wanderingstan

PageRank can be a powerful weapon. Like all weapons, the possessors don’t always appreciate its full power.

FlowingData posted today that a Boston designer stole several of their graphics, in a post titled Do not hire this guy.

██████████, a “user experience designer” in Boston, chose the wrong people to rip off. If █████’s work in data visualization looks familiar, it’s because none of them are his, and all of them were featured on this blog.

The evidence is pretty damming, and the guy almost certainly did it.

But the big questions here are (1) is that blog post a punishment fitting to the crime,  (2) how is the power to “punish” distributed on the internet.

First, is the punishment fitting to the crime?

On the one hand, content creators are generally powerless to do anything about theft like this. There is no internet cops looking for such theft, no Supreme Court of the internet to deliver a sentence. So it’s understandable that FlowingData would use whatever power they do have: they can write posts to their audience.

On the other hand, this power is awesomely strong. By creating this post FlowingData has insured that any search for the perp’s name will return their post as a top result. Because the blog is so popular, anything they write about is sure to be a top search result.

Possibly forever.

Commenter R. Kane makes a good point about long range consequences:

I think what I’m interested in is this: given the choice between two applicants of similar qualifications one would always choose the applicant without a damning top ten search result. Even in five years. Even if the application was for a short-order cook. (link)

and later

I’m raising the point that not only is his design career probably over, but any career. I think this is a profound shift, and I think it’s almost entirely due to the way search/blogs/comments work. (link)

I agree with Kane that this designer will probably have trouble finding any work in the future. And that is a punishment way out of proportion to the crime.

Second, how did FlowingData get this power to destroy someone’s career? In a word, PageRank.

My tax preparer has no internet presence, and it looks like they may have cost me almost a thousand dollars through negligence. I realized this morning that even with my mediocre PangRank, a short post about them would surely be the top Google result for the firm’s name. Believe you me, I thought long and hard about it!

It feels odd to hold such “power,” especially since it isn’t equally distributed. Not everyone has a blog. Not every blog has the Google juice to get a result into the top 10. But some blogs do, and this is a very unequal distribution of power.

It really is the wild west out there. What would ideal internet justice look like?

(Yes, I redacted the guy’s name so as not to contribute yet another page to search results. And yes yes, I realize that by linking to the original article, I am only further increasing the PageRank of that post, and further pushing that post to the top of the search results. PageRank is a devious power.)

Another page from my old journals, where I experiment with lettering. Emphasis here was on strict verticals, but to make all horizontals as fluid and swirly as possible. Done with the usual black ballpoint.

I think this is from 2008, after getting back from Colombia. I especially like the short entry at the bottom from when I’m sick—you can feel the sickness in the letters! Seems my best work always comes from extremes of emotion: either elated as in the previous example, or feeling down as is the case here.

Previously: Lettering: “Somewhere in the Colombian Jungle”

All Lettering Posts

I’m the go-to guy for computer questions in my family. And as I’ve visited friends in past months, I’ve done the same thing around the globe. The upshot is that I now have a pretty standard “package” that I give people. It’s a collection of free programs and a few tweaks that have worked best for me over the years. Having just done another set of installations this past week across western Germany, it’s about time to write it all out for me to remember. If you do tech support in your family, you might find it useful.

This is assuming they high speed internet connection and are running Windows XP or Vista. Say what you will, but that’s what most “normal” people use.

Browser: Firefox

The old classic is still the best. You can download it here. Google Chrome is decent alternative, but Firefox’s add-ons give you more options for patching things up.

