Read at Joe’s

Some GM cars have a wireless communication system called OnStar, which lets you communicate with GM service people for roadside assistance, directions, vehicle diagnostics, unlocking doors and other driving and travel type of functions. I was just reading this article from 2004, that talks about all the wonderful things cars will be able to do when they’re equipped with special vehicle-to-vehicle networking. Things like traffic monitoring and safety hazards in the road ahead can certainly be done with special-purpose vehicle-to-vehicle networking.

But why bother? Why not just have a 3G wireless broadband node integrated right into the car? Then, a car could become its own little wi-fi or Bluetooth hotspot. All your wi-fi or Bluetooth devices could connect to the Internet using the car’s 3G node. Wouldn’t it be great for passengers to simply pop open their laptop, PDA, or wi-fi enabled phone in the car and have it just work? And because you’re connecting via IP, you have all the flexibility, reach and power of being on the Internet, not just connected to some proprietary, closed, auto-only network.

Almost anything you can do with a special auto-to-auto network, you can do with an IP network, and in many cases, do a better job with more choices and flexibility than a purpose-built auto network. Think of all the really cool applications you could do with integrated Internet access plus GPS. The car itself becomes a node on the internet. It could talk to its manufacturer’s vehicle support site, keeping track of driving records, trips, gas mileage and checking for service bulletins. This could be integrated with the service records for the car, assuming it is serviced at one of the manufacturer’s dealerships. If properly instrumented, problems could be diagnosed remotely.

And here’s something I’ve always wanted: be able to “talk” to my car’s internal computer system using my laptop. Why not? If the car has a full function little server in it, instead of those special purpose, non-integrable systems, the car’s server could present a web-site you could hit with your laptop through the car’s built-in wi-fi or Bluetooth network. And this could be tied in with service information at the manufacturer’s engineering and service sites. Now when the “Check Engine” light comes on, you could find out in plain English what’s wrong by going to car’s home page.

In terms of traffic and directional information, what could be better than being tied into the most up-to-date maps from a centralized repository, like Google maps? Real-time actual speeds could be forwarded to a central server (one you’d be able to choose, I’d hope) and traffic information would be thus crowd-sourced and redistributed out for rerouting around tie-ups.

Oh, and of course, you’d be able to use IP telephony over the link as well. Wouldn’t it be cool to be able to use Skype audio and maybe even video, right from the car? And by using either the GPS time information, or an NTP server on the net, the clock in the car would never be wrong again! And you’d never have to set it for time zones, since it knows where it is at all times. Now that would be a true GeekMobile!

So, there’s today’s brainstorm. I just found out through Twitter that Chrysler is indeed planning something like this for 2009. If you know of any other plans or projects like this, please let me know in the comments.

Tags: 3G, automobile, broadband, IP, networks, onstar, wireless

There’s an old expression in golf, “Every once in a while, even a blind squirrel finds a nut.” It’s usually invoked when an otherwise inept duffer (like myself) makes an incredible golf shot worthy of a pro. This applies to photograpy, too, I think. Sometimes, without realizing it at the time, you just happen to snap a memorable photo; one that captures the essense of a place or a person.

Very early this year, I visited the Boulevard Diner in Worcester, Massachusetts with friends Scott Monty and CC Chapman, both diner aficianados. I am a very old patron of the Boulevard, having gone there after fraternity parties in my college days, 40 years ago. It was great to be back, enjoying the ambience and the sausage sandwiches. I spend some time snapping photos of the place, which should really be a historic landmark. It’s a Worcester Lunch Car diner, originally built in 1936 and has much of its original woodwork and finishings. I happened to catch this view of the counter, the menu board, the waitress in a reflective moment, and the cook, gossiping with a friend.

It may mean more to me because of my college memories, but I think it speaks to a certain essential America; an honest, hard-working city; the nobility of work; the sense of place and heritage you only find in old things. In particular, I love the waitress. She’s proud, straight-backed and comfortable with her cup of coffee, looking out on the world.

