Connecting the Dots

Polaroid, Nikon & Kodak

Running along the Charles River in Boston some time in 2000, I came across the former headquarters of the Polaroid company. By that time, this purveyor of instant film and cameras was already history. Having had recently finished the book, Land's Polaroid (about the formation of this company based on a truly groundbreaking invention) the dead company whose building was in front of me was startling.

Next comes the announcement a couple of weeks ago that Nikon is joining Canon in "deemphasizing" (i.e., abandoning) the film camera business in favor of digital. Now comes yesterday's press release that Kodak's digital sales last year came in at 54% of gross revenues, which is the first time in the company’s history that digital revenue exceeded their revenues from film. Kodak also reported that total losses for 2006 could exceed $1 billion.

Perhaps I'll be running in Buffalo, NY in the future and cruise by the abandoned Kodak headquarters.

What the Bleep? Evidence of Elevating Consciousness

As though you needed more evidence of how the internet and Web is accelerating the connectedness of humankind, read The World is Flat, A Whole New Mind or this article in today's New York Times (registration required).

To my amusement, the NYTimes article inadvertently presents evidence of a much more intriguing and powerful trend than "Hollywood doesn't get it": that there is a large and growing (and relatively unidentified) groundswell of seekers on the hunt for meaning, understanding, social connection, anchors, direction and legacy. Whether you deliver products or services -- and are wrestling with how to adapt in this time when people are racing from traditional media to the internet -- this group of seekers is elevating their consciousness and I'd advise us all to be watchful and in sync with this trend as it unfolds.

The article talks about the sequel to What the Bleep Do We Know?, a film called What the Bleep!? Down the Rabbit Hole.

"What the Bleep Do We Know!?," - a quirky cinematic look at the intersection of science and spirituality - spawned worldwide study groups, a cottage "Bleep" industry and a coterie of fans who have been clamoring for a sequel since the film's release two years ago.

That follow-up, "What the Bleep!? Down the Rabbit Hole," is to open in theaters in New York, California, Arizona, Washington and Oregon next month. The first film drew gross revenues of more than $11 million, not bad for a film with no immediately identifiable audience.

But Hollywood still seems to be scratching its head over the little hybrid that combined a narrative starring Marlee Matlin, animation and interviews with scientists discussing how quantum physics, molecular biology and neuroscience can affect one's everyday reality.

What is going on with people that a film like this has such a following?

A Rojo, Google & My Privacy Story

Nervous about your privacy on the 'net and your ability to control it? I'd like to tell you an uplifting story about one company, Rojo, and the behemoth search company, Google, and what happened with my privacy.

I often look at the referring pages to see how people have come to my blog or any given post within it. It's enlightening to see where people came from (which often surprises and delights me) and also to see the various search strings that ultimately led someone to click on one of my posts.

Someone did a search in Google for "steve borsch"+ Eden Prairie and ten results were displayed. Much to my horror, one of them had my full signature (address, phone, mobile #, etc.) in it. It turns out Rojo, two years earlier, had inadvertently exposed bug reports publically and Google had spidered them, rendering them searchable (Note: this inadvertent exposure by Rojo was fixed long ago).

Though it's simple to find just about anyone and data about them if you're search savvy, this was far too naked of an exposure. I immediately contacted Rojo through email. Did my email fall in to a black hole at Rojo? What was the likelihood that a major company like Google -- enbroiled with Justice Department data requests and the shitstorm around cooperating with China on their search restrictions -- would care at all about some guys exposed information being brought to their attention by a feed reader company?

Future of the Web: it's CAPP

There was quite a list of Web 2.0-ish homepage & portal offerings on Techcrunch's This Week's New Ajax Homepage today. Some I'd seen before, several were new to me. All of them made me yawn...

We don't need more homepages or portals and ways to aggregate stuff that we each can point at ourselves. There are plenty of options for that and most are woefully inadequate.

