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The Article…

Alan Cohen, VP of Marketing for Nicira, a disruptive startup focusing on altering the IT networking landscape, recently wrote a guest post for TechCrunch suggesting that an “Arab Spring” of sorts is occurring within IT. Reader comments have indicated a significant distaste for the analogous use of Arab Spring in comparison to IT – the one involving the loss of human lives, the other changes in business structure and Mr. Cohen has apologized for the offense some feel at the branding. I don’t think it was the best title for the post – but there has already been rampant discussion of that fact – and I would like to focus more on the content of Mr. Cohen’s post.

Cohen suggests we are seeing a seismic shift in the IT sector – similar to that which occurred in the 1970′s with the advent of the personal computer. He notes early innovators like the iPhone (antecedent to smartphones), VMWare (virtualization), and Salesforce (SaaS). While I agree with his historical evaluation of the situation and also that a seismic shift is occurring within the IT sector – I do not share his optimism about the nature of this change.

Cohen states, “If IT providers do not supply what the end users want, the latter, like
the brave individuals who took the streets of Cairo, Tunis, and Tripoli,
will take matters into their own hands.” He deems this “shadow IT:” “Bring your own device is shadow IT. Most SaaS applications start by
bypassing IT and going directly to functional groups (managing sales
through Salesforce or sharing through Box.net).”

Now, working outside the box with one’s own devices/services concerns me enough (e.g. smartphones, file sharing), but Cohen then suggests that it is time for revolutionary employees to step things up a notch – implementing their own infrastructure: “If IT does not provide the end user with the infrastructure they need,
the latter can rent it, by the hour or month from companies like
Rackspace or Amazon. All you need is a credit card and no approval from
IT.”

Cohen concludes by challenging those within the IT industry, “But if you are in IT, you have to ask yourself: What side of history will you wind up on?”

Problems with the Article…

I do work in IT. I’ve been a geek practically since I was born and have worked full-time in the industry for the past six years. But this isn’t about my IT credentials…and it shouldn’t be about defending IT as IT. Truth is we have our weaknesses. Many of us who work in IT are a bit antisocial, introverted, ADD, OCD, or (append acronyms here). We aren’t always the most flexible folks to work with and there is certainly room for growth in our lives and skills…That said, I do think there are some serious problems with the sort of revolution Cohen is endorsing here…and I think his IT guys probably grimaced reading this article as I much as I am now.

Lets talk for a few minutes about the dangers inherent in this sort of “revolution:”

Reduced Productivity – While using a device familiar to the end user may be a pleasure and expedite that individual’s productivity, it may result in a decrease to organizational productivity. For example, if one finds an Apple iPhone easier to utilize than the company provided Android or Blackberry devices (or whatever might be the standard) it is very likely that generally you will not require IT support in utilizing your phone…but then there come those times when you do…

• When the device craps out and refuses to boot.
• When you can’t get the company email/calendaring software to sync with your phone.
• When someone steals your phone and you really, really need to have that sensitive business data remote wiped.
• When you sell your phone on eBay and someone pulls sensitive data off the storage because deleting data isn’t enough.

At these times stress goes up and productivity goes down – for you and for the IT department. In time that could have been spent deploying five new computer systems only one thing is now accomplished – getting a non-standard piece of hardware working again (or wiped or whatever).

Reduced Security – There is significant danger in the use of non-standard equipment and services for achieving business goals. It is hard enough for IT to maintain complex password requirements on the variety of internal systems any organization utilizes, let alone managing password requirements on non-standard devices. This is especially true of file sharing services. A handy example would be the recent takedown of MegaUpload. While largely used for illegal purposes, numerous individuals used that site for personal or business purposes – to manage their files. It seemed “safe” – and now it isn’t. Doesn’t matter how hard your IT department tries – if you put your files on a system that is raided by the feds, say goodbye to that data – even if it is important financial info. for the management of your institution.

Reduced Effectiveness – Cohen greatly oversimplifies the simplicity of the services currently available to perform complex functions. Amazon, Rackspace, nor even Salesforce are “insert your credit card get your DVD rental” simple services. For the last few days I’ve been spending a decent number of hours pouring over books and documentation on Salesforce – and it isn’t a piece of cake. Do you want to set up Users? Roles? Profiles? Groups of Settings? Are you sure that the way you setup the permission inheritance will prevent Sally Jane from seeing everyone else’s social security numbers? Do you want to use Salesforce? Force? Heroku?

