For the past couple of months I have been exploring a different kind of technology, the biological ones. You see, I need a new neck.

Most of the big news in medical technology seems these days to revolve around genetic discoveries. Nevertheless, the first kind of commonly used advanced medical technologies will be in medical devices. In fact, if you have an older relative, they probably already have an artificial knee, hip or device that assists in the operation of key bodily functions. We’ll all be somewhat cyborg before we ever start routinely relying on gene therapies, which are many years from widespread use.

Most people I talk to about this expect something from the Six Million Dollar Man when they think of replacement joints. No, I will not be able to jack up a car with my neck after this surgery. I’ll just have the neck of a younger person, one made of nickel, stainless steel and plastics.

Like 27 million American adults, I have osteoarthritis. In my case, the vertebrae in my neck are expanding and have needles of calcium growing into the muscles and nerves in my neck. But the real problem is my degenerative disc disease, which 85 percent of adults begin to experience by age 50. A piece of what’s left of three completely destroyed cervical discs began compressing the nerve that leads to my left arm.

I’m 47 and have had Degenerative Disc Disease for years. During October, it became unendurable, causing searing pain all day and night. I lost the feeling in several fingers of my left hand. It is awful. I needed a body upgrade like the one in the image to the right above, a ProDisc cervical disc replacement.

Now, here’s where the inequalities start to kick in. My insurer doesn’t particularly like paying for the disc replacement surgery, preferring the established treatment, which is Read the rest of this entry »

CNET reports on Google’s efforts to expose Google Reader user’s shared items to Google Talk contacts.

The article compares this to the Facebook Beacon project, which would have made purchases and other personal preferences available to people who are Facebook friends. That’s not an exact analogy, since the Google systems bridged two different applications to expose personal data—it’s actually worse. At least, on Facebook, it wasn’t a matter of creating links between different application services, just an extension of what was shared with “friends.”

For many years, since I started covering technology in the late 80s, companies have tried these experiments with “services” that diminish personal privacy. Cookies, referral spam programs, hosted home pages that include personal data in selecting ad placements without any permission from the user—all these and many more have slowly eroded what we think of as “privacy.”

From the perspective of the long view, this is plainly a corporate strategy to diminish the expectation of privacy. It is wrong.

Let’s make 2008 the year we all work together to establish a boundary that defines personal privacy as something we, individual users, have complete control over. Freedom begins with our decisions. Make sure the user agreements you click are compatible with your expectations of privacy. Don’t sell out your personal information for empty promises. Hold vendors like Google and Facebook, among many others, to the promises they make that they will protect, not violate, your privacy.

Rest in Peace Marc Orchant

It was only a few weeks ago that Marc Orchant and I were exchanging mail about his new gig with the David Allen Company, and planning to meet this past week at one of Buzz Bruggeman’s amazing dinners.

It’s an incredible tragedy, one no one could have expected of such a warm and engaged person, that today would be Marc’s last. Marc Orchant died this afternoon surrounded by family in a hospital room one week after suffering a heart attack.

I spent a tremendously enjoyable evening with Marc and his wife, Sue, at DEMO a couple years back. In an industry packed with interesting people, he was one of the friendliest, most enquiring people I’d met. He probed for knowledge with real passion, talking about how we use technology and what ways it can be improved with genuine humanity. We became friends that evening and traded mail, talked at conferences and I followed his writings because they always conveyed the warmth of the person behind the screen.

Ironically, it was my health that was in question as we tried to coordinate a meeting in Seattle. We were going to circle back and set a time before the trip, which he had to cancel for other reasons. His last note: “K - hope it goes well. Let’s try next week.”

I know it will go well with you, Marc. You’ve provided an inspiring model for those of us who knew you and everyone who experienced your work.

Fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD–see Wikipedia) is how IBM tried to retain its dominance, what Microsoft used to cement its monopoly and, now, I suggest we review recent Google news and wonder:

Industry Leaders Announce Open Platform for Mobile Devices: In which Google and “a broad alliance of leading technology and wireless companies today joined forces to announce the development of Android, the first truly open and comprehensive platform for mobile devices.”

Google Launches OpenSocial to Spread Social Applications Across the Web: When we learn that Google’s “release of OpenSocial marks the first time that multiple social networks have been made accessible under a common API to make development and distribution easier and more efficient for developers.”

