A change to my publishing streams

These are the last days of app.net. It ends in 3 days. App.net has been good to me. Great tools, smart and interesting people, RSS integration (albeit grudgingly at first) and the best communication/conversation platform I’ve worked with. App.net was what Twitter should have been. It has made clear how badly Twitter has failed.

These are, surprisingly, also the end times for Maciej’s Pinboard as a publishing platform. I have 33,236 pins there, and something is broken. Neither pinner.app or pushpin.app are able to connect and download the streams. From what Maciej has written in the past I may have passed some throttling limit. I’m using Pinboard in ways he did not intend — and the iOS apps don’t scale either. 

So I need to make some changes. Gordon’s Notes and Tech will stay on Blogger for now — it’s been surprisingly robust and trouble free for many years. It helps that there’s an exit strategy to WordPress if Google kills it, but as best I can tell Google is going to keep Blogger limping along.

My DreamHost wordpress microblog has mirrored my pinboard stream for years. I’m going to see if there’s a way to make it a true microblog publishing platform. I’m not sure how to do that, in particular it’s not obvious how I can conveniently post via Reeder.app. It will take me a while to work that out.

In the meantime there are several app.net spinoffs in the work. I’m tracking several of these as much as my time allows - especially pnut.io (@jgordon) and 10centuries (@jgordon). March 2017 is a heck of a month for me so things have gone slowly.

Uncertain times! For now if you follow kateva.org/sh you’ll see what I’m up to, no matter how the process evolves.

Beyond Simplenote: I still want a graph layer (concept map) overlay for my memory augmentation notes collection

I still want a graph layer atop my notes.

Yes, I want my personal locally stored data unlocked memex. Since the passing fad of the web is now, you know, passing, maybe I’ll get one.

Maybe someone will play with this now that there’s not much point in doing another searchable memory augmentation app. Apple and Google each have their “good enough” solutions. Those solutions have scary data lock issues, but for their vendors that’s a feature, not a defect. (For the record, I’m still on Simplenote/nvAlt, despite the extremely very insanely annoying search bug in the Simplenote Mac client. [1])

The idea is as old as time. Each open data format note has a title, a body, tags, and a unique identifier. The app maintains a separate data store of noteID pairs (relationships, no directionality or additional relationship attributes necessary).  When viewing a note one sees titles of related notes. There’s a UI for viewing the graph that also treats tags as nodes [3], and a UI for editing relationships.

The key is that the individual notes remain separate files and the note-note store is plaintext/rich text as well. [2]

One day…

PS. I think this was kind of what Gopher did. 

- fn -

[1] My own extended memory collection has moved through DOS text files, FileMaker Pro text base, PalmOS Notes, DateBk Memo, AvantGo files, Outlook Notes, Evernote, Google Notes (killed!), Toodledo Notes/Appigo Notebook,  and Simplenote/ResophNotes/NotationalVelocity/nvAlt. No wonder I’m a nut on data lock issues and distrust Cloud solutions for extended memory even as I use them. Also: Before Simplenote, Palm Notes, iOS Notes, Keep, EverNote and OneNote there was Tornado for DOS. 

[2] Remember when Mac Classic gave every file its own unique ID? Those were the days. How to get the unique ID for the notes is the trick for a plaintext implementation especially across platforms. With rich text one can bury the unique ID in the metadata. Unique ID could be an IP6 URI.

[3] Remember when graph data visualization was a thing? That was the early 90s I think, around the time of VRML and MCF/RDF.

See also: 

(This is started out as a tiny post but I kept finding more old material I wanted to think about …)

• All I want for Christmas is a graph (mind-map) … on App.net 11/2012 discussion of this on ADN.
• XMind: Impressions and comments on the mind mapping market 11/2012. I buried the lede in this post, the discussion of the graph layer for a Notes collection is buried within. I gave up on XMind because client-side Java died.
• Tinderbox, Simplenote, MindNode and data freedom 10/2011. Earlier version of this plea. Lists some Personal Information Managers I’ve known. My plaintext/rich text standards love is born of much painful experience.
• Escape from Outlook Notes - ResophNotes, SimpleNote for iPhone and Notational Velocity 7/2010
• Cloud data: Should I trust (Simplenote) Simperium? 8/2010. Only while nvAlt works.
• Before Simplenote, Palm Notes, iOS Notes, Keep, EverNote and OneNote there was Tornado for DOS. 
• Taking note: Tornado Notes Lives—Sort of (an entire blog on note taking. I just subscribed!)
• Escape from Outlook Notes - ResophNotes, SimpleNote for iPhone and Notational Velocity 7/2010
• Palm/Palm Pilot: Personal Experiences and Tips: my old Palm Pilot web page. For nostalgia.
• Jon Udell’s Interviews with Innovators: Evernote as Memex 7/2008. (Evernote is still in business!)
• Gordon’s Notes: xanadu and Gordon's Notes: memory management
• Full text search and digital prostheses: new email, new mind 7/2008 - A few years after full text really went mainstream. This doesn’t seem to show up on in our productivity stats, which is more than a bit curious. It is almost as if digital tech is simultaneously increasing and decreasing economic productivity, so we see only the delta.
• The Mundaneum 2008
• Mac NoteTaker for PalmOS with TextMate 1/2006 (oh, the pain)
• Palm to iPhone - the summary 8/2008
• Farewell Palm I didn’t get rid of all my old PalmOS gear until 2010
• The rise of software rental (aka software as service) 2/2010
• Moving Palm notes to Toodledo via CSV file - what worked. (Hard!) 9/2008
• Google’s IQ boost is only beginning 12/2009. Even as I wrote that Google was making a hard turn into evilplusness. Now it’s the AI assistant moment.
• Project Memfail: Tackling my search space problem 9/2013. I rely on my Notes as pointers to other stores but I still need Google’s increasingly shaking custom search engines.
• Thinking tools 2014 - holding steady but future unclear 5/2014. Two years later it’s basically the same toolset, but I created kateva.org/sh as a backup given ADN’s expected lifespan.
• Why we need to retire at sixty 3/2010. Memory augmentation is not an option.