• Remove all the default bookmarks and replace with one’s that make sense for the user. Change the name of each bookmark because the defaults are really long. My standard set, with the names that I give them:
  - Search: Google, of course.
  - Email: Gmail (see below) or whatever web email service (if any) they use.
  - Wikipedia: Wikipedia
  - Maps: Google Maps, with default location set to their home.
  - News: Google News, with local news set to their city.
  - Weather: Weather Underground, with location set to their city.
  - Dictionary: Wordnik, new online dictionary that I worked on last year. (Or dictionary.com if you’re feeling boring.)
  - TV: Hulu, which has most TV shows. Only works in United States, unfortunately. (Alternatively, you can also add bookmarks for specific shows that they like.)
  - Radio: Pandora is again sadly US-only. Ask your friend for a few songs or bands they like, and watch as they are amazed at the music that Pandora delivers. (You’ll have to create an account for your friend to save their stations.)
  - Facebook, if they use it.
  - Their bank, local library, and other sites that they might enjoy. My mom loves the OneAcross crossword helper, for example.
• Install Adblock Plus add-on to save them from advertsing overload.
• My parents had a problem with accidentally pressing “F11″ and making Firefox go fullscreen. (F11 is directly above the Backspace key on their keyboard.) Using the Keyconfig add-on you can disable (and add) keyboard functions to solve problems like this.

Anti-virus: Avira

All free anti-virus software is annoying, but I’ve found Avira to be the least intrusive. It does it’s job silently for the most part, save for occasionally showing a pop-up advertising it’s pay products. (This can be deactivated if needed.)

• Be sure to do a full system scan one you’ve installed it. If they haven’t had anti-virus software before, their system is sure to be infected.

Images: Picasa

You’d be surprised how many people I’ve met who have a digital camera but never figured out how to get the pictures onto their computer! I did a lot of research on this one, as my Dad has scanned 10,000+ photos and needs to manage them. (More here) The best free solution has been Picasa from Google. Of course, only install this if they don’t have any image program, or are unhappy with what they are currently using. I find many people are using crappy software that shipped with some product they bought. My Dad, for example, was using a absolutely hideous program from HP that had installed itself with his scanner.

• If they have been using a different program, or have downloaded images scattered around, move them all to their “My Pictures” folder.
• Have Picasa then scan only their “My Pictures” folder. Otherwise it will find all sorts of random crap from other programs.
• Remove the “Blog This” button unless they are a blogger. (Right-click on the button area to configure this.)
• If your friend uses Gmail, configure the “Email Image” button to work with their Gmail account. If they use a web email other than Gmail, configure Picasa to remove the “Email Image” button.
• If your friend uses Facebook, install the Facebook Uploader button and connect it with their Facebook account. Very important: Once you have installed the Facebook App, you must do a few extra steps: In Facebook, click on “Applications” in the bottom left, then “Edit Applications”. Change the “Show” option to “Authorized”. Find the “Picasa” application and click “Edit Settings”. Grant the application “Extra Permissions” so that your friend won’t be confused by having a 2nd step where they have to approve uploaded images within Facebook.)
• Connect their digital camera. When Windows asks what you want to do, select “Import with Picasa” and importantly also select “Do this action from now on.” The important thing is that Picasa launches automatically when your friend connects their camera.
• Show them how to print an image using the “Print” button at the bottom.

Webcam: Logitech

Video calling amazes people. Every person I visit who sees me viedo skyping with friends immediately asks “How can I get that?” And OK, they’re not free. But the good news is that webcams can be had for $20 these days—not bad. I’ve had the best luck with Logitech webcams, especially for sound quality. The one’s with Carl Zeis lenses have amazing picture quality. (Stay away from Microsoft models because the software tries to strongarm the user into Windows products, and the button on top is an unnecessary complication that will only confuse people as it tries to launch Microsoft junk.)

• After installing the Logitech driver software, modify the settings so that the “Logitech Assistant” does not launch every time the webcam is used. This extra floating window just confuses people.
• Mount the webcam so that your friend, when sitting at the computer, has their head right near the top of the screen in the webcam image. Not centered in the image.

Telephony & Chat: Skype

I’m not a fan of the new interface, but Skype remains the best video chat solution in my opinion. It gets through most strange firewall situations, and isn’t tied to a specific email provider like Google Talk or Yahoo Video. And at least in my family, it’s what most people already have.

• You’ll have to create an account for your friend. Be sure to give them the login details in case they need it someday.
• Add as friends any people that you know your friend might want to call.
• Add a picture to their profile, if you can find one. People like that.
• To reduce spam for your friend, change the settings to only accept chats or calls from people in their contact list.
• Configure Skype to login automatically and to launch with Windows.
• Configure Skype to use their webcam for video and for the microphone.
• Restart the computer and try making a call to make sure that all the default settings are correct.
• In Firefox and Internet Explorer, remove the stupid Skype add-on that is added by default. Sheesh.

