The Browser: best of the web and a marketing failure

The Browser is a curated take on the kind of 'this is interesting' content sharing usually associated with Twitter or (to the real cognoscenti) with Google Reader Shares.

It intersects with similar services like Instapaper's content shares, but there's no obvious automation component. It's old-style human curation with links to the original source.

It's good curation - pretty much everything they show today is interesting to me. Unfortunately, I've already read most of the referenced articles. It's hard to see how they can make money; a GigaOm review says they're considering charging subscribers. That's a tough one, though I wish them well. It's hard to compete with free, but perhaps free will go away (it happens) and they'll find a niche.

Whatever their future, it's clear they're a marketing failure. I mean, I'm just reading about them now?! That's insanely bad marketing.

Yes, they have a feed. I'll be following it ... http://thebrowser.com/feeds. So if you follow my Google Reader Shares ...

Klein on why we commie secularists should feel less discouraged

Yes, these are not the very best of times. The Lesser Depression, Rick Perry, Obama the helpless, etc. Commie secular liberals like me are feeling defensive, powerless, discouraged.

But perhaps, Ezra Klein and Stephen Skowronek tells us, we've got this wrong. We're under attack not because we're wimps, but because we're the grown up establishment (emphases mine) ....

The Done Deal - Ezra Klein - WaPo

Much of what I'm hearing at the American Political Science Association's convention is best summed up in table form, and so doesn't make for very good blog posts. But not all of it. Yale's Stephen Skowronek, for instance, made a very provocative argument questioning whether progressives should continue to look back to the New Deal for inspiration. The left, he said, likes to think of itself as an insurgency dedicated to transforming the scope of government. But today, that mantle properly belongs to the right.

... the basic insight seems correct: Liberals tend to underestimate how much they have accomplished, and how much ground conservatives have ceded, over the course of the 20th century, and even into the beginning of the 21st. Liberals tell themselves a narrative in which the last few decades have been dominated by conservatives, but conservatives look around and see a state that has been substantially shaped by liberals. Social Security was joined by Medicare was joined by Medicaid was joined by disability insurance was joined by the Environmental Protection Agency was joined by the Americans with Disabilities Act was joined by the Children's Health Insurance Program was joined by the Medicare Prescription Drug Benefit was joined by No Child Left Behind was joined by the Affordable Care Act and so on.

Right now, the liberal dream, as embodied by ideas like the public option and universal early childhood education, is to push a bit further in the direction we're already going. The big conservative dream, as embodied by Rick Perry, is to somehow turn back the clock and undo almost a century of social-policy legislation. Where it was once the liberals who had radical ideas for what we should do with the state, it's now conservatives who are waging war on behalf of transformative policy change...

I emphasized the ADA because it still blows my mind. George H Bush signed that bill in 1990. Twenty years later it's relatively uncontroversial, but it was a major progressive victory. It's much more progressive, for example, than anything Canadians have.

Opposition to redistribution - two causes

Three weeks ago a typically anonymous article in The Economist reviewed two of the less obvious obstacles to reducing inequality and poverty in America ...

Economics focus: Don’t look down | The Economist August 13th, 2011

... America is far less inclined than many of its rich-world peers to use taxation and redistribution to reduce inequality. The OECD, a think-tank, reckons that taxation eats up a little less than 30% of the average American’s total compensation, compared with nearly 50% in Germany and France...

... Broadly speaking, countries that are more ethnically or racially homogeneous are more comfortable with the state seeking to mitigate inequality by transferring some resources from richer to poorer people through the fiscal system...

... A new NBER paper finds evidence for an even more intriguing and provocative hypothesis [about why the poor may not support poverty reduction]. Its authors note that those near but not at the bottom of the income distribution are often deeply ambivalent about greater redistribution....

... Instead of opposing redistribution because people expect to make it to the top of the economic ladder, the authors of the new paper argue that people don’t like to be at the bottom. One paradoxical consequence of this “last-place aversion” is that some poor people may be vociferously opposed to the kinds of policies that would actually raise their own income a bit but that might also push those who are poorer than them into comparable or higher positions...