MySpace and Google Join Forces to Launch Open Platform for Social Application Development: Which marks the “joining forces” of “MySpace, the world’s largest social network, and Google as founding members of OpenSocial.

The Nielsen Company and Google Establish Strategic Relationship: Announcing the launching of “a first step,” a Web analytics “relationship [that] leverages Nielsen’s experience in television audience measurement to bring demographic data to the Google TV Ads™ advertising platform.”

Basically, four of the last five press releases from Google have amounted to “me and my friends are going to…” beat a major competitor or rule a marketplace based on pre-announcements without a great deal of substance or products that can be seen and used today. Google sounds more like Microsoft circa 1988-to-1992, when it was launching consortia right and left to block competitors without delivering much, or any, real product. Microsoft still does this, but it doesn’t enjoy the credibility (or, better, the credulousness) that greet Google announcements.

Google says “me and my friends are going to…” beat you with technologies that can’t be seen or used today.Android, the Google open mobile platform introduced today is months or years away from release, albeit some companies claim it will be part of products in the next year. Reality is nowhere to be seen or held, nor can you buy any of these big ideas.

OpenSocial, for all the noise, is little more than a loose collection of APIs that solve no new problems in social networking. I agree with Dare Obasanjo of Microsoft that “OpenSocial is to a standardized widget platform as an internal combustion engine is to an airplane. A step in the right direction but still very far from the end goal.” Sure, Dare works for Microsoft, but Read the rest of this entry »

After years of installing and managing Unix, Windows and Mac servers, I’m happily settled on Mac OS X Server 10.4 running on an old G4 system, but recently I received my upgrade Mac OS X 10.5 Server, or “Leopard Server,” and it looks like an ideal small workgroup server (of course, that remains to be seen). It combines the easy administration of previous Mac servers with improved directory and calendar serving, wikis and blogs, backup and remote access and podcasting features that are very attractive to me. I would like to run it on an Intel-based Mac Mini.

But here’s the catch: I can’t get a straight answer from Apple as to the realistic minimum system requirements to run a small workgroup server. According to the documentation and Apple’s web site, Leopard Server will run on a PowerPC G4 867MHz processor with one GB of RAM and 20 GB of free disc space. It is unrealistic, though, to think that configuration would be able to serve many network sessions, mail, podcasting or secure iChat sessions simultaneously.

That absolute minimum just happens to be the configuration of my current Mac OS X server, though I have 1.75 GB rather than only one GB of RAM. So, the question is, do I upgrade to a new server and, if so, what is the right choice in hardware?

It makes sense to me, given the comparative price of a PC able to run a Linux installation, that I should be able to run Leopard Server on a Mac Mini, which would be much more compact than my old G4 tower and fit for my decidedly intermittent heavy usage.

According to the guy I spoke with at 1-800-MY-APPLE, Read the rest of this entry »

Playing games is a great way to keep your mind sharp. Brain Age, a Nintendo DS game, says it can “keep your DS brain in shape” (I don’t think I have a DS brain) using the techniques of a Japanese neuroscientist. I’m always looking for a way to sharpen specific skills, whether it is thinking strategically or beating friends at poker. This week, I finally feel like I mastered the Jambaz investing game, coming in second out of 31 players that visit my personal blog.

It’s in these more defined undertakings that I think computer gaming can be tremendously helpful, because a computer can help you try many more strategies quickly.* When you combine that opportunity to simulate more attempts at success with competition with the crowd, as Jambaz has with its stock picking game [click here to enter], which has been running the sidebar of this blog for the past few months, I think we can start to see how social gaming can be an important and worthwhile tool.

I’ve been an investor in the stock market for a long time. However, I am a buy-and-hold investor, looking for what I consider to be undervalued shares and keeping them for a year or much longer. There isn’t much incentive, once a buy decision is made, to keep up on what is going on, because I’m confident that the returns will come. This has worked very well for me. I have no losers, and five stocks up more than 200 percent, in my portfolio now. At Marketocracy, where I’ve run a model mutual fund, I’ve sold only a few, and added fewer, stocks I bought since I started last October—my fund (listed as “MMF”) is 23.24 percent ahead of the S&P 500 since its inception and up 35.59 percent on the year. I’m pretty comfortable with my picks.

