FYI, I made a clean start with a new blog over at cannell.org/blog.

Last night Lori and I gave the featured presentation at a Farmington Public Schools Parent Forum. The title of our presentation was "It's a Whole New World." Here is the "elevator pitch" we worked from when developing this presentation:

Many parents only think about (or talk about) the Internet when a news report comes out covering a crime involving a child and the Internet. This results in many parents simply trying to "contain" the "Internet risk." While managing risk is critical we also want parents to think about the types of skills their children need and what they can do today to help them succeed in a future where the Internet will play a pervasive role in their personal and professional lives.

In support of this presentation we created a new website, www.SafeHomeComputing.org, as a place to publish the presentation material along with copious notes and links to the websites we referenced. We have also added a number of news feeds from several blogs and media outlets that deal with home computing and Internet safety issues.

I just loaded Performancing for Firefox and it is everything I expected. This is an awesome blog publishing tool and it works perfectly with my Drupal-based blog.

I am still just starting to use these types of tools but, based on my initial impressions, Performancing clearly sets the benchmark for blog publishing tools.

Technorati Tags: performancing

powered by performancing firefox

This is getting too easy. It's been about a year since I seriously investigated client-side blogging tools. At the time they were quite lame. I have been meaning to set some time aside to test Performancing for FireFox but haven't gotten around to it.  With all of the publicity around Windows Live Writer I decided to go take another look at these types of tools.

This is my first post using Windows Live Writer. I guess I won't have an excuse for not posting anymore. My first ten minutes in this tool has been pretty good. I probably spent more time installing the beta software (I took the bait and also loaded the Windows Live Toolbar, the Onfolio RSS reader looks interesting, btw) than it took to configure the software.

My server software is Drupal 4.6 and Live Writer seems to work well with it. I understand there are some problems with Live Writer creating temporary posts to support "Web Preview".

Nevertheless, this is impressive.

Discovering great new music is getting really hard to do. With busy schedules at work and home I have virtually no time to go exploring at music stores. However, I am having some success by renting concert videos from online DVD services like Blockbuster Online. By surfing through the listings I occasionally find highly (member) rated concert videos. So I take a chance and place it in my queue. I previously found Beth Hart and now Ben Harper and the Innocent Criminals, Live at the Hollywood Bowl.

It's rare to find someone with the natural enthusiasm and talent like Ben Harper. This concert is an engaging mix of R&B and Rock with a touch of Hip-Hop and a dose of Reggae. Harper's versatility, talent, and love for the music shines through it all. I especially loved the groovin' rhythms of "Brown Eye Blues", the edgy guitar in "Temporary Remedy", the rolling melodies in "Gold to Me", and the thoroughly enjoyable blending of street sounds in "Steal My Kisses". Harper also shows his vocal talents in a cover of "Sexual Healing". It's a rendition that gives Marvin Gaye a run for his money.

This is awesome music. True talent.

GEEK WARNING: This post contains technical jargon and discusses a topic that will bore the daylights out of most people. Only those who think they know what this post is about based on its title should read on.

A topic I cover in a recent Collaboration Loop post is calendar subscriptions. This is something made popular by Apple's iCal program which allows Mac users to publish schedules for others to subscribe to and display on their own iCal calendar.

How iCal works is simple but it is the combination of how it leverages existing standards and the creation of a new URL schema that makes it innovative. In short, whenever you see a URL that starts with webcal:// you can be sure that it points to an Internet location that contains a calendar in iCalendar format. You should also treat this calendar as something that should be periodically checked for changes and not a calendar that is imported one time. Simple, but effective.

The challenge I had was deciding how to refer to this method in the Collaboration Loop post. I chose "webcal". My choices were to refer to this method as:

1. iCal
2. "Techniques made popular by Apple's iCal"
3. webcal

In the end I called it "webcal" because there did not seem to be any better options. iCal is too ambiguous and "Techniques made popular by Apple's iCal" is too long to use more than once. Webcal was just right. I have not found any reference to this method as officially being called, or even proposed to be called, "webcal" so let me be the first to propose this name.

