I'm off for a much needed vacation but I wanted to wish everyone in the U.S. a happy and safe Labor day weekend.  I've always been particularly fond of Labor Day because it's a holiday that doesn't really mean anything. 

It's a day away from labor so essentially it's a holiday that exists to be nothing more than a holiday.  No paying respect to some long dead historical figure or paying deference to your deity of choice.  Just a simple day off with no strings attached.

I'll be on vacation until the 9th and staying away from blogging for the most part but I do have a few automated posts that I pre-wrote to keep the site from going completely dark.  They'll popup every couple of days or so.

So have fun and I'll see everyone in a week or so.

I wanted to follow up on something I think I glossed over too quickly yesterday.  But in order to get us there I want to talk a little about Corporations in general.

I like corporations.  I think they, by and large, work better than any other social unit at getting things done.  But that comes at a price.

The thing about a corporation is that it's a monarchy.  The buck has to stop at the CEO which means everyone has to follow his/her lead.  In turn that philosophy has to trickle down through the chain of command.  A corporation only works if everyone down the line follows the orders of the person above them.

It is the very antithesis of Freedom.  It's servitude for compensation. 

But that's ok because each employee has the freedom to leave the company they work for at any time if they don't agree with the judgement of the people above them.  A person's entire life isn't tied to a particular job which gives them that freedom. 

The polar opposite of that is one's country. 

Having to abandon one's citizenship and leave the country is a really big deal.  That's why Governments are based around the concept of freedom.  That's why Government shouldn't be like corporations and that is why you can't move corporate positions into the Government.  Because they are designed...DESIGNED to work in a monarchy.  They are totalitarian by their very nature. 

Which is exactly why the idea of a Chief Technology Officer of a nation is foolish.  It is a simplistic answer to an astoundingly complicated problem.

In an Op-Ed for the Washington Post attorney Dusty Horwitt makes two distinct points.  The first is...

But in our information-overloaded society, the concept of TMI is no joke. The information avalanche coming from all sides -- the Internet, PDAs, hundreds of television channels -- is burying us in extraneous data that prevent important facts and knowledge from reaching a broad audience.

Lawyers are familiar with this phenomenon. In fact, they use it to their advantage: They know that if you want to hide damaging information about a case, there's nothing like a document dump to do the trick. You make the facts freely available -- along with so much irrelevant data that no one will ever find them.

That, is a point in and of itself.  He then goes on to his second point...

Rather than call for government regulation of technology itself, perhaps the best way to limit the avalanche is to make the technologies that overproduce information more expensive and less widespread. It could be done via a progressive energy tax designed to keep energy prices at a consistently high level (while providing assistance to lower- and middle-income Americans).

The reason I'm making a special effort to frame this as two points is that I don't plan to spend much time on the second point which is very likely the dumbest thing I've ever heard.  That said, this goes back to a theme I pointed to in my post last week.  This is the mentality of people who want to give Government control of technology.  Doing so means if Government feels you're producing "Too much information" Government can arbitrarily raise energy prices to prevent you from doing so. 

It's Robert Scoble's totalitarian dream come true. 

But I digress.  Going back to the first point I think there's some merit in what Mr. Horwitt is saying.  Reliable sources are being drowned out by the noise of the Internet and that is a problem not only for our Government but for our Society as a whole.  Anyone who has read the ridiculously polarized ranting of most political bloggers (and who aren't ridiculously polarized themselves) should understand what I mean.  These people should not be at the top of the Google search.

But in saying that I have to point out this door was opened by the mainstream media.  They abandoned their principles of neutrality and began to show their bias which made them no better than the crazed political bloggers out there.  In a world where Bill O'Reilly and Keith Olbermann are considered newsmen how can the mainstream media really criticize bloggers?

Which brings me to my point.  If the mainstream media wants to save themselves and do Society a favor at the same time they need to do two things:

1.  Rediscover the art of Journalism.  If you want to be considered the reliable source than you actually have to work at being reliable.  That means knowing your biases and going out of your way to counter-act them.  During the 2004 election Bob Woodward wrote a book about the Bush Administration that was on the recommended reading list of both the Bush and Kerry campaigns because it was truth without bias.  That should be the goal of every reporter.

2.  Embrace the web as a whole.  As crazed as I think most political bloggers are they're still relevant.  What newspapers need to realize is they shouldn't be competing with bloggers they should be acting as a portal to them.  Any good news paper site should allow their readers to "drill down" into the web.  By doing that they effectively solve Mr. Horwitt's original problem by putting the reliable source up front while at the same time taming the so-called "too much information" problem by providing an orderly gateway to the rest of the web.