Jambaz, though, gives me an engaging way to stay in touch with what is going on with individual stocks, getting me thinking about potential buys. Having been one of the alpha testers, I’ve been playing from the very beginning. Now, I am working with Jambaz to recruit more players, because I am really finding it is helping improve my market mind.

It took a while for me to see the benefits of the “exercise” of picking the next day’s close for the stocks Read the rest of this entry »

I’m on a bit of a tear today, but it is because I just got over a week of Percodan-induced drooling after I had some surgery on my aging shoulder. I don’t know if it is just that I am coherent for the first time since last Friday or that got my teeth into this VRM thing in a way that I’m finally able to explain…. Anyway, I hope you enjoy this rant.

Another frequent trope in discussions on the VRM Project list and over the years since the Net first appeared in the public mind is the information intermediary. John Hagel wrote a whole good book about it. I wrote about it back then and on blogs in recent years, too. Today, Mark Lizar wrote to the Project VRM list:

The idea of a community driven and trusted intermediary is a very attractive model for a bank of the future. Theories that trust can be used as a currency replacing money provide a good concept of how an identity bank may prove valuable. Although I think for VRM and the user centric perspective as a whole, there is the core concept that the individual should be the identity bank. What is underlying such an effort is ‘clarity’ over control of identity.

Bank = owner? Banks don’t own the money they hold. Remember that every ledger sheet has to balance–banks make a profit on their management of money, including their own balancing of assets and liabilities as well as from fees paid for transaction (management of money) services. I agree about the control of identity—as one aspect of the problem of social and economic interaction—but not one of us is a bank. We are the source of the value a bank would like to, well, bank.

Banks don’t own money, which is technically the property of the central banks that issue currencies.

We may own our data, but it seems the problem is working not with one intermediary, as in the resource-constrained geographically disparate cash or electronic money economy, but many intermediaries in a variety of domains. Even banks have clearinghouse services.

Perhaps the better taxonomy is:

• Money = Data
• Central Banks create and own bank notes = people create and own data about themselves (and have the same level of connectivity, albeit not throughput).
• Banks = “value-added” domain-specific intermediaries
• Currency = no user-centric analog, which is why banking analogies fall down and why VRM pushes social exchanges to the fringe.

We don’t need an analogy for currency to complete this picture. We need to forget currency entirely, because it is an artifact of analog times.

Data flows from place to place, but must be recallable by the owner as the volume of bank notes in circulation may be expanded or contracted by a central bank. That leaves the bank dependent on the central bank, just as an intermediary should be dependent on rather than in control of its customers, the owners of data.

You are the central bank in the VRM world, the user-centric design world, and humane networked markets. You.

Transactions in social environments are not solely about the exchange of monetary or commercial value, as it may also be gifted value, prospective sharing of data to discover potential value (which may be the basis of a future negotiation that, if it fails, results in revocation of access to data), or may have no value (”sharing” or “altruism”). Trust cannot stand in for a currency, because it serves a different function and is variable from moment to moment and relationship to relationship across various topics.

I spent several years working with the Chaordic Commons, which was attempting to extend the shared ownership-distributed governance system that produced VISA. The type of “bank of the future” mentioned below is tremendously complex and not amenable to comparisons to cooperative banks, because there are many informal settings for the exchange of information prior to, during and after, even in lieu of, a commercial transaction that was simply ignored by banks. Indeed, many of the functions of those banks formalized processes that are trivial today. Being an objective third-party recorder of transactions and notary services were the primary value-add provided by these cooperative banks, and at a far higher cost to users than data networks require today.

So to draw out the metaphor based on this taxonomy, if money is data, the basis of exchange for either form of value may be negotiated anywhere, but the access to the actual specie needs to reside on each of our “central banks” on or controlled by our PC, phone, etc. so that the owner of that data/specie can regulate the value of that asset, and in both strictly monetary and social senses.

The problem that I’ve finally identified in my reading of this discussion over the past months is that all the scenarios proposed describe commercial transactions of one sort or another as the default design challenge, to the detriment of the much wider range of social interactions in which we use and share information.

We don’t change currencies from dollars/euros/yen/RMB to split a bill and pay for drinks among friends while using some other currency to pay for business services or capital goods, unless geopolitical borders are crossed. Money is money, give or take the current exchange rate between currencies.