Valid Pain Points…

I understand there are real pain points for end users in organizations. Not being able to share files in a simple and efficient manner is frustrating. Using outdated and clumsy software to manage customer relationships is frustrating. Learning new technologies and devices outside your comfort zone is time consuming. These are real issues and IT needs to pay better attention to them…but…and this is a big BUT…looping around IT will not decrease but instead increase these pain points.

Sure, you might be able to happily use an iPhone even though IT says no and never have a single problem…but then again…and as the complexity of the device/service increases the issues exponentially increase.

Finding a Road Forward…

Now the real question is, what is a workable way forward? How can end users and IT cooperate to achieve optimal effectiveness, productivity, and security? Well, it isn’t an easy or short road…but then again, real revolutions never are. I’d suggest that the consumerization of IT is a short-term bandaid fix for the real needed change. Too often we take the easy way out rather than working through the difficult decisions that really need to be made.

• Communication - IT needs to get better at communicating what they are doing in their little forests of IT solitude and why we aren’t really just sitting around playing video games and watching youtube. On the other hand, we need end users to get better to actually listening to IT. So frequently folks ask me, “How did you do that?” But they usually don’t want me to tell them…b/c as soon as I open my mouth their eyes glaze over and their fingers drum impatiently on the desk. Now, I know I’m using some technical terms – but I’m willing to explain them if you are willing to ask questions and listen. Maybe with time you’ll learn more about the tech terms I use and I’ll get better at describing technology in clearer terms.
• Prioritization – One of the biggest challenges facing everyone everywhere is the constant call to do more simultaneously and faster. Oftentimes the issue for IT is not lack of desire to improve a given service to the end user, but lack of time. This means the organization as a whole and its individual departments need to determine what projects are most important – and what projects (in spite of being so important) are less important.
• Consideration – IT needs to consider not only what is the best technology but also what will have the greatest net positive effect for end users. Meanwhile, I’d recommend instead of bringing in new devices and services to circumvent IT folks ask IT, “what can I do to have the greatest net positive effect for you?” By focusing on those areas you reduce time IT has to spend in them and free IT to focus up on working on those devices and systems you really want.
• Forgiveness – We can all be nasty at times…and if you haven’t personally been nasty to someone, I guarantee someone else in your department has. A lot of us walk around with a heavy bundle of war wounds. You walk into an IT person’s office (or vice versa, into an end user’s office) and a single word, your position, or what happened earlier today may cause that person to dive underneath their desk as if someone just shouted that mortars were incoming. Getting along means letting bygones be bygones and when new items come up, dealing with grace and humility – for both sides.

What do you think? What is your experience working with IT folks? Or working with end users? Is consumerization of IT really the way forward? If not, what is the alternative?

As you can see there are a large number of options – and this is just a partial list. Lets take a closer look at a few of the best candidates:

• Quick Adsense – This plugin has over 200,000 downloads and a 4 Star average review rating from sixty-nine reviews. It offers straightforward customization of where ads will be placed on a page but also requires you to generate individual code bits from Adsense for each slot.
• Adsense Manager – While downloaded over 330,000 times it only has an average review of 3 Stars from ninety-six reviews. It doesn’t appear to be under ongoing development – althought the author did release an update to enable the plugin to work with the latest version of WordPress.
• Ad Injection – The third most frequently downloaded adsense plugin with 95,000+ downloads and holding 4 Stars with thirty-four reviews. Appears powerful with a lot of customization options, but also a fairly intuitive user interface.
• This is the plugin that is my most preferred at the moment.

Related articles

• WordPress Announces WordAds To Compete With Google AdSense [News] (makeuseof.com)
• Add Google AdSense Ads to Your WordPress Blog (hackingworlds.wordpress.com)

1. ^[1] I think. If I missed one, let me know. ↩
2. ^[2] See also Ad Codes widget. ↩

Image via Wikipedia

Overview:

IMHO, the current state of search is depressing. This is not a new realization for me. It is seven or eight years ago now that I first imagined a social search engine which would not rely solely on algorithms to determine the relative importance of search results but that would consider both machine and end-user feedback. This was in the early days of Nutch and I began researching the possibility of utilizing Nutch as the underlying core engine for such an endeavor, I rounded up some small-term investment capital, and so on. Unfortunately, this was also at the high peak of my struggle with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) and my efforts eventually fell through.