Yes, every once in a while, even this blind squirrel finds a nut. I hope you’ll share it with me.

There is renewed interest in trying to construct a microblogging platform using XMPP for the “push” or notification of followers. The Open Birdcage project is aiming to

establish a full environment for an XMPP based microblogging service. Environment means the full stack necessary beginning from protocol and API definitions to server side and client side implementations.

I am hoping that this project will also be able to make a distinction between publishing of content and notifying subscribers of the publishing event. This is a generally useful function that transcends microblogging. It would be a great boon to live-bloggers, news services, live-streaming video or any publishing endeavor where time is a factor.

I’ve written in this space previously about the idea of a personal publishing platform. OpenBirdcage may give us the opportunity to decouple the notions of creating and posting content from the notion of notifying others that the new content is available.

In this decoupled model, you could choose a notification provider separate from your publishing provider, although certainly the two might be offered by the same site. In addition, you could choose multiple notification providers so if one failed, subscribers could simply fall over to one or more backup site.

This model would allow not only microblogs, but any web publisher to very rapidly notify subscribers of new or changed content without having to poll. Your personal identity and/or publishing site would present XRDS records allowing subscribers to discover your notification provider accounts, which could be totally distinct from your publishing provider.

XMPP publish-subscribe plus Atom is well-suited to this model. It would allow small content like microblog posts to be sent right in the notification, while links would be sent for larger content.

Tags: Atom, decoupling, microblogging, notification, publishing, xmpp, XRDS

To all those who wonder what people see in Twitter, I wish I could show you my Twitter stream from yesterday, my birthday. I got so many warm Happy Birthday wishes from my Twitter friends. Too many to count right now. Many from people I’ve never met in person, but with whom I’ve made a friendly relationship on the web. The wonderful thing about Twitter is that people can reach out and publicly wish you a Happy Birthday or Anniversary or whatever no matter where they are.

Thanks, Twitter friends!!

I’ve been having a little conversation on Twitter this morning with a fellow golfer in the UK (@greenfee) about the upcoming Ryder Cup matches, which will be held this year at Valhalla Golf Club in Louisville, KY on September 16 to 21. To tell you the truth, I’d completely forgotten that the Ryder Cup was this month, until @greenfee mentioned it.

Our US teams have not been faring too well in the last few of these biennial events, and got their hats handed to them in 2006 at the K Club in Ireland, suffering an 18 1/2 to 9 1/2 drubbing at the hands of the GB/IR/Eu team. So, naturally the media hype machine is gearing up for a full-court press to see if Our Boys can salvage their self-respect on our soil in a couple of weeks. The fact that it is on American soil this round only further intensifies the pressure on the US team to win.

And it’s this very pressure that, it seems to me, is responsible for their poor performances of late. But it’s not that the US guys aren’t capable of handling pressure. They stand over 2 foot knee-knockers every week that can be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, and potentially millions in endorsement deals. But that is an individual pressure. It affects them and their families, but doesn’t bring glory or shame upon a nation. That’s pressure!

Some have analyzed this pressure as something the Americans also bring upon themselves by taking the Ryder Cup way too seriously. Not that it isn’t important, but it’s certainly not the End of The World as the press would have us believe. The American teams are way too worried about losing, it seems to me, which is what causes them to clutch so much. They’re all furrowed brows and solemn concentration.

Contrast this with the UK/Euro teams. The night before matches, you’re more likely to find them out drinking together or watching sports or just relaxing. None of these Come To Jesus meetings and bed checks that characterize the Americans. Maybe it’s our long history of puritanical conservatism, but the American teams ought to emulate their opponents a little and just lighten up.