An article today in the BBC News pointed out a Pew Internet study which shows, "The internet has played an important role in the life decisions of 60 million Americans, research shows.   

Whether it be career advice, helping people through an illness or finding a new house, 45% of Americans turn to the web for help, a survey by US-based Pew Internet think-tank has found."

People are on the hunt. They want information. They want expertise. They need filtering by experts and their peers. They can't invest most of their attention and time trying to find it.

There's got to be a better way.

Is Microsoft Expression the game changer?

Before I start this gushing, enthusiastic blog post, you need to know three things:

1) I'm an open source advocate

2) Though literate with the PC and Windows, my preferred platform is Mac OS X

3) I've been on a major hunt for next generation web technologies and enablers for the new adventure I'm on.

Knowing that major changes in the paradigm of tools to build richer web applications were underway by several companies, I keep my eyes and ears open and talk to lots of people in leadership positions and just in-the-know about what's going on. Robert Scoble's post today about the release of Sparkle (the code name for the now beta released Microsoft Expression) led me to the Expression site. There are videos, you can download a beta release, and read FAQ's, specs and more.

Brain & Body Hacks

This article in New Scientist touches on something that is certain to accelerate: augmentation of our brains and bodies. People are hacking software, hardware, cars, bodies (now with tattoos), business models, music (mashups and remixing), and more frequently their brains.

WHAT if there was a drug that helped you do your job better, and your boss was pressuring you to take it, even though it could be bad for your health? There are already drugs that can boost memory or alertness, but whose long-term effects are unknown.

Having personal experience with attention deficit -- and the methalphenyidate (e.g., Ritalin) which enhances and enables focus -- I've been acutely interested in the apparent increase in non-medical use of neuroceuticals (cogniceuticals, emoticeuticals and sensoceuticals), in particular the use of drugs like Ritalin by those with so-called 'normal' brain function. This practice has been going on for many years with students (a recent law school grad I know was amazed how most of his classmates used Ritalin to focus during cram time before finals).

Think about all the steroid scandals in major league sports. Is this augmentation and hacking of the body? You bet. There isn't a snowballs-chance-in-Hades that the body builder above could've been pumped like this picture without the use of steroids...but in the future it may not matter as evidenced in the picture of the kid wearing an exoskeleton.

For more about brain hacking, see Zack Lynch's column on the Corante network and, especially, his 15 Laws of the Neurosociety.

As I read Ray Kurzweil's new book The Singularity is Near, he provides very cogent arguments about machine augmentation for cognition, as well as for our bodies...and that developments are accelerating exponentially (encapsulation here in this interview). Undoubtedly we've already been augmented in many ways with surgeries and procedures (e.g., Lasik for eyes), knee replacements, cellular manipulation (e.g., chemotherapy) and in the future exoskeletons.

As enhancements continue to increase in scope and availability -- and competitors in schools and for jobs hack themselves to accelerate their performance -- what will you do?

Connecting the Dots podcast for January 21, 2006

Lots to discuss:

• A Whole New Mind
• The Singularity is Near
• Entrevis
• Heartland Circle
• Newsvine
• Raising of the collective consciousness
• Participation, participation, participation (did I mention participation?).

Download or listen to this week's podcast

Are you hiding something?

This is being written about all over the 'net, but it is so disturbing -- and how this has added to my continued outrage over domestic surveillance and its threat to our privacy -- that I felt compelled to be yet another blogger posting about it.

According to a San Jose Mercury News article this morning, "Yahoo, Microsoft and America Online all complied with a government request for data on consumers' Web searches, a Justice Department official said Thursday.

Court documents and sources maintain the information did not compromise users' privacy.

But Google has refused to accede to government's demand, and on Wednesday the Bush administration asked a San Jose federal judge to force the Mountain View search company to comply with the subpoena."

Hallelujiah Google.

According to a Justice Department spokesman, Charles Miller, "My understanding is we were seeking what keywords are put in and URLs. Nothing personal.''