Over the years I have watched as promising engine after promising engine has come along and in their turn failed to take the lead or even maintain their momentum. Years have passed and at each step of the way I have said, “It must just be around the corner…This is ages in technology time.” Even Google came out with SearchWiki, while not a perfect implementation it was a huge step in the right direction. For the last year or two I’ve been using Zakta and I’ve spent time on almost every other social search engine currently (or previously) available – yet I find that in the long-run they have all failed me.

So here I am so many years later longing for just such an engine. I’ve written on this blog about the topic before, but I will write again. In this post I will specifically propose the formation of an endeavor to create a social search engine, and I hope it will foster some interest in the community. I am not ready nor able to undertake such an endeavor myself – but I am interested in being part of such an endeavor.

Open Source: Ensuring Continuity

It is worth noting at this juncture that I’d intend for this project to be open source. Too many times I have lost the social search data I have accumulated because a specific engine has folded. My hope would be that the resultant project would be open source with commercial implementations and would provide a significant amount of data portability between engines, in case one engine should fold. We’ll talk more about the open source and portability aspects of the project later in this proposal.

What is Social Search?

Before we jump into a discussion about how to build a social search engine it is necessary first to define what is meant by social search. Unfortunately the term social search is used to delineate several different concepts which are very different from one another.

There are the real-time search engines which focus on aggregating information from various social media networks – and sometimes prioritizing links based on their popularity within a network. For example Topsy, the no-longer-real-time OneRiot, and the now-defunct Scoopler.

There are the engines which are focused on finding humans – e.g. allowing one to garner information about a person. Wink eventually became this sort of engine, Spokeo would be another example. They are essentially white pages on steroids.

Finally there is what I mean by social search – and I would use another term but there is no other term I am aware of which is so widely used to delineate this type of engine (and I want to ensure the widest possible audience). It is sometimes called a “human-powered search engine”^[1] Google and Wikimedia may have come closest by terming it a “Wiki” (SearchWiki and Wikia), but it seems to me that there is a need for an entirely new term that better and more precisely defines the idea…perhaps one result of this proposal and its aftermath will be just such a term.^[2]

Core Parameters

In this section I will delineate what I believe are the core required features for a social search engine. An engine which included these features I believe would be a 1.0 release. There is certainly room for numerous improvements, but this would define a baseline by which to measure the proposal’s progress. I am not infallible, and I am sure there are aspects of the baseline which should be edited, removed, or replaced – I am open to suggestions.

• Web Crawler – The engine must include a robust web crawler which can index the web, not just a subset of sites (e.g. Nutch).
• Interpretive Ability - The engine must be able to interpret a wide variety of file formats, minimizing the invisible web (e.g. Tika).
• Engine - The engine must be able to quickly query the aggregated web index and return results in an efficient manner (e.g. Nutch).
• Search Interface - The engine must include a powerful search interface for quickly and accurately returning relevant results (e.g. Solr).
• Scalability – The engine must be scalable to sustain worldwide utilization (e.g. Hadoop).
• Algorithms – In addition to the standard automated algorithms for page relevance the system must integrate human-based feedback including:
• Positive and negative votes on a per page basis.
• The ability to add and remove pages from query results.
• Influence of votes based on a calculation of user trustworthiness (merit).
• Promotion of results by administrative users.
• Custom Results – The results must be customized for the user. While the aggregate influence of users affects the results, the individual user is also able to customize results. One should see a search page which reflects the results one has chosen and not the results one has removed.
• Ability to annotate individual entries.
• Portability – The engine should define a standard format for user data which can be exported and imported between engines. This should include customized query results, annotations, votes, removed and added pages, etc. This will be available to the user for export/import at any time. While additional data may be maintained by individual engines, the basic customizations should be portable.

I’m sure I’m missing some essentials – please share with me whatever essentials I have forgotten that come to your mind.

Starting from Zero?

