Werd I/O

Rereading the Guardian article about Elgg, I'd forgotten this detail, which is true:

The idea was conceived in late 2003, when Ben Werdmuller and Tosh were working at Edinburgh University developing e-learning and e-portfolio systems. Werdmuller (an avid blogger) persuaded Tosh (who had just started a PhD in e-portfolios) to start a blog of his own to support his studies. Within a week, Tosh had received comments on his blog from people pointing him to relevant resources and others bloggers had begun to link to him.

Dave and I shared an office at the University of Edinburgh. He was skeptical about blogging at that point, so what I told him was this: start a blog, post every day, and leave a meaningful comment on someone else's blog every day.

I wasn't sure that it would work, but thought that it probably would. Sure enough, within a week or two, he was part of the global elearning community, and was participating in conversations with its thought leaders. It was through this medium that we put out the initial white papers (completely unofficially) that provided the basis for Elgg, which went viral in the elearning community.

Could that happen today? I'm not sure.

The turning point for my first startup came one rainy Friday afternoon, in February 2007.

As TechCrunch reported:

A new open source cross-site social networking service called Explode launched today and looks like a very appealing alternative to the now Yahoo! owned MyBlogLog. Built by UK open-source social network provider Curverider (whose primary product, Elgg, is similar to PeopleAggregator), Explode offers an embeddable widget that links out to users’ respective profile pages on any social network but allows commenting and befriending in one aggregated location. I found Explode via Steve O’Hear’s The Social Web, one of my new favorite blogs.

Steve O'Hear had written:

Although comparisons with Yahoo's MyBlogLog are inevitable, Explode isn't primarily intended as a way to turn an existing blog into a social network, nor as a way to monitor traffic. Instead, think of it as a loosely joined network that works on top of existing social networking sites and blogs, to allow a user of one site to 'befriend' and communicate with a user from another.

Curverider co-founder, Ben Werdmuller, says that Explode is very much a 'work in progress', and that they are already working on an API, and also have plans to add support for OpenID.

Dave Tosh and I had been working on Elgg for three or four years at that point, and had obtained a two-person office above a bookstore in Summertown, an affluent area in North Oxford, awash with coffee shops and restaurants. Our startup was fully bootstrapped; not a single penny of investment had been put in, except for our own work, and the non-monetary support of the people around us.

As Februaries in England can sometimes be, it was a cold, overcast day, with nothing to recommend it. Because we were bootstrapping, we had been working hard, as always, and we were exhausted. Also because we were bootstrapping, our waistlines had seen the effects of long hours in front of the computer sustained only by relatively cheap food, so we'd decided to buy ourselves gym memberships and try to go regularly. (I think we managed eight or nine times.)

As we worked out, we decided that, screw it, we weren't going to work on Elgg for the rest of the day. There was nothing to be gained, we were feeling kind of burned out, and surely there had to be something more fun we could do.

Elgg was a full-blown social networking engine, and although we later completely rewrote it, it was still a pretty powerful piece of software used by companies and institutions all over the world. And I had a simple idea.

When we got back, I got to work widgetizing all of Elgg's functionality: writing templates that would take pieces of its output - the friends list, for example - and embed it in JavaScript such that it could be made to display on any website. This was back when people still had websites where people could embed HTML and JavaScript, and the effect would be that any website could be part of a larger social network. That wasn't a small idea: it captured questions people were already having about siloed sites, and would later be tackled by projects like Google Friend Connect. (Of course, the IndieWeb movement is answering those questions today.)

Dave created a template for the site so people could sign up and get their widgets. At the last minute, we created a logo. I made it in about 5 minutes in MS Paint, which seemed appropriate for a hacky site, and we both agreed that a ridiculously bad logo was probably good: it captured the scrappy ethos of the whole afternoon project.

After four hours of work in total, we made it live, and pinged some people we knew, like Marshall Kirkpatrick, who at the time was a TechCrunch writer (now the CEO of the excellent Little Bird), and Steve O'Hear, who had previously written about us in the Guardian. For us, it was a bit of a lighthearted thing we'd put together at the end of the week, and we didn't really expect anyone to cover it. To his credit, Dave proactively got in touch with everyone anyway.

Boom. Steve wrote about us, and then Marshall wrote the story on TechCrunch. This was more coverage than the tech press had ever given us.

The fact that we had executed quickly on our idea, which in turn had developed out of having worked on social networking platforms for years, mattered. The fact that we didn't try and make it perfect, or spend ages putting it through careful design cycles or product feedback loops, was unimportant. We had a working first version, and we put it in front of people, who thought it was compelling. This directly led to many more customers for Curverider, as well as our first investors, who got in touch because they had seen the coverage.

Those four hours of work - and the quick decision to muck about, be creative, and follow our whims for an afternoon - literally changed the fate of our company, and both of our careers.

Net neutrality is the principle that "Internet service providers and governments should treat all data on the Internet equally, not discriminating or charging differentially by user, content, site, platform, application, type of attached equipment, and modes of communication." In other words, all of my Internet data is treated the same, whether it's from Netflix, Skype, Baidu, your personal website, or a startup nobody's heard of. If I'm competing with Netflix, I can't pay your access provider to have my movies stream faster than theirs.

When net neutrality rules were adopted in the US by the FCC in 2010, the conservative Wall Street Journal columnist John Fund disingenuously painted it as follows:

The Federal Communications Commission's new "net neutrality" rules, passed on a partisan 3-2 vote yesterday, represent a huge win for a slick lobbying campaign run by liberal activist groups and foundations. The losers are likely to be consumers who will see innovation and investment chilled by regulations that treat the Internet like a public utility.

These rules were themselves a compromise, which neither pleased conservatives like Fund, nor net neutrality advocates. However, it did ensure that Internet traffic saw some protection.

Fund was flat-out wrong. The Internet should be a public utility; whereas some have tried to paint net neutrality as being a set of anti-business principles, they in fact protect the Internet as an open marketplace for innovation. The rules ensure that businesses will not be penalized on the network for being new, and allow new technologies and approaches to flourish. Removing these rules allows ISPs to control the market, whereas a utility Internet ensures that free trade is possible.

Verizon, the US telco formerly known as Bell Atlantic, had been fighting to overturn the FCC ruling for commercial reasons:

And in court last Monday, Verizon lawyer Helgi Walker made the company's intentions all too clear, saying the company wants to prioritize those websites and services that are willing to shell out for better access.

She also admitted that the company would like to block online content from those companies or individuals that don't pay Verizon's tolls.

On January 14th, Verizon won.

The implications are that net neutrality is dead and buried, and that carriers can begin to charge the fees for access that Verizon referred to. In turn, this may open the floodgates for unequal access to the Internet everywhere; although the FCC only has jurisdiction over communications in the United States, enough of the Internet is transmitted over the domestic backbone to make a difference.

Not only does that affect the quality of the Internet and the ability for new Internet businesses to operate - it also, together with last year's extensive NSA revelations, disproportionately affects American Internet businesses. One of the founding principles of the Internet's architecture is that traffic can be re-routed; why wouldn't other nations begin to work around the United States's compromised network?