I'm not claiming to be an expert but I'd be willing to bet my bank account on the above two steps.  It's time for the media to remember their job is to present the world to their readers.  Blogs are part of that world and finding a logical way to present them might just save the mainstream media in the long run.

Jaiku Invites, a Jaiku fan site, posts on what appears to be Jaiku's move from their own infrastructure to that of Google.  Here's the quote...

For those of you not familiar with trace routes the last few lines there show that the domain Jaiku.com is now on the google network. The IP address that it finishes at is also one belonging to several blocks used by GAE [Google App Engine]. Up until this, Jaiku.com had remained on the same Finnish server it was on when google bought it, trying to survive on just 1GB of RAM.

For those who aren't familiar with the name Jaiku was a microblogging service that competed with Twitter, Pownce, etc...  In October of 2007 they were acquired by Google and essentially shut down (existing users could still use it but they stopped taking any new signups). 

That was all we heard from Jaiku for a long, long time. 

I'll be honest, this post is less about Jaiku and more about Google's business strategy in general.  You see there are a few factors that are unique to Jaiku that make a very important point about how Google is being run internally.  Those are...

1.  Microblogging was an emerging business with a lot of attention when Google bought Jaiku. 

2.  Microblogging is not that hard a programming task.  Any modifications Google would have needed to make to Jaiku should have been fairly easy to do.

3.  Jaiku was already written in Python (the native language of Google App Engine).  The framework it was written in was not Google's preferred one (GAE uses Django, Jaiku uses Twisted) but the fact that it was already written in Python should have sped the process along a little.

4.  Jaiku had an urgent need for more resources.  As Jaiku invites puts it...

Jaiku.com had remained on the same Finnish server it was on when google bought it, trying to survive on just 1GB of RAM.

So all in all it was in Google's best interest to get Jaiku up and running as quickly as possible and the task couldn't have been much easier.  Yet it still took Google 11 months just to move it over to their servers. 

I think this proves that Google's propensity for burying the companies they acquire is not a technical problem (though I'm sure that contributes) but one of poor management.  Because this was about as easy a technical task as they could have gotten and they still fumbled the ball. 

Google is backing itself into a very uncomfortable corner right now.  They can't seem to grow organically yet they also can't seem capitalize on companies they acquire.  The problem is being hidden right now by their massive search revenues but once that stops impressing Wall Street people are going to start looking real hard at Google's (apparently flawed) business practices.  I'd hope for their sake that these problems are fixed by then.

I'm generally not one to quote Valleywag but their post entitled "Why sponsoring bloggers is a waste of money" is definitely worth a read. 

Even Scoble couldn't save Seagate. Almost a year after the hard-drive maker renewed a sponsorship deal with the prolific blogger, its stock is down 35 percent. Archrival Western Digital, meanwhile, is up 40 percent. So much for the profession of "influencer marketing," a field which has exploded since the 2000 publication of Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point and the subsequent work The Influentials. These books, translated into action by marketers, have prompted companies from AT&T to Yahoo to hire executives expressly to suck up to bloggers. Seagate's Scoble sponsorship is the purest expression of this trend. And the best illustration of why it doesn't work.

The theory it's based on is nonsense. It is true that ideas spread virally through the population. But it turns out that there's not a single set of influencers who are reliable Typhoid Marys. Duncan Watts, a former Columbia University researcher who now works for Yahoo, found in a study that the emergence of contagious ideas is random. Repeated experiments found that anyone can start a trend, and it's impossible to predict who those people will be.

Now, like any Valleywag piece they feel the need to turn it into an attack on someone but if you look below that the idea they're putting forward is actually an interesting one. 

For those who don't know I worked at a small computer store after getting out of high school.  In said store the technicians acted both as computer repair people and as salesmen.  I don't mind telling you I was uncomfortable in the latter role at first but after making a little money off commissions I "got good" real quick. 

During this time I learned an important lesson about influence which is that it isn't worth that much.  From a salesman's perspective getting someone to buy something is about getting them excited when they're in the store.  So excited that they need to have what you're selling that very instant. 

Regardless of what the so-called "influencers" in their life told them to do.