The spirit that should prevail at a Ryder Cup should be more like the atmosphere at the annual Men’s Invitational Tournament at my club, tucked away in rural Connecticut. It’s our big event of the year, and occurs on a Friday and Saturday in late July. Most every private club has some kind of event like this every year. It’s a member/guest tournament, meaning that the teams consist of a club member and a guest that they invite to participate. At our club, the competition consists of five nine hole matches within flights of six teams each. We play 27 holes on Friday and 18 on Saturday. The winning twosomes from each flight then have a shootout type of playoff to determine the overall winner. It’s a lot of fun and quite competitive but for the most part everyone maintains a sense of fun and the winners may get a few hundred dollars in pro shop credit and some other goodies. But mostly it’s played for fun and bragging rights. Sure every once in a while, someone gets bug up their nose about an alleged rules violation, but thankfully that is the exception. On Friday and Saturday there are big social events to which spouses are invited. There’s lots of eating, drinking, kibitzing and tall-tale telling. A Good Time Is Had By All, and with rare exceptions, people leave as friends and perhaps made a couple of new ones. But by the next year, only the winners remember who won and people look back on it with pleasure.

I think the GB/IR/Eu teams approach the Ryder Cup in much more of this amateur spirit of cammaraderie that you find at a member/guest tournament at a club. It’s not the prize, although that’s important, for sure. It’s the experience of competing and then, like Rugby teams, exchanging shirts at the end of the match and getting your drink on with new mates.

So, Paul Azinger, invite the other team over for some good Kentucky BBQ and a keg before the competition begins. Invite the wives, and enjoy yourselves. I’ll bet you do much better.

Ok, I finally bit the bullet and signed up for a slicehost.com account. For those of you unfamiliar with SliceHost, it is not your typical shared hosting site. You get a bare virtual server to start, with root access, that you can actually both hard and soft reboot. For anyone doing development, it’s a huge win because you can get right in there and muck around with anything you want, from enabling ports to setting Apache’s configuration. And you get guaranteed amounts of cycles. So far, I’m very impressed. It’s wicked fast (as we say in Boston) even though I only have a 256 meg entry-level slice. You can upgrade at any time and the prices for a dedicated server are really, really good compared to the other providers - only $20/month for the minimum level slice.

And so far, support has been good. This may be due to the fact that there aren’t that many customers on it yet, but I was pleasantly surprised to log into the support chat room yesterday (a Saturday) and find one of SliceHost’s developers in the room. He answered my question quickly and with a minimum of questions. How refreshing! I also had occasion to use the support email line, and got a fast answer to a really stupid mistake on my part (duh). You see, I’m a born-again linux newbie. That’s because I’ve been away from unix-style development for literally decades. It’s really fun to be back in it again, and things have come so far in the intervening years! Software like aptitude that can intelligently install *and* uninstall packages right from the command line is great. And it’s so refreshing to work on a system that is, at its base, so simple. Take apache, for instance. All the configuration is right in one text file. No screwing around with dialogs that go 5 levels deep for IIS. It’s all right there. And with PHP, you just plop the files in the right directory and they get executed, no searching for hours for the right dialog option to turn on to get the server to process scripts.

Yes, it’s a lot of fun being back in unix-land again. I think I’m going to like it!!

It’s the day after PodCampBoston3 and I’m trying to digest and internalize the experience. Chris Penn and Chris Brogan always emphasize acting on the inspiration you get from going to PodCamp. This post is about an idea that I think I will act on at the next PodCamp I go to. But since that may be a while, maybe you can act on it first at the next PodCamp you go to.

Michael Gaines, Sarah Vela, Sarah Curtis, Tracy Apps, PhilCampbell and I did a live version of PushMyFollow at PodCampBoston and during the discussion we came up with the idea of PodCamp Graduate School.

PodCamps always attract lots of people that are newbies to social media, and that’s wonderful because it’s far and away a better place to learn and connect than a traditional conference or seminar. And new people keep it fresh and exciting, injecting new ideas and opportunities to make friends.