All is not necessarily lost. Michael Copps, a former FCC commissioner, recently wrote that broadband should be reclassified as "telecommunications".

On Wednesday, Copps wrote a blog post titled, "The Buck Stops At The FCC," calling upon the commission to "reclassify broadband as 'telecommunications' under Title II of the Communications Act." The effect of that move would be to designate Internet service providers as "common carriers," making them subject to increased FCC regulation.

Common carriers "transport goods or people for any person or company and [are] responsible for any possible loss of the goods during transport" - as opposed to contract or private carriers, which may refuse to carry anyone else's goods. This would effectively turn the Internet into the utility John Fund was so afraid of.

Copps continues:

Without this step, we are playing fast-and-loose with the most opportunity-creating technology in all of communications history. Without this step, we are guaranteeing an Internet future of toll-booths, gatekeepers, and preferential carriage. Without this step, we stifle innovation, put consumers under the thumb of special interests, and pull the props from under the kind of rich civic dialogue that only open and non-discriminatory communications can provide.

Lest we think it's as simple as this, the EFF recently released its opinion that the FCC can't - and shouldn't - save net neutrality. Granting the organization power over the Internet itself gives it too much power to regulate what has been, traditionally, an open, international medium:

Internet users should be wary of any suggestion that there is an easy path to network neutrality. It’s a hard problem, and building solutions to resolve it is going to remain challenging. But here is one guiding principle: any effort to defend net neutrality should use the lightest touch possible, encourage a competitive marketplace, and focus on preventing discriminatory conduct by ISPs, rather than issuing broad mandatory obligations that are vulnerable to perverse consequences and likely to be outdated as soon as they take effect.

The Internet is a marketplace; there can be no doubt about that. I think that the incumbent businesses coming out against net neutrality tend to be ones deeply entrenched in old technologies: after all, both telephone and broadcasting are effectively technology businesses. They just happen to be ones whose underlying technologies are obsolete. Their businesses are hurting because something better has come along, which is meeting the needs of consumers in a more efficient way, and they're struggling to adapt.

Too bad. The Internet will win, and with it, consumers. There is nothing to be gained by restricting it; certainly not in the long term. Net neutrality will create wealth, it will create jobs, and it will set the stage for innovation for decades to come.

I grew up on American folk music. My fondest memories are gathering with my extended family in Massachusetts to sing informally. I knew the lyrics to This Land is Your Land or Charlie and the MTA long before I knew the words to anything they would play on the radio.

I also grew up with progressive values. On the American side of my family, there have been union leaders, college professors, thinkers and writers; people who cared about social justice, for whom the works of people like Pete Seeger were meaningful. As the New York Times writes:

His agenda paralleled the concerns of the American left: He sang for the labor movement in the 1940s and 1950s, for civil rights marches and anti-Vietnam War rallies in the 1960s, and for environmental and antiwar causes in the 1970s and beyond. "We Shall Overcome," which Mr. Seeger adapted from old spirituals, became a civil rights anthem.

He was in a group called the Almanac Singers, which also included Woody Guthrie, another legendary progressive folksinger. Their album Talking Union and Other Union Songs was admitted to the Library of Congress as a historically significant recording. Union Maid is on that album, as well as a famous recording of Which Side Are You On?; but it's the lyrics of Talking Union itself that I think are particularly brave. It was originally written in the 1940s, in the midst of World War II - and then re-released at the height of the McCarthy era!

If you want higher wages, let me tell you what to do;
You got to talk to the workers in the shop with you;
You got to build you a union, got to make it strong,
But if you all stick together, now, ‘twont be long.
You'll get shorter hours,
Better working conditions.
Vacations with pay,
Take your kids to the seashore.

He was the kind of artistic hero who embodied the values I aspire to, and who does not seem to exist anymore.

Over on MetaFilter, I commented:

He was, sadly, blacklisted for being a communist, and recognized as a living legend by the Library of Congress. An anti-war singer, a champion of workers rights, a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee and a children's entertainer; an undeniable part of America's cultural history. I enjoyed this full-length concert with his half-sister, Peggy.

Here's his version of If I Had a Hammer, which he co-wrote; there's also a Smithsonian Folkways episode about him, which is an hour long and a free download.

Like a lot of people, the thing that first got me into programming was games. I'd learned rudimentary BASIC as a kid, but it was as a teenager that I started to get a taste for the thrill of making something and sharing it with other people.

Adventure games had always been my favorite. I remember playing a port of the Colossal Cave Adventure; later, I got hooked on Infocom's very well-written output, particularly the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy game, which was co-written by Douglas Adams himself. Finally, I came across LucasFilm Games, who published The Secret of Monkey Island, which is still my favorite piece of digital entertainment of all time. (Honorable mentions from other genres include SimCity 2000, Railroad Tycoon and Populous; to my shame, I never got into Civilization.)

But it wasn't those games that inspired me to build.

Whereas Monkey Island and its brethren were produced by companies that sometimes felt like (and sometimes literally were) movie studios, the shareware games movement was a rich mine of scrappier, but somehow more creative games. Jeff Minter's Llamasoft was probably the pinnacle of this; its game Llamatron was an off-kilter take on Robotron: 2084 but featuring a llama that battled against mutant Coke cans, Mandelbrot fractals and Mr Potato Heads. (It's worth mentioning that I've never been particularly interested in illicit substances, although I can't speak for Mr Minter.) Its anarchic design was liberating, and it felt doable. It was actually doing some sophisticated things behind the scenes, but nonetheless, for a beginner coder, Llamatron felt within reach.

I started learning as I wrote in Prospero Pascal, and then shared what I'd built with my friends Marcus Povey and Tom Nunn, who were also building. Something happened that was new to me: I felt playfully competitive with them, and everything they built spurred me to try and create something better. It was a virtuous circle. We were 14.

My first game involved a simple maze that was slowly revealed as you walked around it, cribbed in part from one that Marcus had already written. Subsequently, each game became a little more sophisticated. The Numerator ("he's always on top") was a take on Llamatron with a wave audio backing soundtrack. Mr A Goes For a Block was a psychedelic take on Sokoban that made it onto some early-90s shareware CD-ROMs. I wrote a space game with 3D starfields and a collaborative maze game where you flipped between two characters at different ends of the same labyrinth who needed to work together to get out. My crowning achievement, eventually, was Mr Sheepz, another game clearly heavily inspired by Jeff Minter, wherein you had to eat sheep grazing in increasingly-complex fields before giant sheep-eating snails got to them first.

And then I turned my attention to the web and never looked back.

Lately I've become aware of a whole new subculture of independent game developers, who have been experimenting with new forms, narratives and designs, using the web as a medium. Using HTML5 and JavaScript, sometimes in conjunction with engines like CreateJS, Turbulenz and many, many others. Others are building mobile apps; others are building the same kinds of full-screen desktop games that I used to.

