Most of those reading this blog know me personally, so I think it important to share with you all the recognition one of my favourite people in the world - my father, Timothy.

He was invested on Friday by her excellency Michelle Jean, Governer of Canada as a Member of the Order of Canada. You can read about his investiture in the London Free Press and Vancouver Sun . Curiously, no coverage (on the internet) is available from the Times Columnist - did they write anything?

I am very proud of my father and his accomplishments and it is heartening to see that sentiment shared by a representative of a nation. He is a model citizen and a role model for me. Despite my rather juvenile antagonism he is forever a source of pride for me, and I’m sure my family.

He casts a long and deep shadow with his attainment, however he has always been a source of vigor and clarity in my rather tumultuous journey.

Congratulations dad.

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Today I found myself inspired, perhaps accidentally in my political science lecture. Proffessor Ron Diebert was giving a lecture on internet censorship wherein he explained how and why it worked and, probably more interestingly how his Citizen’s Lab has developed methods to circumvent these censorship fire walls. The software he was demonstrating was Psiphon software which allows a user to selectively enable themselves as proxy hosts for users of computers in countries with censorship laws. Psiphon’s mandate is very simple, enable access to content and services by using a known surrogate who trusts the users accessing the system.

The first question I conjured in my mind was, “How does one establish an external connection from Tunisia to, say, Canada without having real-life connections?” Deibert’s answer was, one can’t, really. His team is coming up with a brute force solution by simply starting up a number of anonymous hosts who can be accessed by anybody - at which point those hosts will be a choke point easily blocked by the censorship walls they’re circumventing.

The other thing Deibert was careful to point out was that Psiphon is a connection mechanism - it doesn’t attempt to guide the content of transmission, it simply opens the line for anything.

This is well and good and Psiphon is an excellent start but I think there are more valuable, and considerably FAR more subversive applications to the proxy premise that might benefit activists and dissidents in places such as China or Burma. The idea leaps upon several phenomena such as viral marketing, trust networks, proxy hosts and open content formats.

A key vulnerability is psiphon is the synchronous nature of the host and the psiphonite - the host computer must be connected to the internet at all times, which, unless it is a server is unlikely. To eliminate that you must have a redundant network of nodes that can route amongst themselves intelligently, further, it will remove the existence of a supernode structure by connecting psiphonites to trusted nodes with low-latency connections.

I name my idea Leakynet - in reference to the news leak, leaking through the dam of information presented by censoring governments, and perhaps the Law of Leaky Abstractions . The idea is simple, take a newsfeed interface like Google Reader or Feedburner and build it on a P2P network. All news items are sorted based on the reliability of the source and relevance to your interests. You read something you like, you tell your LeakyNet so - next time something similar is available from the same source it’ll be rated higher - the reverse is true. A user’s tolerance levels of specificity and reliability of a source are customizable.

How do you decide, without setting up some random arbitrary connection, what trust connections a given node has? Firstly, you build on existing social networks - friend of a friend systems.

Think of four people, one of them is you, one of them is a Brumese journalist. You’re both on LeakyNet and you don’t know each other. Burmese journalist uploads cell phone footage and commentary to the LeakyNet and sends them to his friend Steve (another of the four).

Steve trusts this Burmese Journalist quite a bit (say 80%) and he’s interested in what’s going on in Burma (9 on a scale of 10, say). So Steve gets the info from his Burmese friend on the top of his list.

Steve has mutual friend with you, Cheryl, she thinks Steve is a bit of a nut so she doesn’t always buy everything he sends but usually finds him trust worthy, so he gets a rating of 60% but she’s not at all interested in Burma (2 out of 10).

Cheryl is quite skeptical and almost always trust worthy, so you trust her at least 80%. You’re pretty fascinated by what’s going on in Burma say, 6 out of 10.

Say, also, that you rate video footage as considerably more reliable than written accounting (say an addition 10% trust) putting your effective trust of this story at 90%.