We don’t call the minister to talk about giving alms in the form of livestock while insisting he pay us for what we sell him in cash.

Even in medical records we see the need for different forms of access to, and management of, personal medical information that do not relate to commercial transactions or value exchange. We don’t create medical information, we are medical information, most of it necessarily recorded by experts who interpret many factors to provide a diagnosis, treatment or as a part of wider study. We pay a doctor to see and diagnose our condition; she writes that information down not only because of the fee we paid for the visit, but for her own future use, because of regulatory requirements, the requirements of insurers and transaction processors, legal liability management and, if they participate in clinical research, for use in research. We may want to share that some or all of our medical information to find others with similar conditions or to contribute to research for a cure without ever contemplating an exchange of value.

The problem, then, is how to interact with the different intermediaries who might interact with our information in response to economic, social or survival needs. I’d wager that the majority of those interactions during your typical day, while they may be a source of value to someone, are not primarily commercial from your perspective. So, before we get to the question of the bank, we have to start with the social interactions that precede or moot the need for fixed exchanges of value.

Before we are a customer we are someone or many persona who isn’t a customer, yet in discussing this question we begin with the role of customer. That isn’t user-centric.

For many months, I have been reading the Project VRM list hosted by Doc Searls and Harvard. The putative Bill of Rights for Users of the Social Web has addressed this challenge, as well, but misses in ways similar to VRM, because of the implicit relationships between social web service providers and their customers.

A posting today on the Project VRM list by Alan Mitchell of the Buyer Centric Commerce Forum finally clarified for me the problem I have repeatedly run up against when trying to fit the Vendor Relationship Management into a social nomenclature. Alan writes:

When push comes to shove, the terms of vendor-customer relationships are either designed around the vendor’s value agenda (buy me!) or they serve the individual’s value agenda – is this the best decision for my life, circumstances, priorities etc?

However you cut it, you can’t avoid the fact that for the individual, value is defined by an improved ability to make and implement better decisions. Personal decision-making purposes and processes are the heart of the issue: everything we do follows from this.

The ‘R’ word in abstract simply skates over this elephant in the room as if it doesn’t exist. This doesn’t benefit anybody in the long run.

Ideally, in the scenarios Doc has laid out along the way, the vendor only comes calling when the customer raises a flag indicating a desire unfulfilled. That would work if life were like an economics textbook’s description of rational decisions made in a market with perfect information. Instead, folks’ attention is captured by something and they usually buy without doing any research. So, VRM is merely filling the gap between those that are satisfied with the information at hand and those that desire to negotiate or find a better deal.

Yet all these transactions take place in a continuum with our social behavior, which involves many roles and channels of communication that may serve as a catalyst to a transaction. Alan put it well: “The ‘R’ word in abstract simply skates over this elephant in the room as it it doesn’t exist.”

The problem in the extant social economy of information, both online and off, is that nothing personal is out of bounds of business interests, to the degree that we (the people formerly known as the audience) are not able to define the relationship and are forced to become “the customer” before we even want to be a customer.

The project I am currently working on focuses on what my team and I believe is essential to sustaining the difference between a social relationship and a commercial one: the control of personal information across many sites and relationships. Given that control, which is multi-directional and multi-faceted, which allows for a variety of types of relationships, we expect a lot of different forms of commercial interaction will be forged, as well as a richer variety of social relationships than the Web currently supports due to the emphasis on advertising as business model.

We believe the same information may be used in different circumstances for different types of relationships, and extracting the maximum value from that information depends on having it confidential in the new context. So, even if it has been shared before with someone, it should not be used in a different setting to elicit a transactional response, unless the customer wants it to be used that way.

Microsoft, or any of the other medical vendors out there working on this problem (look at WebMD and Emdeon, for example), will not solve this problem by creating a medical data silo, HIPAA notwithstanding. This is because the information about our medical or psychological health, for example, may be a powerful social anchor that moors us to a community, yet never becomes “public” for commercial purposes. We need to find ways to share that information selectively.

Neither will this problem be solved by building transactional silos in the midst of social fields. Both economic and social value flow over the same conduits, through the same information, so we need to focus on how and when that information may be shared as the basic unit of the problem VRM intends to solve.