My friend Tef recently moved into a flat of indie games devs, one of whom organizes an event called The Wild Rumpus, after Where the Wild Things Are:

It was in August 2011 in a glamorous Nandos (a sordid middle-class chicken hut chain where every dish tastes like cayenne pepper dissolved in lemon juice) that George says he was asked to help form a committee to hold something called ‘The Wild Rumpus’. The Wild Rumpus is game roughhousing: the informal event takes place in a hired bar, features simple lo-fi multiplayer games you can play with friends between drinks. They use projectors and huge screens, and the games are always visually mesmerising, competitively thrilling, or require players to engage in social theatre lubricated by beer. It’s always busy, and there is as much pleasure in spectating the bright colours and social friction that the games bring as there is in actually playing games there. “Closer in spirit to party, playground, or even drinking games, these are all games that you can’t play at home on your own” it is declared. The atmosphere is in between that of a game night with friends and an electro-pop club night with extremely well-behaved patrons.

At the first XOXO, meanwhile, one of the standout moments was discovering a game called Johann Sebastian Joust, which is played by multiple people with controllers, but no screen. It's the kind of game that blurs genres, but that's not the point; it's fun, sometimes hilariously so, and the technology creates a framework that feels like an augmented playground. Indie Game: The Movie, screened at the same event, is as inspiring as any movie about individual creativity.

Games never really went away, but the interconnectivity of the web, the openness of our platforms and the ubiquitous availability of simple technology means that there's more opportunity to experiment than ever before. It's not all about running and shooting things, which I've always found pretty snoreworthy (dalliances with the original Wolfenstein 3D and Doom aside).

It's been a while. I think it would be nice to pick up some tools and build some stupid fun.

My employer, Latakoo, is an enterprise media management company. We help people send files - mostly video, but we're expanding - really fast using any Internet connection.

A lot of our customers are involved in news and journalism. Here's a sample:

Used @latakoo on Air Force One to ship video of POTUS leaving DC as the plane was taxiing! Pretty cool technology. pic.twitter.com/N2rABZcCzF

— Jim Long (@newmediajim) December 9, 2013

It's not uncommon for us to get support requests from journalists in places like Syria who need to get footage out quickly and securely. Shortly, we expect to talking to people in Sochi a lot.

So here's the thing. We're a small, very agile (with a small "a") startup, and we need a little bit of help getting some of our upcoming projects out the door. They're all high profile, directly affect customers who themselves high profile, and are full of really meaty, interesting engineering problems. Oh, and they're based out of Austin or San Antonio in Texas.

Here's what we need:

• A freelance Objective-C iOS developer to help us with our completely redesigned iPhone and iPad apps.
• An experienced freelance PHP developer to help us build our media management interfaces, further expand our international file upload network, and integrate with things like ElasticSearch and CloudFront. Knowledge of HTML5, WebRTC and real-time application development are a big plus.

Sound interesting to you? Great. Email me at ben@latakoo.com, and let's talk!

Please, please, please, no agencies, offshore or otherwise. I want to work directly with individuals, and you have to be local to Austin or San Antonio.

Last week at Homebrew Website Club, I was asked how Idno syndicates to third-party sites like Twitter when I post content.

Here's how it works.

First of all, Idno has a plugin system, that allows new functionality to be added system-wide. As well as new kinds of content like slide presentations, plugins are available that interact with the APIs of Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare and Flickr.

When I install any of those plugins in Idno, I'm taken through a process where I register my Idno site with the third-party API. Each of those sites has a slightly different process, but in each case it takes about 30 seconds.

Once the link has been made, the plugin shows up as an option in Idno's user settings screen. I click "settings", and then click a button to link my account to the site:

This is exactly the same procedure as logging in with any of those sites, or attaching any third-party application. It's about two clicks: in the case illustrated above, I'm taken to Twitter, which asks me to confirm that I want to give Idno permission to use my Twitter account, and then taken back to my Idno settings. Internally, my OAuth token for that site is saved to my user account.

Here's where things get interesting.

Remember I said that Idno's content types are also provided via plugins? There's a plugin for status updates, for photos, blog posts, events, etc etc. Whenever I want to add a new content type to Idno, I add a plugin. (They're really easy to write; the presentations plugin was written in about an hour, while I was recovering from a root canal operation.)

As well as descriptive content type - "status update" - each plugin announces a generic content type that maps to those used by the activity streams specification. A status update is also a "note"; a blog post is an "article". This allows plugins to extend functionality for certain kinds of content without dictating which plugin you use for that content. Someone can add extra logic for status updates, while not caring which status update plugin I actually use.

When I post new content, the system pulls up an interface supplied by that content's plugin, and also asks any syndication plugins if they're able to handle content of this type. So when I click on my "status update" button, Idno asks plugins if they're able to syndicate content of type "note".

Idno automatically renders some buttons for me based on those plugins. If I enable the "Twitter" button, my content will be syndicated to Twitter when I post it. If I enable the "Facebook" button, it'll go to Facebook, too. If I later decide to add a button for Path or LinkedIn or Friendster via a plugin, it'll show up there, and work in exactly the same way, without me having to change any of the status update plugin.

When I hit Save, the syndication plugin receives information about the content type (but not which plugin created it), as well as information about my account. It retrieves my API token from when I linked my account through my settings panel, and uses that to sign an API request posting the content to that site. It then retrieves the URL of the syndicated content and saves it to the local content in Idno, so a "syndicated to" link can be displayed underneath it. (Check at the bottom of this post's page: you'll see a link to Twitter.)

This process works throughout Idno. Photos (of generic type "image") can be syndicated to Facebook, Twitter and Flickr, and while the logic is different for each site, the user interface flow is the same for each one. This works whether I'm posting from a laptop or a phone, and whether I'm on the standard web interface, a custom interface or the API.

It's important to note that none of this takes much time, for any of the parties involved. Writing a content plugin takes about an hour; writing a syndication plugin can take much less time, if the third-party API uses OAuth. Site admins can install a plugin and set it up in a few minutes. The process for the user takes mere moments, and that's the most important thing.

#idno #posse #indieweb

Bruce Schneier had to brief a branch of government on a government agency today:

This morning I spent an hour in a closed room with six Members of Congress: Rep. Logfren, Rep. Sensenbrenner, Rep. Scott, Rep. Goodlate, Rep Thompson, and Rep. Amash. No staffers, no public: just them. Lofgren asked me to brief her and a few Representatives on the NSA. She said that the NSA wasn't forthcoming about their activities, and they wanted me -- as someone with access to the Snowden documents -- to explain to them what the NSA was doing. Of course I'm not going to give details on the meeting, except to say that it was candid and interesting. And that it's extremely freaky that Congress has such a difficult time getting information out of the NSA that they have to ask me. I really want oversight to work better in this country.

If there's this level of government oversight on the NSA - i.e., practically none - and if the NSA is actively spying on government, which seems likely, it's fair to describe them as a superlegal organization. They're effectively above the law, above the government, and above democracy. All in the name of security. Is this the kind of agency that should exist in a country whose stated principles all relate to representative democracy and individual freedom?

The following is doing the rounds on social media. It sounds like fun, so I thought I'd adapt it:

I, Ben Werdmuller, promise to send a small work of art for the first fifty people who comment on this post by replying from their own website. Twitter or Facebook is not enough. Just link to this post and let me know you want in; I'll update this and provide an easy way to do that shortly. (If you're a developer, you can get started right away.)