After watching the video and deciding that you think it’s credible and useful you say you like this source - you’ve now created a DIRECT trust connection with the Burmese journalist. Next time he posts something, it’ll be ranked higher on your list. There’s also a confidence adjustment 1 time of 1 is significantly less confident than 99 times of 100.

Further, the more friends that have high trust ratings for a given source, the greater their score on your index. Say Steve also knew another friend of yours - that story would score even higher on the index.

The key is to separate reliability with relevance - the relevance is inherent in the content, the reliability is a quality of the producer.

When something is transmitted, it is “pushed” to your computer. If you remove something out of resource concerns, the system will push the content out to nodes who have a “warehouse” share on their drives to store content for the network.

The system would function very much like a neural net as action potentials create feedback which builds connections which change the behaviour of the next action potential. Content from low trust sources would disseminate slowly whereas high-trust sources would flash through the network.

Instead of being pull based web sites, or search-centric P2P, it would be a pushed based content channel that eliminates the inherent weakness of centralized providers by utilizing P2P transfers.

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Click Forensics just released some data on the rise of click fraud on the internet. The value of pay-per-click traffic is stiffly eroded by these measures since most advertisers will factor in the losses when quoting pay-out options. This has many effects. Firstly, it discourages publishers from scrubbing their clicks as is - since they know that the pricing scheme is adjusted. This results in advertisers placing click scrubbers on their ads which has two countervailing outcomes of decreased trust between advertisers and publishers and a huge asymmetry in the power relationship between the two.

I know I’m not alone when I say that traditional models of advertising and the mechanisms by which advertising transactions are handled are simply not sustainable. They invest more in technological engineering and “smart” advertising platforms rather than investing in smart advertising strategies.

The era of aggregated advertising distribution, where anonymous publishers and anonymous advertisers are brokered by an aggregation agency such as Google is cheap, sure, and relatively low-risk. However, cheap advertising isn’t the same as good advertising and the return seen no Google ads is routinely VERY LOW.  Google ignores a very important property of commerce - similarity usually means competition.

Partnerships between complementing groups is what Google HOPES to accomplish. Since publishers and advertisers are, if they obey their categorical limitations, complementors. The more one reads about a given thing, especially material written by experts and enthusiasts, the more likely they are to buy that thing.

An example of dumb advertising - Nikon paying into Google AdWords to have their new D-SLR on virtually every photography related website. The smart move, which they also did, construct a website made FOR Nikon Cameras feature demos of the new product, videos of people using, how-to guides (especially ones that show off SLR-only features and demonstrate the superiority of the camera). The smartest move? Take an existing photography publication and pay them to generate guides and content on how to use the new camera, send them a some models to use and give them access to resources to product high quality content.

Everybody wins, the publisher gets to produce high quality content on a cutting-edge camera, Nikon gets lengthy relationship-building advertising that generates enthusiasm for their product and the customer gets improved content from their existing publisher OR finds a new publisher with whom to establish a relationship. SEO companies get more work and online marketing people can establish a higher quality network of a smaller size by handling quality, relationship building transactions instead of throwaway contracts that last a month or two and cost a few thousand dollars.

It’s odd how the same principle in different contexts can be misunderstood. Marketing people understand the power over the customer things like celebrity endorsement has or using scantily-clad models to display unrelated products (like beer or shampoo). Whereas establishing relationships with customers by endorsing content providers they use and encouraging growth of the market-place by empowering publishers to produce high quality stuff comes across as naive or stupid. “What stops a customer from buying a Canon camera after watching our expensively produced videos on how to take good shots with exposure settings?” Mis-attribution of arousal, that’s what.

Instead we get leaderboards and skyscrapers yelling at us from the margins of Facebook, MySpace or Google - being clicked on by a tiny fraction of users, a tiny un-profitable fraction.