The claimed relationship between tribal homogeneity and support for progressive taxation is hard to prove, but it feels consistent with the humanity I know. The second claim, that poor Americans may fear assistance that may make them "better but last", has some college-student experimental evidence (for what that's worth) -- but it also feels familiar. Pratchett called this "Crab Bucket" in his novel Unseen Academicals.

These obstacles don't make progressive taxation and poverty reduction impossible, but they do make it harder. It's worth understanding where resistance comes from.

Google Quick, Sick and Dead - 6th edition.

It's been only four months since the 5th edition of Google Quick, Sick and Dead - 5th edition. It's been a busy time though, with the launch of G+ and Google recently announcing another set of official closures. The terminations were of products I thought had already been discontinued, so I don't have them listed below.

As with prior editions this is a review of the Google Services I use personally - so Android is not on the list. Items that have moved up or are new are green, items that have moved down or officially discontinued are red, in parens is the prior state.

For me personally the news is not good -- both Google Reader and Google Custom Search are now on the Dead list (though Google has finally fixed the broken icon that was displaying with custom search). These are two of my favorite Google services, but neither of them deliver significant ad revenue to Google. That, in a nutshell, is the problem with relying on Google's cloud. G+ is mildly interesting, but so far it's not doing anything useful for me.

The Quick (Q)

• Google Scholar (Q)
• Gmail (Q)
• Chrome browser (Q)
• Picasa Web Albums (Q)
• Calendar (Q)
• Maps and Earth (Q)
• News (Q)
• Google Docs (Q)
• Google Voice (Q)
• Google Search (Q)
• Google (Gmail) Tasks (Q)
• YouTube (Q)
• Google Apps (Q)
• Google Profile (Q)
• Google Contacts (Q)
• GooglePlus - G+ (new)
  
• Blogger (S)

The Sick (S)

• Google’s Data Liberation Front (S)
• Google Translate (S)
• Books (S)
• Google Mobile Sync (S)
• Google Checkout (S)
• iGoogle (S)

The Walking Dead (D)

• Buzz (D)
• Google Groups (D)
• Google Sites (D)
• Knol (D)
• Firefox/IE toolbars (D)
• Google Talk (D)
• Google Parental Controls (D)
• Google Reader (S)
• Orkut (S)
• Custom search engines (S)
• Google Video Chat (S) - replaced by G+ Hangout

See also:

• Google Quick, Sick and Dead #1 (1/09)
• Google Quick, Sick and Dead #2 (11/09)
• Google Quick, Sick and Dead #3 (6/10)
• Google Quick, Sick and Dead #4 (10/10)
• Google Quick, Sick and Dead #5 (5/11)

Netflix 2011 - now we miss Blockbuster

Our family's been having trouble with defective cracked Netflix DVDs for years. Now we find 1/3 of all the DVDs we receive, and 1/2 of the PG movies, are defective. This is a major bummer because we don't do TV, much less Cable. Three DVDs a week is it.

We'd switch to Netflix streaming, but it's been a bust for us. Netflix's streaming market is not PG-13 and under.

So we've had no love for Netflix, even before they raised prices. The future is not brighter - today Netflix lost a contract with Starz, a major content provider.

Now we miss Blockbuster. Too bad Netflix did 'em in.

I don't think things will get better in the near term; there's a big fight brewing between cable, content producers, copyright holders and the rest -- Amazon and Netflix, with Apple lurking in the wings. Not to mention the bit torrent gang (go Pirates!).

I think we'll drop down to a single Netflix DVD a week, timing it so we can return a defective one before the kids weekend movie slots come along. We'll try dabbling in Amazon streaming to the Mac (Flash, yech). Too bad Apple isn't really in this game.

Carroll on Time: emergent or fundamental?

My favorite part of Sean Carroll's posts on the nature of Time was about emergence vs. fundamental time ...

Time exists...The real question is whether or not time is fundamental, or perhaps emergent. We used to think that “temperature” was a basic category of nature, but now we know it emerges from the motion of atoms. When it comes to whether time is fundamental, the answer is: nobody knows. My bet is “yes,” but we’ll need to understand quantum gravity much better before we can say for sure.

Carroll, my favorite physics blogger, confirmed that I was on the right track when I wrote entanglement and the realness of time. I wasn't just making it up! I'm willing to bet a beer that within fifteen years the consensus will be that time is emergent rather than fundamental. That's easy for me to say, I really have no idea what I'm talking about.