To understand my reasoning behind this let's first review how an iCal calendar goes from being authored on a Mac to being subscribed to by another iCal user:

• An iCal user, let's call him Nate, creates a calendar. For this example, let's say this calendar is a schedule for my favorite professional sports team; the Detroit Pistons basketball team.
• Nate instructs his iCal that he would like to publish this calendar. Since I do not have a Mac I don't have specific dialog boxes but I will assume that the configuration for this calls for the entry of a URL or, perhaps, a .mac account (which maps to a URL).
• iCal then exports the Pistons' schedule to a iCalendar-formatted file and uploads it to a webserver using the webdav protocol at the specified URL.
• Nate's friend, Kate, wants to use this calendar. Nate sends Kate an email message with the URL for the published calendar. For this example, the URL is webcal://www.example.com/DetroitPistons.ics
• While Kate is reading this email she clicks on the URL which fires up her browser. The browser recognizes the URL scheme (webcal) as something handled by an external program (iCal). It fires up iCal and passes the URL to it. (ok, again, I don't have a Mac so the email program may invoke iCal directly, not important to the flow of this story, stay with me).
• Kate's iCal first adds the URL to its list of subscribed calendars. It may also download the calendar for the first time using http. In fact, the URL used for the actual download is the same as the URL above except http is used instead of webcal; http://www.example.com/DetroitPistons.ics

• Now that Kate has subscribed to Nate's Pistons calendar Kate's iCal will periodically download the Pistons' calendar using http. If it is coded correctly and behaved like a good citizen of the Internet (like I expect iCal is, but I can't verify) it would save the date of the last calendar change and only download the whole calendar after noticing that the date is newer. This important piece of information is provided by the http protocol and avoids unnecessarily downloading the whole calendar file.
• iCal then reads each event in the calendar, matches it up with the version of the event it downloaded previously, and updates the calendar if it has changed (or was added or deleted).

So, if I have not lost you by now, you should recognize that an iCalendar file specified with an http URL scheme is handled differently than one specified with a webcal URL scheme.

• The http URL scheme causes the browser to download the entire file and then hands it off to an external program, which would import the calendar events.
• The webcal URL scheme causes the browser to handoff the URL to an external program. It is up to the external program, in this case iCal, to add it to the list of subscribed calendars.

Many of you probably feel that I should just call it "iCal". But that is too ambiguous for the following reasons:

1. This is the name of an Apple product, not a method.
2. iCal is often used as a short-hand name for iCalendar, the standard file format. To see what I mean read Wikipedia's definition of iCal . Although iCalendar provides a piece of this innovation it does not sufficiently describe it and is still too ambiguous.

To make matters worse even vendors aren't consistent in describing this method:

• For some reason Trumba's Public Calendars have an ICAL link that uses an http URL scheme which simply imports events and does not subscribe.
• Airset seems to get it right. It offers two links. One to download the calendar (using http scheme) and the other to subscribe (using the webcal scheme).
• Microsoft's Windows Vista page goes out of its way to completely describe what it does in three paragraphs.
• IBM's recent announcement is quite vague on what support for iCal really means. It took this blog entry from someone who attended Lotusphere to clear up the ambiguity for me.

In the end "webcal" seemed to describe it best.

Does this make sense or did I miss something?

It is interesting to note that rss and atom might have benefited from the URL scheme approach; perhaps call it rss:// or atom:// but instead the standard that emerged uses embedded "link rel"s to indicate an associated feed. Using a URL scheme would have been much simpler but browser support is the big issue. Another topic for another day.

I recently started blogging over at Collaboration Loop. My first two posts are:

• A Vision For Collaborative Technologies
• Outlook 12 and Future Intranet RSS Aggregators

And while you are there check out some of the other bloggers contributing to the site. I am honored to be in the company of such GEECs (Global Experts In Electronic Collaboration).

Collaboration Loop is produced by Media Live (now part of CMP Media) which also produces the Collaborative Technologies Conference. The next conference is coming up this June in Boston.

Today was the first time I read something from Bucky Fuller (I think). I came across a quote of his in this post from Dave Pollard. It hit so close to home for me that I just had to capture it here:

You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.

I have been looking into Google Analytics to help with our local sports association website. We use League Lineup to manage all of South Farmington's Baseball and Softball leagues. Parents use the site to find practice and game schedules, directions to fields, enter games results, and standings.

We first used it last year and it was very successful. Antecdotal feedback from parents has been all positive and the web traffic we saw convinced us to upgrade our site to include banner ads from our sponsors. Now, I hate online ads, particularly those nasty pop-under kind that happen when using Internet Explorer. But, these League Lineup ads are tastefully insert into the same spot on every page AND they come from local businesses that are supporting youth sports in the community. These are not your standard internet ads. They come from local businesses and are intended for local families.

