December 28 2010

Alternatives to Destroying Net Neutrality

ISPs want to make more money. They argue the best way to increase profits is to pursue new revenue streams – reconnaissance by charging the customers.

While I have nothing against capitalism, it’s important to realize that the telecom industry, and ISPs in particular do not follow capitalistic principles.

Normally, a company should do what it likes with its product, but there are two major reasons against allowing ISPs to do so:

  • In a free market, companies shouldn’t need regulation, however, the ISPs operate as a monopoly (or in rare cases a duopoly) environment. It is most likely ISPs abuse the power the monopolistic practices have lent them with intention to increase profits. While profit is good, it should not come at the short-term, non-monetary, expense of the customer.
  • The internet, as a communications medium has become essential to democracy, it is unacceptable for a country that values free speech to allow the Internet to become fragmented into separate networks. Publishing on the web means must mean the entire web.

 

ISPs argue that they need to charge more to “recover costs“ of building the network infrastructure could be re-phrased as: we want to make more money. It’s not the regulator’s job to allow infringement of customer and citizen rights to help industry make up for a poorly planned business model and shareholders’ demand for continual growth.

“Recover costs” is a straw man argument. If true, it assumes that ISPs are not capable of paying off the cost they incurred building their infrastructure and will eventually need to shut down their networks. Bullshit.

ISPs have very nice profits, and could amortize the cost of building infrastructure over the years that the network is in existence, budget to keep the networks active, expand the networks to accommodate more paying customers, and still keep up nice profit margins. Hell, that’s what they are doing!

Not that anyone should deny ISPs the right to expand their businesses. Let me offer some alternatives to destroying the détente that is Net Neutrality:

  1. Become a competitive industry. ISPs may think that current monopolies allow them to charge more and get away with terrible customer service, but it’s harmful in the long run. Monopolies bequeath power, but entice stagnation. In any business – but especially the technology business – stagnation means the death. ISPs should compete with each other in the same geographic areas. There should be not one, or two choices, but six, seven, or eight. Failure to compete is valuing short-term monetary gains over long-term company health. Someone will disrupt you.
  2. Get into the obsolescence business. Resume charging for modems and routers, then, upgrade your networks – constantly. Not maintenance upgrades that don’t do anything but change protocols, but legitimate upgrades that give real increased speed. If networks followed Moore’s law and doubled in speed every 18 months, you’d have a legitimate hardware business on your hands.
  3. Promote online paid services. What if Comcast charged me an extra $20/month, but I got a Flickr Pro account ($25), Economist subscription ($110), Wall Street Journal subscription ($103), Evernote Premium ($45), Hulu Plus ($96), and/or Amazon Prime ($80) annually? ISPs should leverage what they have – intimate access to customers without sacrificing their customer’s interests.
  4. Go international. Hard yes. But ISPs in Europe do it. Not only does the international market have a huge number of new customers, but it would do ISPs good to see how the rest of the world actually competes.
  5. Produce original content. Just because we don’t want ISPs to favor their own content, doesn’t mean they can’t have, or make money from original content. Charge for access à la Fancast. Not seeing the adoption you like? Make the product a viable alternative to TV (see: Hulu Premium). There’s a nut to be cracked around Internet TV, and it’s really mystifying why the ISPs aren’t all over this one.
December 3 2010

Photo Advent: Wacky Backpacking

On topographical maps, a solid blue line means that water is guaranteed any time of year. Priceless in a desert. Priceless when you’ve got enough water for about the next half a day. Not at all helpful when you turn the corner of the canyon and the stream is there … only it’s frozen over?

Death Valley in January is a wacky place. Death Valley is a wacky place.

In a few months, Cottonwood Canyon (no joke - some cowboy named it.) will regularly be over 100ºF in a few months. But in January, days are a cool 50º and nights are a freezing 20º.

My group of three spent five days backpacking through the western mountains of Death Valley in 2008. I got to carry 10 lbs of camera gear in addition to my 40lb pack. A Nikon D70 body (old, used, but operable and I don’t care too much if it gets banged up), a polarizer, a Nikkor 17-35mm f/2.8, a Nikkor 105mm f/2.8 micro, loads of batteries, 20GB of CF cards, and a pack of microfiber cloths. Except in the roughest of terrain, I keep the camera slung from my pack in front of me. The rest of gear I stow in my pack with an insert from my Domke bag. Using the Domke insert is the best solution I’ve come up with to keep the gear padded on a backpacking trip, if you’ve got a better one, I’d love to hear it.

When I’m backpacking, I keep the 17-35mm on my camera most of the time. It’s a tack-sharp wide-angle that makes it great for landscapes, and the low aperture makes ideal for the quick portrait or in low light. It’s a heavy lens, but it’s short, and worth it. The polarizer never leaves the lens. (If you’ve never tried a polarizer, do it. Now. This will be here when you get back.)

The macro lens serves double as a telephoto lens. 105mm isn’t enough to do any bird photography, but it works great for most large wildlife, and a true macro usually comes in more handy (also: the it weighs only a little over a pound, a good tele starts is over five).

Backpacking while photographing is an interesting challenge when you’re with a bunch of non-photographers who are more focused on getting to a good place to camp before dark than waiting for the perfect light. I’ve often found that the secret to convincing others to play along is to take plenty of pictures of the people in the group – everyone loves a new Facebook photo. I also volunteer to take up the rear – I’ve found that people are more inclined to let you play if they don’t feel like they’re waiting for you.