Flare: Google Earth

While maybe not as strictly “useful” as other applications, Google Earth is downright impressive and people, especially older non-technical people, find it to be amazing. Furthermore, your friend can use it to Geotag images in Picasa if they later feel ambitious.

Office: OpenOffice

If they haven’t bought Microsoft Office, they certainly don’t need it. But of course, they are bound to need to read (and sometimes create) files in Word, Excel, or Powerpoint formats. OpenOffice does a not-great but passable job.

• Important: Change the default saving format to the Microsoft formats. (Yes, we all should support open formats. But believe me, you don’t want to try and explain this to not technical friends. Like it or not, Word and Excel are the defacto formats.) Go to “Preferences->Load/Save->General”. For each “Document Type” (Text Document, Spreadsheet, Presentation) change the “Always save as” option to “Microsoft XXXXX 97/2000/XP”.
• Java will be installed as part of this process. Be sure you do NOT get tricked into installing the Yahoo toolbar as part of this. (See Todd’s jihad against toolbars.)

Screensharing: Microsoft Sharedview

If you are especially close with the person you’re helping, and don’t live nearby, you may want to be able to fix things remotely. The most foolproof free solution I’ve found is Microsoft Sharedview.

• If your friend isn’t using Hotmail (let’s hope not!) you’ll have to create a Windows Live ID for them. You can use a non-Hotmail email account for this.
• Configure SharedView to use their account, and to log in automatically.
• Add a desktop icon that says something like “Share Computer with Stan”, but you might want to use your name instead.
• Of course, you’ll need an account and SharedView on your computer too! Test sharing their screen with you. Also, this will also put your email address as the default the next time they open the program.

I live several thousand miles away from the people I provide tech support for, so I also have people install VNC, open source screen-sharing application. I use UltraVNC which has good support for Vista and a good encryption solution. (Note that you’ll probably have to open a hole in their firewall and do some port forwarding, which is beyond the scope of this post.)

UPDATE: Just learned of LogMeIn Free, which looks promising. May be even easier than Sharedview, and also free.

Email: Gmail

Your friends probably already has an email service they use. But if they don’t like it or are looking to change, Gmail is the best bet. The built-in Google Chat also gives you a backup chat service for when Skype doesn’t work. You can have it pull from their old account if needed. Or you can have their Gmail account forward to their old account.

Backup: Mozy

This one isn’t free, but Mozy is something that you should encourage them is worth the $5/month. I honestly haven’t used others, but hear good things about Carbonite.

PDF Reading: Foxit Reader

The Adobe reader is bloated, slow, and constantly annoying users. Install Foxit Reader and make it the default for PDF files. Note that you’ll also have to make this change in Firefox. (In the Options dialog, click on “Applications” and find “PDF”.)

Final System Cleanup

If they’ve been using their system for a while and haven’t had a good tech support person, you’ll have lots of garbage to clean up.

• Remove all shortcuts from the desktop except for Firefox, Picasa, Skype, Google Earth, and programs that your friend specifically mentions using.
• Check the “Launch at Startup” folder to see what crap may be set to automatically launch. Remove anything that your friend doesn’t actually use.
• Clean out any toolbars from Internet Explorer and Firefox.
• Remove links to Internet Explorer from the desktop and start menu. Rename the Firefox shortcut to something like “Web Browser - Firefox”
• Remove unused programs from the “Start” menu.
• Remove unnecesary icons from the system tray.

Playing tech support for a friend or family member is a noble and often thankless task. Good on you for taking it on. If you have other suggestions or ideas (or a similar list for Mac or Linux?), please share them below.

More:

• How to Survive as the Family Tech Support Guy (or Gal) on Lifehacker.

Walking around Berlin with a friend, we hit upon discussing “What were the most important outcomes of Web 2.0?” In other words, now that Web 2.0 is officially dead, who were the real world-changers that came out of it? By comparison, the world-changers of “Web 1.0″ seem to have been Google (taught the world to search), Amazon & eBay (taught the world to buy online), eBay (taught the world to auction, and to sell its junk)

#1 Wikipedia - The hype around it has died town, but only because we all take it for granted now. It has become the standard go-to reference for the planet. We probably don’t understand yet how much this will change our society. At first I argued that Facebook had been the most important, but my friend argued convincingly that Wikipedia has changed the lives of more people and more fundamentally changed human life. It is interesting that Wikis in general have not had the same impact. (See my other thoughts on Wikipedia as the storehouse of objective knowledge.)