***You may in turn post this on your own site and make something for the first fifty people who comment they want in on your post.***

The rules are simple: it has to be be your work, made by you and the recipient must receive it by the end of 2014 . It can be anything: a drawing, photo, video, a conceptual work of art or anything in between ...

This weekend, Mozilla CTO Brendan Eich called on the world to examine Firefox's source code to protect it from NSA intrusion:

Through international collaboration of independent entities we can give users the confidence that Firefox cannot be subverted without the world noticing, and offer a browser that verifiably meets users’ privacy expectations.

Firefox is the only major web browser that's fully open source; by extension, it's the only browser that can be publicly verified to be free of unwanted surveillance code (and other malware). This is a great example of how open source software is more secure, and can be more trustworthy than closed source platforms.

However, browsers are more than their core, so it's important to bring up the issue of plugins and components. These are not necessarily as verifiable, so users should proceed with diligent caution. (Perhaps a site could be established that verifies software and plugins in an auditable way?)

For example, the closed-source h.264 video codec has typically not been supported by Firefox's core code. Instead, the browser links to operating system libraries if they exist, or can use the Adobe Flash plugin to play these videos. In most cases, neither the OS libraries nor the Flash plugin are open source, and therefore are not verifiable. Additionally, you may remember that Cisco has released a component that will allow for cross-platform h.264 support:

We plan to open-source our H.264 codec, and to provide it as a binary module that can be downloaded for free from the Internet. Cisco will not pass on our MPEG LA licensing costs for this module, and based on the current licensing environment, this will effectively make H.264 free for use in WebRTC.

Note that it's the binary module, not the open source codec, that will be license-free, and this is what will be incorporated into Firefox:

We are grateful for Cisco’s contribution, and we will add support for Cisco’s OpenH.264 binary modules to Firefox soon. These modules will be usable by downstream distributions of Firefox, as well as by any other project.

This remains a great move by Mozilla, because it opens up sites like YouTube (and latakoo) without forcing users to install Flash, but it does mean that the h.264 codec component in Firefox will be unverifiable. In turn, this continues to highlight the importance of truly open source, license-free media codecs, not just to maintain a healthy software development ecosystem, but to protect all of our privacy, too.

The problem is not that there aren't any open source h.264 implementations; it's that the MPEG-LA issues licenses for the technology based on patents it controls, which effectively means that anyone who wants to create h.264 files at scale must build significant license costs into their model. Cisco's binary distributions include an agreement that they will pay for these license costs.

It's worth noting that Mozilla continues to work on Daala, its fully open source codec, and Google has made some strides into kind-of-license-free video with VP9. However, h.264 has established itself as a standard - we use it at latakoo for that reason - and is unlikely to be displaced in the near future.

I found this piece about the "do what you love" mantra challenging:

By keeping us focused on ourselves and our individual happiness, [Do What You Love] distracts us from the working conditions of others while validating our own choices and relieving us from obligations to all who labor, whether or not they love it. It is the secret handshake of the privileged and a worldview that disguises its elitism as noble self-betterment. According to this way of thinking, labor is not something one does for compensation, but an act of self-love. If profit doesn’t happen to follow, it is because the worker’s passion and determination were insufficient. Its real achievement is making workers believe their labor serves the self and not the marketplace.

It goes on to describe how this way of thinking actually erases peoples' work:

But by portraying Apple as a labor of his individual love, Jobs elided the labor of untold thousands in Apple’s factories, conveniently hidden from sight on the other side of the planet — the very labor that allowed Jobs to actualize his love.

The whole piece is worth reading.

I don't think it's completely right, but there's no doubt that "do what you love" comes from a place of privilege, and is only available to a small subset of people. It certainly shouldn't diminish the work done by other people, as the article rightly points out. And there is an implied distinction there, which implies that someone is somehow less of a person if they aren't in the privileged position of being able to work in a particular way.

That implication is unjust, and harmful in a variety of ways. From a technology standpoint, I find myself coming back to the obvious questions: How can we empower? How can we help remove these kinds of divides? And then wondering if these are the right questions at all.

I like the sound of the Objectives and Key Results system that Google uses:

First, you set up an Objective. Then you set up a number of "Key Results" that are quantifiable that will help you hit your objective.

Your objectives should be definitive and measurable. Don't say, for instance, I want to make my website prettier. Say you want to make your website 30% faster. Or you want to increase engagement by 15%.

This is great, but only if every single person in the company does it. If you limit OKR to certain people, for example engineers, then you create a two-class system: people whose performance is graded, and people who aren't. Everyone up to and including (and in some ways especially) the CEO needs to be a part of the system.

On a Google Ventures post about the system, Rick Klau clarifies:

Low grades shouldn’t be punished [...] OKRs are not synonymous with employee evaluations. OKRs are about the company’s goals and how each employee contributes to those goals. Performance evaluations - which are entirely about evaluating how an employee performed in a given period - should be independent from their OKRs.

Makes sense, right? It encourages employees to set ambitious objectives, and ranks the company as a whole on how its constituent members hit their targets. I think the transparency - everyone can see everyone else's OKRs - is an important facet of that.

Have you used them? How did they work out for you?

I enjoyed, but didn't fully agree with, TechCrunch's piece Silicon Valley Lost, And Found:

However, in other ways, what drew my mother and my grandfather here is very much alive. A desire for non-conformity and a grandness of aspiration still exists in certain entrepreneurs here. The 150-year-old Gold Rush mentality lingers on in the engineers who show up every year from all over the world to try their luck at starting new companies. The Valley’s unique cultural language around materialism and status persists. While it does get flashier every year, there is still a certain discretion about being well-dressed or having a nice car here, at least compared to New York or Los Angeles.

"Non-conformity and a grandness of aspiration" is what I love about working in tech. I find subversion comforting, so find a lot to love in cities like Berkeley, Oakland and San Francisco (just like I enjoyed the anarchic artistic scene in Edinburgh). As well as the cultural environment in those places, which developed independently of the technology industry, I enjoy tech's ability to look at the status quo and decide that it can be made better. Contrast that with many industries, which remain stagnant, or worse, start to see themselves as institutions.

But let's not forget the petty bigotry and wealth-imbalance-related issues that have started to come to a head this year. Or the more-and-more audacious displays of wealth. That "discretion" about materialism that the author discusses is important to me; even in the short time I've been here, it's become more and more visible to me. I'm interested in what I consider to be the "real" Silicon Valley, by which I think I mean the "authentic" one: the one that's about making things better with your skills, rather than people turning up because they think they can make a fast buck.

The difference is illustrated ably, earlier in the article:

Working with bankers and traders also wasn’t the same as dealing with founders, engineers and hackers day in and day out. People were sharp, but they didn’t love their work - not the way my grandfather or dad did. Jobs in banking were a means to accumulate year-end bonuses and holidays. They didn’t spend their spare time messing with a half-dozen oscilloscopes or building makeshift telescopes.

Those people - the folks in the basement with their oscilloscopes and telescopes, tinkering on their own terms - are my heroes. The people with that nerdy tinkerer mentality, and the freedom to pursue it that is still fairly unique to Silicon Valley, are the ones who changed the world, and will keep on changing it.