Learning new habits and skills - Pinboard, Simplenote, Toodledo and the skr tag

Being new-old means learning to be deliberative about things that were once opportunistic.

I used to get my exercise whenever I could — now I do regular group classes. Similarly, I used to pick up new habits and skills whenever the need arose or training required — but as of today i’m doing something more … deliberative. Something that should work better than my ad hoc approach of the past 30 years, not just because old brains suck but also because my old approach didn’t really work all that well. Even with a (relatively) young brain.

My new approach builds on 3 of my favorite tools: Pinboard, Simplenote and Toodledo — and a tag [1] of ‘skr’. The tag stands for “skills review”; it’s short because I wanted something fast to type.

I created a “habit/skills review” task in Toodledo and scheduled it a couple of weeks out. The task reminds me to review things tagged ‘skr’ in Pinboard and Simplenote. Meanwhile, as I come across things that I want to learn and make a part of my cognitive toolkit, I tag them ‘skr’. In Pinboard I save a Pin with that tag, in Simplenote I create a note with that tag.

Ever two weeks I get to the task and do my review. It only takes a few minutes. If I learn something I can remove the tag, if I’m failing to learn it I can take other measures or decide it’s not worth the investment.

I think this will work…

[1] Rant diversion — why are so many tagging implementations so awful? Why do so many devs exclude tag strings from full text search? Why does Simplenote display tags by data created rather than alpha sort? Why can’t one “merge” tags? Why … why …

Thinking tools 2014 - holding steady but future unclear

Revisiting something I wrote 14 years ago reminded me of the tools I use to think about the world. Once those tools were conversation, paper diaries and notebooks — even letters. Later came email, local BBS, FidoNet [1] and Usenet [3]. In the 90s we created web pages with tools like FrontPage and “personal web servers” [2] — even precursors to what became blogs.

In the 00s we had the Golden Age of Google. My thinking tools were made by Google — Google Blogger, Google Custom Search Engine, Google Reader (RSS/Atom) and Google Reader Social. We loved Google then — before the fall.

From 1965 through 20011 my thinking tools continuously improved. Then things got rocky.

These days I still use Blogger [4]. Blogger is old but seems to be maintained, unlike Google Custom Search. I’m grateful that Daniel Jakut continues to update MarsEdit — I wish he’d use Backer to charge me some money. There are features I’d like, but most of all I’d like him to continue support.

I still rely on RSS, even as it fades from memory (but even new journalism ventures like Upshot still have feeds). Feedbin (20$/yr) is almost as good as Google Reader [6], Reeder.app is still around (but unstable), and Pinboard ($10 lifetime) has turned out to be a “good enough” de facto microblogging platform — with a bit of help from IFTTT (0$) [5].

App.net Alpha ($36/year!) [7] powered by PourOver and consumed in part through Duerig Root-Feeds has filled out the rest of the microblogging role — and replaced the intellectual feedback of Reader Social.

So as of 2014 I’ve cobbled together a set of thinking tools that are comparable to what I had in 2009. It feels shaky though. Few people under 30 know what RSS is, app.net is not growing (even Twitter is dying), and I’ve recently written about the decrepit state of Google Custom Search. Of Google’s twitter-clone, the less said the better.

I wonder what comes next? I don’t see anything yet. I’m reminded of the long fallow time between the end of Palm @2003 and the (useful) iPhone of 2009 (transition hurt). Expect turbulence.

—fn— 

[1] FidoNews was last published July 1999.

[2] FrontPage 98 was a prosumer tool; the closest equivalent today would be MarsEdit or Microsoft’s forgotten Live Writer (2009).

[3] I used to tag Usenet posts with a unique string, then search for them in DejaNews and later Google Groups. So a bit of a micro-blog.

[4] I do use WordPress on Dreamhost for my share archive.

[5] Pinboard is about $10 for lifetime use. That’s so low it worries me. There’s a $25/yr option for a full text archive for every bookmark, but I don’t need that; it would just confuse my searches. Maybe Maciej should seek Backer funding for new features?

[6] Speaking of Backer funding, I’d fund a feature that gave me in-context editing of Feedbin feed titles.

[7] App.net is by far the most expensive of the services I use, but if you visit the site the yearly subscription fee is undiscoverable. You only see the free signup, without mention of follower limitations. This bothers me

See also

• Strange loops: Google custom and customized search - and a memory blog 8/2008 
• Full text search and digital prostheses: new email, new mind 7/2008. I still do email this way, though modern corporations are working hard to erase digital memories.
• Microblogging 2012 - Pinboard? 4/2012
• The not-so-vast readership of Gordon’s notes - and why I keep posting 1/2011
• Google’s IQ boost is only beginning 12/2009 We loved Google then.
• Gordon’s Tech: After the fall of Google Reader: Posterous, Tumblr and Zootool with Twitter on the side 9/2011 - I did find what I was looking for …
• What my blogs are for: memory management and the Google-Gordon geek-mind fusion 7/2008
• Gordon’s Notes: Why I love app.net (ADN) 1/2013
• memory management - tagged posts

Project Memfail: Tackling my search space problem

I've hit the Wall.