Unfortunately, League Lineup's banner ad service does not provide any click-through data that we could use to determine the success of the program and to provide our sponsors. So I was excited about the launch of Google Analytics. The price is right for a non-profit (free) and it appears to be just what the doctor ordered. Even with the trouble Google experienced this week launching the service I am still excited about the possibility of this service solving a real problem for us.

However, Fredrik Wacka, over at CorporateBlogging.Info points out an issue that I never thought about but will definitely cause a stir on the 'net. Here is what Fredik says:

This is another case of law playing catch-up with technology. I checked Google's privacy policies and I see nothing that addresses this issue. They only address how they use information about users of Google services. Google must have known about this before launching GA. Why didn't they address this beforehand?

Between the launch problems and these potentially huge privacy issues, Google is starting to look more like a company of mere mortals rather than the visionaries we have been hearing about.

If you are like me, you are the one friends and neighbors call when they are having problems with their home computer. I love providing this type of help to those I ...well, love, but it gets a little frustrating when you see the same problems over and over again.

Microsoft and the FTC had a press release last week called "Don’t Get Tricked on Halloween: Federal Trade Commission, Consumer Action and Microsoft Warn Internet Users of Zombie Computers". It was accompanied by a really good Powerpoint presentation that illustrates what can happen to an unprotected computer. Be sure to read the speaker notes to get the full story.

The slides recommended these steps to protecting your home computer (links to products added by me):

• Use a firewall - I've had good luck with Zone Alarm (free download) but it is better to use a hardware firewall like the D-link 604 Router ($23 to $55 via Yahoo! Shopping)
• Get computer updates
• Use anti-virus software - Try using AVG Anti-Virus from Grisoft (free for personal use)
• Use anti-spyware software - I like Ad-Aware from Lavasoft
• Be cautious of attachments (don't open just any file sent via email)

However, they missed one REALLY IMPORTANT tip to save your PC from becoming a zombie. I am serious when I say DO NOT USE INTERNET EXPLORER, use Firefox instead. Not only does it provide better protection it stops nearly all of those annoying pop-up ads.

Charlie Wood and Greg Reinacker have previously discussed enterprise RSS requirements. Charlie highlighted security, administration, and integration. Greg focused on security in the form of authentication, authorization, and encryption.

They are both wrong. Well, not completely but they are missing the bigger picture.

Enterprises will use RSS on an intranet differently than consumers on the Internet. The biggest differences are driven by:

• How enterprise collaborate within an Intranet. For example, feed ratings for public Internet sites are useful but do they have a role for Intranet sites? Maybe, but how do they apply to enterprise applications providing personalized feeds?
  
• Teams within companies work closer together and need to work from a common set of information.
• Access control is a much bigger concern.
• Companies have tiers of staff and management that have access to different things.
  
• Often times Sarbox controls use the words "need to know" so access to information not directly attributable to your job also needs to be addressed.
• Companies have different computing infrastructure components such as identity management systems and system management suites.
• Companies need to manage internal IT services. They need to understand system capacity and performance trends. They may want usage reports to properly assign costs of resources.
  

In my opinion enterprise RSS requirements fall into these categories:

IdentitySecurity

Integration
Administration and Service Management

I love this "Not Insane" To-Do List. Nothing beats setting priorities.

Imagine you are the most powerful person in the world; the President of The United States. You have enormous and powerful resources at your disposal. A superpower military can be mobilized at your command.

Then you are briefed on the worst hurricane in recent history heading towards New Orleans, which is known to be a disaster waiting to happen. You don't just read this in the newspaper, you are personally briefed by the federal agency that tracks these things.

It is predicted that many Americans will die, the area will be devastated for years, and there is a strong liklihood of catastrophic flooding, the nightmare scenario everyone has feared.

What does W do? He delegates it, to Chertoff and Brown.

Do you think W's response would have been different if the hurricane was heading towards Texas, Maine, Washington DC or Florida?

How could this happen? I see three possible scenarios:

1. Incompetence (or maybe, dereliction of duty).
2. Apathy towards impoverished people and people of color. How can anyone argue with Kayne West's statements?
3. An educated choice to do nothing, perhaps for political gain.

Granted, the local and state goverments weren't any better. How could the Mayor of New Orleans not take decisive (and planned) actions to evacuate the city, with or without federal help (and when did he ask for federal help)? I am sure the state government of Louisiana could have done a better job too.

But, we need to find out how the federal government could have bungled such an important job. This isn't just another political scandal that will end when someone is fired. This screw-up cost thousands of lives and is one reason why we have the impeachment process.

