Issues – mediabistro.com: MobileDevicesToday.

At first glance, this might seem like a silly argument, but I can see where the Authors Guild is coming from.

If you look at the recent fights the Writer’s Guild of America and the Directors Guild of America have had with Hollywood, a lot of the conflict were over things like DVD residuals that at the time they were negotiated didn’t seem to be very important, but as technology changed, came to be significant revenue situations. and once the genie is out of the bottle, it’s hard to fix the problem.

How’s this relevant to the Kindle? Well, today, Kindle’s text-to-speech audio capability isn’t going to be a serious competitor to current audio books — but five years from now? Look at how technology improves, it’s not hard to see speech technology improvements that could turn this into a viable alternative to buying an audiobook. As a consumer of books, I like the idea of buying the book once and being able to read or hear it as I prefer. As a once-and-maybe-future author, I can certainly understand why the AG is worried about this cannibalizing the audiobook market (and its revenue stream for authors).

I think, however, that this is a fight the Author’s Guild should lose. I think Neil Gaiman covered it well, and I agree with his view — ultimately, I don’t see either a rights derivative conflict here OR any kind of implied guarantee that just because audio books are a viable revenue stream now that this has to be guaranteed to continue existing. I’d encourage the Author’s Guild to start laying the groundwork for rationalizing rights purchasing for the time when these things bundle back together, not trying to prevent it from happening — because ultimately, they’ll lose (and should).

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But can we learn anything from paid content attempts in the past? After all, this has been tried at varying levels before. Until The New York Times opens the books on its mothballed Times Select service, which kept certain content — mainly columnists and archives — behind the pay wall, these two examples, from 2003-2005, will have to serve as examples

via Will paid content work? Two cautionary tales from 2004 » Nieman Journalism Lab » Pushing to the Future of Journalism.

Here’s one more. A long, long time ago in a Galaxy far away, one of my first jobs in Silicon Valley was with a startup (see footnote 1) doing interactive services for cable TV. We’re talking almost 30 freaking years ago, folks, and teletext-type technology, which was state of the art then. And the goal of all of this was — ta da — value added services. Online banking, news tickers, weather, etc etc. And of course cable companies wanted customers to pay for them.

But every pilot test failed miserably. 100,000 people in Ohio were given the services free for six months, and surveys showed very positive responses to it. They liked what they saw. And when they were asked to pay even a nominal fee for it (a couple of bucks a month), about 2% signed up for it.

Nothing new under the sun.

This long predates the “consumers have gotten used to things being free on the net” problem. Hell, for the most part, it predates the net (at the time, I think it’d just been renamed the Internet from Arpanet, but USENET was still modem-based.

Thinking about it, the reasons for this problem go deeper than “we expect it for free”.

One is that both television and radio have made people think this stuff is free. Yes, there are commercials — advertising subsidizing the cost so the consumer doesn’t have to pay anything. That’s likely one of the strongest reasons there’s resistance to paying for things, a multi-decade history of things being “free”.

And with cable? well, consumers are already paying for cable. Any surprise people resist paying for things that come on the thing they’re already paying for?

Advertising long subsidized the true cost of that newspaper or magazine, making them artificially cheaper to the end consumer.

Circle those ideas back to to the internet today — and people pay for their internet connection, so are we surprised they resist paying for stuff they get off of what they already pay for? Those of us on the distribution side of the equation understand the details of how this all works, but should we be surprised that the consumer only sees it as a double-dip? And we’ve seen this resistance to this pay-again mentality going back decades. Look at the resistance we see today to the airline’s tacking on fees for things like checking bags. Consumers see this stuff as bait and switch (and in some cases, I’m not sure they’re wrong). Perhaps one problem we’ve had here is we’ve done a bad job of teacing the general consumer how all this works and why the ISP charges don’t pay for things.

But the bigger issue is that issue of “free”; and that goes back to the early days of commercial radio. 80 years, mulitple generations of “this is free”. It’s really not — the cost is watching/listening_to commercials as part of the programming. And now advertising isn’t paying the freight, we’re trying to shift the burden on the consumer after decades of subsidizing content (long before the internet!) — and the consumer resists it.

Surprise.

Just a thought: I’ll bet, and I have no data to back this up — that if you do a study of people who primarily watch network television and compare that to people who contribute to PBS or NPR, that the PBS/NPR crowd is a lot less resistant to paying for content online, because they’ve already made the decision to pay for content rather than sit back and take what the advertisers are willing to pay for and have them watch “for free”. And amybe down that road lies some answers, not in technology or micropayments or nag walls or whatever, but in working to educate users why what they (and their parents, and grandparents) were used to: free content, with commercials they used to go to the bathroom during…

(footnote 1: the startup was founded by Paul Baran, one of the people who invented packet switching networks. Which is the underpinning allowing you to read what I’m typing. It didn’t make it — but in the back room was another startup called Telebit, which invented the first modems that did data compression and error correction, and which ended up playing a key part in the growth and success of USENET and Email back in the days before everyone was hooked up to the net, and basically allowed for the growth to critical mass that eventually made the internet mainstream. This just reinforces my view that Silicon Valley is really just six people, but they all moonlight….)

