Eben Moglen on Personal Data Control

This isn’t the first time I’ve listened to this speech, but this time it really clicked. Eben Moglen speaks so carefully and thoughtfully that listening to him is a real treat. I’m not even going to try to highlight his points and pick out quotes here. Everyone should go and listen to this talk.

Other random stuff:

• A new find: Spark on CBC. Seems like a good mix of tech stories and interviews and the whole show is interesting and engaging. There’s a blog where you can join in, and you can also download the unedited versions of interviews. There’s a wiki where you can jump in and contribute to the show.
• Billy Hoffman on Ajax Security. Scary security stuff. Reminds me of this panel about the darker parts of online marketing.
• Phil Windley and Jon Udell on Online Reputation Frameworks. This is important stuff to be thinking about. Online reputation can really follow you around: it most likely never disappears.
• The Linux Link Tech Show. What is there to say about this show? I hated its aimlessness at first, but they do get interesting guests, and there’s some bits of interesting conversation in between the long silences, technical problems, and background noises. The show is at least twice as long as it needs to be.
• The SciFi Guys is interesting, lots of scifi news discussion and great guests.

Jeff Jonas on Non-Obvious Relationship Awareness

I didn’t expect to find this one so interesting (being based on casino security), but it turned out to be fascinating. Interesting similarities to this Rich Skrenta talk about Topix.

Main points:

• Put all your data in one place. New correlations and ways to analyse the data will emerge.
• With separate data spaces, you will miss important, valuable relations.
• Save queries (again, in the same space) and notify of changes and updates.
• Stored queries can connect to other queries.
• Stream data into the system and learn and fix errors (repair history) along the way.
• Sequence neutrality. End state is the same regardless of the order the data arrives.

Interesting quotes:

• “… when you dream, you’re doing deep recontextualization … to remedy some things you actually have to go offline for.”

Jon Udell interviews Stefano Mazzocchi

Mandating coherence and structure doesn’t work.

Main points:

• “Valid” means different things to different people and groups.
• Imposing structure in separate realms can and does work, but designing for interoperability between realms creates all kinds of new value.
• Just get all your data together and let structure emerge/evolve/develop.
• Don’t throw structure away, defer it until you really know what you need.
• RDF and graphs. I’ll admit right here that I don’t really understand these (yet ), but I may have to look into them more.
• Use peer pressure and self-interest to build interesting, valuable, open data sets. It’s the only way to make this stuff happen.

Interesting quotes:

• “There’s no such thing as quality of metadata.”
• “… there’s that perception that coherence is quality.”
• “Data first, instead of structure first.”
• “Just start off, and write down whatever you want, and then you can incrementally add structure to it, and make value out of the structure as you build.”
• “There’s a lot of structure in email, if you want, it just depends on what kind of structure you want to look at.”
• “A lot of the semantic web research was based on the big hypothesis that was ‘If whatever, then we could do this.’”
• “… when they show up, we can party.”
• “It’s clear now that it’s all about data and loose pieces connected together than it is about uber ontologies …”

Scott Kveton on OpenID

Nice overview of open web/social stuff like OpenID, OAuth and DiSo.

Main points:

• Keep things really simple to start. Just get basics working so we can build on them.
• The potential of OpenID endpoints for service discovery. I hadn’t thought about this, but it’s really obvious once you hear it.
• These technologies are actually great for big companies. They can make use of them without having to be the initiator and deal with the suspicion and other associated problems
• OpenID takes a big load off of developers by handling their whole authentication system for them.
• Interesting balance between design-by-committee and just-build-some-stuff with DataPortability and DiSo.
• Keep things loosely joined. Don’t depend on one tech for a task, make it all swappable.
• Being the repository for “master profiles” is valuable.
• Focus on people who already get it (to whatever degree), and build momentum. You can’t convince other people without that base.
• Building a personal reputation based on trust of opinions and knowledge is extremely valuable.
• Monetizing too early can be dangerously limiting. Tough balance.

Interesting quotes:

• “Simple usually wins in the long term.”
• “Help people discover new things.”

There’s definitely a theme there. Some other stuff:

• Jon Udell interviews Fernanda Viegas & Martin Wattenberg about Many Eyes, an interesting social data visualization project.
• Whedonesque reported that Joss Whedon would be on the GeeksOn podcast. And he was. I checked out a couple of other episodes as well, and it seems like a really interesting, well done podcast. I’ll keep listening.
• Chris Messina on DiSo is a nice introduction to the DiSo project.