Update: Best mainstream media observation made regarding W's response:

NewsGator's CTO Greg Reinacker's comments about RSS security make good reading. We need to ground ourselves in the understanding that RSS uses HTTP for a transport and we have many existing methods to secure this channel already. However, I think Greg is missing a key business value here. Often times we say "security" when we really mean "identity."

In my view identity is a key application integrator, not only for RSS-based applications but for any application. As soon as we know someone's identity then a whole bunch of barriers fall and new opportunities arise. This includes things such as convenient single sign-on, access control (ok, "security") and also personalization; being able to send needed information tailored to the right person.

Personalization of RSS feeds is what is really going to rock the world. After all, doesn't personalization go to the heart of what users of aggregators are trying to do; make more efficient use of their time? RSS changed the blogging world but identity-driven RSS could change the world of corporate applications.

Sure, using RSS for better blog reading is great and so is using RSS in more dynamic scenarios such as monitoring search results, retrieving the latest weather, or watching someone's wish list. But, when a solution can retrieve information intended for me, from applications I have to deal with all of the time, then it starts solving my most critical information aggregation problems.

I am attending the Burton Group Catalyst Conference and listening to the morning sessions in the Identity and Privacy Strategies track. Jamie Lewis and Mike Neuenschwander are fantastic speakers but I am finding myself less than satisfied with their presentations. The content of the presentations is first rate. I highly recommend the Burton Group and the Catalyst Conference. However, at times, I am finding their talks hard to follow and they seem more than a little mechanical (ok, I'll use the word, they're a little boring).

The problem I am sensing doesn't have anything to do with Jamie or Mike. Both of these guys know their stuff and have perspectives on these topics that are hard to match. But, their Powerpoint slides seem to be getting in the way. The best part of both of their presentations happened when they went "off-slide." Jamie was fantastic when he started riffing about Brown and Hagel's recent book and how it supports (even overlaps) the Burton Group's approach or when he talked during slides that have no bullets (like the Identity Management Architecture, In Context slide). Mike is a funny and engaging guy but seems to get slipped up at times when he (almost reluctantly it would seem) returns to looking at the slides showing on the monitor in front of the stage.

In short, it felt like these two presenters' personalities were tied behind their backs because of their slides. It's because these two guys have loads of personality that I noticed the problem.

I probably felt this disillusionment before but never had an informed opinion until I read Cliff Atkinson's "Beyond Bullet Points." I tried, with admittedly limited success, applying this to a presentation at the CTC conference last month. But, the first two presentations from Jamie and Mike are great examples of how slides full of bullet points clearly get in the way of the message.

It seems that the use of Powerpoint is trying to serve two uses. The first is the person who takes slides home, prints them out, and then distributes them to others in their company. The second use is for the person in the room watching the presentation. I think the problem with these presentations is that the slides are trying too hard to meet the needs of those people taking them home. However, from my perspective, they are clearly failing with the people in the room.

Atkinson provides an approach for addressing both needs. He says to use simple, bullet-less, slides for those in the room (this is a gross oversimplification of the methods Atkinson prescribes, read his blog for more information). For those taking the slides home, you should provide Acrobat versions of the slides printed in the 'Notes Page" view augmented with additional narrative in the Notes section of the slide.

It's interesting to note that Burton provides a page to download both Powerpoint and Adobe Acrobat (PDF) versions of the files. This web page would be a great place to provide both versions of the presentations.

Last week I attended the Collaborative Technologies Conference held at New York's Chelsea Piers. Overall, this was the best conference I have attended in a long time. The quality and mix of people in attendance was outstanding. Conversations I had during breaks, at lunch, and at dinner were engaging, educational, and, quite simply, enjoyable.

I would love to list everyone I met and talked with last week and during the months preceding the conference, but I just don't have the time to do it. But, thanks to the many of you who made CTC a great event for me.

Kudos to MediaLive, and specifically Jennifer Pahlka, for producing a conference with a successful mix of business and technology covering the whole gamut of collaborative technologies. There were a number of occasions during the conference when someone mentioned to me that this was the first conference they've attended that had this comprehensive focus on collaborative technologies. However, I have to admit to tooting my own horn since I was an active participant on the CTC Advisory Board and had some input on the track themes and agenda.

Monday started off with a keynote presentation from Tom Malone entitled "The Future of Work" based on his book of the same title. If you haven't read this book yet, it's pretty good. Malone discussed how business is evolving similar to governments. From initially being tribal to becoming centralized and hierarchical, to becoming decentralized.