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For those who aren’t rabid Mozilla users, Mozilla Messaging has landed. This sub-org of Mozilla dedicated, at first, to Thunderbird is potentially able to kick Facebook right in the client. The implications of this are pretty enormous. I’ve said to several people over the last couple years that the one key technology that everyone seems to overlook insofar as innovation is email. It occupies a majority of people’s internet existence and its interactive framework set the precedent for all the social networks and other applications we’ve seen so far. Social networking apps like Facebook essentially reposit and make public your contact list - this contact list plugs into several other application that provide service - but the most important being text-based communication!

Thunderbird has the potential to complete disrupt this by eliminating the centrality of a website and allowing all Thunderbird clients to communicate in a P2P network. So people on your Thunderbird list can have access to the same functionality as Facebook but it has the advantage of a dedicated local client to leverage all the capabilities available to say Outlook or iTunes. I realize Flock sort of does that by integrating access to several networks. The key difference is that Flock accesses proprietary systems whereas Thunderbird implements open protocols (IMAP and POP3).

By essentially eliminating the need for a single monolithic middle-man we could have many social network service providers being able to integrate seemlessly with a variety of clients - the most viable and advanced being of course Thunderbird.

Mozilla could literally become the market leader in social networks by integrating open standards into its communication tool Thunderbird.

Social networks don’t dictate WHAT you send, they structure TO WHOM you communicate with. Thunderbird has handled email very well and Thunderbird 3.0 looks to improve on it immensely by adding calendaring (a major reason I still use Outlook and Evolution).

OpenSocial provides some impetus but it’s still built around the idea of a centralized network authority that enforces and reposits the social connections of its users, it’s the identity authority. If instead users could use a single identity integrated into Thunderbird to access a myriad social network services that share a common identity protocol (say, OpenID) we could kiss the days of ad-driven, profit focused crapware systems like Facebook goodbye.

If Thunderbird implemented systems for say, trust or interest networks, you could have information intelligently self-disseminate! Now THAT would be incredible - the information that I’m interested finds ME!

PS - I’ve reclaimed by blog from my server’s auto-blog roller. I’m using WordPress 2.4 and hope to upgrade to 2.5 ASAP. Various widgets will be finding their way onto my index page - enjoy.

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My friend David Eaves mused a while ago about a business/service model that only struck me now as a source for some huge growth. He described the concept as a “timeshare secretary”. Essentially, it’s a remote executive assistant. This person would be shared amongst four or five different people who pay into the services available. The XA/Secretary would receive all the pertinent information and compile it into a centralized dashboard.

This, I think is the PERFECT job for stay-at-home parents. The key here would be develop software tools that automate a great deal of their tasks and make it easy to juggle the schedules of multiple agents who are all over the field - thankfully a few organizations that specialize in this kind of thing.

So, the obvious business venture would be to create a marketplace for secretaries and agents and then do a co-operative buy-in system. The easiest way to do it, I think, would be for secretaries to establish a salary expectation, the maximum number of clients they’ll accept, and the time commitment they can make. Agents can post a job expectation description with the amount they’ll be willing to pay, any bonuses they can offer. Agents are clustered in batches and any combination that fulfills an XA’s profile notifies that XA and the appropriate agents of the match. Agents can also make bids on XAs directly in an auction format - only the number of winners is the cluster of agents who buy-in to the XA.

The system could handle things for XAs like maximizing revenue potential and filtering out postings that preclude them etc.

The key sticking points would be privacy issues, competition issues and other complications when you’re dealing with potential conflict of interest on the XA and the Agent. That said, the business venture would have to vet XAs pretty extensively before they get on the system - it wouldn’t be a free-for-all like Monster.ca

There aren’t a great deal of software tool requirements - a rollable CMS to handle scheduling, contact management and the like. Telephone routing and procurement would be the key sticking points. VOIP plans can handle the call center - style phone routing. As for purchase handling, it may not be a service we could support in the system directly.