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Following up on my post the other day on three technologies I’m hoping mature this year, one of the commenters noted that Netgear announced a product at CES that does what I’m looking for. You can see the product details here. That’s pretty much what I was thinking of, and it’s available via Amazon (Product Page here) for about $120.

Now, I’m going to need to decide which network I want to use; do I do this with AT&T on my current account, or someone else? Some more research to do, but this seems to be the solution I was looking for; only real question is when I’ll feel comfortable that the network will be reliable and fast enough to warrant turning off the DSL and the landline.

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There are three technologies I hope get to the point where I’m willing to buy into them this year. They’re all things I’ve been watching and wanting to buy, but every time I look, they’re not quite where I want.

First — the eBook reality. the first Kindle intrigued me, but I’ve seen the “future of electronic books” before, and so I decided to wait and see. the Kindle actually surpassed my expectations, and now Amazon has introduced Kindle 2, and it’s much better. My primary interest here is to have a good, easy to use/read electronic library, especially of technical stuff, that I can carry around. Reading for recreation on an eReader is less insteresting to me, but couldn’t hurt.

Unfortunately, even thought the new Kindle comes closer, at its current price point, it doesn’t make the cut. I’ll keep waiting. Maybe the rumored Kindle software on mobile phones? We’ll see. but we’re nearing a tipping point where electronic books will make sense, which three years ago, I wasn’t sure we’d ever see. Kindle at half the price? I’d buy it. Today? I am staying on the sidelines.

Second — the convergence of electronics in the living room. I keep waiting for Apple to upgrade the Apple TV to be a real living room dominator. And I guess I’ll keep waiting a while. They’re doing a survey on possible features to a limited audience right now, which indicates to me that they’re now trying to figure that device out and get serious about a “non hobby” product — and I honestly expected to see that product at the last Macworld. So Apple’s product timelines and my expectatons are still in sync. The big limiter here is availability of content, still; for netflix streaming to my Xbox, only about 10% of the items in my queue are avaialble for online delivery. A quick look at iTunes shows that’s not any better. That makes this convenient — but not an option. Yet. And whatever Apple does needs to have 5.1 built in so I don’t need a separate home theater box to drive the speakers…

Something tells me this year is the year companies dive in and seriously try to own the living room. My short list: Apple, Microsoft and Nintendo. One of them will get it right in the next couple of years. If someone else wants to come in and distrupt the market, the window is closing.

Third — For the last few years, we’ve had internet in the house via DSL. This is our third generation of network in the house, going back to 1998 or so when that means leased lines and expensive routers, so it’s amazing how far it’s come. But now, I’m starting to look at what comes next. And what I want is a home network based on EVDO or 3G, a dongle I can carry iwth me when I travel and plug into a device at home to drive the wireless network, with real broadband speeds and reliability. This would allow me to finally dump the landline/DSL (and their monthly payments), and carry my network with me, since when we’re not home, do we really need the netowrk there? Not really. Unfortunately, I’m just not convinced this is ready for prime time — the dongles are there, but the home network interfaces aren’t yet. Unless you know something I don’t know, of course.. I mean, seriously. We use (and are really happy with) DirecTV. The idea of installing cable just to get a modem and fast cable modem speeds instead of DSL irritates me — but that my mom’s home network is faster than mine annoys me. Even though, in reality, I rarely notice my network’s speed, which implies it really isn’t “slow” as much as I’m realizing it’s been a few years since I upgraded….But isn’t that part of being a geek? Oh, and I’d love to do the portable dongle, but I just don’t want to add one more monthly charge to my budget. Unless I can remove one I don’t need, and the logical one seems to be the DSL line, no?

Honestly, I’ve been waiting for Wimax for a while, but the rollout is — problematic, painful and slow. So maybe I’ll stop waiting.

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App Store reviews have been controversial from the beginning — while they can be helpful for buyers, you often have no idea just who’s leaving comments or what their real agenda is. Njection, the makers of Nmobile (which we played with a while ago) are having a huge problem with what they’re calling “sockpuppet” reviews on the App Store.

Someone (they believe this person is in cahoots with their competitor) is posting bad reviews on their app and trying to trash them and their product elsewhere (including in a comment here on TUAW). And unfortunately, as they say, they don’t really have much recourse against this behavior — they’ve appealed to Apple, who’ve replied that they’ll leave comments up, unless they’re offensive or extremely false. Apple’s own guidelines for reviewing apps asks that the reviewers deal with apps on their own merit rather than attacking competitors, but that seems to be more of a recommendation than a firm rule.

Njection says the comments have kept consumers from trying out their apps, though it seems difficult to actually track how many people haven’t tried your app (and why). It’ll be interesting to see if Apple makes other changes to the review system if this sort of thing rears its ugly head more often. At this point, it seems devs just have to deal with it by doing damage control when necessary and making their app good enough that “sockpuppeting” doesn’t strongly affect public opinion.

via Fighting sockpuppet reviews on the App Store – The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW).