Next, I was joined on stage with Clay Shirky (ITP/NYU), Laura Baur (Maritz), Melanie Turek (Nemertes), Michael Sampson (Shared Spaces), and Robert Kath (Pfizer). Our panel discussion was entitled "Is Collaboration IT's Last Chance to Matter." Overall, the conversation went very well but, unfortunately, we were having problems with the numerous microphones in use (it seemed that only five out of the eight microphones worked at any one time and predicting which ones that were working was hit and miss) and I expect the impact of the panel discussion (although it sounded great to me :-) was significantly impacted.

At lunch I met Brian Hoogendam, the President of Advanced Reality. We talked about the concepts behind Jybe, which facilitates peer to peer collaboration by passing events rather than using screen scraping. The methods used for this type of real-time collaborative experience, although not new, are compelling and we may see some really cool stuff evolved from this in the future.

The afternoon sessions started with Lisa Kimball's "Effective Virtual Teams" which was particularly good. My notes are sketchy since I was hoping to get a copy of the slides but there are more notes on the CTCWiki. I also found that the Group Jazz site has a number of whitepapers I plan on reading as well.

I then caught Clay's "Blogs and Wikis: Emergent Collaboration in the Enterprise" session with Anil Dash, Ross Mayfield, and Peter Thoeny. Clay's introduction to blogs and wikis, and the way he contrasted them with other types of forums was excellent. Unfortunately, the presentations from Anil and Ross often sounded a little commercial but there were nuggets of good stuff sprinkled among them nonetheless.

Unfortunately, I wasn't able to get to Dave Martin's "Effective Meetings In A Virtual World" session since it was running concurrently with Clay's session. Dave is Co-Founder of Smart Technologies, the makers of the SmartBoard. I once attended a workshop led by Dave and it was excellent.

Later that evening I had dinner with the rest of the CTC Advisory Board, the MediaLive staff, and some folks from SocialText (including Ross Mayfield). The dinner conversation was fantastic.

Tuesday started off with a keynote from James Surowiecki, author of "Wisdom of Crowds." Having just read the book much of the material was a review for me but the presentation was very good nonetheless.

Next, Melanie Turek hosted a panel discussion between Anoop Gupta of Microsoft and Gordon Quinn of Nortel entitled "Presence: The Battle for the Desktop." Although I expected to hear commercial pitches (and they did fall into "message" from time to time) the session was excellent. Clearly, these two executives understand the value of presence and the role it can play in the future.

After lunch I started the afternoon off by attending Melanie Turek's "Virtual Workplace" presentation. Next, I listened to Zack Rosen's presentation on CivicSpace, an Open Source collaborative website management solution tailored for civic advocacy groups based on Drupal.

My session, covering creating a strategy for collaborative technologies, was next up. Overall, I think it went well. I have to admit to being more nervous about this session than the keynote panel the day before. But, I was satisfied with the results and received some good feedback afterwards.

Unfortunately, there were a number of overlapping sessions during Tuesday afternoon that I am sorry to have missed. Specifically, I would have liked to see Michael Sampson's "Collaborative Team Workspaces" session, along with the "Conferencing Applications: Are They Commodities," and Eugene Kim's "Patterns of High-performance Collaboration" session. Too many good sessions, too little time.

The evening "Inaugural Dinner" was great. The food was incredible; the location breathtaking, and the GEEC table Michael and Eric Mack organized was totally awesome. Listening to the diverse background of everyone at the table, hearing about their interests, and what first sparked their interest in collaborative technologies was fantastic.

Wednesday highlights were "Simple Lightweight Applications," "Open Source Collaboration Solutions," and "Content Management Goes Collaborative." Unfortunately, I had the same problem as the day before and was unable to sit in on Michael Sampson's "Extending Collaborative Applications to the Mobile Worker."

I found the BaseCamp demo in the lightweight applications session to be intriguing. A very simple solution but their customers are swearing by its usefulness. The Open Source Collaboration session was a discussion led by Eugene Kim. Peter Saint-Andre of Jabber, Matt Mullenweg of Wordpress, and Peter Thoeny of Twiki.Org also joined in.

However, later on Wednesday is when the real excitement started. My 7:45 flight out of LaGuardia was cancelled at 8:30 leaving me scrambling to book a Northwest flight to Detroit… by way of Minneapolis… out of JFK the next morning at 7am. The bad news (it gets worse) was that New York hotels were pretty much full before and the Hotels.Com computers crashed just as I was making a reservation. In short, it's a good thing I had an interesting book to read while spending the night at JFK airport.

