Thought leadership that does not translate to leverage through exclusive ownership is an excellent paradigm for success and creating value.
Creating environments where as many as possible win as much as possible, is a more general and even more widely applicable truth super set of the above one, but it offers less useful and easy to apply cues, clues and information.
Google does a great job of that in the field of web search, marrying users seeking information on topic X and commercial entities selling topic X centric information and solutions.
The web does a great job of creating a publicly accessible place to convey, create and consume information and many aspects and sorts of culture and entertainment, largely without middle-men and gate- keepers, at least for the technically minded portion of the creative class.
Palm seem to be making a good attempt at bringing this to the mobile industry, that has been very far behind the game in those respects, so far.
Apple has traditionally been making good efforts at creating an environment where the user, the developer, and Apple, win, in their computer and to some extent music industry ma ouvers. They are doing a terrible job with their mobile app store.
Mozilla.org has made a valiant attempt at making web users and web developers win, by opening up the web browser as a platform subject to evolution without central governace and vested interest gate-keeping, but have to date done a similarly bad job with addons.mozilla.org, which has a loud primary imperative of making mozilla.org not lose, likely in some US law centric contorted version of liability. This very likely applies equally to the Apple app store.
User scripts (via Greasemonkey in Firefox and other Mozilla derivates, user javascript in Opera and Google Chrome, Greasekit in Safari and other Webkit derivates, IE7 pro, Trixie and others in Internet Explorer), aim for and to varying degrees manage to open up web content to being improved, recontextualized and made more available and easy to access to users, where formerly gate-kept by web site owners.
This post would be better contained by ending here, but I feel I want to diverge a bit into a side track about a project close to heart to me -- Greasemonkey -- and how its politics relate to the above, and what has been going on there, recently; feel most encouraged to break off reading here, if disinterested.
As a Greasemonkey maintainer, I effectively in part act a gate-keeper for what goes into Greasemonkey and (somewhat stream-linedly) all web browsers of those running it in their web browser. That does not mean I want to remove from user scripting the element of being subject to the un-gate-kept evolution, but it does mean that I have an agenda about to what extent the project and product named Greasemonkey subjects its users to security hazards, complexity of usage and opportunities for sabotage (whether through any ill intent, or merely unfortunate accidents made possible through ill-thought-through or ill-conveyed design) and irrevocable breakage.
The actual codebase of Greasemonkey explicitly does not come with that agenda, though (it is MIT licensed, which I'd say roughly translates to "take it apart, borrow or evolve parts or all of it pretty much any which way you choose, with or without attribution, but don't pass it on to others under the guise of carrying the same guarantees or governance Greasemonkey did -- such as by attempting to claim and market and redistribute it under the same name, logo and the like"), and I know I speak for both myself and Anthony when I note that we put it up on Github with the express purpose of making it easy to fork off and improve on with as little friction and gate-keeping as possible.
Github makes it very easy to do so, which is good. It is a fantastic place for rapid evolution where everybody are naturally cooperating with each other.
We're a bit sad that it unfortunately (so far, at least) does not come with enough controls and measures to bound ill effects of people that do neither cooperate nor take constructive input, but does whatever they themselves decide best. The codebase we host is protected from ill effects like that, but the wiki is not, which makes it very easy for anyone to poison projects on Github, through poking about in a project's wiki pages, under stealth guise and semblance of project officiality. This wiki can be hidden, but not turned off, and anyone following the project will get news of the latest stream of edits and spammage.
We have one or two (might be the same person, might not -- it's not important) self-appointed wiki editors doing this, disregarding from input from us maintainers, wreaking some havoc with taking the official Greasemonkey wiki's content (after having been banned there, for the same reason), reworking it and adding disinformation here and there. Very likely just from failing to realize that it is wrong, but the end effect to readerships is bad, whatever the reason.
All the good annotation support (the wiki, of commits, in tickets, on lines of source code in the repository itself, and so on) thus becomes unmanageable, when a busy agitator spams it with venomous attitude and tone, setting a example for collaboration by poisoning the well for us. The lesson in it for us may be that if we want to set a friendly tone and maintain the cooperative but guided evolution we prefer, we need to self host the repository and all of the channels we operate, though the only thing we really care about is the project itself and how our efforts in that direction don't get wasted on administrativia and baby-sitting unlistening back seat drivers.
I think this is a plea to Github to make more people win, by letting poisonous people lose.
2009-11-19
2009-10-15
Plan B 4.0
It's Blog Action Day, and 2009's topic is climate change. With the most enlightening read on my 2008 list being Earth Policy Institute's Plan B 3.0, I was really glad to see Plan B 4.0 released a while ago -- it is available in its entirety in both HTML and PDF formats online, which happily means we can augment the material using tools like Greasemonkey and MashLogic (I am one of the developers and maintainers of both extensions).
Both extensions, in different ways, allow us to easily improve our reading experience by running code that someone else already wrote once, for material that was published by yet another unrelated person or organization, without any sort of organized cooperation among either of us. I find that notion incredibly powerful, and an uplifting thought about where decentralized cooperation is taking us online.
When I read Plan B 3.0 (the paper copy I bought at the release party of the Swedish translation, as it were), I found myself wishing I could more effortlessly look up the many high quality source references that are strewn about the book for the immense amount of facts about recent macro events affecting our planet, on all sorts of levels, instead of flicking back and forth as soon as I got curious. Footnotes work really well in hypertext. The online versions actually don't yet do that for footnotes.