But in the two years since the first PodCamp, in which just about everyone was a newbie, the state of social media has advanced. There are now a lot of PodCamp veterans that are beyond the “what is Twitter?” or “Social Media Marketing is about listening” stage. There are now people with some experience who want to share more advanced topics or ideas, who have gotten to the next level and want to keep breaking ground. For them, maybe there should be a slate of Graduate Level sessions. Maybe session presenters could tag their content like colleges number their courses. 100-level courses are for neophytes, 400 and 500 level courses are for more advanced topics. Someone suggested even listing prerequisites for sessions. I could have used this in my session on Distributed Microblogging. Because I wasn’t sure of the overall level of knowledge of my audience, I spent some time covering the basics of Twitter and microblogging. I then ran out of time before I could get to the part where I’d hoped to tap their collective wisdom about user-centric publishing. Had I listed the “course level”, I might have been able to get into the more interesting issues that I missed out on. In retrospect, I could have broken the talk into two sessions, a 100 or 200 level course on microblogging and a 400 or 500 level course on User Centric messaging. The ideas and concepts from the first could have been a prerequisite for the second.

I’ll wrap up with some observations about this PodCamp. The Joseph Martin Center at Harvard Medical School was the best PodCamp venue I’ve been to, by a long shot. It was comfortable in spite of 90+degree heat in Boston, spacious and modern with lots of conversation-friendly areas. It had excellent A/V equipment that worked without a hitch and without fiddling or head-scratching (for me at least). And get this: FREE PARKING right under the building. Free Parking? In Boston? That’s unheard of. I was smiling ear-to-ear upon arriving and discovering that unexpected present. There was an outage of the wi-fi on Saturday, but by afternoon it had returned. In classic right-hand-doesn’t-know-what-left-hand-is-doing style, the IT dept. had apparently scheduled a server downtime over the weekend.

The placement of food and vendor tables could have been better, as they both caused some serious congestion. Things like this that are cause people to stop and talk or make up plates of food should NOT have a major traffic path going through them. Pathways should be kept open, and stopping places should have plenty of open space in front of them.

The somewhat controversial $50 entry fee worked well in discouraging no-shows and ensuring that there were serious campers there. The crowd was, in my opinion, just the right size. I had the feeling I’d seen just about everyone there at least once. After PodCampNYC and the last PodCampBoston, there was some discussion about how big a podcamp can get and still have that camp-like feel, in which you “know” at least by sight almost every person there. This one had that nice feeling. I just find that experience viscerally different than one in which you are part of a huge, overwhelming crowd. You want that family, we’re-all-in-this-together feeling and about 300 seems to be tops for that. The venue did contribute to a positive experience, though, because it kept us all together and well-mixed, unlike PodCampNYC in which people were spread out across several buildings.

So that’s a wrap on PodCampBoston3. Thanks to the organizing committee for all their hard work and did I mention…. FREE PARKING?

Tags: boston, pcb3, podcamp

Preface: I’m not really happy about the conceptual uniformity of this post, but I wanted to get the ideas out. There are really two things I’m talking about. First is the idea of a Personal Publishing site identified by my OpenID rather than accounts on individual publishing or messaging services. The second is the notion that all messaging modalities are essentially the same in that they push or notify instead of working by polling.

One thing that’s become obvious to me after working on and thinking about Distributed Microblogging is that all forms of messaging are essentially the same. The only differences between email, IM, chat and microblogging are quantitative not qualitative. There are only matters of degree in length, asynchrony and number of recipients. While it is true that sometimes a matter of degree results in a defacto matter of kind, I’m convinced there is some kind of Grand Confluence of these different messaging modalities in our future.

I didn’t include blogging as messaging because the essence of a message is that the sender initiates the transfer. So even though you might subscribe to a blog using RSS, feed readers still operate by polling, i.e., periodically checking for something new. So blogging is still basically a “pull” operation, where messaging is a “push”.