The main benefit is for people who aren’t executives (with accompanying salaries) who have a demand for secretarial work, but not of a sufficient volume to warrant full-time employment. This system would allow such agents to find others like themselves AND find workers who specialize in this kind of professional service.

The primary profit centers would be manifold - firstly, there would be a brokerage fee for successfully transacting people. Agents would likely have some sort of pay model to have access to the system. The infrastructure would have some sort of pay model - again shouldered by the Agents. Finally, and perhaps the biggest, it would provide a gateway to larger-scale professional services firms like KPMG, H&R Block etc. Who could sign agreements with the venture to be our preferred suppliers of upstream professional services (handled by the XAs)

XAs would be stay-at-home mums or particularly vital retirees, students and young technically savvy young people. Responsible highschool students would make perfect XAs. Probably the most under-utilized sector of the populace could be working at this kind of thing.

Obviously there are very significant legal issues surrounding this concept but I don’t think they are at direct odds with the basic model…

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Anyone with their ear to the ground heard the news of this offer long before it was officially released. It’s a natural progression in the maturation of the web industry as a separate entity from the internet industry, which is separate yet again from the computer industry.

The much touted web 2.0 “shift” isn’t really a shift, it’s an inevitability of the medium. The web as an extension of reality, an appendage to the real-world and portal we use to access real-world things is on the way out. The ecology and content of the medium, the diversity of services, capabilities and sheer quantity of people connected have made it an equally valid avenue for interaction - intellectual, social and eventually physical.

Yahoo! started out as a mechanism for content integration - it quickly became a traditional content churn and stagnated. Those few innovative products it offered (like Flickr) were purchases not in-house creations. GeoCities etc all had their time and place as the vocabulary and mechanism for meaning of the web matured, evolved and was eventually discarded like the training-wheels they were.

One’s identity and location is the primary mechanism of value. Location exists outside of real-world geography and now about one’s location in social graphs, content systems, transaction networks and the like. Tools that allow you analyze flow and dynamism - rather than static content “stacks” are those that will provide the greatest value and greatest room for innovation in the future.

Microsoft is still the provider to virtually everyone’s interface with the digital world. Even IF there are large collections of users who don’t use any of their products ALL consumer software is an answer to it - unavoidably. Microsoft is the pace car of the software product race.

While it’s obvious that Microsoft stands to position itself as a competitor to Google’s advertising marketshare, I don’t think it’s a battle it can win or should even fight. Microsoft isn’t about marketing, their competencies have centered around large scale integrated platforms for productivity and interrelation. There’s still nobody who does it quite as well on the scale that Microsoft can.

Yahoo! and its properties provides a new column of channels for Microsoft to offer that same coherent, integrated service SYSTEM that it does in its operating system, office suite, web tools even gaming console. It has room for innovation through the cross pollinating of its own software - to a degree simply no other company could even dream of doing.

Off the top of my head, email and contact management is a big area that the merger could address. The cross-cutting integration of email, chat, social networks, personal homepage/blogging and say…my gamertag by having my respective applications share a centralized, open data standard would be Microsoft’s disruptive tech. It’s something Google just couldn’t do. Connecting my social networks with my Windows Media PC to share TV shows with my friends or plan movie get-togethers is another option.

Integrating Flickr with my outlook contact list and Facebook to tag and merge the resources of each is yet another simple mashup.

With Microsoft’s interests in Facebook and the potential acquisition of Yahoo! we could see a great deal multi-media social networking and social graph centric information tools.

The ads, well, they’ll make money - sure, at least for the next couple of years…maybe. New revenue models need to start coming, and fast. Advertising, the way it is used, delivered and sold, is not sustainable.

Much of Yahoo’s product offering is stagnant or obsolete, if it is to successfully leverage the $14 billion dollars in assets it needs to separate the wheat from the chaff.

For god’s sake KILL GEOCITIES.

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