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Wednesday, November 13, 2002
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 Wednesday, November 13, 2002
started 11/13/2002; 9:19:46 AM - last post 11/13/2002; 9:19:46 AM
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Doc Searls - Wednesday, November 13, 2002 
11/13/2002; 1:19:46 PM (reads: 4829, responses: 0)
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More fun in Akihabara 
Alter ID
| | Grounds for Identity is my latest thinky piece in Linux Journal. Bryan Field-Elliot has a nice response, too, pointing out that strong identity services go hand-in-hand with strong DRM. I agree, but only when the subject of the relationship between the customer and the vendor is that stuff we call "content." There are all kinds of other businesses that can be built on strong identity infrastructure. |
| | For example, let's say you have a bunch of preference and relationship info that reside in your smartcard, or in a third party repository that keeps it for you (both, doesn't matter). You're travelling. You're in a rental car with a personal smart card interface. You put your card in the slot. Because you've expressed an interest in stopping for a cappuchino along the way, the car, which is equipped with GPS and receiving data from a satellite service that's already clue'd in (through your trusted repository) to your travel plans, tells you there's a Starbucks at the next exit. |
| | Or lets say you want the travel plans that you make with United known to your preferred car rental agency, automatically. Or lets say you want your relationship with American Express to include more than your buying history, your credit history and your contact info. Maybe Amex, which has an exclusive relationship with Costco, could make a business out of intermediating purchases of stuff Costco doesn't carry, but you'd still like to buy. Making yourself and your repository of personal information selectively available to companies with which you have real relationships makes lots of fun businesses possible, and none of it has to take place anywhere near the content business and the DRM mess it's currently caught up in. |
| | In any case, you're not going to get more than a tiny subset of the possibilities happening if all relationships are mediated entirely on terms suppliers alone set. |
| | We need fully empowered customers. That's what ID infrastructure is about. |
| | (By the way, I don't think Bryan and I are in disagreement about any of this. I just want to bring up non-DRM examples. I should also add that Bryan is actually doing the hard work of making this stuff happen. I'm just writing about it.) |
| | ...if nobody gets paid, the corps will do it; and if VCs ain't supporting innovation and the open source community doesn't step up and do it for free, how does it happen? |
| | There is this persistent notion that open source and commercial work are naturally opposed. They're not, and they don't have to be. |
| | In this slide here, from my OSCon talk last August (I used the same slide in my talk at DIDW), I make the point that commercial software companies don't just sit on top of infrastructure, but also contribute to it. As Dave says, "Ask not what the Internet can do for you, ask what you can do for the Internet." His own answers to that question include XML-RPC, SOAP and RSS. Those are infrastructural protocols on which businesses can be built. Dave runs a commercial software company. But what he did with those protocols counts as open source work. And it created infrastructure the rest of us are glad to have around. It's AND logic, not OR. To borrow another of Dave's metaphors, it's like mixing hot and cold water. Most of the time you need some of both. |
| | So the answer to how it happens is that commercial companies quite often do pay for it. What they get from the results is something everybody can build on. And since they've been involved in creating it, they have a competitive leg up on the competition. It's what Craig Burton calls "causing anarchy and taking advantage of it." This is what Apple is doing with Rendezvous, what IBM is doing with UDDI, what Jabber Inc. is doing with XMPP (the Jabber protocol), and what Userland is doing with the protocols I listed in the last paragraph. |
| | None of those protocols make money in themselves, any more than HTTP makes money, or the rest of the Net makes money. But each new ubiquitous protocol broadens and deepena the range of Net-based business "solutions" that can be built on them. |
Sigh for the day
| | I normally avoid politics here (AOTC gives me all I need), but since Iraq said yes, I'm breathing a little easier. |
| | As I've said before (and Glenn agreed), war at its best is a lesser evil. If we find a strategy less evil than war for doing some good in Iraq, we should go for it. |
Less is more
| | New York City restaurants are being swarmed by a fat-seeking, protein-craving army. Local dieters are flocking to low-carbohydrate eating plans that prohibit all potatoes, pasta, bread and sugar, but seem to offer unlimited access to eggs, cheese, red meat and butter. It's a tantalizing prospect: weight loss without any hunger or deprivation. |
| | Hey, I've been in that army since mid-August. I'm down more than 25 pounds. A couple nights ago I put on an expensive suit I bought the last time I succeeded on a diet, about seven years ago. That was on the McDougall diet, which is severely vegetarian. My wife and I did the vegetarian thing for a couple of years there. We ate lots of greens 'n grains, plain yogurt and other relatively taste-free stuff best suited for vegivores from a level or two down the food chain. You know: stuff that's mostly not on the menu, or the result of subtracting taste sources from stuff that is on the menu. Vegetarian burritos, for instance. We bailed and gained it all back before we took up the Atkins regime. |
| | With Atkins, you can go to a steak house and eat pretty much everything but the bread and potatoes. Fat's not an issue. Yeah, you're a bit fussy about what you don't eat, but as we see from this piece, the restaurants are getting used to it. |
| | I've taken to walking up the hill from our house. The hill rises from 500' to 900' in about a quarter mile. In the past my knees would have been groaning. Now I take it with ease, and feel terrific when I get to the top. (The view doesn't suck, either.) |
| | Some low-fatties dump on Atkins (the Times piece cites Dean Ornish, for example); but if you eat more fat and exercize more while weighing less, I'm not sure there's a problem. I mean, if I'm shedding fat under my belt, isn't there likely to be less clogging my arteries? |
| | In any case, thanks to Dave Sifry for the pointer. |
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