#2 Facebook - It rolled up all the other innovations in one neat and tidy package. Most importantly social networking (as from Friendster and then MySpace), photo sharing (as from Flickr), and “the feed” (not sure who originated this, though it certainly existed in other places before.) Traveling overseas, I am amazed at the how many foreign conversations I now here which are littered with distinct utterances of “facebook”. It was said that countries tied together by trade were less likely to go to war. I suspect this is even more true of countries tied together with social networks. (My thoughts on Facebook over the years.)

#3 Blogger / Wordpress / Blogs in General - It is now taken as given that anyone in the world can express themselves for free on the internet. Blogging was what brought this belief to the mainstream, and how we settled on the standards for this format. We take all of this for granted now, but we should remember that 10 years ago people were still debating of what order posts should go on a page, how comments should work, and experimenting with unholy hybrids like “blikis” (blog+wiki).

#4 Craigslist - Arguably the most important factor in the decline of newspapers in the US. Craigslist has revolutionized the way we sell and buy. The entire world of physical things is now far more liquid. It has mostly taken over from eBay as the place for personal commerce.

#5 Twitter - Though still without a business model, Twitter is certainly on to something. It came later in the Web 2.0 game than the others, and is an extension of the blogging paradigm. Perhaps it will be like Google, which came relatively late in the Web 1.0 game also.

Who else would you put on this list?

"Somewhere in the Colombian Jungle"

While my notebooks fill up with “things I should really blog about” entries, I was encouraged recently to share some of my favorite handwriting styles. That, and I was excited to find the My Handwriting Flickr group for inspiration. Most of you know that I’m a bit obsessed with letters, and in my mostly-daily journal I try to create new styles whenever I can.

This is a journal entry from 2008 after visiting the “Lost City” of Ciudad Perdida in Colombia. Inspiration was all (hundreds of them) stone circles that marked where homes once stood a thousand years ago–so goal was to exagerate all the circles in the text, and in all random-seeming sizes like in the city.

More about Ciudad Perdida at Wikipedia

On Flickr

…and greetings to all from Berlin!

After months of talk, I’m finally in Berlin and enjoying a  warm day sitting outside on a quite street.

I’ve been trying to ressurect my German of course. Though “resurrect” is surely too strong a word for something which was never quite alive in the first place!

Thankfully many of the words are coming back, but I’m also remembering some of the meta-experiences of being the foreigner. For example:

• Like a child again: Being a foreigner feels a lot like being a child. I’m filled with childlike wonder at seeing new ways of doing things. The horizontal centrifuge washing machine is so fascinating! The way you tell the waiter how much you’re paying, not how much you want back–so interesting! And also childlike in feelings of powerlessness. Not knowing how to properly take out the garbage. Not being able to participate in “grown up” conversations. Having to ask questions all the time.
• The choice to “Tune Out”: It is easy to “tune out” a foreign language. So I find it much easier here to get lost in my own thoughts. And as it’s more socially acceptable for me to not understand what’s going on in a conversation, I’ll often “tune out” for lengths of time to think deeper about something that someone has said and drift off into implications. I remember getting on the airplane to fly home after a year in Germany, and being truly annoyed with all the English jabber around me that I could not help but listen too–so distracting!
• Most Interested Listener Problem: Listening takes my full concentration. And with limited language capability, I rely heavily on the speaker’s body language and facial expressions to piece together what they are talking about. So when someone in a group is speaking, I give them my rapt attention, never taking my eyes away for fear of missing a clue. I then appear (and am) the most engaged listener. And yet I am understanding the least! But subconsciously, they start directing more and more of their talk to me, and direct follow-up questions to me (”So, has this happened to you too?”, “So you agree?”), and generally direct the conversation to me once they are done speaking. Ack! Then I am busted, outed, revealed! (Perhaps I didn’t manage to understand anything at all?) The trick then, is to listen as closely as possible all the while appearing to be one of the least interested listeners. Not so easy!
• Need For Creativity: When you’re only catching bits and pieces of a story, it demands extraordinary creativity to try and fill in the gaps. I find this to be a nice mental exercise. E.g. given “horse”, “field”, “yesterday”, “first time”, “jump”, “and then I laughed”. Was he riding the horse in a field, and jumped off? Or the horse jumped? Or maybe it was the first time riding in that particular field? Or maybe it was the horse that laughed? In any case, you have to keep all possible storylines currently in your head until you get enough (understood) context from later in the story to eliminate possibilities. If the needed context doesn’t come, then my stack overflows and it’s time to start over.
• Fake it till you Make it: When people figure out that you’re not understanding everything you say, they feel compelled to stop and explain (or to switch to English). But most of the time, all you need is for them to keep going and later context will fill in the gaps. (See above.) So I find myself relying heavily expressing the usual signs of interest and understanding (”I see.”, “Really?”, “And then?”, “Oh!”, ” No way!”) to keep them talking. A friend in Osnabrück once outed me on this, saying that I was one of the best foreigners at this “skill”!

