In the United States' ongoing efforts to turn the world into a padded room where everyone only says nice things and nobody can hurt themselves, our benevolent government is close to reaching an agreement with major banks to freeze rates on adjustable rate mortgages for people who can't pay.

So hey, free houses!  Under the agreement, the people who are eligible for the rate freeze will most likely be those who were able to pay under the previous rates, but aren't able to now.  Moral of the story?  If you can't pay for your house, just don't!  Because, you know, if you try to make your payment, your rates might keep going up, like it said they would in that mortgage doc you didn't bother to read.  And you won't get bailed out. 

The acrobatics our government and the financial industry are going through right now to avoid a total market collapse is making my head spin.  The shortsightedness and drug-addict behavior of the equity markets continues to amaze me.  It will be interesting to see how this unfolds.  My gut says that they won't be able to keep up this precarious balancing act for much longer, and we're in for some fireworks soon.  You can only fly in the face of common sense for so long.

I love social news sites like Digg and Reddit, but Reddit is quickly becoming my favorite.  Its users, while typically far more liberal than I, are not shy about using the site in unconventional ways.  The other day it was a method to suck money out of Giuliani's campaign, today it is this:

And, lest you doubt the power of the Social Net:

There’s been a pretty fascinating discussion going on in the blogosphere recently about the benefits and hazards of centralization on the Internet.  Three main hot button topics have come and have ignited the discussion:  TechMeme, TinyURL, and FaceBook.

If you’re not familiar with TechMeme, it’s a site that aggregates blog posts around a particular topic (meme) and creates “conversations” around them.  It’s pretty popular among the Web 2.0 crowd and many people—myself included—tend to use it as a tech newspaper.  It’s really handy in that regard, because you can see when there’s a popular topic that’s getting a lot of coverage without having to subscribe to thousands of feeds.

On the other hand, the way TechMeme aggregates the posts is something of a mystery.  It’s unclear whose blogs are on its “reading” list (my blog is part of the mix, and I’m not exactly sure how it got there), and they seem to be giving a lot more traffic to the big corporate blogs such as CNN, CNET, and TechCrunch lately. People are complaining that this is killing genuinely new and innovative memes off the site, and I tend to agree.  It used to be an incredibly interesting site to read because you’d see all kinds of offbeat and obscure ideas that you would otherwise never have heard of.  Recently it’s been more along the lines of technology news commentary, which is a real shame.  I would almost rather see the site broken up into an “A List” and “B List” site, I’d probably pay much more attention to the “B List” version.  But the point is that the one site having the power to decide which blogs are important, and thereby which memes are important, seems to be hurting the diversity and egalitarianism that made blogs interesting in the first place.  It’s a single point of failure in the brainstorming business.

And then there’s TinyURL.  Most people are probably familiar with it—but if you’re not it’s just a service that will take a long, obtuse URL and shorten it into a URL of about 15 characters.  It’s become more popular recently thanks to the micro-blogging phenomenon using sites like Twitter which let users post extremely small blog posts.  Usually the posts are limited to about 200 characters, so if you want to embed a link in your Twitter post, TinyURL is a handy little tool to help save space.

The downside, as with TechMeme, is that TinyURL is a single point of failure.  It went down the other day, and all of a sudden many, many links stopped working.  It poses the question of whether using any single point on the Internet as a conduit for so much traffic is actually a good idea, even if it makes life a little easier.  (I also have questions about where the Google juice for TinyURL’s go, to TinyURL itself or the destination site.)

And then there’s privacy—the big 500-lb gorilla hiding in the corner.  People are starting to have concerns about what Facebook and other social networks are doing with their data.  I’ve been blowing this horn for so long I’m starting to get tired, and the only way around this roadblock is to actually OWN OUR OWN DATA (duh).  IMO trying to fix the companies themselves is just a band-aid--just like tamed lion, even the most trustworthy companies can turn on you at any time ("Don't be evil" comes to mind here).  Of course, if you willingly give a company your data, they will use it to make the most money they can.  If you don't like it, you should rethink capitalism.  Don’t try to fix the companies, fix the freaking paradigm.  This is one area that needs decentralization in a bad way.

What I think is interesting is to watch this dance back and forth between centralization and decentralization.  For every two steps we make towards decentralization, we take a step backwards towards centralization.  What starts out decentralized ends up centralizing for a time in the name of progress and convenience, until the centralized systems are shattered into a million pieces as necessity and self-preservation demands it.  Technology innovation tends to happen in one spot (company, site, community, etc), and shortly afterwards that one spot becomes a centralized hub for all activity around that innovation.  Until it’s not.