Reading the essay I'm reminded that in classic General Relativity Fate rules; a life history is fixed from death to birth, like the track of an ancient LP. Calvin would approve.

I wonder if Carroll holds that opinion as well, updated for an era of Quantum Gravity perhaps with a twist of the many worlds interpretation of QM.

Modern physics is so weird.

Google's identity failure: recreating the joy of Buzz

Google + requires us to use our "true name". In may case John F, not "John Gordon" or any of my other aliases.

Charlie Stross has a good rant on why this is a bad idea. He finishes with a set of solid recommendations (emphases mine) ...

Google is wrong about the root cause of online trolling and other forms of sociopathic behaviour. It's nothing to do with anonymity. Rather, it's to do with the evanescence of online identity. People who have long term online identities (regardless of whether they're pseudonymous or not) tend to protect their reputations. Trolls, in contrast, use throw-away identities because it's not a real identity to them: it's a sock puppet they wave in the face of their victim to torment them. Forcing people to use their real name online won't magically induce civility: the trolls don't care. Identity, to them, is something that exists in the room with the big blue ceiling, away from the keyboard. Stuff in the glowing screen is imaginary and of no consequence.

If Google want to do it right, they're going to have to ditch their naming policy completely and redo from scratch.

To get it right, they need to acknowledge that not everyone has a name of the form John Smith or Jane Doe; that not everyone uses the same character set or same number of names. They might be able to get away with insisting on a name that appears on a piece of government-issued ID; but then they need to acknowledge that people have legitimate reasons for using one or more pseudonyms, allow users to register pseudonyms associated with that name, attach pseudonyms to different (or even overlapping) circles of friends, and give the user a "keep my real name secret" check-button. Then and only then they'll begin to develop a system that has some hope of working.

I can't improve on Charlie's rant. He's one of many, but he says it well.

Unfortunately, this isn't the first time Google got it wrong. They made the exact same mistake with the Buzz Profile. I wrote about that over a year ago ...

Gordon's Notes: The Buzz profile problem: I am Legion (feb 2010)

I am father, brother, in-law, son, and spouse. I am coach. I am volunteer. I am citizen and activist. I am a physician. I am an (adjunct) professor. I am an oddity in a large, conservative, publicly traded corporation. In the corporation I am a team member, known to some customers, occasionally publicly facing, known in various ways and various places. I have other roles and have had many more over time.

I am Legion. So are most middle-aged persons.

Only one person knows all the roles and all of the stories that are not excruciatingly boring (hi Emily).

That’s the problem with Google Buzz, and why my Google Profile doesn’t include my pseudonymous (John Gordon) blog postings or my Google Shared items.

Buzz is tightly linked to my Google Profile, and my Profile is trivially discoverable. I don’t want corporate HR or a customer or business partner to instantly know that I’m a commie pinko Obamafanboy with a dysfunctional Steve Jobs relationship.

I have LinkedIn as my bland corporate face, and, despite Facebook’s innate evilness, a FB profile for friends and family. Inside the corporation I’ve a blog that serves as a limited persona.

We all have many roles, identities, avatars, personae, limited liability personae, characters, facets and so on. The problem with Buzz today is that it’s tied to the Google Profile, and that profile is the closest thing to my unified public face. It crosses boundaries. So it can only hold the limited information channels that are available to all.

Google hasn't learned enough from the disastrous failure of Buzz. They're repeating old mistakes, and seeing old results. Already G+ activity seems to be falling, and losing people like Stross isn't helping.

This can be fixed. Like Charlie says - give us a hard identity that the police can track if need be. Tie it to credit cards. Heck, for a fee "validate it" so we can better protect ourselves against identity theft. Then give us as many pseudonyms as we want, and give us tools to manage them while keeping our TrueName to ourselves.

AT&T: In case you forget why you hate the company (but not the customer reps)

I had another set of AT&T interactions when I added son #2 to our AT&T famlly plan ($10 a month). They reminded me why I fear and despise AT&T.

Surprisingly, they also reminded me that AT&T has exceptionally pleasant and agreeable service representatives. They are even more agreeable than the average Apple store staffer. How can such an evil company have such pleasant customer service [1]? It's a mystery. My best guess is a mixture of brain implants and illegal substances.