Come on...let's get real. What's going to happen if they match multiple inquiries to a given user's IP address? Think that will be "just cause" to get a warrant and go after a given searcher if, say, they were going to child porn sites? Oh yeah I forgot...the government doesn't need warrants anymore and -- similiar to dissenter's patriotism being called in to question after 9/11 -- anyone fighting this will undoubtedly be painted as "siding with the pornographers and are against safeguarding our children."

You'd better hope that your search history, web sites you've visited, library books you've checked out, non-cash purchases you've made, organizations you belong to, cell or phone calls you've made (all subject to tracking and being data-mined) couldn't possibly provide just cause to law enforcement to come after you.

You've got nothing to hide, right?

Single Sign-on, Identity Management & Trust

Thank God for tabs and password management in Firefox. Open right now in my browser are several services I use daily: my Vonage dashboard, Gmail, Typepad, Newsgator, Newsvine, Feedburner, Blue Host (my web site host), Pandora and a few others (and don't even get me started on the 15 or so newspapers and magazines that require their "free" registration!). Each require credentials (username and password) in order to use these web services and Firefox can store them for me so I don't have to remember these and dozens of other combinations.

Password management has become a running joke.

My solution to managing personal credentials is my own unique password generation scheme...but most people that I know use the same username and password across all the web sites they use (including their bank, brokerage, eBay, etc.). This is a huge problem since discovery of one combination would provide a black hat hacker with the key (or at least an idea about how you set 'em up) to a wide range of sites as well as the user's privacy.

We desperately need a better way...especially as web applications continue to explode and more of our computing life is online.

Single sign-on has been the business mandate (and Holy Grail) of the Information Technology organizations in companies for several years...especially as browser-based web applications have exploded within organizations. Having one sign-on for you and I to then have access to all consumable web sites, web applications and services would be great, wouldn't it?

There's a problem. Who *are* you and I?

Identity management is a critical key component of enabling single sign-on and access to many online offerings -- and determining who the person is actually using them. The Liberty Alliance is a promising, cooperative industry group trying to tackle this issue head-on. One aspect of the Trusted Computing initiative is to minimize fraudulent use of a computerized system or device, but facilitating identity management is fraught with peril (someone steals your laptop, knows your credentials, and can easily spoof systems telling them that it's you).

The last part of the problem I'm seeing is one that not many people are talking about: it is one of simple trust (or the lack thereof). From NSA performing domestic surveillance and a history of it in the Federal government to security expert Steve Gibson's report that there is a "back door" Microsoft put in to Windows for who-knows-what reason (though Microsoft denied it just like they did back in 1999), it makes a guy wonder if the government or even a cross-industry alliance could be trusted?

If the Web is to truly live up to the potential we all know it could (online voting, more commerce, human relationships) then single sign-on, identity management and especially trust need to be figured out.

Newsvine...

Received an invite to the private beta of a new RSS-based service called Newsvine (though I'm in the second wave of people). I like the service!

You know what though? It's kind of a mashup of concepts around aggregation, blogging and social promotion of articles.

Surprisingly, the service seems to have hit a unique sweet spot that combines the best of Digg (reader picks and promotion of articles based on, shall we say, popularity of reads); a news aggregator like Newsgator; and a *very* easy way to "Seed Newsvine" with anything a person reads while surfing the 'net through a Seed Newsvine link in my Bookmarks Toolbar.

They have a *very* interesting twist: they've added a participatory piece to Newsvine. You can set yourself up as a "columnist" and post, seed articles, place links, and more. I can see very quickly three things:

1) There will be too many columnists
2) There will be too many articles
3) People will vote for articles en masse getting to what I've said previously in posts: too much content, too little time, and I don't necessarily care what everyone else cares about.

Still, I really love how attractive it is and that it is laid out so cleanly. This makes it inviting to use and I think you're going to hear a lot about Newsvine soon.