It's partly entropy-related wetware failure, but I'd be in trouble even if I were immortal. I have two many search-spaces and information stores in too many places.

Things aren't so bad in my personal domain - I have two search spaces. My Simplenote files (via NvAlt), Email (Mail.app) and Google Docs (via Google Drive and CloudPull [1])  are mirrored back to my Spotlight search space, and I use a Google custom search engine against my blogs, archived web site and app.net streams. So my two personal search spaces are private/secure and public. I can manage that [2], and I'm careful not to add anything that would require a third search space.

In my work domain though it's a mess. I have information scattered across several Wikis, multiple document stores, my local file system and multi-GB email store, and the remnants of blog whose server died. All of this in an environment that, for multiple reasons, is driving to an information half-life of 1 year. I have too many search spaces; I can no longer track them all.

So I'm launching Project Memfail :-). I need to rescope my search spaces - esp. my corporate one.

- fn -

[1] My main information loss over the past decade was GR Shares, I have some recovery there via CloudPull.

[2] Native spotlight search has issues, but I can work around those. Of course when Google Custom Search dies I'll be in for a painful transition.

Strange loops - five years of wondering why our corporate units couldn't cooperate.

Five years ago I tried to figure out why we couldn't share work across our corporate units.

This turned out to be one of those rabbit hole questions. The more I looked, the stranger it got. I knew there was prior work on the question -- but I didn't know the magic words Google needed. Eventually I reinvented enough economic theory to connect my simple question to Coase's 1937 (!) theorem, 1970s work on 'the theory of the firm', Brad DeLong's 1997 writings on The Corporation as a Command Economy [1], and Akerloff's 'information assymetry'. [2]

Among other things I realized that modern corporations are best thought of as feudal command economies whose strength comes more from their combat capacity and ability to purchase legislators and shape their ecosystems than from goods made or services delivered.

Think of the Soviet Union in 1975.

All of which is, I hope, an interesting review -- but why did I title this 'Strange loop'?

Because I used that term in a 2008 post on how Google search, and especially their (then novel) customized search results, was changing how I thought and wrote. This five year recursive dialog is itself a product of that cognitive extension function.

But that's not the only strange loop aspect.

I started this blog post because today I rediscovered DeLong's 2007 paper [1] as a scanned document. I decided to write about it, so I searched on a key phrase looking for a text version. That search, probably customized to my Gordon-identity [3], returned a post I wrote in 2008. [4]

That's just weird.

 - fn -

[1] Oddly the full text paper is no longer available from Brad's site, but a decent scan is still around.

[2] There are at least two Nobel prizes in Economics in that list, so it's nice to know I was pursuing a fertile topic, albeit decades late.

[3] John Gordon is a pseudonym; Gordon is my middle name.

[4] On the one hand it would be nice if I'd remembered I wrote it. On the other hand I've written well over 10,000 blog posts. 

See also: 

• Gordon's Notes: The Modern Firm - a review 4/2012 ties some of this together. That 2008 paper was a gift that kept on giving!
• Gordon's Notes: Browsing the blog backlist - we need a new app 6/2012. Reading that old blog posts of mine reminds me that we still need a tool for resurfacing old blog posts.

Google's Project Glass - it's not for the young

I've changed my mind about Project Glass. I thought it was proof that Brin's vast wealth had driven him mad, and that Google was doing a high speed version of Microsoft's trajectory.

Now I realize that there is a market.

No, not the models who must, by now, be demanding triple rates to appear in Google's career-ending ads.

No, not even Google's geeks, who must be frantically looking for new employment.

No, the market is old people. Geezers. People like me; or maybe me + 5-10 years.

We don't mind that Google Glass looks stupid -- we're ugly and we know it.

We don't mind that Google Glass makes us look like Borg -- we're already good with artificial hips, knees, lenses, bones, ears and more. Nature is overrated and wears out too soon.

We don't mind wearing glasses, we need them anyway.

We don't mind having something identifying people for us,  recording where we've been and what we've done, selling us things we don't need, and warning us of suspicious strangers and oncoming traffic. We are either going to die or get demented, and the way medicine is going the latter is more likely. We need a bionic brain; an ever present AI keeping us roughly on track and advertising cut-rate colonoscopy.

Google Glass is going to be very big. It just won't be very sexy.

Why coupons? Price concealment information and memetic archeology in the pre-web world

Emily and I were wondering what business purpose coupons serve. They make brand price comparison labor intensive and hence unaffordable for most of us; this presumably allows both price discrimination (selling things at different prices to different markets), but it also enables companies to hide their prices from one another.

I couldn't find a good recent overview; the best I could do was a 1984 article by MC Narasimhan (A Price Discrimination Theory of Coupons).  A modern paper would want to include comparisons to Amazon's experiments with dynamic pricing, price hiding in pharmaceutical distribution, the regulatory and strategic concealment of physician office fees all in the context of game theory, information asymmetry (Akerlof, 1970s), and behavioral economics.

I can't find anything like this. So either we have a Google fail or yet another failure of modern economic academia (or perhaps a success of journal publisher information concealment, which is probably somehow related to coupon clipping).

Update: I gave this another 30 minutes of thought and realized there's a much more interesting explanation for this meme absentia.

This is pre-web economics; work done in the 1970s and 1980s. Discussions of affinity discounts, coupon clipping, frequent flyer mile economics and the like are the province of undergraduate textbooks. I shouldn't be looking in scholar.google.com, I should be checking out DeLong and Krugman's posts, tumblrs, and tweets.