The first upset came about when I tried to add son #2 through the AT&T web site. I didn't want a contract or subsidized phone, and the site assumes that. I cancelled out. That is, I thought I cancelled out. I found out the next day that I'd unwittingly switched from my text messaging plan to a new plan. This turned out to have  silver lining, as the new plan is the same price and adds unlimited mobile-to-mobile calling - an unannounced upgrade to match the competition. Despite the upside, this was an occult contract change. I hate occult contract changes.

The next (minor) aggravation came when I realized I had to go in and turn off AT&T marketing for my son's phone. Yes, AT&T spam text is an opt in feature. If you don't want AT&T spam text you have to opt out -- for every phone.

The big aggravation came when I was warned that AT&T will enroll him in a data plan if I switch his SIM card to a "smartphone", even if the "smartphone" never uses data and even though he doesn't have an AT&T phone and isn't on an AT&T contract.

This is so wrong. I think AT&T tries to justify this is as a "feature" to prevent high fees for out-of-contract data use, but really it's pure evil. It makes old iPhones much less useful and drives new phone purchase and data contracts. (If you have to pay a data fee without a phone, might as well get a subsidized iPhone so part of the fee goes to Apple.)

There's a twist, however. I've written about this before: Does anyone know what AT&T's smartphone data plan rules really are?. It's not at all clear, despite what AT&T reps are told, that this automatic enrollment applies when a user doesn't have a contract. Son #1's iPhone has been on our family plan for over a year and he's never been enrolled. (Maybe the trick is his iPhone has never used AT&T data services, so it hasn't triggered their enrollment.)

Al Franken is our Senator, and he's going to be interrogating AT&T about their T-mobile acquisition. I'll remind him to ask about their obligatory data plan.

- fn -

[1] For example, today's rep convinced me to drop from 1400 min to 700 min on our family plan. This means we lose the Google Voice friendly (but meaningless otherwise) "A List" feature, but that's offset by their mobile-to-mobile/unlimited texting plan.

See also:

• Does anyone know what AT&T's smartphone data plan rules really are? (8/2010)
• AT&T Contracts, Terms of Service and Plan Terms – observations of interest (6/2010)
• Gordon's Tech: AT&T will data block a phone - but this disables MMS messaging
• AT&T’s secret Nov 2009 mobile contract change – Elegant Evil
• John's head explodes: AT&T rebate paid with an AT&T debit card (1/2008)
• Head still exploding: The AT&T mobile phone rebate card scam (3/2008)
• Mobile phone fraud - The accidental data charge and other scams (11/2009)
• AT&T is a partner to phone scams that target the vulnerable elderly (4/2009)
• AT&T sends more SMS Spam, locusts infest exec underwear (2/2009)
• Annals of idiocy - AT&T spams customers about a TV show (1/2009)

Communication and collaboration: We have the pieces, but not the puzzle

The geeks of my tribe share two obsessions.

We are obsessed with managing and extending our knowledge.

We are obsessed with communication and collaboration (C&C).

These are good times for us, but they could be much better. We've seen the pieces of the C&C puzzle come and go, almost coming together than spinning away.

Things have gone better on the discovery/notification/subscription side of C&C. We have had email lists and usenet newsgroups (yes, I am old); now we have Atom/RSS Pub/Sub standards, Google Reader (tragically dying), Facebook, Twitter and Google+. There's even Yammer, a corporate clone of Facebook with some G+ thrown in.

Alas, the publication side of C&C has stalled. We have had these pieces wax and wain:

• Vermeer/Microsoft's FrontPage 98 (RIP @1999) -- a true ancestor of the Wiki
• The wiki. I've largely used Sharepoint, which is more than a little similar to FrontPage.
• Blogs with APIs that support rich editing tools (sorry, web tools aren't there yet).
• Onfolio/Microsoft's Windows Live Writer and Red Sweater's MarsEdit (OS X). The former is in maintenance mode (at best), the latter is much less capable but is being actively maintained.

It's frustrating to have the pieces, but not the puzzle. We want a solution that has these features

1. The power and authoring speed of Windows Live Writer/FrontPage 98 client.
2. Content display that support both item based and web-like navigation. We had much of this with FrontPage 13 years ago and you can see much of this in Sharepoint 2007's odd wiki. It's very easy to imagine a set of articles appearing as both a blog and a wiki.
3. Change notification.