Digital Protection: Are You a Pirate or a Saint?

Are you and I a pirate or a saint?  Probably neither....but we're all considered pirates by those wanting to protect content at all costs. Even at the cost of confused, upset and angry customers who are becoming increasingly reluctant to buy new devices and content.

This weekend I used Handbrake to take the National Geographic DVD Guns, Germs & Steel and rip it so I could put it on my new video iPod -- mainly because I haven't had time to sit in front of my TV for three hours and watch the DVD (though do have intermittent time when I'm holding my iPod and could watch this over time). To my delight and as a bonus to ripping this, I no longer had to SIT THROUGH THE NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC PITCH at the start of each segment! Like many commercial DVD's, the FBI Warning, previews and other content disallows fast forwarding or skipping to the start of the movie/content.

This behavior and ripping capability -- and being able to use content you purchase on different devices -- is exactly what the Digital Millenium Copyright Act and other digital protection schemes are attempting to stop or make so damn hard that it's easier and cheaper to just buy the content or consumable like inket printer ink.

You aint' seen nothin' yet...and the restrictions around high definition video transport will make the music DRM issues look like child's play.

Information Overload: Can you see what's coming?

As I've embarked upon a new adventure and am in the formulation stage by necessity -- and of interest since it helps me get even better at connecting the dots -- I've been investing in research time. It's key to the path I've chosen to be even more on top of the changes and thought leadership surrounding blogging, podcasting, video blogging, RSS, microformats (and all the other enabling technologies and combinations thereof). These developments are allowing us to be better able to tap in to the global conciousness of humankind like never before in history -- if there are methods at-our-fingertips to do so.

The river of content is flowing faster and faster. This river of content available on the internet is reaching flood stage and is in a variey of media types. As newspapers, magazines, radio and television lose eyeballs to the internet and become ever more desperate to cling to their advertisers, they are finding increasingly garish and dumbed down methods of getting the attention of the eyeball owners back (which, in my view, will only push people away faster). As broadband continues its adoption and more people get on the internet and attempt to connect their own dots, it's becoming exponentially more difficult to see or tap in to the collective consciousness and stay on top of changes in an industry, area of interest, or even to stay relevant in the workplace. Primarily it's more difficult to understand change and to see disruptive technologies or business models coming...and having time to act.

How can you answer the questions or understand the answers over time: What's going to happen to your industry or your job in the next five years?  To your children's future? To your health, old age, or social and political developments?  How will you know and/or see what's coming? Most importantly, how will you be able to stay on top of what Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie are up to?  ;-)

We control the internet and your use of it...

How would you like somebody to tell you for what services you could and could not use your internet connection? Or which innovation you could take advantage of and by which companies? Bittorrent? Nope...it uses too much bandwidth. A competing voice over IP (VoIP) to the one that your ISP (e.g., Comcast, Roadrunner, et al) wants to sell you? Or completely crush some disruptive telephony service like, say, Skype, GoogleTalk or iChat?

It's happenin' kids. The trolls are coming out from under the bridge's to collect their tolls.

iLife and iWork Initial Impression

UPDATE 01/14/06: added link to 1:30 screencast of iLife crashing. 

Followed blog updates during Steve Jobs keynote yesterday and headed to Apple's web site and read up on the new software and hardware. Impressed with Apple's typical prowess at streamlining workflow with applications that are gorgeous and work great, I popped on over to the Apple Store this afternoon and picked up two family packs of the new iLife and iWork '06 for $200 plus tax.

For the first time, I'm not pleased with what Apple has delivered.

Connecting the Dots podcast for January 10, 2006

Perspective on the Microsoft, Google and Yahoo CES announcements; Apple's announcement today; and a brief discussion about what I'm seeing with innovation and how that ties in to my great, great Grandfather's store: Borsch's Cheap * Cash * Store.