Here's a typical scenario:

• Customer needs a new computer.
• Customers goes back and forth on it for weeks asking anyone who they think knows anything about computers what to do. 
• All those people give basically the same advice "buy a big brand"
• Customer goes on line, looks at the big brands, but isn't really excited by seeing pictures of computers so they put it off. 
• One day, Customer sees the little computer shop where Tom works and decides to drop in. 
• Tom shows customer the cool games, photo editing software, music applications, etc... that could be theirs and gets them so excited they can barely contain themselves. 
• Customer walks out with generic PC from the little Computer Shop that Tom works at. 
• Final Caveat: When asked by someone taking a survey, Customer says he "took friends advice" because people get embarrassed about making impulse buys.

It really is as simple as that.  That's why I sold so many computers and that, by the way, is why Apple's cool looking stores do so well today.  Customers don't care about the opinion of so-called "influentials" they care about being excited.  Even if that isn't what they say to someone taking a survey.

So the bottom line is that Valleywag is right on both counts.  Convincing Influencers (and Sponsoring Bloggers by extension) isn't worth much because you need to get people excited about your product and being told about it won't do that.  You're far better off focusing on advertising that shows off your product and a sales experience that pushes those exciting features. 

Because the adrenaline from that will give your customer the push they need to actually buy your product.

Scoble's back to pushing his Orwellian "Government should have it's hand in all technology" agenda again.  This time he wants a national Chief Technology Officer...

On the way over to the interview I kept thinking back to our Washington DC visit. Both Republicans and Democrats told me they wish there were someone in the White House that they could talk to about tech and science issues. That seemed to support Barack Obama’s tech policy, which calls for a national CTO position.

Now first, let me just say that I'm extra sensitive about this topic right now. 

I have many friends and several family members who currently work for the State Government here in California.  Currently all those people (about 150,000) are about to have their salaries cut down to minimum wage because the Governor and the Legislature can't agree on a budget after 52 days of trying.

For the record that cut means they'll make $6.55 an hour which comes to $229.25 a week before taxes.  So if two Government workers making the average salary of $35,000 a year are married they'll see their combined monthly salary drop from $5833 to $993 with practically no warning

(The courts have stayed the decision until the end of August but a month's warning is essentially none in my book)

This sort of situation is why the last thing we need is a national, government dictated tech policy.  Because Government can't move quickly and that's exactly what IT needs to do.  A Government based CTO would need congressional approval to make decisions which would be a disaster. 

Let me give you one hypothetical scenario.  Some new threat arises and the CTO of the United States decides we need new Firewalls immediately.  Congress agrees but the Senator from Utah wants to buy the technology from Novell while the Senator from Washington wants to buy it from Microsoft.  Suddenly we're playing politics and the congress ends up debating the situation for weeks while our technological infrastructure gets compromised in the mean time.

Think I'm wrong, look at the areas hit by Katrina.  For all the political blame passed around the bottom line is the Katrina situation would have been avoided if any of the various Governments (State, Local or Federal) had managed to do their job competently.  Moreover, the situation could have been resolved in minutes had there not been a bunch of Government imposed rules that prevented competent people from stepping in (Most notably, the Military deals with these types of situations all the time overseas but they couldn't help our own citizens because Posse Comitatus prevents the use of any Military forces on U.S. Soil)

I don't think I need to point out that a virus hits much faster than a Hurricane. 

That's the point: Government, by it's nature, can only hope for baseline competence at best.  If anyone can name even one example of a Government operation that runs efficiently I'd consider rethinking my position but after spending my whole life asking that same question I've yet to get even one good answer. 

Given that why would you want to entrust more power over things, especially something as vital as IT infrastructure, to an organization (aka the Government) that has never managed to do anything right? 

Addendum: A thought that occurred to me while I was posting this…

Most Obama supporters see George Bush as a bad president with no respect for privacy and Obama as a good possible president who would respect their privacy. Hence, they’re willing to give Government control over our technological infrastructure to Obama.

Now, I’m not saying that is true (I don’t take political sides here) but let’s assume for the purposes of getting into another person’s mindset that it is true. How then does it never occur to these people that a bad President like Bush might come in after Obama and use all the control they gave Obama for nefarious purposes?

2nd Addendum: I hate doing two addendums to a post but I just love this quote from Duncan Riley because it proves exactly what I was saying the first time Scoble brought this up...

One of the promises of the Obama campaign is to appoint a Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of the United States should he win in November. It’s recognition of tech has a driving force within the US economy, and it’s an idea that I know I’d want copied in my native Australia.