This whole discussion leads to another fascinating topic, one that I think is going to be the defining trend in the next phase of Internet evolution:  personal Internet ownership.  It’s the ultimate level of decentralization, decentralizing the Internet so that it operates on the basis of each individual person, not relying on these central hubs we have today, like social networks and Old Media outlets.  Taking the Internet’s server network and turning it into a human network.

We moved from Chicago to the Boston area recently.  If you've ever driven from Chicago to Boston, you know that you'll spend about $15 in tolls along the way.  Not exactly cheap, but what's kinda nice is that the I-Pass box you stick in the window to auto-pay your tolls in IL also works in every state along the way.

So, the family and I drove out here and paid our $15 in tolls... but we also had my car moved out on a car transport--and I forgot to take MY I-pass out of before loading it onto the truck.  So my car ended up paying every toll along the way as well, while sitting up on top of a car transport.  I only noticed when my I-Pass account refilled itself halfway through the trip.  Bummer.

Moral of the story:  remember to take your I-Pass or auto-toll-thingy out of your car before you have it transported!

Found this hilarious work of Photoshop genius today, was just too funny not to share.  Now off for Thanksgiving dinner, round two :)

Ok, so this probably falls into the category of dirty pool, but... it IS pretty ingenious :)

Saw this on Reddit today:

What an innovative use of technology!  Now, I'm not encouraging this or anything... but if you may happen to feel that Giuliani is a sleazebag... and you might happen to have a few spare minutes... and you think he might have received a little too much in the way of corporate money.... well, you might want to reconsider, perhaps, this great man and beacon of liberty... by checking out Rudy's site a few dozen times, using his handy Google ads.  I guess that's ONE way to arrive at campaign finance reform!

This also illustrates the chasm between the Old Media's understanding of the way the Internet works and the way it actually does work.  They think it works like television, where you can just throw money at it and people will soak it in like zombies.  The way it REALLY works, however, is virally--that is, people tell other people about candidates, and candidates with good ideas float to the top.  It's really a good way to separate the wheat from the chaff, actually.

Viva la Internet!

When I talk to people about why I'm bailing out of the US Dollar, they usually ask why, since I live in the US.  This is the reaction you will usually hear on Old Media as well, which parrots the party line from The Fed.

Well, noted investor Jim Rogers recently had this to say about Ben Bernanke's comments to Congress along the same lines:

"He is a total fool,'' Rogers said. "He said Americans who buy only American goods are not affected if the value of the U.S. dollar goes down. I was terrified.  If you only buy American products and the dollar goes down, the price of oil goes up, copper goes up, wheat goes up,'' he said. "That affects you. He doesn't understand the economy as far as I can see.'"           

I usually end up launching into a long-winded explanation about commodity markets, the global economy, oil competition from APAC, and the depegging of the dollar.  Rogers is much better at being succinct than I am.

For some reason our government is hell-bent on understating inflation, probably so they can keep lowering rates as demanded by our screaming, kicking, pouting, crack-addicted stock market.  Reality says that inflation is far higher than they want to admit.

You know things are bad for the dollars in your wallet when supermodels demand anything other than dollars for payment and Jay-Z starts flashing Euros in rap videos.  I'm sure this is not what was intended when Congress was given authorization to regulate our money supply.

Disclaimer:  Before I get a nastygram from Cisco HR or legal, the title of this post does NOT refer to Cisco in any way but rather the Internet/technology community in general.  I just think the term "human network" is a really great way to describe what the industry is stumbling towards.

I know “the human network” is Cisco’s slogan, and there’s a lot of cynicism around it being marketing fluff.  However, I think that they actually have the right idea in making that the ideal (it was a brilliant slogan in my mind), because there’s no doubt in my mind that it’s the direction things are headed.

The latest evidence that this is happening is the recent, awkward choice of Yahoo and Google to market their email services as social networks.  (And, what's with the "Inbox 2.0"?  This versioning everything is getting REALLY old at this point.  Personally I thought "next generation" worked perfectly well as a descriptive term.)  This is pretty obviously a desperate attempt to grasp at some social networking market share—not by competing toe-to-toe against the leaders on a level playing field, but by changing the name of the playing field.  While I think it’s ill-conceived and probably won’t do anything but add some features to their email platforms, they have hit on an interesting theme that I happen to have a particularly strong interest in.  And that theme is online identity convergence, aka the march towards a true Human Network.

Back when I started my weblog, my very first posts centered the idea of taking email and making it your online identity, for single-sign on and personal identification.  Turns out that it doesn’t work very well in practice, but making your email address a central component of your online identity is, in fact, very important—even in what we think of as a typical social network like MySpace or FaceBook.  In fact, most social networks use their users’ email addresses as the ultimate key/validator/identifier for their individual users at the end of the day.  If you have to reset your password, you use your email address.  If someone wants to find you on the site, they usually have to use your email address.