Download or listen to this week's podcast

Borsch's - Cheap * Cash * Store

As we all move forward in 2006, I've been thinking alot about what seems to be on everyone's mind: innovation; top-line revenue growth; doing things differently.  Couple that with my Dad turning 80 years old on January 5th -- and my working again on an important project of mine scanning and retouching old family photos all while thinking-through next steps on my life journey -- and thoughts about my great, great Grandfather John Borsch and his Borsch's Cheap * Cash * Store came roaring in to my brain.

Let me tie these together.

Letterman confronts O'Reilly's "Spin"

Link to Video

My Sunday morning surfing usually has a political bent to it. Primarily this happens since I read the local Minneapolis paper as well as The New York Times. Throw in a little Meet the Press and I spend a lot of time thinking about the world, politics and the disinformation and "we're on message" data thrown at us daily.

When a guy like David Letterman -- usually more interested in light, comedic banter -- confronts the spin doctor, Bill O'Reilly, you know that mainstream America is increasingly aware of the bombardment of propaganda we're receiving vs. intelligent discourse. This is worth the three+ minutes to watch...if only for the out-of-character confrontation by Letterman.

Grandpa and Grandma's Blog

You're looking at two of the sweetest people God has ever put on this Earth. My maternal grandparents were incredibly loving, kind, generous of spirit and, through no fault of their own, people with a narrow world view.

They were born in the late 1800's in the Dakota Territory, courted by carriage since cars hadn't been invented yet, and the most coveted job for a rural kid was getting hired by the railroad. They saw the car enter, adoption of the telephone, the Depression, both World Wars, progress in civil liberties, the landing on the moon and much more. They were almost always in perpetual disarray and befuddlement over the world and searched for any solid footing they could find. They found it in a railroad job of 44 years, their church and small town, their tiny house packed to the rafters with a lifetime of stuff. They took no risks and thus achieved little reward. Their context and world view was shaped and extended by the television and newspaper, but they questioned little.

Oh my how things have changed and no, blogs weren't around since they both passed in the 1970's.

Following a link from one blogger to another one who has been absent from the blogging scene for awhile (John Perry Barlow), led me to quite a musing about the state of global consciousness and also to where Barlow's head is at right now. I share some of the sentiment with him and commented...which led me to thinking about Grandpa and Grandma.

I've said it before, the opportunity to be connected to others thoughts, context and point of view (i.e., collective consciousness) through blogs, podcasts, vlogs, alternative news sites and more is unprecedented. That consciousness travels as fast as packets can assemble at their destination. Questioning, fact checking, truth seeking and more is accelerating shaping all of our world views.

It makes me wonder what Grandpa and Grandma would've thought if they were alive right now and young enough to handle an internet connected computer. I'm fairly certain that, at a minimum, Grandpa would've been connected to other railroad buffs who'd worked on James J. Hill's Great Northern Railroad.

UPDATE: Wow...just to prove a point that the collective consciousness is real, I had stumbled across a photo and link to a student in North Dakota with the same last name as my grandparents (I did a Google search on the surname to see what was out there on the Web). I emailed her December 7th inquiring as to whether or not there was a family connection. 55 minutes after I posted this blog post, an email arrived! She apologized for its late arrival and that she'd talked with her Dad over the holidays. Turns out her grandpa was most likely a cousin of mine and that her Dad recalls my grandpa's fathers name was Ole (it was). She and I are cousins though I don't know what level or how far removed.

Solar LED light instead of kerosene lanterns

What if this was your experience living in rural India: "Until just three months ago, life in this humble village without electricity would come to a grinding halt after sunset. Inside his mud-and-clay home, Ganpat Jadhav's three children used to study in the dim, smoky glow of a kerosene lamp. And when their monthly fuel quota of four liters dried up in just a fortnight, they had to strain their eyes using the light from a cooking fire.