Except, of course in the 1970s Brad and Paul were high school students. Google's Usenet (1980s blog posts) archives start in 1981, and email lists aren't much older. The memetic gulf stream [1] that swept ideas from academia to geekdom didn't exist.

So this isn't really a Google or Academia fail, it's a need for new innovations in memetic archeology [2] within the pre-web world (early singularity: 1820-1995).

[1] As of 5/28/2012 Google has no results on "memetic gulf stream". Try it now.
[2] Seven real hits today. Try it now. 

PS. Emily points out that the OpenStax nonprofit textbook movement will expose many of these memes to the Google filter feeder. (Meme phracking?). Incidentally, I found that reference through my pinboard/wordpress microblog/memory management infrastructure now integrated into my personal google custom search.

Microblogging 2012 - Pinboard?

Once every few days to weeks I write a short essay, from a few paragraphs to a few "pages" (remember the page?).  Every few minutes to hours I share a link and a comment from a few words to a pair of paragraphs.

Both forms of writing almost always involve links; they point to a linkable entity.

I have to call the first blogging and the second microblogging because I can't escape the b-word (is there a language in which the name is less painful?).

Whatever the format, I do the writing for same reasons. It's primarily a way for me to learn, think, and remember. I do it publicly because I have the hive-mind communicator gene-set. I want to share the ideas and things that I like.

I want to share -- but sharing has a very important side-effect. Sharing enables indexing.

My extended memory relies on Google Custom Search (oh Google, why has thou forsaken me? I forget too much without you.) Everything I share has an entry in a Custom Search Engine I use several times a day, though recently the embedded ads have become oppressive.

I do the blogging using Google Blogger. I wanted to move to WordPress, but I decided the quality and security issues of an independent WordPress site were too severe for me; I don't have the time. I'm now evaluating a paid account on WordPress.com.

The micro-blogging is a bigger problem. I used to use Google Reader Share - one of the lesser known but most beloved products of the days when Google was Anakin. Reader Share died when Google became you-know-what.

Twitter is too constraining and I don't trust Tumblr. After trying several options I settled on Pinboard because of its business model (I pay), sharing/export options, RSS support and, especially, Reeder.app and Instapaper integration. I use IFTTT to republish my Pinboard 's' stream to my Twitter stream, and I'm now experimenting with using IFTTT to repost them to an archival and indexable WordPress or Blogger repository.

The indexable bit is a Pinboard problem. Pinboard's developer does not love microblogging; he wants to have a bookmarking service. Pinboard posts are NOINDEX by design.

Pinboard has other microblogging limitations. I use tags to create routable streams of shared information. Almost all are part of my primary share stream, but some are special sub-streams for my colleagues or for my own reference and actions. Because of the way Reeder.app works many of these are single character tags. This isn't how Pinboard is supposed to work; tags are supposed to be global - not personal. I can't, for example, show only my own tags in the Pinboard UI.

Lastly Pinboard isn't as reliable as Reader Share was - though almost nothing is. Sometimes, when I post, Reeder.app hangs waiting for Pinboard to respond. (The hanging behavior is a Reeder.app design flaw).

I'd be delighted if Maciej Ceglowsk's Pinboard.in were more of a microblogging platform. I wish I could see only my own tags for example. Above all, I wish Pinboard included an option to use the Atom publishing protocol to create an indexable and persistent post on a blog. I'd double the amount I pay Maciej for that feature.

I don't hold out too much hope. Pinboard is known to geeks, but it's not a big revenue stream. In a crazy world where a small photo sharing site can be worth a billion dollars, Pinboard is almost an anachronism...

... I wrote Pinboard in the spring of 2009 as a personal project, partly out of frustration with a redesign of Delicious that I felt removed a lot of utility from the site, and partly because I had long wanted to have a bookmarking site that would archive my bookmarks...
... The service has stored about 45 million bookmarks as of January 2012, and has just over 20 thousand active users....

... Pinboard is written in PHP and Perl. The site uses MySQL for data storage, Sphinx for search, and Amazon S3 to store backups....

As a bookmarking service Pinboard is a labor of love. It probably wouldn't do better even if it were extended to be the front end to a standards-based microblogging service - but I hope Maciej will consider the option. There might be some money from current subscribers, and perhaps referral fees if Maciej recommends an optional WordPress service (ex: Dreamhost, WordPress.com).

Someday we'll get back to the original Google Reader Shares vision. It might take a while though. After Palm died we were lost in the desert for a decade before we returned to a handheld calendar, tasks, contacts and notes solution. I hope this trip will be a bit shorter.

Update 4/30/12: Maciej is exploring how Pinboard might be a better microblogging profile, and whether it would work to enable Pinboard indexing. In the meanwhile I've turned off IFTTT posting to Blogger and disabled indexing of that test blog. I'll go forward with archiving my Pinboard posts to WordPress - http://www.kateva.org/sh/.

Google and Facebook: how Chrome supports life with an dully evil corporation

Just three years ago Facebook's Gordon's Evil Score was 12, and Google was a mere 6. Today, 3 months after Google's day of infamy, I'd give Google 10, Facebook 8, and Apple a 6. (Philip Morris gets 15. Evil is relative.)

These days Facebook is less evil than Google 2.0, probably because Facebook has been on pre-IPO best behavior. Post-IPO I expect 'em to hang with Google in the gray zone of generic AT&T-style corporate badness. After all, both companies package and sell us.

So why is Facebook's badness boring, and Google's badness Bad?

It's because we always knew Facebook was evil. I never gave FB anything I couldn't walk away from. If Facebook went away tomorrow, I'd be slightly sad.