So I wrote a handy user script that not only adds bidirectional footnote hyperlinks, but also pulls them into the end of the paragraph that references them, the first time you click them. Try it (direct install link); it's a very comfortable reading style.
If you run MashLogic too, you get essentially the same feature for bringing in content from Wikipedia (and sometimes references to people from LinkedIn), without losing more focus on the material than you find you want to, getting up to date about relevant data about, say, the World Food Programme's operations, or where the Xinjiang Province is. I find it a rather rich and low-effort way of broadening your general knowledge about everything.
It would be delightful if Google Books would export an index of their entire repository of books, and provide a linking scheme so we could turn those book and page references in the footnotes into actual hyperlinks too, the way we currently do with Wikipedia article names. Take the first reference in the introductory chapter, for instance (full precision of the deep-linkage only available after you install the above mentioned Greasemonkey script :-) -- with a catalog of all book titles to book id:s available, we could turn that into a link like "[1] Sandra Postel, Pillar of Sand (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1999), pp. 13–21.]" -- just like that.
The web is a very exciting medium, only just starting to show its potential. And as for Plan B 4.0, I can warmly recommend sinking into it, letting yourself fascinate with richer understanding of where we're heading, and all the fascinatingly intricate ways our global economy and ecology connect, affect each other, consequences and solutions.
There's even a good number of tips for ways we can all join in making the world a better place on the Earth Policy Institute's site. Happy Blog Action Day, and do spread the word!
Both extensions, in different ways, allow us to easily improve our reading experience by running code that someone else already wrote once, for material that was published by yet another unrelated person or organization, without any sort of organized cooperation among either of us. I find that notion incredibly powerful, and an uplifting thought about where decentralized cooperation is taking us online.
When I read Plan B 3.0 (the paper copy I bought at the release party of the Swedish translation, as it were), I found myself wishing I could more effortlessly look up the many high quality source references that are strewn about the book for the immense amount of facts about recent macro events affecting our planet, on all sorts of levels, instead of flicking back and forth as soon as I got curious. Footnotes work really well in hypertext. The online versions actually don't yet do that for footnotes.
So I wrote a handy user script that not only adds bidirectional footnote hyperlinks, but also pulls them into the end of the paragraph that references them, the first time you click them. Try it (direct install link); it's a very comfortable reading style.
If you run MashLogic too, you get essentially the same feature for bringing in content from Wikipedia (and sometimes references to people from LinkedIn), without losing more focus on the material than you find you want to, getting up to date about relevant data about, say, the World Food Programme's operations, or where the Xinjiang Province is. I find it a rather rich and low-effort way of broadening your general knowledge about everything.
It would be delightful if Google Books would export an index of their entire repository of books, and provide a linking scheme so we could turn those book and page references in the footnotes into actual hyperlinks too, the way we currently do with Wikipedia article names. Take the first reference in the introductory chapter, for instance (full precision of the deep-linkage only available after you install the above mentioned Greasemonkey script :-) -- with a catalog of all book titles to book id:s available, we could turn that into a link like "[1] Sandra Postel, Pillar of Sand (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1999), pp. 13–21.]" -- just like that.
The web is a very exciting medium, only just starting to show its potential. And as for Plan B 4.0, I can warmly recommend sinking into it, letting yourself fascinate with richer understanding of where we're heading, and all the fascinatingly intricate ways our global economy and ecology connect, affect each other, consequences and solutions.
There's even a good number of tips for ways we can all join in making the world a better place on the Earth Policy Institute's site. Happy Blog Action Day, and do spread the word!
2009-09-04
How to convert a FAT32 disk to NTFS
I had a near-Windows experience today.
I have had an old 500GB USB disk sitting around, that I used for manual backups in pre-Time Machine times, back when I deemed FAT32 to be the comfy file system choice for hooking up a disk with any computer I might want to reach it from. Today, I think that sweet spot is NTFS.
Especially as Time Machine doesn't want anything to do with FAT32 devices as backup targets.
I figured the easiest way to convert the filesystem in place (as I didn't have any other disk around) was to boot up a Windows XP virtual machine in Parallels and let Windows do it.
That procedure was perilous. If you ever embark on doing it yourself, here is how you probably want to do it:
If you skip that first step, you are wise to remember that a Windows machine needs baby sitting not to do bad things to itself. Like deciding it has found and applied security updates that it really wants to restart to complete in ten, nine, eight, ...all the while that long file system conversion pass is humming about in the background.
I have had an old 500GB USB disk sitting around, that I used for manual backups in pre-Time Machine times, back when I deemed FAT32 to be the comfy file system choice for hooking up a disk with any computer I might want to reach it from. Today, I think that sweet spot is NTFS.
Especially as Time Machine doesn't want anything to do with FAT32 devices as backup targets.
I figured the easiest way to convert the filesystem in place (as I didn't have any other disk around) was to boot up a Windows XP virtual machine in Parallels and let Windows do it.
That procedure was perilous. If you ever embark on doing it yourself, here is how you probably want to do it:
> net stop wuauserv
The Automatic Updates service is stopping....
The Automatic Updates service was stopped successfully.
> convert E: /fs:ntfs
The type of the file system is FAT32.
Enter current volume label for drive E: [...]
> net start wuauserv
The Automatic Updates service is starting.
The Automatic Updates service was started successfully.
If you skip that first step, you are wise to remember that a Windows machine needs baby sitting not to do bad things to itself. Like deciding it has found and applied security updates that it really wants to restart to complete in ten, nine, eight, ...all the while that long file system conversion pass is humming about in the background.
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