It's not written about much these days, but out there in the rest of the world, engineers still draw scorn. You hear them being talked about as "back-room guys", with the implications that the other, "normal" people should be front of house. Geekdom is still niche, and in places, taboo. And that's one of the other things that makes Silicon Valley special - here, geeks have freedom to be themselves, outside these constraints. And it turns out that when they have this freedom, they create the world's most valuable companies, develop transformative technologies, and so on.

This is important. What worries me a little about the latest trends are that the engineers have been co-opted into a resource by incoming people with dollars in their eyes. Factories of willing developers are being established based on the promise of the previous generation, and the lottery-like idea that maybe your company will succeed to the tune of millions, or billions, of dollars. As one engineer told me at a well-funded company that will remain unnamed, "yes, you work weekends, but everyone else does too, so your coworkers kind of become your family." That's nothing short of a bullshit deal, and it seems to me that this kind of exploitation risks killing what's special about the Valley. It also perpetuates the inequalities we've heard so much about this year.

But the non-conformist geek engineers are still there, tinkering on their own terms, side-by-side with San Francisco's counterculture, which lives on. It's one reason why I've fallen in love with the #indieweb community (and its spin-off, Homebrew Website Club). These movements are no less likely to change the world, but they're on our terms, for us and for everyone, rather than the predatory desires of a generation of hopeful MBAs.

I hate gyms. At their best, I'll stick a podcast on, hook myself up to a machine, and do a circuit of resistance training to follow. If it's a good podcast, I will have learned something, but I don't think they're interesting, and I don't think they're real exercise. I also don't think that one burst of exercise is as healthy (or feels as good) as spreading exercise throughout the day. I've never been good about building them into my routine.

My career and livelihood also demands that I sit in front of a computer all day, at high levels of alertness. This isn't a recipe for good health, and it's not uncommon (although, I think, less common now!) to see laptop warriors swigging at soda or chugging a Red Bull to keep their energy up. I don't want to be that guy, and the two to three cups of coffee I drink a day already worry me.

I grew up in Oxford, a town where walking is easy; it was as fast to walk the two miles into the city center from my house as it was to catch the bus. So I learned to walk everywhere - something I continued to do when I moved to Edinburgh, and something I still try and do here in the US. It's harder here, even in cities like San Francisco; in some parts of America it's actually a kind of taboo to walk instead of take the car. I hear there's also some kind of obesity epidemic these same places. I'm shocked.

Walking everywhere - six miles or more a day, according to Fitbit - has always been my number one form of exercise. Here, I have to be a bit more careful about it. My work is based in Austin (I'm the outlier here in the Bay Area), and don't have an official office, so I could just pay for something that suited me; I chose Local Office, a perfectly-placed spot in West Berkeley that meant I automatically had a 3 mile walk built into my day. I took another hour to stroll around for lunch, and I had my six miles. This last year, I started to build in other forms of exercise; sometimes, when nobody was in the office and I was at a stopping point on whatever I was working on, and nobody else was around, I'd drop and do 20 push-ups. By the time the office closed, I'd worked my way up to 100 a day. (And lost over 15 pounds.)

Local Office is sadly gone. These days I often work out of RockIT Colabs, a coworking / maker space (they have an office upstairs, 3D printers and welding stations downstairs) right on the edge between Chinatown and the Financial District in downtown San Francisco. The community is perfect for me, but even factoring in my BART ride from Berkeley, the exercise isn't quite there. For some reason, I've also lost my habit of jumping up from my desk and walking around or doing some intensive exercise whenever I hit a stopping point. (The ability to drop and do some exercise with impunity is one of the few benefits of working from home over a shared office space.)

I'm having once again to think more explicitly about exercise - I'm definitely gaining weight, despite mostly eating well and doing the right things - and may, once again, have to try and join a gym. Or I might consider becoming a runner. Or something else.

If you're sat in front of a computer all day, what do you do to keep yourself healthy?

The moments when I do my best thinking are always the quiet ones. All my devices are off, there's no sound around me except for (when I'm lucky) the gentle breeze through the trees, or the swish of far-off cars. My mind is at peace; uncluttered and uninterrupted, while at the same time free to meander.

Which is at odds with where my brain is for most of the rest of the time. Compared to many of my peers, I use a relatively small number of devices on a regular basis: really just one phone and one laptop. Nonetheless, I find myself checking social media potentially hundreds of times a day. I'm a dopamine addict, and I'm pretty sure it's killing my creativity, concentration and productivity.

I'm not alone. Earlier today, Tantek Çelik adapted an old saying for the modern age:

In the land of the distracted, the singularly focused person is king.

But how negatively is social media affecting the way I think?

Note that the problem is with multitasking, not lack of focus. Unfocused thought can be an advantage:

In recent years, however, scientists have begun to outline the surprising benefits of not paying attention. Sometimes, too much focus can backfire; all that caffeine gets in the way. For instance, researchers have found a surprising link between daydreaming and creativity—people who daydream more are also better at generating new ideas. Other studies have found that employees are more productive when they're allowed to engage in "Internet leisure browsing" and that people unable to concentrate due to severe brain damage actually score above average on various problem-solving tasks.

The results regarding multitasking, however, are not so positive. Clifford Nass, a psychology professor at Stanford, noted the effect of multitasking on students at his institution, specifically with respect to smartphones:

The research is almost unanimous, which is very rare in social science, and it says that people who chronically multitask show an enormous range of deficits. [...] We have scales that allow us to divide up people into people who multitask all the time and people who rarely do, and the differences are remarkable. People who multitask all the time can't filter out irrelevancy. They can't manage a working memory. They're chronically distracted.

They initiate much larger parts of their brain that are irrelevant to the task at hand. And even - they're even terrible at multitasking. When we ask them to multitask, they're actually worse at it. So they're pretty much mental wrecks.

Furthermore, just as second-hand smoking has effects beyond the original user, this multitasking behavior affects others too:

On a test following the lecture, students in view of multitaskers performed significantly more poorly than those who weren't in view of multitasking. The difference was 17 percent, enough to drop a solid A to a B-. Less surprisingly, a second study confirmed that the multitaskers themselves, not just those who incidentally witnessed multitasking, similarly suffered a drop in performance.

I've struggled with low self esteem for much of my life, which is associated with dopamine levels, and may make me more susceptible to this kind of addiction. Regardless of whether there's any truth to this or not, in 2014, I want my brain back.

Already, I've reduced my social media usage by posting to my own site here at werd.io rather than directly to the silos in question. This month, I'm reducing the number of quick-fix sites and networks I participate in, and have already jettisoned Instagram and Snapchat. It's not that I'm becoming an Internet hermit; instead, I want to focus on the kinds of content and interactions that are enriching to me. If I'm learning, growing and being productive, that's great. If I'm persisting because I get superficial rewards with no real lasting value to me, then it's time to jump ship. Long-form communication and engaging conversations are important.

As is spending more time with everything switched off, a cup of tea in my hands, leaves rustling in the breeze.

It's traditional to create resolutions for the new year. I've been thinking a lot about where I want to take my work in 2014; these are some ideas.