Google though, Google once made me smarter. Our family uses Google Apps. My shared images are in Google's web albums. A lot of my external memory is Google dependent (so losing Google Reader shares felt like a mini-lobotomy). Google search, born in the day of the ad-infested Portal, was beautiful.

Google though, Google was going to make free the world's knowledge.

Google though, Google wants to build a sentient AI. Do we want our first sentient AI born of our bad parents?

That's why Google's Page-driven race to the Darkseid matters a lot more than Facebook's perennial villainy. We loved Google, we trusted Google,  we married Goole and made Data together -- and we were chumps. (Some of us are still in denial.)

What now? Well, Google hasn't turned into Philip Morris -- and it probably never will. They've just become as evil as most publicly traded corporations -- and a lot of us work for those. Besides, we can't completely divorce. Think of the Data. [1]

So I'm still living with Google. Yeah, I did try Bing. Have you ever used Bing? Go and give it a try. I'll wait here for a while. Right. Even EvilGoogle is better than Bing.

I'm living with Google, but I'm keeping my distance. Coincidentally (?) Chrome recently made this much easier.

Chrome now supports client-side identity management. On my Mac the Preferences:Personal Stuff menu has a "Users" section. A "User" is simply a separate identity, where an "identity" is a set of cookies, credentials, bookmarks, cache and so on. Optionally, a "User" on Chrome can be associated with a Google account, and Chrome/Google credentials and bookmarks sync between those accounts. These don't have to be Google+ accounts [2]. If you link a Chrome User to a non-Google+ account, you're basically using GoogleMinus. That's what I do.

In Chrome I currently switch between 5 Users as needed, each with a paired Google account. One user is my original TrueName "113" Google account. I deleted that account's G+ Profile, so this "User" gives me something of an old-style GoogleMinus experience. This account owns my Google Docs, my Email, my Calendar, and way too many Google properties to remember (including the remnants of Google Reader social.)

I use my G+ John Gordon identity with Blogger [3] and Google Reader (I moved GR subscriptions over to this account). I have yet another identity associated with my corporate work, another with our family domain, and then 1-2 more to make it easy to switch between the kid's Google accounts [4].

Google Chrome has made it easier to live with Google 2.0, but it's an uneasy relationship. Evil Facebook is fine -- because I don't care. Evil Google is not a good long term relationship. I'm seeing other services now, services like Pinboard.in and the shared items I post there. It will take decades, but I'm hoping true alternatives to Google will emerge. Alternatives that charge real money for their services. That's how I'll know they're worth being with.

[1] It's no coincidence that when Google turned evil, the Data Liberation team fell silent.
[2] For now, though in future that might be impossible to avoid.
[3] Google's blogs can have multiple contributors, so I just made John Gordon an admin on blogs that started with John F. as admin. Early on Google forbade pseudonyms in G+ accounts; now they only require that pseudonyms "appear" to be well formed, generic names not associated with celebrities or historic figures.
[4] All through our family domain. They don't know the passwords.

See also:

Others

• Microsoft, Apple, and Google: where does the money come from? | ZDNet 2/2012
• The ‘Eggs In One Basket’ Index - SplatF 2/2012 Google is fully dependent on Advertising revenue
• Facebook, Google, and the Future of the Online 'Commons' 2/3/2012. Fallows is soft on Google. He hasn't come to terms with the new Google.
• Against the wall – Marco.org 2/1/2012 - no illusions here
• Google's Broken Promise: The End of "Don't Be Evil" (Gizmodo, 1/2012)

Me

• Gordon's scale of corporate evil - 3rd edition 11/2011
• Google 2.0 11/2011
• Dapocalypse now: Google's day of infamy 10/2011
• Google 1.0 is dead. When did it start dying? 11/2011
• Divorcing Google - and hoping for GoogleMinus 1/2012
• Responding to Facebook’s lions: Stop friends using the apps 12/2009
• I deleted my Google G+ Profile 11/2011

Divorcing Google - and hoping for GoogleMinus

Google hired a hit man, and was shocked to find bodies. Now the remnants of Google 1.0 are punishing Google 2.0, though Matt Cutts hasn't said anything. He didn't used to be so quiet.

Google 1.0's glorious Data Liberation Front is pretty quiet too. Their Twitter feed went silent on 9/15/2011.

It's sad. I loved Google from my first searches in 1997 until the Google-Apple war began in 2009. Even then I wanted to believe in their original mission to free the world's knowledge. I didn't really lose faith until Google deleted my Reader Share memory - with 1 week's notice.

Yeah, I was denying simple arithmetic. Google's is an algorithmic corporation that iterates on its goals, and its goals are to delivery value to their paying customers. Advertisers. Yes, Google, like health insurance corporations, has an Agency problem.

Notice how much junk their is in Google searches these days? How many "plus.google.com" pages? How ads are growing across Google's search pages? This isn't going to stop -- not unless Google divides into two companies.

Now I'm moving off the Google platform. It's a slow and painful process. Just as painful as moving from DOS to Mac Classic, from Mac Classic to Windows, Windows to OS/2, OS/2 to Windows 2K, Windows to OS X, Palm to iOS…

Especially like moving from Palm to iOS. That's because there was a wasteland between the end of PalmOS and the rise of iOS. It was a kind of technological winter; a gap between one life and the other. I nursed my aging Palm devices along because the alternative was to resurrect my Franklin Planner.

That's what life is like post-Google - because there isn't a good alternative to Google. iCloud? Please. Microsoft? I wish. Yahoo!? Ok, you get the point. I won't go on.

So it's a tough divorce. It would be even harder if I were an Android customer. I wonder if Android users understand how tightly they're tied to Google -- and why.