Incidentally, we also want this publishing platform to be easily used as a personal platform and a public platform, and we want to the two to optionally synchronize via Dropbox or the equivalent.

Oh, yeah, and it needs to have a published and open API (though it doesn't need to be open source).

This isn't so hard, really. Give me $30 million and I'll make it happen. I promise.

See also:

• Vermeer/FrontPage lives in Sharepoint Wiki (6/08)
• Chaos at Microsoft: the story of Windows Live Toolbar, Onfolio and Writer (10/2006)
• RIP Onfolio - the last of the standalone XP feed readers (9/2008)
• Gordon's Notes: Lessons from Microsoft SharePoint (5/2008)
• Front Page 97/98/2000, Personal Web Server: my old FP web page. Lots of prior art there for better or worse.
• MarsEdit 3.1.3 - Still not Windows Live Writer, but definitely worth the money (5/2010) - it continues to slowly improve. The image management is still minimal and the editor still struggles with Google quirks (WLW doesn't have problems).
• Blogger's text editor: I make another plea for a rational approach to paragraph formatting (3/2011) - I'm not in love with Blogger.
• Project Xanadu - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: Old ideas aren't necessarily wrong

Update: Since writing this I decided to install the latest version of WLW, which is version 2011. It's dead. I feel the pain of the original Onfolio team. Seeing quality software die is a bit like watching a good kid turn into a career criminal.

I'm still here ...

No, I haven't vanished. I have, however, been on an epic family road trip through the data-link free wilderness of rural America and Canada -- where even Motel data connections are feeble. It's a good reminder that a large amount of North American geography is essentially off the net. Completely. I rarely see mention of that.

I have a large backlog of posts that I'll slowly mine as I reengage. The beauty of Feed/Subscription is, of course, that this shouldn't matter for most of my readers. You'll get a line item in Google Reader as I return to the usual routine ...

Starting with Google Reader: Gordon's Bundle's

My sister in law is getting started with Google Reader. I put together this set of "Bundles" for her. Google Reader users see a button that allows them to add a set of feeds in a single click. Each Bundle page also includes an link to an OPML file that can be imported into any decent feed reader.

• The NYT Bundle
• Science related
• Emily and my premium news sources
• Politics

Note that the "Bundles" feature was added in 2009 and has been neglected since. You can't delete or revise a bundle once it's created and they don't update dynamically. So the above set of Aug 2011 bundles will be less useful over time.

One last feed -- this is a feed for everything I share via Google Reader shares.

Google's non-documentation for Bundles refers to the Shared page, but today I noticed a 'create bundle' item on the drop down for Folder Settings...

See also:

• Reading the NYT for free
• Google's extremely limited documentation on bundle creation. (Note that Bundles cannot be deleted. This is obviously an abandoned feature of Reader, which is looking pretty abandoned itself these days.)

Plutonomy

Don Peck's essay starts with a bang and a neologism (emphases mine) ...

Can the Middle Class Be Saved? - Don Peck - The Atlantic

IN OCTOBER 2005, three Citigroup analysts released a report describing the pattern of growth in the U.S. economy. To really understand the future of the economy and the stock market, they wrote, you first needed to recognize that there was “no such animal as the U.S. consumer,” and that concepts such as “average” consumer debt and “average” consumer spending were highly misleading.

In fact, they said, America was composed of two distinct groups: the rich and the rest. And for the purposes of investment decisions, the second group didn’t matter; tracking its spending habits or worrying over its savings rate was a waste of time. All the action in the American economy was at the top: the richest 1 percent of households earned as much each year as the bottom 60 percent put together; they possessed as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent; and with each passing year, a greater share of the nation’s treasure was flowing through their hands and into their pockets. It was this segment of the population, almost exclusively, that held the key to future growth and future returns. The analysts, Ajay Kapur, Niall Macleod, and Narendra Singh, had coined a term for this state of affairs: plutonomy.

In a plutonomy, Kapur and his co-authors wrote, “economic growth is powered by and largely consumed by the wealthy few.” America had been in this state twice before, they noted—during the Gilded Age and the Roaring Twenties. In each case, the concentration of wealth was the result of rapid technological change, global integration, laissez-faire government policy, and “creative financial innovation.”...