This is what the whole things has been about from the start.  Bloggers wanting validation so badly that they're willing to inflict terrible consequences on the world to get it.  The message is...

"Give Government control over the infrastructure, let them dictate over the Internet and basically drive full speed ahead to the future that George Orwell warned about.  As long as someone's paying attention to me I'm happy"

Bottom Line: Technolgoy does not need the Government to validate it's importance.  It's done just fine and will continue to do so.  Bloggers on the other hand seem to want it more than anything else.

Forbes has an article entitled "Why A Four-Day Work Week Doesn't Work" in which they come to the conclusion that so called 4-40s (Working 10 hours a day instead of 8 and taking 3 day weekends) don't work. 

But there are serious drawbacks. Packing 40 hours into four days isn't necessarily an efficient way to work. Many people find that eight hours are tough enough; requiring them to stay for an extra two could cause morale and productivity to decrease. As for saving on the cost of commuting, it likely isn't true.

37Signals writer Stephen Jenkins then weighs in saying Forbes has missed the point.  He says...

The point of the 4-day work week is about doing less work. It’s not about 4 10-hour days for the magical 40-hour work week. It’s about 4 normalish 8-hour days for the new and improved 32-hour work week. The numbers are just used to illustrate a point. Results, not hours, are what matter, but working longer hours doesn’t translate to better results. The law of diminishing returns kicks in quick when you’re overworked.

Besides, very few people work even 8 hours a day. You’re lucky if you get a few good hours in between all the meetings, interruptions, web surfing, office politics, and personal business that permeates typical work day.

Fewer official working hours help squeeze the fat out of the typical work week. Once everyone has less time to get their stuff done, they respect that time even more. People become stingy with their time and that’s a good thing. They don’t waste it on things that just don’t matter. When you have fewer hours you usually spend them more wisely.

Here's the problem with the 37Signals theory: It makes no sense.

Why exactly would an employee squeeze more work out of less time?  What's their motivation to do that?  I suppose this might work if you have a job that has absolute set amounts of work that have to be done in a week but most jobs have goals that can't be given a fixed time to completion.  Which means an employee who wastes time 5 days a week could just do less work and continue to waste time 4 days a week. 

Does Mr. Jenkins really see an employee who would normally waste time at the water cooler saying "Sorry, I can't talk because I only work 4 days a week instead of 5"?  Doesn't seem likely. 

I do think the idea has some merit if you're creative with it though.  At one point we discussed an idea where Friday would be a "meeting day" and if departments could get their meetings done in less time they'd get to leave early.  The idea was to take the #1 time waster and give them an incentive to do that quickly while at the same time removing it from the rest of the week (which in theory allows people to produce more during the first 4 days). 

Sadly that plan never got implemented.

I don't know, as someone who works about 66 hours a week it couldn't matter less to me in the end.  If given the choice I'd rather have a job that makes me want to be here 66 hours a week than a job that has me looking for ways to leave anyway. 

Michael Learmonth of Silicon Valley Insider has some great news for fans of Hulu, the online video site started by NBC and Fox to stream full episodes from their various properties.  In a post entitled "Hulu Beating CNN, Turner, Still A Fraction Of YouTube" Mr. Learmonth says...

Hulu, which didn't formally open for business until March, is now the 8th-largest video site in the U.S.

That's according to new stats from Nielsen, which reports that the JV between Fox and NBC racked racked up some  105 million video streams in July, up from 80 million streams in May.

He also provides this break down of the numbers...

I am a huge Hulu fan so let me get that out of the way first.

Having admitted that I don't think these numbers tell the whole story.  A couple things to consider...

1.  The report quotes "Total Streams" but doesn't give any indication of what that means.  This is important because Hulu streams largely entire TV shows with 4 or 5 ads embeded into each while all competitors above it tend to deal mostly in short clips with 1 ad at best.

2.  Hulu monetizes 100% of their streams while others who allow for user uploads don't get anywhere near that.  Youtube, for example, is reported to only monetize 3% of their total streams putting their number at 150,727 as compared to Hulu's 105,830.  Given that and Point #1 above I think it's very possible that Hulu is actually running more ads than YouTube on a monthly basis

So it looks like Hulu is actually turning into a success which is, in my opinion, as important as news on the web gets. 

You see, Hulu was an attempt by two major studios to actually do Internet Video  right.  Hulu offers full episodes that can be embeded, shared and e-mailed just like any other type of online video.  So positive numbers are a huge thing because they mean the idea of web video is starting to prove itself. 