I read the blog TreeHugger daily and they had this post today about low cost, highly efficient, solar powered LED lighting in rural India and how it's changing life there. The original article was in the Christian Science Monitor and is one I heartily recommend you spend 3-5 minutes reading...especially if you're a Westerner that is relatively clueless (like me) about the state most of the Third World's population lives in.

This program for lighting in India hit a hot button for me and I found this article to be very compelling. Why? A former colleague had been in community outreach and she had traveled extensively in Africa...and regaled me with stories about the poor and inadequate living conditions she came upon. This woman was working with the African nations to combat the horrific HIV/AIDS epidemic and one need she and the team had was low cost power to drive the field HIV testing devices that were about the size of an inkjet printer.

I consequently scoured the internet for human or solar powered devices, learned about the frighteningly small energy output from most alternative energy sources and the cost of battery storage of that power. Hearing tales from my colleague about how even simple lighting at night could transform a village -- let alone power for the AIDS testing box -- I was enamored with finding a way to harness knowledge around the world about alternative energy -- and how new technologies like LED's were one that could be utilized -- but wasn't able to devote the personal energy to do much myself.

"As many as 1.5 billion people - nearly 80 million in India alone - light their houses using kerosene as the primary lighting media. The fuel is dangerous, dirty, and - despite being subsidized - consumes nearly 4 percent of a typical rural Indian household's budget. A recent report by the Intermediate Technology Development Group suggests that indoor air pollution from such lighting media results in 1.6 million deaths worldwide every year."

LibriVox: Free Audio Books

Interested in free audio books? If you are, then you should check out yet another source of people investing their time, energy and effort giving and placing value in to the world.

The LibriVox project provides totally free audiobooks from the public domain. There is a catalog of works completed which include wonderful works such as Treasure Island, A Christmas Carol, The Raven, Moby Dick and many more.

"LibriVox is a place where volunteers record chapters of books in the public domain, and then we release the audio files back onto the net (via podcast and catalog). Right now all our books are in English, but we welcome all languages - we just need volunteers willing to read in other languages.

Also note: LibriVox is an entirely VOLUNTEER effort. We have no budget, no staff, everything is done by volunteers. Keep that in mind if you see some errors, mistakes, or problems with how we do things."

My intention is to participate in this effort. What saddens me is that most works in the public domain are pre-1923 due to the changes in copyright law (more about the public domain here). There are literally dozens of books I'd like to read -- that are currently out of print -- but trying to figure out who to go to, how much it would cost to obtain the rights to release an audio version in to the public domain, and then pay them is too hard.

With Google arm-wrestling publishers about Google Print (to scan and make works searchable), the Creative Commons striving to be an alternative to 'traditional' content providers, and podcasters pushing hard on the record industry to open up catalogs for mash-ups and use, perhaps win-win scenarios will come to the fore and make intellectual property more open and free.

Heading toward the Sun...

One thing I dislike about blogs is that they're positioned often as online diaries.  Unless I've been following a blogger for a long time -- and usually reading them because they're informative about something -- I don't particularly care to read about their daily lives.

One exception to that rule is Doc Searls. Because he's in-the-game in the open source and Linux world (he's editor of the Linux Journal among other things) and is an "A-list" blogger, I read his informative musings daily. However, he peppers his daily blog with an occasional post that provides his readers with personal insight into the man that has, for instance, made me want to meet him someday as we share many views.

His post today is contemplative, tinged with trepidation about troubling things that occurred in 2005, but quite optimistic and enthused about this year.  Though he's a bit older than me, I also share his sense of time flying by and that there is a sense of urgency to make impact while there is still time and energy within each of us.

The picture above is one I took while on a cruise through Alaska in the summer of 2004. Like yesterday's Alaska photo that accompanied my podcast (of a fishing trawler heading home after a day at sea), this one is apt since God wired me as a happy-assed optimist and I feel fabulous, in a great mood and atypically optimistic today and this photo says it all: the fishing trawler is emerging from the dark, is coming out from under the foreboding clouds, and is heading for the light of the Sun.