But blogging and messaging can be thought of as similarly implemented if we separate two notions: message content and message notification. Think of sending a message as two operations. First, I create and store the message content on a place I’ll call my Personal Publishing Site or PPS. Second, I send out a short notification message to the recipients, with a link or key back to the stored post on my PPS. Third, using the link or key I provided in the notification, the recipients call back and get the content from my PPS. Now, in the case of small messages like IM, chat or microblogging, it would be a time and bandwidth saver to just send the message body along with the notification. One correlation that seems pretty consistent is that short messages like IM, chat or microblogging tend to get sent more frequently and with a shorter delivery requirement than say, email or blog posts, which can languish for days without being read.

What if all messaging operated this way? What if, instead of going to different sites to talk to friends there with different tools and capabilities, we created and sent (published and notified) all messages using our own Personal Publishing Site? What if community or other types of sites could receive our PPS messages and post copies of them or links to them?

We have a glimpse into the possibilities of this world with Identi.ca and the open source software that powers it, Laconica. What if everyone ran their own laconica service? That would be like a Personal Microblogging site. What if our OpenID page contained meta-data about what laconica server to use to contact us? What would that mean for the notion of community sites? Would they become more like simple mailing lists if you didn’t have to “go” there to communicate with your friends who might also be friends there? In this model of the world, we’d have discussions by a sort of Dueling Banjos publishing. I publish a message which you read, then you respond by publishing a message that I read. Depending on how subscription works only you and I might see the messages, or they might be seen by a wider group of our subscribers or anyone, sort of like an @ conversation on Twitter.

ps: The DISO project is attempting to address some of these issues, if you want to pop over there and do a little reading.

Tags: diso project, laconica, microblogging, openid, personal publishing

I can usually restrain myself from kvetching about bad English. I will admit it’s a thing with me. I see red when people make plurals with apostrophes. I wince when my friends online insist on using your when you’re is called for, their when they’re is needed or write then when they mean than.

Even though many of these transgressions are in hastily written emails or IMs, many appear in blogs, where you’d think people would care more about putting their best foot forward because they’re expressing their personal point of view for all to read. Even then I hold my tongue.

But today, I saw a blatant faux pas that just pushed me over the edge. I cannot remain silent any longer. This is a company’s web site. This is their product, their pride and joy. There’s only one and everyone from the CEO to the janitor has probably seen it. And here it is in screaming blue large font:

Here we have a mismatched noun and verb. It should read, “Finding events that are close to you”, or alternatively the contraction, “Finding events that’re close to you.” I prefer the former. Now, I doubt that even these idiots would say, “All my dogs is big”, but they appear to think that using the contracted form of “events that is close to you” is fine.

Alright, I’m prepared to believe that the programmer who coded this page may not have been a native English speaker, but God in Heaven Above, is everyone in the QA department, the marketing department and the management also illiterate? Did not even one of their proud Moms (probably closer to my age and schooled in an era where you learned these things in elementary school) not notice this painfully obvious mistake?

Enough is enough. Just on the evidence of either ignorance or a patent disregard for quality, I wouldn’t join or use this site until they clean up their act.

And please, tell me about any mistakes that I’ve made in this post. At least I care enough to want to know.

ps. There are places where incorrect English doesn’t bother me. These are Twitter, IM, SMS and chat. Because brevity and speed are of the essence, ur is perfectly acceptable for both your and you’re, as are a host of other inventive abbreviations, contractions and slang.

1. Adults Only airline flights. Not that some adults can’t act like babies, but wouldn’t it be nice to get on an airplane and not have to play toddler tantrum roulette with your seating assignment?
2. Adults Only restaurants. I’m paying $200 or more for my wife and I to enjoy an exquisite dining experience. Can I please have it without someone’s kids banging silverware, running amok between tables and generally making a scene? K,ThxBai.
3. Excessive Perfume detectors at TSA checkpoints (thanks, @Hooeyspewer) and restaurant entrances - complete with flashing red lights and klaxons. Ladies, get a friggin’ clue. You stink!!