Write.

Specifically, I want to write more for other people, following from my previous work for the likes of ZDNet, IBM DeveloperWorks and Packt Publishing. I'm also interested in guest posting on blogs and sites around the web, about the social web, #IndieWeb, open source and responsible application development.

Empower independent content creators.

How can we put independent creators on a level pegging with the world's largest media companies? One thing I've been thinking about is that 24-7 news channels are obviously not a future-facing content medium given the web, where you can look up breaking news whenever you want, wherever you want, from whomever you want, without having to wait for a newscaster to restart their 30-minute cycle. Despite the ease of the web, leaning back and watching TV (or some screen) is sometimes pleasurable. Could you create a video newscast that aggregates stories from multiple providers based on your interests and context? Google News meets CNN?

Help support niche communities on the web.

The strength of the web is that we can all publish and communicate with each other, in a variety of different media, and it can all interlink as a single, continuous mesh of conversation and information. Unfortunately, that strength has been undermined by the proliferation of data silos, which make it harder to establish these kinds of links, and also limit certain kinds of content, topics and conversation through conservative design.

There are so many things to talk about, in so many ways, and by limiting ourselves to the platforms that the likes of Facebook provide, and by funneling the value generated by our communities to those sites, we're not using the web to its full potential. I want to help support the full range of communities on the web, and help them be self-sustaining, so that the people who create safe spaces for niche topics can continue to maintain them.

Idno is certainly a part of this idea, and I will continue to develop it as a first-class social publishing platform for both groups and individuals.

Figure out open source for designers.

Open source software suffers by treating designers like second-class citizens.

The open source process for programmers is well-established: we have many different flavors of version control, and the tools that surround them are first-class. I'm as happy as I've ever been working with Git, and software like GitHub and GitLab.

Working with design media is harder. Not only is it hard to represent visual changes using version control, and manage them in a sensible way using our project management tools, but even the accepted file formats for design work are closed. Photoshop comps are the norm, and UX wireframes often use closed software like Omnigraffle. That's because those tools are absolutely the best ones for the job, but standardizing on those formats make it harder to build open tools for design collaboration. And even with this aside, issue trackers are all written with source code in mind.

Collectively, this all means that welcoming designers into an open source community is extremely difficult. Nonetheless, design is an extremely significant part of any software project. It's worth thinking about the first steps towards making this easier.

Build bridges.

It's hard to share from, eg, the Twitter app to my own website, whether it's based on Idno or something else. I'm planning on building a shim that allows me to do that more easily, based on Android's share dialog. But there's more to do. There are ways to take ostensibly closed platforms and find ways to pry them open. For example, functionality to share closed content by email can be used to integrate directly into other, open software. Other integrations are possible, exploiting "growth hacking" features designed to find more people to lock into these platforms.

Work from everywhere.

I've still never been to Seattle. Or Tokyo. Or Melbourne. And it's been too long since I was in London, or Oxford, or Edinburgh. I want to travel more, and use the fact that I can work anywhere there's an Internet connection - and that I am not responsible for a family at this stage in my life - to see more of the world.

If you'd be willing to host me at your office for a few days, wherever you are in the world, let me know!

Wired reports that we're about to lose net neutrality, and "the Internet as we know it":

[...] Today, that freedom won’t survive much longer if a federal court — the second most powerful court in the nation behind the Supreme Court, the DC Circuit — is set to strike down the nation’s net neutrality law, a rule adopted by the Federal Communications Commission in 2010. Some will claim the new solution "splits the baby" in a way that somehow doesn’t kill net neutrality and so we should be grateful. But make no mistake: Despite eight years of public and political activism by multitudes fighting for freedom on the internet, a court decision may soon take it away.

Couple this with the persistent attacks on our privacy and freedom of communication that have come to light over the last year, and we need to ask ourselves if the Internet is still the networking platform that we need.

I don't think it's as crazy a question as it sounds.

When we talk about the Internet, usually we're referring to the protocols and services that run on top of it: the web, DNS, email, and services that sit on top of them, like Wikipedia, Facebook and Google. The Internet is the foundation on which each of these things sits - but it's certainly possible for similar kinds of experiences to be built on different kinds of networks.

This has already been attempted, of course: Internet2 is a network run for academic and research purposes, using many of the same protocols as the Internet, but on different infrastructure. Some 60,000 institutions are connected.

When the Internet was initially designed, many of the things we take for granted were not incorporated into its architecture - most notably, ecommerce, the web, and the widespread communications we now use every day, across browsers, apps and devices. A lot of these services and technologies are able to exist because of hacks and shims. That's a fantastic testament to the resilience of the network, but perhaps it's time to learn from those attempts and build a v2.

Additionally, the current design clearly allows governments and other entities to easily monitor communications, jeopardizing the business and private communication that it's simultaneously revolutionizing. Just as any business that solely bases its products on Facebook, say, is constantly under threat from that company choosing to change its API, algorithms or interfaces, any business that bases its products on the Internet is now under threat from surveillance activity.

What if we could then choose to modernize our global communications by inventing a new Internet, designed to be used by commerce and protect independent communications? I don't think it's enough to bake encryption into its core (although that should happen) - revelations about, eg, companies like RSA using backdoored encryption methods suggest that we should look at algorithms and methodologies that are inherently more secure even when data is not encrypted. Neutrality should be inherent; ownership and governance decentralized.

If creating a new global network sounds daunting, that's because it's undeniably a mammoth task. Nonetheless, I think there's value in looking at the Internet as a proof of concept, as a thought experiment: what could we change to protect ourselves, protect each other, and continue to change the world without interference from surveillance or corporate misdeeds?

As part of the Nieman Journalism Lab's Predictions for Journalism 2014, Jason Kottke writes:

Sometime in the past few years, the blog died. In 2014, people will finally notice. Sure, blogs still exist, many of them are excellent, and they will go on existing and being excellent for many years to come. But the function of the blog, the nebulous informational task we all agreed the blog was fulfilling for the past decade, is increasingly being handled by a growing number of disparate media forms that are blog-like but also decidedly not blogs.

He then goes on to discuss the death of the reverse-chronological stream, as well as the inevitable move to what he calls tightly-bound social media sites. Thematically, it's an interesting companion piece to Anil Dash's seminal The Web We Lost, which was published last year at about this time.

And, despite some hedging on his personal blog, it's clearly true. Almost none of you will have found this link through a feed reader (although my stats show that some of you are using Feedly, Digg Reader, and even Livejournal's RSS feature). Most links will have come through Twitter and Facebook, with a straggling number showing up through app.net and similar sites. If I'm lucky, someone might submit this post to an aggregator like Hacker News.

Note, though, that you're still reading it. The article isn't dying; you can think of the blog, or the stream, or the feed, as the container that the article sits in.

Medium exploits this in a clever way by presenting articles nicely, and then providing a magazine-style site for you to consume them in. Indieweb arguments about whether you should publish posts on a site that you control or on someone else's aside, there's no doubt that Medium's injected new life into long-form text on the web. That's great, and like Facebook and Twitter, you can choose to think of it as a well-executed proof of concept.