It is not necessary for this project to begin from nothing, significant portions of the endeavor have already been undertaken toward creating an open source search engine – largely by Apache’s Nutch project. The available code should be utilized and with customization could integrate social search features. This would allow some of the most significant aspects of the project to be offloaded to already existing projects.

Additionally, it might be hoped that companies and individuals who have previously created endeavors in this direction would open source their code. For example, Wikia was built on Nutch and the code – including the distributed crawler (GRUB) and UI (Wikia) was released into the open source world.^[3]

What We Need

Now the question becomes, “What do we need?” and more importantly, “Whom do we need?”

First off, we could use donated hosting. Perhaps one of the larger cloud-based hosting companies would consider offering us space for a period of time? I’m thinking here of someone like Rackspace, Amazon Web Services, or GoGrid.

Secondly, we’d need developers. I’m not a Java developer…though I’ve downloaded the code and am preparing to jump in. I also don’t have a ton of time – so depending on me to get the development done…well, it could take a while.

Thirdly, we’d need content curators…and I think this is key (and also one of the areas I love the most). We’d need people to edit the content and make the results awesome. These individuals would be “power users” whose influence on results would be more significant than the new user. With time individuals could increase their reputation, but this would seed us with a trusted core of individuals^[4] who would ensure that the results returned would be high quality right from the get-go for new users^[5]

Finally, we’d need some designers. I’m all for simplicity in search – but goodness knows most of us developers have very limited design abilities and an aesthetic touch here and there would be a huge boon to the endeavor.

Next Steps

At this juncture its all about gathering interest. Finding projects that have already begun the process, looking for old hidden open source code that may be of use, etc. Leave a comment if you’d like to be part of the discussion.

Appendixes

Current Open Source Search Engines

• DataparkSearch – GNU GPL, diverged from mnGoSearch in 2003, coded in C and CGI.
• Egothor – Open source, written in Java, currently under a complete from scratch rewrite for version 3.
• Grubng – Open source, distributed crawler..
• BeeSeek – Open source, P2P, focuses on user anonymity.
• Yioop! (SearchQuarry) – GNU GPLv3, documentation is very informative.
• Heritrix – Open source, by Archive.org for their web archives.
• Seeks Project – AGPLv3, P2P, fairly impressive project which attempts to take social search into consideration.
• OpenWebSpider – Open source, written in .NET, appears to be abandoned.
• Ex-Crawler – Open source, Java, impressive, last updated released 2010.
• Jumper Search – Open source, social search, website appears to be down, currently linking to SF.
• Open Search Server – Open source.

Related articles

• Could Bing Reach Its Potential if Owned by Apple or Facebook? (greatfinds.icrossing.com)
• Create Your Own Search Engine With Yioop (crenk.com)
• Do Search Engines Have a Future? (arnoldit.com)
• Your Future: Search, Social, and Content (greatfinds.icrossing.com)

1. ^[1] Or a human search engine, which becomes sadly entangled with engines meant for finding humans such as referenced previously. ↩
2. ^[2] A few other terms which might be appropriate are collaborative search engine, though this would have to be prefaced with “active” to distinguish it from passive user feedback aggregation (e.g. how long a user stayed at a site); curation search engine (giving the idea of content curation, but this is sometimes thought of in terms of archival); or crowd-sourced search engine (though this centers too much on democracy, whereas such engines would probably benefit from a meritocracy). ↩
3. ^[3] Unfortunately, I have been unable to find a copy of the Wikia UI code. ↩
4. ^[4] Taking a page from early Ask Jeeves history. ↩
5. ^[5] Obviously not necessarily in the long tail, but in the general topics. ↩

Note: I recommend also reading Brennon Slattery’s article on PCWorld, which discusses attempts already to shutdown Bitcoin by lawmakers (due to use in the facilitation of drug sales) and article by Dan Goodin for The Register about a heist of $500,000 worth of Bitcoins, highlighting the potential for theft of the new currency.

Introduction to Bitcoin:

• Calcanis, Jason. L019: Bitcoin P2P Currency: The Most Dangerous Project We’ve Ever Seen. May 15, 2011.- Jason is a well-known web entrepreneur who offers insightful commentary on Bitcoin – its potential and challenges.
• Tercek, Rob. L020: Is Bitcoin the Wikileaks of Monetary Policy? May 17, 2011. – A followup to the above post.
• Wikipedia. Bitcoin. – A good article from the usually-reliable Wikipedia.
• Falconer, Joel. Bitcoin, the Peer-to-Peer Currency that Hopes to Change the World. June 6, 2011. – A great introductory overview article.

