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| Friday, July 5, 2002 |
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Chalk Access Reconnaissance 
| | Gary Turner: Chalkchalking. Without which warchalking would rather bloody the fingers. |
Hung over, I guess.
| | The Net was down all morning. |
More on the connection between transparency and infrastructure
| | The ice age is over. What dominates now is the Internet, with an infrastructure that consists mostly of protocols: TCP/IP, HTTP, FTP, SMTP, IMAP, LDAP, FTP, Telnet, POP3... "The history of the Net is the history of its protocols", Vint Cerf says. These are the things that nobody owns, everybody can use and anybody can improve -- although once a protocol is established, improvement tends to come in the form of additional protocols supporting additional services. These are established often by quiet adoption by many companies, rather than by loud promotion by one company. [Later...] Tim Pozar raises a bleak point about the penetration of those protocols inside corporate firewalls. |
| | Almost speaking of which, John D. Biggs has a good report on PC Expo at Linux Journal, too. I was at the show, too; but only on the last day, which I spent upstairs in the press room, getting a free ride on the show's wi-fi signal and writing stuff like that Suitwatch piece. |
The chalk spreads
| | Neoblogism: memenuked. That's how Matt Jones, warchalking's founding hobo, describes his condition after loosing the idea upon the world. |
The Good Fight
| | As Enron, Worldcom and less obvious practitioners of accounting obscurantism evaporate away like gasoline in sunlight, our curiousity about these companies' faked-up value must inevitably come to rest on the subject of::::: value itself. Like...what is this shit, and why is it so easy to lose? |
| | Lotta good it does, huh? [Aside: that link goes to a Molly Ivins piece because it's the only linkable source of a quote about "transparency" by an Enron executive. I'd rather link to the original piece in the New York Times, but it's more than 30 days old and has therefore scrolled behind the paper's $2.95/link costwall. Earth to Times: Durable links to archived editorial add immeasurably to your paper's value as a source and an authority. Whatever you gain in money by selling old "content" is exceeded by lost opportunity to increase the value of your reputation. Maybe you think that reputation is good enough as it stands, and surely that's true. But think of it this way... you've already sold this stuff once, on the day it was published. By making it accessible as a source of authority you will assure the continued growth of your reputation in perpetuity. [Later...] The Reader responds. |
| | Anyway, I've been thinking aout this value stuff ever since I had lunch in London several weeks ago with Chris Macrae (here he is, on Kynance Place, just before we went around the corner to dine indoors somewhere). Chris, whose father is the economist Norman Macrae, chose marketing as his career, is highly passionate about it, and has lately tirelessly worked to start conversations about value in the marketing context. He's got quite a project going with valuetrue.com, and he's been writing about his adventures on his blog at Ecademy. It's wordy stuff, but so is most thinking out loud, and Chris is doing a lot of it. |
| | What he's trying to do, I thiink, is associate value with transparency. While it's obvious that Enron and Worldcom thrived in an absence of it, and that this was ultimately a Bad Thing, it's not yet obvious that being clear about what you do and how you do it is by nature a Good Thing. (The cult-like value placed on secrecy is one reason.) |
| | I suggest that the value of transparency is also a fundamental condition of what we call infrastructure. We want the stuff we utterly depend on (e.g. the Net) to have no mysteries about what it's made of and how it works. |
| | Transparency is also personal. It's about our own trustworthiness. Our own deeper values. Our honesty and integrity. Our good will. |
| | Look at a company like Johnson & Johnson, whose credo (English version) is a serious foundation not only for what it is, but how it does business in the word. Now compare it to Enron. |
| | High-integrity belief systems are just one kind of infrastructure, but I'm guessing it's also one that's bound to get more exposed every day, thanks to the thinking-out-loud that people like Chris have been doing. |
| | Getting professions to embrace transparency as the 2.0 version of how they operate is going to be a slog, Chris says. Nice to see that doesn't slow him down one ibt. |
Why iRun from iRoq
| | I think the concept behind the iRock is wonderful: plug it into the headphone socket of anything (an MP3 player is the prefered choice), and it transmits the output onto the FM band. The claimed range is up to about 30 feet. Perfect for listening to your iPod on the car radio. |
| | The problem is that the iRock radiates on a choice of only four channels: 88.1, 88.3, 88.5 and 88.7. That's not enough. Say you're in the Bay Area, where KQED is putting out a 110,000-watt signal on 88.5. Even a good car radio (and most of them are remarkably good — much better than home receivers), that signal is going to blow away not only an iRock signal on 88.5, but also on either of the two adjacent channels. That leaves 88.1. But there are local signals there, too. KECG from El Cerrito High is only 17 watts, but that's enough to put a good signal over much of the East Bay. And if you live on a high hill like I used to, with great view, you're getting strong signals from all over the place. KECG was 30 miles from my house down on the Peninsula but it came in fine. |
| | Or let's say you're in Los Angeles. You've got KKJZ on 88.1, KCSN and KSBR on 88.5 and KXLU on 88.9. Since KKJZ (I thought it was still called KLON, but maybe I missed someting... whatever) is the only truly strong station among those four, you're probably best off putting the iRock on 88.7. Still, it's likely that one of the other stations will intrude while you're driving around. |
| | My point: the iRock should allow the user to select any channel on the FM band, including 87.9, which is used by only one 10-watt high school station in Mountain View, California, and a translator (weak rebroadcasting signal) in Brazos, Texas. Other than that, it's wide open (except in places where the local Channel 6 TV might intrude from 87.75). |
| | But hey, the price is right, so what the hell. Try it out. |
Actually, I'm surprised the number's that low
| | Says here 72.3% of TiVo and Replay viewers skip the ads. |
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