When you’re learning a new sport, art, or any activity, you basically suck at it. That’s what it means to be a beginner. But if you keep at it, you will learn to get better.  It occurred to me recently, while I was sucking in a game of ultimate frisbee, that you are actually learning two things in parallel.

First, you are learning the needed skills: how to move, common tricks, techniques, etc…

But secondly, you are also learning to how to evaluate the execution of those skills.

This is all fine and good as you learn these two things in parallel. However, when you slack off for a long time, you lose your edge. I used to be quite a good ultimate player. As of last Saturday, I know that this is no longer the case. The problem is that while you have gotten rusty at the skill itself, you still fully remember how to evaluate. Thus, you can berate yourself for your poor execution.

And as you get older, you accumulate more activities that this can occur in. After all, you can’t be in top form in every activity all the time. Recently I’ve noticed it in myself for frisbee, mountain biking, calligraphy, and even coding.

The sad thing is that you’re probably doing pretty well–just not as well as when your evaluation criteria were being honed. Certainly better than a beginner. (and probably better than people who have been doing it a while.) That is, I actually was playing a pretty good frisbee game!

The trick of course, is to change your evaluation strategy: try to remember what it was like as a total beginner, be extra-cognizant of the things which you are doing right, and give yourself time to re-form the habits and muscle-memory that go into a skill. And if it’s something that you don’t need to be “the best at,” allow yourself simply enjoy the activity rather itself rather than always pushing for “better.”

Many moons ago, my Ben Casnocha challenged me to write about the books that have had the greatest affect on me. Maybe it wasn’t so much of a challenge as a prod to blog. One that took some time to work.

The Grand Inquisitor, by Fyodor Dostoevsky was one of the first to spring to mind.  It isn’t a actually book, but rather a longish story that one character tells another in The Brother’s Karamazov, published in 1880. You can read the whole thing online in twenty minutes.

Why did it have such an impact me, reading it there in that messy dorm room at the start of my sophomore year?

The Grand Inquisitor is basically telling Jesus off. That’s pretty bold for a character written in the nineteenth century, in a story set in the sixteenth, in a book written by a Christian. He says that Jesus messed everything up, and now he and the Church have fixed it.

As if that audacity wasn’t enough, the the Inquisitor’s logic is surprising hard to argue with.

His beef is that Jesus promised to make people both free and happy, and that’s just impossible. Freedom is a burden, it makes them unhappy. People want to believe that they are free, but to actually to have as little freedom as possible. Jesus came and actually increased freedom, which only served to increase the world’s misery.

The “solution” that the Inquisitor and his church have come up with, is for a few people to take on the burden of freedom, thus sparing the rest. In a bizarre twist, the Inquisitor and others in the church are cast as the selfless caring saints precisely because they lie to the masses. The truth, and true freedom, are burden which they carry sacrificially so that others don’t have to. So that the masses can be happy.