I guess I’m not convinced. Looking at the app in question, there are a total of twelve reviews, seven of them 4 or 5 stars, only 3 gave it one star. Since others have the ability to rate the usefulness of each review, there’s some feedback going on with the reviews themselves, and so it’s not until the ninth review that you get a rating of less than 3 stars when sorted by “most helpful”. that seems like some fairly positive reviews overall.

Given that Apple only allows one review per store account and that account has to have bought the product, it’s rather hard for me to see a significantly organized turfing attack here. I don’t know which is reality, but my gut feel is that the turfing worries are overblown.

You could also think maybe it’s a developer looking for a way to explain away bad reviews. And it presumes that the developer didn’t have their friends all log in and report the five star reviews, too. Turfing can go both ways, of course. Not that we’d ever do that — and not that I’m implying the developer did. Definitely saying they shouldn’t, FWIW.

Having said that — there are some ways to limit the impact of turfing if it exists.

First: free limited versions. If users are hesitant to pay for the App because of some bad reviews, then give them a way to trial the app before paying. That’s been very successful with me trying out various free versions of apps on the store and then buying the full version. there’s really little reason to NOT do this, and yes, Apple really needs to formalize support for this in the store in some way, but until then, Lite versions rock, and remove the worry of buyer remorse.

Second: Yelp has this same problem. One way its gets solved is via high numbers of reviews. The larger the set of comments on something, the less impact any individual or turfing campaign can have. So a simple way for developers to limit the impact of turfing attacks is to encourage the users to submit their own reviews. Something as simple, perhaps, as when they fire up the app after having used the app for some period of time, putting up an alert encouraging them to review the app and explain how. add in a couple of buttons (“take me there”, “not yet”, “stop annoying me”), and make it as easy as possible for them to put the review in.

If you think about it, if your users are happy with you, a percentage of them will go and say so. And that stream of reviews will blow out any impact of a turfing attack.Of course, if the users aren’t thrilled, you might get buried, but you wrote a great app, right? aren’t afraid of some criticism, right?

There are other things you can do — a lot of it boils down to giving users information about the person writing the review so they can evaluate the reviewer and decide how much to trust them — and I went into some details on my ideas on that a couple of months ago. Most of that would be relevant to upgrading the App Store reviewing system. Honestly, though, I don’t think it’s all that bad these days. Could be better, but the big missing piece is the ability to do free demos. I expect Apple to solve that at some point, but developers can do something about it on their own.

I can’t think of an app I’ve used that suggested I go to the store and review it, though. Why the heck not? Free advertising, folks. Do it in a tactful manner, and I’ll bet a good chunk of the users will cooperate. Seems to me the BEST advertisement for an app isn’t a five star rating, but that 500 or 1000 users reviewed and recommended it. That’s what you want to aim for.

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It’s a bit pricey. The standard fee is $99US/year. I’ve got one additional email address for my wife, so tack on another ten bucks. Before you fly into an iRage, know that I realize that one hundred bucks for push email, contacts and calendar, 10GB online storage, web hosting and so on is not a bad deal. It’s just that there are less expensive alternatives.

via MobileMe renewal: Yes or no? – The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW).

One thing people forget is they don’t have to renew at list price through Apple.

But the MobileMe subscription through Amazon, then use the code in the retail package to renew the account. It’s available for about $70, a significant discount off list.

If $99 is a price you think you’d be willing to pay, $70 should make the decision easier.

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at MobileMe renewal: Yes or no?. This article is copyright 2009 by Chuq Von Rospach. This content may not be republished on another site without explicit permission from Chuq Von Rospach. Please consider subscribing to my RSS feed so you don't miss a single one of my carefully crafted, emotionally satisfying and Pulitzer-quality words. MobileMe renewal: Yes or no?

First, the notes application on the iPhone is handy, but please sync this to a quickie app on Me.com so I can put stuff in and out of notes easily. Second, and this is a stretch, I know you don’t like to-do applications, but I also have an inkling you could do something that would make me stop using paper and pen for to-dos. And synchronize it.

via MobileMe Notes — Matt Mullenweg.

Yes, please.

My MobileMe is going to need renewing soon. I’ve been taking some serious looks at whether to move everything to google/gmail or MobileMe. Optimally, I want ONE personal email and ONE work email, but right now, I have three personal accounts that mix and merge, and I hven’t decided the best way to fix that. There are things about both that I like, and both that I don’t like — and to be honest, there are things about what Yahoo is doing with their mail I like, too, but I need to be comfortable that Yahoo’s bottomed out, so I’m holding off.

For now, I’m doing to go with MobileMe and the tight integration with the iPhone. A year from now, I don’t know. Lots can change between now and then… But Matt’s noted a couple of significant weaknesses with that approach. Another is a good bookmarking tool that ALSO works with firefox on the desktop, not just safari. Not there yet.

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at MobileMe Notes — Matt Mullenweg. This article is copyright 2009 by Chuq Von Rospach. This content may not be republished on another site without explicit permission from Chuq Von Rospach. Please consider subscribing to my RSS feed so you don't miss a single one of my carefully crafted, emotionally satisfying and Pulitzer-quality words. MobileMe Notes — Matt Mullenweg