The point is that, by process of trial and error, the industry is slowly figuring out that each user is ultimately identified by a node on the network, whether that is an email address or a Web address.  I’m still convinced that everyone will be identified by a URI eventually (I went into a lot of detail on that in the past, if you’re not familiar with URI’s you probably should be), using email addresses as personal identifier is a step in that direction.

When URI’s are used to identify individuals you get the ability to layer on all kinds of communications around that URI.  That includes email, Web, voice, instant messaging, presence, and all sorts of stuff.  XMPP is a great example of the capabilities that you can gain by identifying people using a URI.  The big bump in the road is that in order for this to truly work, I believe that service providers are going to have to give up ownership of their users' identities.  That’s a tough pill to swallow for them, as it completely eliminates any sort of vendor lock-in.  But it’s where things will inevitably end up sooner or later, and it’s interesting to see the contortions the industry is going thru on the way there.

The enterprise software market seems to be undergoing some major consolidation lately, Exhibit A being IBM’s acquisition of Cognos.  It seems to me that things are settling into a few different types of software, and in the spirit of the Discovery Channel special on animals I watched last night I’ve decided to stick them into a family tree:

• Applicatus Flexibulus – These applications are easy to install, easy to administer, and easy to use.  Although relatively new to the software scene, they are breeding like rabbits and have a habit of mating to form entirely new applications.  Web 2.0 companies are leading the charge in this arena.  This family of software includes hosted on-demand systems like SalesForce.com and EmployEase, Latigent/Cisco, wikis, blogs, and a wide variety of open source software (which is less polished but easily accessible).  Typically they are cheaper, have a very light footprint and are built with the user experience in mind.  Very popular with users and IT, they are becoming more and more common, killing other breeds of software by taking over their natural habitat.
• Applicatus Expensivus - Systems that are hard to install, hard to administer, and even more difficult to use.  This includes software like Cognos, SAP, and WebSphere.  These packages can be found living in mid- to large-businesses, where they are typically seen surrounded by hordes of highly-paid consultants from companies like IBM, and can be easily identified by the large amounts of training required to use them.  This software tends to make splashy entrances and then die soon afterwards, like a peacock with a terminal disease.  End users may or may not adopt the technology, depending on their tolerance for complexity and the amount of money spent on the implementation.  You may find this software attempting to mimic Web 2.0 software in an attempt to lure prey, er, customers, however if you observe long enough you will find that it tires easily and cannot keep up the charade for very long.
• Applicatus Legacus—Next to impossible to install, extremely hard to administer, and hard to use.  Typically only found in older and larger companies, this software is a dying breed, because everybody hates it and attacks it on sight.  These are the mainframe and legacy applications that have been around for years and don’t adapt well to change.  Tends not to reproduce, but puts down deep roots and seldom dies.  Many traditional enterprise ERP and financial systems fall into this category, not seeking new customers but simply sucking the blood from their existing customers until they die.  Tend to be antisocial and do not play well with other systems.

Now, if you talk to software salespeople you have to be careful because while they often claim that their software is part of the first category, they often lie.  There’s a certain amount of substance and confidence that’s needed in order to be a true Web 2.0 enterprise software package.  Substance because the software needs to be truly open and easy to use, confidence because opening up software tends to make enterprises more modular and less reliant on any one part.

Today while flying from Dallas to Chicago I did something reckless and potentially life-threatening:  I turned on my cell phone.  It seems foolhardy and reckless in retrospect, but I was curious to see what would happen.  I was in the lavatory and I turned on my cell phone, and started to play a game of solitaire.  I figured that if the airplane started to stall or nosedive I would probably feel something, and then I could turn the phone off or take the battery out quickly.  Or if the cellphone blew up it should be safely contained to the lavatory.

Well, to make a long story short, nothing happened.  I finished my game of solitaire (didn’t win) and made my way back to my seat, disillusioned, to find everything the way I left it (aside from a few angry people at the back who had been waiting a while).  And now I have to assume that either our leadership is incompetent or I've been mislead.  And what CAN I believe?  Can I talk on my phone while in flight at no risk?  What would happen if I were to bring more than 1 quart of liquid onboard?  I always assumed it would explode, but now I wonder if maybe 1.1 or even 1.2 quarts would be perfectly safe??  Come to think of it, my body is 70% water… at 200 pounds of bodyweight that means I’m carrying over 140 pounds of liquid with me at any given time!  If I assume I can carry another 6 or 7 ounces in my bladder, and another 4 ounces in my mouth, that makes almost 141 pounds of liquid I can carry with me thru security!  Is this dangerous???  What if some nefarious person were to drain some of their bodily fluids and replace it with something dangerous… perhaps we should require a blood transfusion at security checkpoints, just to be safe.

(By the way Paige, I know you were on the same flight, sorry about putting your life at risk and all…)