If you buy the idea that articles aren't dying - and anecdotally, I know I read as much as I ever did online - then a blog is simply the delivery mechanism. It's fine for that to die. Even welcome. In some ways, that death is due to the ease of use of the newer, siloed sites, and makes the way for new, different kinds of content consumption; innovation in delivery. Jason talks about the ephemerality of Snapchat (which is far from a traditional feed), and there are an infinity of other ways that content might be beamed to us on whichever device we happen to choose to be using at any particular moment. But these content forms are minor details.

The beauty of the independent web is that we can choose to represent ourselves online - and therefore, publish content - in a manner of our choosing. I happen to like the reverse-chronological feed, but if you prefer to publish in the form of an immersive 3D world, or a radio show, or full-screen autoplaying video with annotations, then, hey, that's up to you. It's all part of a rich, interlinking medium. Independence means not necessarily going with the flow.

The counterpart to that is how you read content. In the past, we've been very stream-heavy: RSS readers, Twitter feeds, Facebook timelines, and so on. But there's no need for that to be the case. Part of the joy of a diverse web is that while I might choose to read in the form of a feed or a newspaper, you might want to mash your reading list up in entirely new ways. You could have a robot announcer read to you while you drive to work in the morning (wouldn't that be better than the radio?), or mash related articles up to provide new kinds of content that provide better insight than the sum of their parts. And I can choose to use a completely different form to you. Each one of us can have a completely different experience.

That's a tough concept to get across to an audience that's used to mass media, where everyone consumes the same content in the same form. But we don't need that anymore. Not only can content be personalized, but the form of the content can be personalized. Facebook might agonize over the algorithm that decides which posts are surfaced, but in the future we can each have our own algorithms. Form and content will be separated.

These new kinds of readers will begin to appear in 2014, powered by simple web technologies like HTML and microformats. They will eventually be as easy to use as Twitter and Facebook. And they will make us all more empowered readers and creators, once again connecting us all, but this time on our terms.

TechCrunch reports that IBM bought Aspera yesterday:

Aspera’s software is built on “fasp,” its patented file transfer technology. Fasp is designed to leverage a company’s wide area network (WAN) and commodity hardware to achieve speeds that are faster than FTP and HTTP over a secure network. A WAN is essentially a company’s network across a large geographic region. Aspera’s technology optimizes the WAN through its software that allows for granularity in the way the technology is used. Through the process, Aspera optimizes the bandwidth, latency, bottlenecks and a host of other factors.

Essentially, Aspera is an optimized, proprietary protocol built on UDP. The sender and receiver needs to have Aspera software (or software that licenses Aspera's technology) installed for the transfer to take place.

IBM's thesis that we need faster file transfers is obviously correct. Uploading large data or media files is a pain, and it's not a problem that's going away. While downstream bandwidth is getting better all the time, upstream bandwidth often suffers in comparison - and between big data, more sophisticated applications and our insatiable appetite for video, the size of the files we're moving across the Internet is going up.

[Disclosure: right now I'm CTO at latakoo, a startup that helps enterprises (including TV news networks) move large amounts of media data around. We use a toolbox of compression techniques, as well as a global upload network, to make managing media files much faster. Journalists use us to, for example, upload video from Air Force One while the plane is taxiing down the runway.]

Don't think there's a problem? 5 minutes of recorded video on an iPhone 5 can be 1gb or more in size. Try uploading that from anything other than a super-fast broadband connection.

The trouble is that a protocol like Aspera's naturally leads to lock-in, and can only solve the problem for certain kinds of software. Unless fasp is open-sourced now that it's owned by IBM, every piece of software you own will need to have a license for their patents in order to take advantage of it. Not only does that lead to more expensive software, but it also limits the innovation that can happen around the protocol. If your business relies on fast file transfers, that's a lose-lose situation for you: you're locked into an expensive ecosystem, and there's little chance of a disruptive incomer to tweak and play with the protocol. Because of that, folks will just invent new protocols. When an improvement is made, it's likely you'll have to buy into a whole new ecosystem, as opposed to just upgrade to the next version. You'll hop from lock-in to lock-in.

Knowing that we need to speed up uploads, and use all available bandwidth, we need to think about other, more open approaches. UDP makes a lot of sense as a bedrock, but an open protocol designed for resilient file transfer is needed - and then, with a first version prototyped, we need to seed libraries all over the place, in every available language. We need to design it for backwards-compatibility. And we need to make sure it remains unencumbered with patents (possibly, in today's climate, by defensively registering a patent and then widely granting a license).

Our approach with Latakoo has always been to use standard protocols and optimize the files that are being transferred over the top. That works really well, and ensures wide compatibility with all kinds of networks, from corporate infrastructure through satellite modems connections. Even better would be to be able to rely on a well-supported open protocol that optimizes the upload stream in ways that TCP does not (and then, continue to optimize content with this as a starting point). Bittorrent exists, of course, and is wonderful - but is often blocked because of unfortunate connotations and liabilities relating to media piracy.

Developing such a protocol is in the interests of Netflix, Google, and, yes, Latakoo. Faster file transfers are empowering for every user, and save large service providers money. They're easier to integrate with, and allow for an ecosystem where the customer is in control. Everybody wins.

Aral Balkan announced IndiePhone today. He did a good job of making it sound exciting, in a very Jobsian way:

I think it's great that he's driving interest in the subject, and of course it's fantastic to see anyone starting something up with these sorts of principles. I particularly agree with his arguments about poorly designed open software. I do have some specific questions though:

1. I'm curious about the motivation for actually building a phone. That seems like a very Apple thing to do - whereas for me, an indie approach would imply being able to run the software of my choice on the device of my choice, with full control over data transmissions and storage. It's also a dangerous thing to do, and could taint the water in the same way that Diaspora arguably did for decentralized social networking. The Ubuntu Phone failed, and it had a giant name behind it. Meanwhile, Firefox OS, with a much more handset-agnostic approach, is chugging along nicely.
2. What might the experience look like? Whereas the likes of Apple are very prescriptive, to me "indie" suggests that I should be able to tailor my own experience to a much greater degree than other platforms. For example, the ideas surrounding a people-focused communication experience might work well for a lot of people, while others might want their phone / platform / OS to work another way. Independence means I should be able to choose.
3. I want to make sure latakoo and idno can both run on it. What might that process look like? What kind of software will it run? That isn't clear yet.
4. Why was it necessary to trademark the word "indie" in the context of the cloud and operating systems (as well as "indie cloud", "indie phone" and "indie OS"), given that the indie web is a concept that's been around for years now?

I love the ambition here. But I'd also love to know more, and I'm a little bit concerned that the presentation inadvertently co-opts terminology and ideas developed by existing communities, without involving them in the project.

I've been using personal computers since before I could write my name, but grew up hating Macs. To me, they were expensive, style-fascist icons that represented a kind of elitism that I was allergic to. Computers should be for everybody, and I felt like the Mac represented an ideal of something that was only available to the wealthy. (We were not particularly financially wealthy when I grew up, but my parents always did make sure we had a computer, from the Sinclair ZX81, through an 8-bit Atari, to a series of MS-DOS PCs, and I learned BASIC and written English at more or less the same time.) I did finally buy a MacBook Pro a couple of years ago, but mostly because I'd managed to destroy the plastic casing of a series of PC laptops, and I realized I needed something made of metal. I drive my laptops hard.