I want to know what Kapur, Macleod and Singh are doing now. Six years ago they got the key components of our world right -- technology (information technology), globalization (rise of China and India), laissez-faire policy (ignoring the explosion of fraud across the world economy) and "creative financial innovation' (see fraud).

I'll be studying this essay.

Rick Perry's magic stem cell transfusion

Rick Perry is running for president. In case you hadn't noticed. This is telling ....

Perry's Surgery Included Experimental Stem Cell Therapy — Rick Perry | The Texas Tribune:

,,, The possible presidential contender didn’t reveal that he’d undergone an experimental injection of his own stem cells, a therapy that isn’t FDA approved, has mixed evidence of success and can cost upwards of tens of thousands of dollars.

The governor’s procedure did not involve embryonic stem cells, which he and many other conservatives ardently oppose using for medical research on both religious and moral grounds. His treatment involved removing his own adult stem cells from healthy tissue and injecting them back into his body at the time of surgery, with the belief that the cells would assist tissue regeneration and speed recovery.

In a statement on Wednesday, Perry spokesman Mark Miner called the procedure “successful” and confirmed that it included “the innovative use of his own adult stem cells.”...

The Texas Tribune has more coverage.

Perry used his personal political power to get a Korean treatment pushed by a Perry friend and orthopedic surgeon. Enthusiasts claim miraculous regenerative powers. (If true, incidentally, I'd expect to see malignancies too.)

Autologous stem cell infusion is a long way from proof of safety and efficacy; sadly, orthopedic surgeons have a history of enthusiasm for alternative therapies that burn money and harm patients. This fits with the GOP's antipathy to science and enthusiasm for alternative medicine.

Geezepreneurs and the depression - we're not dead yet

America is a dog that's been beat too much.

Our publicly traded corporations can't get much pull from America's dwindling middle class. Their growth and future is abroad. The vast compensation of their executives will build higher walls around the estates of the new aristocracy.

Left Behind, we are the Detroit Windows 7 of nations.

So now what?

Now we need to climb out of of the ruins. Because we're not dead yet.

We could use some help. Roosevelt style investments in infrastructure and schools would be a good thing, but they are not enough and the Tea Party is too powerful to allow them.

So instead we need lots of small to medium privately held businesses [1]. It would be great if we could get something like a national small business generation service, but good-enough health insurance, an accelerated and expanded loan program for small businesses, reduction of the tax and accounting scams that favor large corporations [2], rationalizing regulatory frameworks and providing startup education programs would all help.

Who will start these businesses? The usual suspects - the young, the immigrants [3], the restless. They're not enough though. This time America needs geezer entrepreneurs - geezepreneurs. In a global economy where talent is plentiful and cheap, we have a surplus of the undead gray without hope of retirement. Might as well use 'em.

The forty plus set aren't going to do all nighters any more, but we have learned a lot about leading and managing people, and about how the world works. I admit, even as a geezer myself, I'm surprised by how productive 60+ software engineers are. Maybe it's selection bias -- perhaps by that age only the very best are still coding. Whatever, these guys are really good, even if they need flexible schedules to help their kids, grandkids, and parents.

Small business growth driven by geezer entrepreneurs and the underemployed young. It's different. Try it.

--

[1] In theory these measures are GOP friendly. Alas, that's confusing rhetoric with reality; to the extent that the modern GOP has any guiding philosophy it would be directing short term benefits to its voters, donors, and office holders. They are at least compatible with past GOP rhetoric, so that might help a bit.
[2] Removing those advantages from large corporations helps level a currently very uneven playing field. On the other hand, they will never surrender the fruits of their political investments. So, perhaps disguised as deficit reduction, we try for reduction rather than removal.
[3] Canada mitigated its social security problem largely by importing wealthy and/or highly educated citizens. I'm amazed this isn't talked about in the US.

Update 8/17/11: See also - Tillman and Phelps, National Bank of Innovation

Lithium batteries last!

The five year old Canon lithium battery for an old camera of ours is still useful.

That's a real improvement. Lithium batteries used to die after 1-2 years.

We now return to our usual depressing posts.