To all collaborative technology vendors I recommend you plan to be involved with this conference next year. MediaLive hit the bulls-eye with CTC and I personally am looking forward to next year's conference.

For more information:
CTC Wiki
CTC Blog

As part of a project to restore our kitchen after a plumbing incident we decided to take this opportunity to update the adjoining family room. Out goes the paneling (that I liked, which should tell you enough about my sense of taste) and in comes dry-wall, new recessed lighting, and (best of all) in-wall speaker wiring. So my wife gets a new kitchen (I like it too) but I get a new Dolby 5.1 surround sound system.

Don't be too impressed. We spent more money on the in-wall Monster cable and installation than the receiver and speakers. But, to me, this sounds awesome. I didn't appreciate the sound quality until I rented Alison Krauss and Union Station Live from Blockbuster Online (don't take this as an endorsement of Blockbuster). I thought there was something about the richness to the music but it wasn't until the first song completed that I realized what was happening. The surround sound put me in the front row, I heard the crowd cheering all around me. Now, take a quality live group like this, pair it with a good sound system (at least, to my ears) and I'm a happy camper.

But, our old setup had an mp3 jukebox connected to our stereo. It ran Windows and was based on an old computer I bought off of eBay for next to nothing. It looked really clunky since it was a used office computer so we kind of hid it on a table in the corner behind our couch. It was an experiment that worked. My wife loved the sound quality (even from it's old soundblaster card) and the accessibility to our entire music collection. But, with the new family room we needed to spruce this up with something more stylish. I speced out a new multimedia PC based on the Silverstone Lascala 4 black computer case. This thing looks like a sound system component and not a computer.

However, I ran out of time in March to finish buying all of the components and building the computer. The whole setup would cost about $900 to build and, even then, I am concerned about keeping it cool in the TV stand. But, along comes the Dlink DSM-320 Media Player. This thing looks almost comparable to what I was planning to build (only things missing are an external monitor and a DVD player). Prior media players I explored were limited to RCA audio plugs and stereo sound. The DSM-320 comes with both SP/DIF and Toslink optical digital sound connections. It even has component video plugs.

BestBuy has the DSM-320 available for $200 with $50 in rebates. Subtract the "Valued Customer" coupons they sent me and this box is costing about $130. My optimism may be premature but this things connects to 802.11g networks. I am hopeful it will work with my wireless network since I am using two Dlink 802.11g routers to cover my house.

So, even though I have already bought some components for my custom multimedia computer, this Dlink box should still save me a bunch of money. I'm a little concerned with the quality of the wireless connection and mostly with the quality of the media software. We have been using MusicMatch Jukebox and have been very happy with it (the building of a dynamic playlist while a song is playing is very cool) so this may be a showstopper.

I'll report back my excitement or disillusionment with the DSM-320.

I think Beth Hart's "Live at Paradiso" may be the best rock and blues concert video ever made. Her energy is unbelievable. Either this woman is possessed or she is the greatest rocker of a generation. The passion she exudes and the genuine connection she makes with her fans is refreshing to see. Beth Hart is no cookie-cutter, over produced, teen idol that we hear on pop radio these days. Beth Hart is the real deal.

The songs "Broken & Ugly", "Immortal", and her rendition of Zeppelin's "Whole Lotta Love" alone make the DVD worth the price. Imagine a mixture of Robert Plant, Janis Joplin, and Axl Rose and you start to get a sense of the incredible talent of Beth Hart.

A word of warning to parents: Hart's lyrics, language, and on stage gyrations would probably result in this video being rated R if released into theaters and will be too much for kids under (at least) 15 years of age. But, she is an artist I would want my daughters to experience when they are older and able to better separate art from reality. Beth Hart's clear command of everything going on and her obvious musical talent (both vocally and instrumentally) are wonderful things to see and hear.

I have just started to blog over at the Collaborative Technology Conference Advisory Board Blog. The CTC is a conference coming up in June in New York. Participating on the advisory board has been lots of fun and a terrific opportunity to meet some innovative and imaginative thinkers in the world of collaboration solutions.

In the coming days I think you will see that CTC is going to be a great conference; one you will not want to miss if you have any interest in learning about cutting-edge collaborative tools and in hearing about new approaches to understanding and applying them to their fullest benefit.

I hope to see you in New York in June.