So I want you to know that this comes from a position of non-fanboy-ness: the MacBook Air is astonishing.

It's only got 4GB of RAM, but I guess the solid state drive and high IO performance makes up for it, because it performs at least as quickly as my MacBook Pro with 16GB. The processor is also a little slower, but the only time this has revealed itself so far was when initializing Xcode for the first time, and it paused briefly. The ten hours of battery life - allegedly up to 15 on Mavericks - should more than make up for that. I don't think this is going to be a video editing workhorse, but guess what? I rarely edit video.

Where are its speakers? They're like magic, because the sound is far better than on my Pro, or any laptop I've ever owned, and I can't see them anywhere. Are they behind the keyboard? The sound just opens up and fills the room. It's fantastic. And the rest of the Air is silent. No fans, no nothing.

I'm installing all the usual development tools on it, of course, and I'll be using it as a development web server and everything else I could possibly need. The fact that I can do this with a machine that weighs under three pounds and has a battery that will last a transatlantic flight is a freaking revelation.

My MacBook Pro's wifi died this year, and it couldn't be replaced without a significant expense, so it's just become my new desktop machine. Don't feel bad for it: I expect I'll be using it for years to come (every other part of it works really well). But barring any major gotchas, an Air seems like a much better portable machine. I just wish it came with a retina display.

This little exchange has been tickling me:

In closing the debate Baroness Bonham-Carter of Yarnbury looked back to the past and directed a question directly at Lord Grade, previous Director of Programmes at the BBC Michael Grade.

"Finally, as Doctor Who has dominated the debate and I see my noble friend Lord Grade in his seat, I cannot resist wondering whether, had he known that Sylvester McCoy would regenerate into John Hurt, he would still have cancelled the programme?"

Lord Grade nodded vigorously to indicate the affirmative.

Politics.

I've been following this pull request thread involving the removal of gendered pronouns in an open source project with interest. It's an obvious change to make a project more inclusive, yet it was met with:

Sorry, not interested in trivial changes like that.

A patch was finally included, but then reverted by the same commenter.

This is dumb. In English, choosing gender-neutral pronouns is simple. Here's how, using the aforementioned reverted patch as an example:

• Gendered: The user needs to know that some data has already been sent, to stop him from sending it twice.
• Neutral: The user needs to know that some data has already been sent, to stop them from sending it twice.

In the past, I've heard people gripe about the use of "them" to reference a singular person, but it is actually correct English. It's called the "epicene they". Shakespeare used it; Jane Austen used it; you can use it.

One more time:

• Excludes 50% of your users: The user must feel comfortable using your software, otherwise he may choose another product.
• Inclusive: The user must feel comfortable using your software, otherwise they may choose another product,

There's no extra effort involved. Have at it.

Back in the old days, you'd get a newspaper delivered, and you'd perhaps read it around the breakfast table or at your desk to find out what was going on in the world. The same paper, day in, day out. You'd read the columns, know which comics they ran, maybe do the crossword.

Some people still do this. That's nice. There's something great about reading a paper over a cup of coffee in the morning.

That doesn't apply to the web. Here's the Independent's paywall message:

Thank you for reading and relying on independent.co.uk for your news and information. You have now viewed your 30-day allowance of 5 FREE pages. Want to read more?

I'm sorry, The Independent, but I don't rely on you for anything. I don't read a linear paper on the web; I follow links curated by people I trust. The New York Times has no such illusions, meanwhile, but tells me, in all caps:

YOU’VE REACHED THE LIMIT OF 10 FREE ARTICLES A MONTH

Thanks, The New York Times. There's no need to shout.

The Independent's US price is $3.99 a month. The New York Times is a little more complicated, and expensive: $3.75 a week for the web and my phone, $5 a week for the web and my iPad, $8.75 a week for the web and my phone and my iPad, or all of the above plus a pile of dead trees every morning for the inexplicably lower price of $3.40 a week.

The New York Times is my favorite newspaper on earth, but imagine if I did this for every source I read on the web! I'd be broke, instantly. This is a model that scales well for the dead-tree economy, but doesn't work at all on the Internet, where you could easily read 10 sources in just a morning.

Hence advertising: the Independent knew I was unlikely to buy, so actually displayed a full video ad next to the advertisement asking me to subscribe. It clearly wasn't contextual, because it was for a Porsche - so it's a shot in the dark, basically. Awareness advertising with no real metrics (I assume) to back it up.

Another model must be found.

I don't think it's micropayments. Imagine if you had to pay for every single thing you read on the web, which is the future that micropayments promise. Just as if you paid for a subscription for every newspaper site on the web, if you're anything like me, you'd be broke pretty quickly. Or, alternatively, the payments would be of the kind that we've seen on subscription music services. That's a road that leads directly to Buzzfeed, where articles must be massively popular to turn a profit - and hence are impossibly populist.

In the old days, classified ads played more of a role. It's true that Craigslist's success disrupted $5 billion from the newspaper industry, but it's also true that this does not explain the hard times newspaper owners are experiencing. The context has changed, and attempts to drive traditional subscriptions show that the industry still hasn't full adapted to this. It's not that we're reading on multiple devices now, in different locations - it's that we're reading differently. The newspaper front page hasn't been our first stop in a long time.

Obviously, none of this is, well, news - countless articles have been written about this over the last decade. Yet, a solution has yet to be found. Which is a shame: journalism, newspapers and the communities they represent have become an important, and I'd say integral, part of the world in which we all live.

This year, my mother's life was saved by a double lung transplant. I still have flashbacks to the day she was called, and to the moment when she was pushed through the double doors, wide-eyed, and I didn't know if I was ever going to see her again. Almost nine months later, she's upstairs, taking some medication. It's been a tough road, mostly for her but also for all of us, and I'm thankful that she's here.

I'm thankful that my aunt, who had two separate single lung transplants a little before my mother, is also with us.

And, oh boy, am I thankful for all the wonderful surgeons, nurses, doctors and medical professionals who helped those things be true.

I'm thankful for my family, for their support, and for the fact that we're close. There are people who don't get along with their families, who dread every familial get-together for the arguments, weirdness or stoicism. I'm grateful that I'm not one of them, and am so proud of both my nuclear and extended families. My dad in particular has been a superhero this year. And apropos of nothing, here's the song my sister wrote for my mother a few years ago, when her illness began to really take its toll. I'm grateful we're all in the same place, more or less.

I'm thankful for the support I've had from a raft of people who have understood when I've had to take time out or change plans to help my parents. I'm also thankful for all the people who have understood that this has, in some ways, been the hardest year of my life, and gone out of their way to help me out and be there for me.

I'm continually thankful for everyone who has taken an interest in my work, been a friend to me, and been a part of my life this year. I've met some wonderful people and cemented relationships with people I'm glad to know. And while 2013 has been tough, with all this support and all these wonderful people in my life, I don't see how 2014 can't be an amazing year.

#ma #erica #thanksgiving #thanks