The theory has always been that studios should put their video out there because it will generate more money in the long run.  But up until now that's all there's been, a theory.  Hulu's success could offer substantial proof of that theory which is a huge thing.

As the business model is proven successful we'll see other studios jumping in and allowing their video "out of the box" so to speak.  Once that starts we'll begin to see a world develop where people can view, share, mashup and whatever else without having to fear copyright violations or legal action.   

In many ways Hulu is pioneering a path that all media should follow into the new age.  Allowing widespread streaming so users can determine what they enjoy and then pointing them to purchase items when they want to take them off the computer.  It's a level corporate/user harmony that the music industry should be a jealous of at this point.

Assetbar has a great post on Pandora that I honestly regret having not posted (or realized for that matter) myself...

Pandora’s numbers don’t make sense to me. Have you done the math? Have I done it correctly?

Users LOVE Pandora, but their CEO Tim Westergren says the outrageous fees being charged by sound exchange will shut them down. He apparently thinks his app isn’t worth 44 cents per month to users.

Take a look a the fees that will shut down the site: the current rate is $0.0014 per song per listener. That’s 14/10,000 of a dollar. A little more than a tenth of a penny per song. If you listened to 10 songs each hour, licensing fees would cost around 1.5 cents per hour. At 20 songs per hour, that’s a killer 2.7 cents! Hey, I could pay that.

To spend a whole DOLLAR on license fees, you would need to listen to 2,142 songs. online. streamed to you.

Read the rest here.

Tim Anderson writes a post for the Register entitled "Microsoft Silverlight: 10 reasons to love it, 10 reasons to hate it".  The title pretty much describes exactly what the article offers. 

I agreed with his 10 positives but I had a few comments (both good and bad) on his negatives that I wanted to share.

Silverlight is late to the game. Flash is mature, well trusted and ubiquitous. Silverlight 2 only comes out of beta in the Autumn (we hope). It is the version we care about - the one that includes the .NET runtime - and will still lack support on mobile devices, even Windows Mobile, though this is promised at some unspecified later date.

This seems true but in a lot of ways it isn't.  As someone who has been experimenting with Flash/Flex I have to say that, while the plug-in is more mature, Microsoft has a huge lead in the arena of developer tools.  I've been impressed with a lot of what Adobe has to offer but I can honestly say I miss Visual Studio every time I sit down to work with Flex (Flash, the program, is really a completely different paradigm making it hard to compare the two).

No support for the popular H.264 video codec. Instead hi-def video for Silverlight must be in VC-1, which is less common.

This point I'll not only agree with but go further.  There are a lot of multimedia features that Silverlight is just woefully behind in.  A big part of why I am experimenting with Adobe's technologies is because Silverlight can't take input from a webcam/microphone which is just a ridiculous omission. 

In many ways Silverlight 2.0 is still just a stopgap on the multimedia front.

It’s another effort to promote proprietary technology rather than open standards.

Again I'd go a little further and say this is an attempt to get Web Developers familiar with WPF development (Which stands for Windows Presentation Foundation and is Microsoft's new way to create desktop apps for Windows).  Silverlight is modeled after WPF and I think that drove a lot of the design decisions.  Decisions that don't necessarily work in Silverlight's favor.

Microsoft's biggest problem these days is that they desperately want to pull people back to the desktop and it's becoming painfully obvious that they are willing to sacrifice online initiatives to do it (Microsoft Mesh is another example of an online initiative practically designed to drag users back to a desktop paradigm)

Silverlight is a browser-only solution, whereas Flash can be deployed for the desktop using Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR). Having said that, yes I have seen this.

Well again, as pointed out above, Silverlight is VERY similar to Microsoft's new Desktop technology WPF.  My preliminary experience with Silverlight has been that a good modular design can allow you to carry about 95% of your code to WPF without problem.  I'd put the effort level within striking distance of the effort it takes to verify that a Flash app will work as an AIR app. 

In the end Silverlight is a Microsoft product which means they're going to iterate quickly and just keep pounding out new versions until they have something competent.  I have little doubt they'll eventually catch Adobe in terms of features. 

The questions in my mind are (a) will Adobe manage to match Microsoft in terms of development environment and (b) will Microsoft manage to turn away from it's desktop ties and let Silverlight innovate in ways that are beneficial to web development and which don't necessarily sync up to their desktop development goals.  The answers to those two questions will probably determine who comes out on top when all is said and done.