How will this winter end? Amazon? Apple? Microsoft?!?

Or … perhaps …. GoogleMinus.

GoogleMinus, because there are businesses in Google that make money selling value to users. Google Docs, for example, sells ad-free solutions to schools and corporations. These aren't not huge businesses, but they might be profitable if they could lease infrastructure from GooglePlus.

GoogleMinus, because there are still, I think, some idealists left at Google -- and they might prefer to work for GoogleMinus rather than GooglePlus.

It could happen. The EU might require a breakup. Civil strife within Google might make a breakup internally acceptable.

Imagine a future when GoogleMinus packages GooglePlus search. For an annual fee of $100 I get the ability to block plus.google.com searches, and a control that lets me filter out web sites that run ads. Wouldn't that be interesting?

Update 1/9/12: This Android retrospective is relevant. I'd forgotten the day Google made its deal with Verizon; a deal signed in blood at midnight

Update 1/10/12: Today Google dedicated their search function to promoting Google+ properties.

Too much history

One of the reasons I blog is to engage with a fascinating world, and to track the streams of history.

I'm finding that harder to do. It's not that I don't see the streams, or see ways to connect them -- it's that there's too much. I feel as though history just kicked up a gear.

Partly this is the loss of Google Reader's share/tracking functions. They were a key component of how I engaged with my fragments of the world's knowledge flow. Even if nothing else had changed, losing those functions and my share repository would be disorienting.

I don't think it's just the loss of Reader though. It's more that Reader's capabilities masked the rate of change. Without them, it's easier to see how the world is changing.

These are truly whitewater times.

Dapocalypse now: Google's day of infamy

I shared thousands of articles through Google Reader.

They were a part of my extended memory. I often searched that repository.

This evening they are gone.

I had expected bad news, but I didn't expect the entire shared story repository to vanish.

Yes, there's a JSON export. I will do it of course, but Google is not providing any tools to navigate or transform that data set. The export of data in a non-useable format is no export at all.

Dapocalypse now. Google, I want a divorce.

Update: The JSON export links aren't working for me.

Google Reader: This is going to hurt

Let's get the good news out of the way.

Google has stepped back from their Buzz/G+ nymwar policy. Google will support pseudonyms. So they listened after all.

More good news. As promised, Google Reader lives.

That's enough of the good news. Don't want to overdose.

The bad news is that Google will be ripping out a lot of GR in favor of G+, even though G+ lacks a mechanism for subscribing to aspects of a person's stream. Much of the functionality I love, such as the feed for GR shares, the web page created from GR shares and notes, the ability to follow my trusted curators shares -- it's all at risk. In my case, tens of thousands of annotations, a vast amount of Cloud data, is at risk. Reeder.app, by far my most heavily used iPhone app, is at risk.

The worst news is that Google is giving us 1 week's warning. It's almost as though they want to get this over with before they get a nymwar level of feedback.

Happily, we bereaved GR users are not alone. There are 357 comments on Alan Green's G+ announcement, and the last few hundred are a tad ... unhappy. Please feel free to add your comments one way or another.

My primary comment is that Google needs to stop and think - carefully. Sure, there aren't many GR power users. What we lack in numbers, however, we more than make up in geekery. We are uber-geeks and/or journalists, and we have a long memory. Apple can blow away data, but we don't mind. We never trusted them with our data. Google though, Google's not Apple. We expect different failures from Google.

There's a tsunami of hurt building in the obscure little GR community. We may be small Google, but we're rabid little buggers. E.D. Kain, Sarah Perez, Skeptic Geek, Jesse Stay, Incidental Economist, Martin Steiger, Brett Keller, me... We're coming out of the woodwork.

There is a right way to fix GR. That would be to clean up and fill out the current feature set, and replace Reader's dead Buzz functionality with similar G+ functionality. Offer us the option to share via G+ in addition to GR -- assuming G+ gets its interest streams working.

Google's making the same kind of mistake they made with the nymwars. That one they're fixing. Maybe they'll fix this one too.

So we're gonna yell. One week isn't much, but it may be enough time to get Alan Steel and his colleagues to put the brakes on. Stop, then think.

Update: My companion G+ stream post (restricted).

Update 10/21/11: There's a petition expressing user concerns about Google's plan.

The not-so-vast readership of Gordon's notes - and why I keep posting

I get emails when a reader (infrequently) comments. The author deleted this comment, so I'll keep it anonymous ...

Say, is it not odd that you don't have a bunch of readers reading your blog? You have been writing this since 2003 and nobody comments or reads it? Is this even real?

Oh and I figured out how I reached your blog. I was looking for "nobody reads your blog" on google and a comment from your blog showed up on the 47th page.

Its sad and funny at the same time...

I wasn't able to replicate his search results, but unless we're post AI this was a bio post, not a bot post.

It's a good question [4], but there are a lot of blogs that go unread. So mine is not that unusual. What's unusual is that it's been persistently unread for 7 years. So the real question is - "why would anyone write 5,494 posts that nobody reads?" (@9,000 if you add Gordon's Tech) [1]

The short answer is that I read both of Gordon's Blogs. As I wrote back in 2007 ...

... my own very low readership blogs are written for these audiences in this order:

1. Myself. It’s how I learn and think.

2. The GoogleMind: building inferential links for search and reflection.

3. Tech blog: Future readers who find my posts useful to solve a problem they have that I've solved for myself.

4. Gordon's Notes: My grandchildren, so I can say I didn't remain silent -- and my tiny audience of regular readers, not least my wife (hey, we don't get that much time to talk!) ...