I just caught up with Evelyn Rodriguez's old post 80-Hour Work Weeks are Bunk. I too read the Fast Company article she references where the author said Work/Life Balance is bunk and it got me thinking along the same lines. Work/Life Balance was once another code word for "having it all", another myth along the lines of the super mom from years ago. And with all of the talk about India, China, etc. working endless hours for next to nothing it is easy to get caught up in the panic of thinking we must work longer hours to survive. I just don't buy it and I think Evelyn makes a strong case.

Evelyn also references the awesome Do Less! manisfesto. Seth Godin captures the essence of the choices we need to make (especially working parents, but it applies to everyone) when he says:

Indeed, you can't have everything. Maybe we should call it Work/Life Priorities?

The amount of snow we received here in Michigan is much more than was expected. This morning at 9am I heard a radio announcer say we were expecting to receive 3-6 inches of snow. But when I looked outside we already had at least six inches and it hadn't stopped.

The local NBC affiliate, WDIV, said they "expected a total of 3 to 6 inches of snow to accumulate in the northern region of metro Detroit, and 5 to 7 inches of snow in the southern region."

As it turns out at 4pm today we had a total of 12.1 inches with more coming. Just a few weeks ago the "Storm Teams" from all the local stations told a near-apocalyptic tale when we received six inches in the early morning causing schools to close. This time, we receive more snow than I can recall in years and we hear nothing.

To me, it just goes to prove that local weather reporting is driven more by flash (fancy graphics, special effects, put a reporting outside during the first snowstorm) and little about really telling the public what they need to hear.

Fortunately, it was Saturday so a relatively few number of events were affected. Still, I was talking with parents this morning about whether basketball games at Oakland Community College were cancelled. Since the local media missed this story (even though they just needed to look outside) I think many of us didn't want to believe it ourselves and tried to continue with our day inspite of the impassible roads and parking lots filled with deep snow.

By the way, not everyone dropped the ball. The weather service issued this warning at 9am this morning: "Any travel is strongly discouraged. If you leave the safety of being indoors... you are putting your life at risk." Now, how could we get a message as important as this out to as many people as possible? Hmmm....

Doesn't the title of this post sound odd? I mean, if it's a natural inclination for a child to tinker, and in the process learn something new, why is this so bad?

A recent post by Joe Wilcox on his Microsoft Monitor Weblog made me stop and scratch my head at what we are calling bad behavior. In his post Sleepover Sunday Joe tells an engaging tale of the good time his daughter and some friends had playing with his computer during a slumber party. It seems the girls took images from Nintendo's website and pulled them into a photo editing program. They were having a blast changing the images (the digital equivalent to drawing moustaches on pictures in a magazine). Clearly harmless fun but in the end Joe says:
Just a couple of weeks ago my wife and I attended parent/teacher conferences at our local school. A similar copyright infringement activity was taking place. Apparently, the kids were reading the book My Teacher for President. As a follow-up activity to the book several classes were also creating posters advocating their particular teacher for president. It was funny to see how the kids portrayed the teachers (and I'm sure the teachers had the biggest laughs).

But, do you think anyone told the school about the "risks of snatching copyrighted characters" from the book. It was obvious to me that these posters were violating the publishers intellectual property rights by creating a deriviative work. Perhaps the school received permission but in most of these harmless situations they don't.

This is a theme in Lawrence Lessig's Free-Culture book. In chapter 2, "Mere Copyists" Lessig says:

Yet the freedom to tinker with these objects is not guaranteed. Indeed, as we'll see through the course of this book, that freedom is increasingly highly contested. While there's no doubt that your father had the right to tinker with the car engine, there's great doubt that your child will have the right to tinker with the images she finds all around. The law and, increasingly, technology interfere with a freedom that technology, and curiosity, would otherwise ensure.

These restrictions have become the focus of researchers and scholars. Professor Ed Felten of Princeton (whom we'll see more of in chapter 10) has developed a powerful argument in favor of the “right to tinker” as it applies to computer science and to knowledge in general. [22] But Brown's concern is earlier, or younger, or more fundamental. It is about the learning that kids can do, or can't do, because of the law.

“This is where education in the twenty-first century is going,” Brown explains. We need to “understand how kids who grow up digital think and want to learn.”

“Yet,” as Brown continued, and as the balance of this book will evince, “we are building a legal system that completely suppresses the natural tendencies of today's digital kids. ... We're building an architecture that unleashes 60 percent of the brain [and] a legal system that closes down that part of the brain.”