Other Interesting Bitcoin Articles:

• Falkvinge, Rick. Why I’m Putting All My Savings Into Bitcoin. May 29, 2011. – Okay, Falkvinge gets on here simply because he is the founder of the First Pirate Party and Bitcoin is a relevant/related concept.
• Keller, Jared. Bitcoin, Digital Currency of the Future? May 25, 2011. – Nothing major here, but it is by a fairly large publisher.
• Quora. Bitcoin: Is the cryptocurrency Bitcoin a good idea? – Quora is a QA site, and this question received a lot of fairly intelligent replies. The first one by Adam Cohen is an interesting argument against Bitcoin.
• Bitcoin – the future of currency. – Written by an atheist and anarchist on why Bitcoin is great.
• Tice, Brock M. Why Bitcoin is Smart, and Not a Scam. May 22, 2011. – A good article defending Bitcoin. Compare to Cohen’s arguments on Quora mentioned above.
• Reitman, Rainey. Bitcoin – a Step Toward Censorship-Resistant Digital Currency. January 20th, 2011. – An article for the prestigious Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) explaining and defending Bitcoin.
• Stalnaker, Stan. Bitcoin, Ven, and the End of Currency. May 20, 2011.
• Robb, John. The Bitcoin Bubble. June 6, 2011.
• Myths. – A wiki article with common “myths” and explanations about Bitcoin.

Bitcoin Related Sites:

• Bitcoin P2P Virtual Currency – The official website for Bitcoin, you can download the P2P software here.
• ClearCoin – serves as a form of escrow serve for Bitcoin transactions.
• Bitcoin Venture Capital (BTCVC) – A venture capital firm focused solely on supporting startups that utilize bitcoin.
• Bitcoin Mining Pool (gbyte) – Allows one to work with others to “mine” bitcoins.
• Bitcoin Plus – Allows you to within minutes get started generating bitcoins.
• Bitcoin Bonus – A rewards site that offers bitcoins in exchange.
• Bitcoin Classifieds – Get stuff off a classifieds using bitcoins, or sell stuff for bitcoins.
• Bitcoin Watch – Allows one to see how much bitcoins are selling for at various exchanges.
• Bitcoin Miner – By a professional bitcoin miner, blogging about the experience.
• BitcoinMe – A friendly site that attempts to introduce folks to the bitcoin economy.
• We Use Coins – An introductory site to the bitcoin economy similar to BitcoinMe.
• Bitcoins.lc – Another mining pool similar to gbyte for mining bitcoins.
• Bitcoin Faucet – Gives you 0.01 free bitcoins.
• Bitcoin Charts – Provides charts and other analytical informationa bout the bitcoin network and exchanges.

My Thoughts:

I recently posted about the need for a non-profit banking system. I’m interested in Bitcoin b/c of it (or something similar) to provide a “non-profit” banking system of sorts. I think Bitcoin has potential and as I have ridden other potential moneymakers (e.g. AllAdvantage) in days far past, I figure I might as well take this ride as well, and see where it ends. From AllAdvantage, I ended up with maybe $200. That said:

• Bitcoin’s complexity is off-putting. Unless it is significantly simplified it will not achieve mass appeal.
• Bitcoin has a reputation problem. It can easily facilitate illegal activities, just as many other technologies can, and it is likely to face legal challenges in the upcoming months.
• Bitcoin has a security problem. At some other juncture I’ll talk about the state of information security in general, but lets just say it isn’t pretty. So having one’s entire wallet stored on your computer…well, it’s risky!
• Still, Bitcoin could be the start of something useful…a currency that cuts out lays of fat from the economy that result in unnecessary fees and complexity.