Later, when I integrated Google Custom Search, my history of posts began to inform my Google searches. My blogs extend my memory into the wider net.

So that explains why there are 9,000 "John Gordon" posts.

As to why their aren't many comments/readers, I can imagine several reasons ...

• There's no theme. Gordon's Notes follows my interests, and they wander. At any given time there will posts that most people find boring, repetitive, or weird.
• I'm writing for someone like me, Brad DeLong, Charlie Stross, Emily L and others of that esoteric sort. That's an uber-niche audience.
• I have no public persona (I write using a pseudonym)
• I like writing, but I don't work at writing. I'd have to work a lot harder to write well enough to be truly readable.
• I don't market the blog.
• I update my blog at odd hours, and I'm slow to respond to comments.
• I have an irregular posting schedule.
• I don't right about areas where I'm really a world-class expert because I keep my blogging and my employment separate.
• I often write about the grim side of reality (that is, most of it).

That covers the bases I think. Except ...

Except, it's not quite so simple. It turns out I do have a few readers -- I'm guessing about 100 or so [3], not counting a larger number who come via Google [2], but certainly counting Google itself. Some of my readers are bloggers with substantial readership, and sometimes they respond to what I write.

So I do have an audience after all, it's just very quiet.

See also:

• Strange loops: Google custom and customized search - and a memory blog
• Google's IQ boost is only beginning

-- fn --

[1] Why do I share thousands of items via Google Reader? Because that's a searchable repository of things I find interesting. Another memory extender.
[2] I don't have a stellar Google ranking, but it's not bad 
[3] About 80 via Google Reader alone, where I share these posts.  There's also Emily, who comments over breakfast. A lot of my posts come out of our discussions.
[4] It wasn't clear when I first posted this that I like the question. I think it's a good question and I think it was meant well. Sorry for not making that clear. I've added this footnote.

Update 1/6/11: Based on comment response I probably have more regular readers than I imagined.

Cloud data: Should I trust (Simplenote) Simperium?

My memory prostheses got a nice upgrade when I integrated my Outlook and Palm/Toodledo "notes" into a single Cloud based repository with powerful OS X (Notational Velocity), Win (ResophNotes), and iOS (Simplenote.app) Clients.

I'm loving this ecosystem. There's speed, simplicity, data freedom, multi-platform and integration with Spotlight and Windows search (both ResophNotes and Notational Velocity can create local stores with each note a simple text file available for indexing and editing).

Did I mention Speed and Data Freedom? Just wanted to check. I'm copying a pasting notes from various scattered sources, building a single searchable repository of my memory extensions. It's a good complement to the memory stores distributed in my blogs and google reader shares and integrated via my Google Custom Search Page.

It's all good fun - until someone gets hurt. Tonight Simperium, the creators of Simplenote, had a single ominous blog post:

Simplenote will be unavailable on the App Store for (hopefully) a short period of time. We apologize to our potential new users. You're welcome to create an account in the meantime and we'll let you know when we're back.

Right. Simplenote, you see, owns that Cloud repository I mentioned. They've evidently been booted from the App Store. Their too-brief posting lends itself to grim interpretations.

I do so love the Cloud.

We must hope that Simperium "simply" violated an API rule with a new release, and that they'll be back soon -- hopefully with a longer news post. For now, however, a comment on my tech blog is especially relevant ...

Blogger:Migrating Notes comment: Martin: "... how can I trust the 'Simperium' entity without any further information available?"

Cough. Good question. How do we know, for example, that Simperium isn't a KGB front mining data to be used by Russian crime syndicates paying for Putin's personal submarine? Maybe "sImperium" is a clue.

The short answer is I don't trust them. I don't trust Google or Apple either Simperium, so it's nothing personal. Or, more correctly, I trust these companies to do what's best for the people who control them within the limits of what they think they can get away with.

So I don't put anything in my Simplenotes that I wouldn't put in my blog. I keep my passwords in 1Password, not in my Simplenotes. I also don't put anything in Simplenotes that I can't afford to lose. All my notes are synchronized by Notational Velocity (open source, the superb ResophNotes does the same thing for Windows) to a local store on my personal hard drive, where the UTF-8 plain text files are also backed up hourly.

I also know that Simplenote is used by some serious geeks, including the notorious John Gruber and the authors of ResophNotes and Notational Velocity. It it should vanish something like it would be recreated.

So I don't trust Simperium, but I'm not worried about them either.

Or at least, not panicky.

PS. All of this stuff is basically free. Simplenote.app is very cheap, and ResophNotes and Notational Velocity are free (donations accepted and encouraged - I gave!). The Simplenotes cloud service is normally free, I paid for premium service. This, by the way, is a bit worrisome. I'd rather Simperium had a clearer revenue stream.

Update 8/13/10: Simplenote responds in comments. They took themselves offline to fix an error in how they configured their update. I expect next time something like this happens their blog post will be more informative.

Update 8/23/10: Simplenote update just appeared in the App Store. So they're back at last.

--My Google Reader Shared items (feed)

51. Not as bad as expected.

This is for men aged 38 to 45. Everyone else, turn the page.

When I turned 5 nanosols (50 solar years), I did a status and lessons learned review.

I just reread it. I still kind of like it, which is pretty good by my standards. It's not as bad as I'd remembered.

51 doesn't get that treatment. But, in contrast to my recent run of bleak posts, I realized I could say something positive.

It's not as bad as I'd expected. My post-fifty buddies, like primips [1] playing mindgames on nullips, pictured a train wreck. Ok, so that's mostly true. But there are exceptions. So don't abandon hope.

Here are four things at year 51 that are better than expected.