The image above is just a taste of the wackiness that we found in Death Valley. For real wackiness, take a look at the whole set on flickr.

August 17 2010

Why I think Public Parts Ought to Include a Generational Focus

US age distribution.

Age distribution in the United States.

Tonight, I asked Jeff Jarvis on Twitter if he intends to include cross-generational interviews/research for his in-progress book, Public Parts. To my surprise, he answered 15 minutes later, in the dead of night (east coast time difference and all), with an indication that he intends to look primarily forward.

Twitter shorthand and late hour  what it was, I presume that Prof. Jarvis meant that he doesn’t intend to focus on the technological or sociological generational gaps, and will instead attempt to observe/predict how the future will unfold.

Though I primarily agree with Prof. Jarvis’s thesis that publicity is the new default state, I would urge him to take a closer look at the generational problems. Based on personal, anecdotal, evidence that older generations – even people in my own millennial generation – I can say that society isn’t comfortable with publicness.

The average lifespan in the US is 78 years and the most of the population is over 30. The majority of the population doesn’t fall into Gen Y (which grew up with the Internet), nor the generation after us which doesn’t remember cassette tapes, nor most of Prof. Jarvis’ generation, that mostly, aren’t as well adapted to the social implications of the internet.

Professor – I am pretty much sold on your thesis, but I’d predict that most are not. I don’t think we can afford to wait 50+ years for those not acclimated to the Internet to be replaced by younger generations.

I’m eagerly looking forward to your book, even more so than the last. I am hoping, that you can make a case that my mother can understand and sympathize with. Without her generation’s, we’ll be waiting more than 50 years for your observations and predictions to become reality.

I don’t want to wait that long.

The above has been a late night post brought to you by a tired writer who has stared at too much PHP all day. Please excuse the sloppiness.
May 31 2010

Facebook's Problem isn't Privacy, It's Lack of Initiative

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The privacy débâcle is distracting us from the real problem: Facebook is dead in the water.

Privacy is too minor an issue to justify its complexity. As long as Facebook continues to make privacy hard to understand, and invisible to the user the issue will remain relegated only to users who are in-the-know. The latest round of privacy changes effectively obfuscated privacy settings, while encouraging users to pump even more data into Facebook (more ↓). Facebook’s reaction to privacy concerns has been a long-term PR strategy. The announced incremental progress toward a solution, which are out just minor feature additions that don’t address any of the real issues.

Zuckerberg’s challenges to conventional thinking about online privacy have become so predictable, it’s starting to resemble Moore’s Law.

—Fred Vogelstein (via Wired)

It’s sneaky and underhanded and leaves a slimy feeling, but if us users are too stupid to appreciate that writing could easily become evidence, or too appreciative of Facebook’s amazing and free features to care about the esoteric privacy issues, or smart enough to granularly control all our content we’ll stick with Facebook until something better comes along.

Facebook has two problems: privacy concerns leading to a

lack of trust, and product development (what to do with all the user data they’re collecting). It’s the lack of product innovation that is Facebook’s huge problem. Despite all hype about F8, and the ensuing privacy backlash, we all missed the greater story: there’s nothing new. Read the rest of this post →

April 21 2010

Jay Rosen Quietly Defined Crowdsourcing at TEDx

Jay Rosen might be a self-proclaimed introvert, but he had my rapt attention as I watched the TEDx talk he gave last month. Listening to the speech, which has just been posted to YouTube, Professor Rosen builds a picture of crowdsourcing that is so close to complete you can taste the open internet goodness. The 18 minutes are packed with all the clues necessary to create a perfect crowdsourcing strategy.

Prof. Rosen doesn’t actually give a bulleted list, but a collection of best practices seems to emerge from his examples. The underlying message, is that crowdsourcing is just a method of data collection. Expect results to be data, not an answer to your original problem.

Here’s my crack at sorting the speech into a coherent checklist:

    Crowdsourcing Checklist Inspired by Jay Rosen

  1. Open your data. If the data needs to be collected, expect to open source it as it’s gathered.
  2. A community must have a common problem. The community doesn’t have to be geographic, but it helps.
  3. Divide the problem into small, well defined, tasks that can be filled out on a form and done in minutes.
  4. Publicize. Use an established platform to ask for help, and keep asking.
  5. Have a timeline. Tweak as the presentation as necessary to meet the goal.
  6. Continuously coalesce the data. The result is data. It needs to be compiled into a human-readable format. This should be an ongoing and public process to let the community know how close they are to reaching the goal.

Those are the lessons I gleaned from Prof Rosen’s talk. I plan on seeing how they fair against, projects like today’s SETI announcement that they would release their data to the public. It seems that their brute-force approach of creating one of the world’s largest super computers didn’t work out. They’re hoping that open sourcing the problem of literally finding signal in noise will find the extraterrestrial life for them.

SETI was originally following the checklist pretty well (they didn’t have a clear timeline, but it’s a little hard to blame them for that). It didn’t work out for them, we’ll see if this new approach – which seems to ignore the list  – is any more successful.

For all those asking, the answer is yes. I am willing to be the secretary of the Jay Rosen Fan Club. ;)