We're building a technology that takes the magic of Kodak, mixes moving images and sound, and adds a space for commentary and an opportunity to spread that creativity everywhere. But we're building the law to close down that technology.

“No way to run a culture,” as Brewster Kahle, whom we'll meet in chapter 9, quipped to me in a rare moment of despondence.

What a culture indeed when we turn a ten year old girls' natural curiosity into a crime.

Check out Chad Dickerson's picture of a huge blue screen of death on Times Square. While you are there, follow the links to other sites tracking bsod sightings.

Here we go again (from Wired):


What about the mute button? Do you think they will allow me to change channels during commercials? I wonder if I'm allowed to close my eyes during the commercial? What about potty breaks? Geesh.

Check out this map of voting results across the United States (via Pito's Blog).

Sometimes a solution for a problem comes from a totally unexpected direction.

For a couple of years now I have been thinking about solutions for parents of young children using the Internet, specifically email. There are plenty of good solutions to help with Internet browsing but very few exist for providing parental control over a child's use of email. The AOL and MSN services are probably the best alternatives and may still be the best choice for a family looking for a total solution. But I still like to think of other ways to solve this problem.

I started looking into GNU Mailman to support mailing lists for a local sports organization. Mailman is a great mailing list management package. The number of options is outstanding and it's capability to be tailored is very good.

One feature that intrigued me was the ability to have messages moderated (which means they require approval from the moderator before being sent on to the list). In particular you can configure the list to moderate messages sent by people who are not on the list. When one of these messages arrive the moderator is notified that a message is waiting. The moderator can either accept the message (so it is sent to the list), reject the message (and a message is sent to the sender telling them so), or discarded. The moderator can also add the sender to a list of approved senders so future messages are not intercepted.

This feature of Mailman appears to meet the parental email control need. Substitute the child's email address for the Mailman list, the parent for the moderator, and you have a parent-moderated email account for a child. What I envision is a single person mailing list (the only email address on the list is the child's) with a parent as the administrator.

The only way a child would suspect their email is screened is when the email is addressed "From: bounce-list on behalf of sender@email.org." This is easily resolvable by stripping some headers (the "Sender:" header for sure, possibly others) from the email by a filter on the receiving email server (formail can easily remove email headers).

By using a mixture of GNU Mailman, a simple script to remove email headers, and a little web app for setting up Mailman lists (with a simpler interface for the small number of options that need to be tailored by the parent) a service provider could easily provide parental-controlled email accounts.

The best way to learn is to do and, most likely, you will screw it up the first few times. I think if there was a single lesson I want my daughters to understand about innovation is that failure is part of the learning process. Failure is not an indication that you aren't worthy or can't do something.

HBS Working Knowledge has an excerpt from the book Juice: The Creative Fuel that Drives World-Class Inventors by Evan I. Schwartz. In the book Steve Wozniak, the inventor of the Apple II (the computer that essentially created the home PC market), is quoted as saying "Every failure is a learning experience and it should be seen as part of progress, rather than seeing it as the enemy."

Apparently Woz failed many times before getting something right and he even laughed about it on one occasion with Dean Kamen. The author concludes "He was embracing failure iteration. 'Another way of looking at failure is learning the ability to iterate,' says Linda Stone."

There is no learning experience better than doing something. Reading about it is fine but if you ever want to be considered qualified to do something, or to be in demand for some skill, hands-on is the only way to go. That means failures are inevitable. So follow Woz's example: embrace failure, learn from it, laugh at it.

I will be in Austin Texas attending the Internet2 Member Meeting later this month. I wonder if there will be any other Drupal (or Civicspace) users attending the meeting. If so, I'd like to meet and chat.

It was a relief to listen to the oral arguments in the Grokster case. The courtroom exchanges are fascinating. It is long so I burned a CD and listened to it while driving.

Groklaw summed it up well:


This has come a long way since Napster. The percentages quoted in Grokster and Napster address slightly different things but show a move away from absolute numbers (90% down from 99.4%). As Lawrence Lessig says in Free Culture:


Finally, some sanity enters into the debate.

Check it out, my GSEC practical is now online at the GIAC GSEC graduates site.

The title of my practical is "Securing Online Team Collaboration Environments."

I highly recommend the GSEC to any computer professional who wants a vendor-neutral certification that shows they are serious about security. Certification requirements were tough, two 100-question exams (up to three hours each) and a written practical. I benefitted from it a great deal.

--
Larry Cannell, GSEC