1. After fifteen years of struggle, I have a good solution for my memory fragments. Thank you RespophNotes, Simplenotes and Notational Velocity!
2. I had thirty years of a bad back that got real bad in my 40s. Now I have a great back, with no surgery. Thank you Physicians Neck and Back Clinic.
3. Thanks to #1 I came across a note I wrote 10 years ago. I listed a number of habits and practices that were making me less productive than I could be. None of them are true any more. Honest. Some of them I figured out, others life beat out of me (with brass knuckles).
4. I looked in the mirror about six weeks ago and my denial collapsed. My muscles were not coming back. I wasn't 10 lbs overweight any more, I was 20 lbs overweight and getting worse. I can't exercise more [2], so I adopted a radical new diet program - EALL [3].

There. Don't you feel all encouraged now?

[1] Med slang for women with one spin in labor and delivery.

[2] That's a lie of course, but it's less of a lie than you think.

[3] EALL - "Eat a lot less" and use a good scale daily. I had to permanently drop my food intake around 40, so this is the 2nd permanent drop. I'm not looking forward to drop #3. At least we're saving money.

Why we need to retire at sixty

Ten years ago there was talk of the boomers working into their seventies. The "me generation" was said to be "young at heart".

Then reality set in. Contrary to popular belief, brain decay is not a late life disorder. It starts in our twenties ....

This Is Your Faulty Brain, On a Microchip - Memory forever - Gizmodo

... Starting in your 20s—not old age—behavioral evidence suggests that you enter a linear cascade of general cognitive decline....

This decline is notably seen in tasks that are highly mentally demanding, like speed of processing (how quickly you handle incoming information), attention, working memory (how well you manipulate and keep information active in your mind), and, of course, long term memory.

In real life, these effects are seen in everything from how long it takes to learn a new skill to how quickly you can recall a factoid....

The Gizmodo article, clearly written by a young chap, imagines we'll outsource our recall and declining cognition to an onboard chip (vs., say Google). Sure.

While we're waiting to be chipped, however, knowledge work is becoming ever more demanding - and non-knowledge work doesn't pay too well (unless you're CEO, then non-knowledge work can pay very well).

In the post-modern world, unless we can bend that decay curve (hello? dementia meds?) many of us will have a hard time doing competitive knowledge work into our 60s - much less our 70s. Bagging groceries yes - genomic engineering not so much.

That could be a bit of an economics problem.

We really should be spending more money on trying to bend that curve. We need my generation to earn money until we take our dirt bath.

Why Apple will lose the Google-Apple war

The were rumbles about Latitude, but the battle of Google Voice made the Google-Apple war public. Now it's a cliche ...

How Apple and Google's Romance Turned To Hate - Apple - Gizmodo

.. They happily worked in the iPhone's 2007 launch. Google gave Apple their maps, their search, and their mail, and Apple gave Google the best spot in their new shiny device. Apple put YouTube into the iPhone and Google made YouTube to work nicely with QuickTime, moving all videos to the h.264 standard (so Apple could avoid that nasty Flash kid). Google even optimized their web apps for the iPhone, and Apple smiled....

I like the prospect of Google-Apple competition, but this is too much. It won't end well for Apple.

Apple has brought me some very good things over the past few years, but Google makes me smarter. There is a major economic and productivity advantage for working with Google. In the medium term, on a global scale, this means Google will win.

If the iPhone doesn't have full access to Google's productivity boosting powers it will lose. No, web apps are not the answer -- the Google Voice web app is pathetic (partly this is because Google is only marginally competent at building client software -- they need to buy Palm for the engineers).

Maybe Jobs will step down. Certainly Eric Schmidt needs to go. One way or another, I hope this war ends soon.

Update 3/13/10: The NYT coverage makes it seem personal - particularly between Schmidt and Jobs. Both have enormous egos, but Schmidt is completely and trivially replaceable. The world would be better off if Schmidt were to retire.
--
My Google Reader Shared items (feed)

How I discover people to follow - on Google Reader

Buzz has been a great disappointment.

It's not all bad though. Google built a lot of Buzz on the Google Reader Shared Item experiments, and as a side-effect they fixed the long broken social bits of Google Reader.

So now I'm enjoying enlisting new unpaid specialists to sort and manage the world's information flow for me. It's like having my own team of incredibly expensive super-smart uber-analysts -- except I don't pay them anything.

Mwaahh-ha-ha-ha!

Ok, so maybe the evil laughter is a bit much. After all, they're free to follow what I share, and we're all feeding the hivemind. It who laughs last is Skynet, as the saying goes.

How do I use Google reader to enlist my witting info-drones?

I look for the "like" link on posts that I like a lot, but that don't have many other "likes". I then click the "like" link and scan the names and associated metadata, looking for people who are different from me -- different nationality, age, gender, profession, etc. Then I look at their shared items. If they've shared interesting things that are new to me, I follow them. I also add them to my special "x-reader" group which allows them to comment on anything I share (should they decide to follow me, though most will not).

None of this worked reliably a month ago, but it works now.

My "People you follow" section is now becoming my strongest information source. I'm able to follow fewer feeds directly, as I now outsource the processing chore to my fellow minions.

Quite nice, really.

Update 3/2/2010: I'm also again trying Google Readers "show in my language" feature to start following non-English "likes". I believe Google's Translation feature is extremely disruptive and amusingly under appreciated. This is how the really big things often come - quietly in the night. Note that the latest betas of Chrome for Windows now incorporate translation services into the browser. I'm looking forward to an English-Chinese-English view of my posts that will allow me to optimize my English writing for English-Chinese automated translation.
--
My Google Reader Shared items (feed)