“And all will be happy, all the millions of creatures except the hundred thousand who rule over them. For only we, we who guard the mystery, shall be unhappy. There will be thousands of millions of happy babes, and a hundred thousand sufferers who have taken upon themselves the curse of the knowledge of good and evil.”

This was a different angle than what I’d been hearing in Sunday school.

There is much more to say about the story itself. But the reason it has endured in my thinking is how often its themes show up in life.

Consider this scene from The Matrix, where the top request of the traitor is to re-enter the matrix, forget reality, not to remember, and to live a lie.

(I also think of the Grand Inquistor in more mundane matters. For example, interface design. User’s think that they want tons of features with freedom over every little aspect. But what actually makes them happy is an interface that hides most “freedoms”, leaving them the few choices that make the most sense.)

Given the choice between freedom and happiness, or the truth and happines, which would you choose? This drives to the recents trends in “happiness research.” The Inquistor’s agrument rests on the idea that happiness is the greater good. Is that so?

I’m working this weekend on a little project inspired by Fred Wilson’s Blog Scrobbler. The idea is to keep a published record of blog posts that you view.

Pretty simple. But it’s got me thinking about a much bigger idea, which is starting to come into focus.

You see, even a few years ago this weekend’s project would entail setting up a dedicated server to hold the data, creating a web interface to display it, managing a user login/registration system, creating an API for accessing it, and much more. That’s hard.

But I can do the project in a weekend because Twitter has done all the work for me: it will be the “data bucket”. I don’t have to set up any servers or write any user registration systems. I just have to collect my little bits of data and ship it off to twitter where it will be stored and published for others to consume.

There is something profound about this.

Already, twitter itself is primary a storage and distribution system, NOT a website. People interact with it via numerous clients and phones. The fact that there is a web interface to view and enter tweets is not the selling point.

I see the possibility for a service that provides huge, generic, user data storage. Users could use any applications they like for adding data (like I use tinytwitter on my blackberry) or for viewing data (like I use tweetdeck on my laptop). Except that “statuses” would be only one of many types of data that could be stored and published: photos, posts, friend lists, song scrobbles, blog scrobbles, current weight, morale, classified listings, emails, etc.

Your hard drive for the web.

There could then be an ecosystem of services like gnip that continuously crawl this data and republish it for consumption by other services. New breeds of services could emerge from mining this data, in the same way the Summize creating a new type of search application by mining twitter’s data.

More importantly, this would allow a user to keep their data (or at least the gold-standard version of their data) in one place. Presently, using any web service means that your data is stored only on *their* servers. This means that your data is spread across, e.g. gmail for email, twitter for tweets, flickr for photos, zoho for docs, etc.

A geeky way to look at it is to again consider the MVC (model, view, controller) paradigm: Twitter provides a model (storage) for tweets, a simple view (the web or incoming sms), and controllers (web form or outgoing-sms). But twitter allows you to use other views and controllers (e.g. tinytwitter or tweetdeck).

If we can separate the storage of our data from the viewing and editing of it, more cool projects like this weekend’s “Blog Scrobbler” –and whole new breeds of companies– would be possible.

At dinner the other night with New York entrepreneurs we realized that half of us came from technical backgrounds, and half not. One of the non-technical founders said something like, “I wish that I could get in there and help with the coding, but that’s one place where hard work isn’t enough. You really have to know how.”

My immediate response, echoed by the other technical founders, was “No, you don’t want to know how to code!” The problem is that if you know how, then you feel guilty for not doing it. In fact, the more competent you are, the easier it is to think that you can or should do it all. It’s the classic problem of founders not wanting to let go.

On the other hand, if you are a non-technical founder, you are forced from day one to rely on other people to build your product. You learn other skills like “how to assess someone’s competency” and “how to inspire others to work” and “how to lead.” These are skills that scale.

(In the parlance of The Black Swan, coding is in the same category of bakers, dentists, and prostitutes.)

Still, in the early stages of any company (and especially when there is no company, but just an idea) a non-technical founder can blow a lot of money paying other people to build prototypes that don’t work.

It broke my heart last year (in a purely business sense) when I talked to a business guy who had spent nearly $20,000 on outsourced programming to build something that really didn’t work.

In a perfect world, you need a founder of each type who trust each other, or a technical founder who knows when to let go.