Related articles

• Bitcoin Heist of the Day (geeks.thedailywh.at)
• World’s First Virtual Heist? BitCoin User Loses $500,000 (pcworld.com)
• The (practical) End of Bitcoin (fraserharris.com)
• Bitcoin virtual currency may be the worst of both worlds (gigaom.com)
• Ask Amir Taaki About Bitcoin (news.slashdot.org)
• Thief steals $500K worth of Bitcoin from compromised computer (venturebeat.com)
• A $500,000 Geek Cyberheist [Crime] (gawker.com)
• Bitcoin slump follows senators’ threats (go.theregister.com)
• Bitcoin Goes Haywire (npr.org)
• What is Bitcoin? Decentralized Digital Currency (currencynewshound.wordpress.com)
• Man says he lost $500,000 in virtual currency heist (go.theregister.com)
• Close to US$500k stolen in first major Bitcoin theft (thenextweb.com)

What is Texty? I’m glad you asked. It consists of two components. One is an application that runs on your Android phone, the other is an extension that runs on your computer in the Google Chrome browser. These two components communicate with one another – transferring text messages sent to your phone to the computer and transferring messages from the computer back to your phone.

Now my wife (who is a SMS fiend!) can text me to her heart’s content and I can reply back in a timely fashion without ever touching my phone! Sure, you could do this before but usually this involved using a different number for text messages sent from the computer than your actual phone number – and this became confusing.

Texty is a great step forward and I won’t be surprised if Google snaps them up (just for intellectual property rights). What Texty is doing is something that should have been a standard feature long ago.

That said, Texty isn’t the perfect application. A few features I’d love to see that would take the application to the next level are:

1. Provide me with a way to backup/store my SMS messages – both from Texty and the phone – to my computer or the cloud. I don’t like having tons of text threads open or to have all the previous days and weeks conversations showing when I’m texting someone – but I do like to have these in the archives (so to speak) for future reference.
2. Right now if you read a message on your computer via Texty and then look at your phone it looks as if you have unread text messages. Texty needs to mark the messages that are read on the computer as read on the phone as well. The easiest way to do this is if I send a reply after receiving a text message in Texty, then obviously I’ve read the message that was sent previously. I’m sure some folks will disagree – so perhaps this could be an optional configuration.

Have you used Texty? What do you love/hate about Texty? What about SMS in general?

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• [Review] CrossTxT Bridges The Gap Between Phone And Computer For Easy Texting – Regardless Of Browser (androidpolice.com)
• Texty: Texts From Google Chrome Via My Android Phone (cash-bandit.com)
• Texty: Texts From Google Chrome Via My Android Phone (louisgray.com)
• Big List Of Android Messaging Apps (maketecheasier.com)
• What’s the Best iPhone SMS App? (brighthub.com)
• Google Sued For SMS Spamming (informationweek.com)
• Can text messaging improve medication adherence? (medicalxpress.com)

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My first experiences programming where on a Commodore 64 and an Apple II+. In both cases there was no separation of the end user interface and the development interface…you could just start entering code at the command line and it would begin building. Things have come a long ways since then – this is good and bad. It is no longer quite as easy or essential to get involved in programming, on the other hand one can much more rapidly build complex applications.

If you ever long for the throw back days you may think of QBasic, which became ubiquitous due to its inclusion with Microsoft DOS…but all these concepts are so from yesteryear – in computer terms they are almost millennia away.

So what if you want to do some simple programming these days with a BASIC feel to it? One good option is FreeBasic. FreeBasic was built to be largely backwards compatible with Microsoft’s QBasic and thus can run many old QBasic programs with only minimal modifications, but FreeBasic has also gone far beyond this and delivers a fairly powerful development environment.

If you do decide to use FreeBasic I recommend downloading a free copy of FbEdit as well. See development usually consists of at least two components – the compiler and the editor. A compiler is the program that takes your code and turns it into an executable program while an editor is what you write the code in. Granted, you can write your code in any plain text editor – but trust me, FbEdit will be a big help.

The FreeBasic forums have a very friendly and active community that will help you along through the learning process. Just take some time to explore the entire site and community, it is pretty impressive.

All this said, FreeBasic isn’t the language I primarily use for development – or the language I would recommend. In general, I’m a Microsoft .NET guy – mainly ASP.NET and VB.NET. Microsoft offers free copies of the lite versions of these applications as well, and while I say kudos to the FreeBasic team and hope they keep up the great work, if you are looking for a job in technology, you might be better off starting with a Microsoft .NET technology. Actually, probably C#.NET instead of VB.NET as I do (old habits die hard).

Related articles

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