I’m ultimately inclined to say that it is not a matter of putting the customer in charge, because that, too, defines a role that doesn’t fully address the use of information in defining our relationships. No one in charge is the only answer, which is a big trick to pull off. The only way to accomplish this is to build systems that serve members first, before they become buyer or seller. It’s a bigger social problem than VRM is fitted for.

Yahoo had its Democratic Candidate Mashup. Google and YouTube teamed with CNN for a series of presidential debates. It’s a troubling trend: Politics is baldly dependent on corporate largess this election cycle.

Now, you may say, “Hey, Ratcliffe, these are media companies covering the election. We need that.” But I’d only point out that these events are examples of media companies creating news rather than covering it. Like the railroad companies of the 1800s that gave a candidate a railway car and right of way on its tracks to speed them to key regions, this is an example of corporate sponsorship of the appearance of politicians. Every candidate got a car, so the railroad would have the winner’s gratitude to exploit in office.

We shouldn’t be blasé about a media company being seen by a candidate as “key” to their election, because that creates exactly the kind of quid-pro-quo relationships that undermine the people’s voice once the election is over. Unfortunately, presidents open their doors to the companies that help them get elected, not the individuals who vote for them.

In Google’s case, for example, there are some key issues that will be decided in the next President’s term: Privacy regulations, wireless access and other legal issues that could constrain or unleash Google’s earning power. Sponsoring debates is good business. Does anyone know if Sergey and Larry have been in contact with the candidates along the way, like the well-heeled influence peddlers of the past?

If these staged events are anything other than programming like you’d expect from any other media company, please continue to watch. Just be sure that you recognize that, as with any other media event, these events are controlled by gatekeepers, editors who feature particular points of view among the audience/questioners submitting their video or text messages to candidates, and it comes with advertising that have never appeared during presidential debates of the past. Nothing is changed for the better.

The Wall Street Journal today explains that analysts are no longer able to use “established Web standards” to assess the value of eBay and Amazon.com. Instead, the companies are being compared to brick-and-mortar competitors on old-fashioned metrics, like revenue per customer. The problem with this transition, which is pushing the valuations of the online retailer and auctioneer higher, is that they had to be measured by different standards in the first place.

Here’s the simple fact: Amazon.com and eBay added customers faster than any other retailers in history, because they were not geographically constrained. All stores begin with customers who spend relatively little and, as trust increases, grow revenue per customer. But analysts have consistently focused on the number of new customers in online retailing, because it was more dramatic to talk about the 100-percent growth in traffic or merchandise volume than to talk about the five-, 10- and 20-percent increases in revenue per customer each year.

Investors who looked at eBay’s most recent earnings by the traditional Web measurements, for instance, might have been disappointed. For its second quarter, the San Jose, Calif., company posted a 6% decline in listings of goods — the first time it has shown a drop. The 12% increase in gross merchandise volume, or the total value of all goods sold, was the slowest growth rate over the past year.

But by emphasizing some of the new metrics, prospects for eBay and Seattle-based Amazon look rosier. EBay’s second-quarter revenue rose 30%, its strongest performance since the third quarter of 2006, and its revenue per listing rose 32%, according to some estimates. Meanwhile, Amazon’s free cash flow — which is operating cash flow minus capital expenditures and which acts as a proxy for operating profit — rose 87% in the second quarter from a year earlier.

However, had Wall Street recognized this second element in online retailing, the inevitability of increased revenue per customer when things are being sold, Amazon.com and eBay would have remained highly valued stocks throughout their lives rather than being seen as having “stumbled” in the early part of this decade, when customer growth slowed to “normal” levels for any retailer.

Investors have actually lost value in these companies because analysts insisted on metrics they believed made the Web retailers more attractive.

The lesson is that Web business should be measured against its off-line competition at every stage in its life, even if it means acknowledging lower revenue per customer.

If you are old in Net years, like me, you’ll remember that folks used to say “Nobody will ever buy a big-ticket item on the Web.” In fact, the Web retailers merely needed to gain consumer confidence to start selling more expensive items.

Quit treating Web business as a special case and the value of real winners, as well as the hollowness of so many badly conceived Web startups, becomes crystal clear. Business is, increasingly, just business. No miracles, no magical transformations. Just hard work and luck.