Find the thread

It strikes me that the NSA and their counterparts missed a trick.

Maybe it's because I'm in the throes of moving house, with all the associated change-of-address shenanigans, but it strikes me that it would be very useful if the government actually operated a single information repository. I mean, that's what they already do, right?

So, why not do it in a way that serves the public? The government sets up an IDDB which has all of everyone's information in it; so far, so icky. But here's the thing: set it up so that individuals can grant access to specific data in that DB - such as the address. Instead of telling various credit card companies, utilities, magazine companies, Amazon, and everyone else my new address, I just update it in the IDDB, and bam, those companies' tokens automatically update too - assuming I don't revoke access in the mean time.

This could also be useful for all sorts of other things, like marital status, insurance, healthcare, and so on. Segregated, granular access to the information is the name of the game. Instead of letting government agencies and private companies read all the data, users each get access only to those data they need to do their jobs.

People have a problem with any Tom, Dick, or Harry being able to read all their information, but the objection isn't intrinsically to the gathering of the information, it's to the unrestricted access. The idea that any busybody can log in and see any information they care about is what we object to.

Offering an IDDB service would go a long way to solving the PR problem of programmes like PRISM and its ilk. Of course there are enormous issues with abuse of such a system, but since it seems governments cannot be prevented from building (and abusing) these systems anyway, couldn't we at least get some convenience out of it?

Looks like the Apple event on the 22nd is effectively the "one more thing" of the iPhone event, not just the Mavericks launch.

Also MG Siegler is pouring some cold water on the rumours of a radically new Apple TV unit. I'm looking to buy a second Apple TV in mid-November, so a spec bump would be enough for me as a reassurance that I will be compatible with the New Hotness when it comes out. The current device will be relegated to AirPlay and occasional YouTube duty.

Of course this would be the week I'm without broadband due to moving house, which is why I'm blogging and having lunch at the pub; strictly for the free wifi, of course. The pint of microbrew bitter? Oh, that's just to pay for the wifi… Ahem.

When social media goes wrong:

End user freedom with IT control - #VMware vision #VMworld

— VMware EMEA (@VMware_EMEA) October 16, 2013

So, VMware want to end users' freedom, giving IT total control? You heard it here first!

In his VMworld opening keynote, Pat Gelsinger showed an endorsement of VMware by IDC as "number 1 in cloud management".

Now Gelsinger did not qualify that statement, but if you go looking for the source of that statement, you can find either a report ranking VMware as number 1 by 2011 market share, or a report ranking them as number 1 by 2012 revenue. The original reports are only available to IDC subscribers, but here's VMware's quote (emphasis mine):

According to market research firm IDC, VMware was named the leading cloud systems management software vendor based on 2012 software revenues

. In the report, "Worldwide Cloud Systems Management Software 2012 Vendor Shares," IDC determined that VMware was the cloud systems management leader with 20.5 percent market share. Driving market growth in 2012 was enterprise and service provider customers' expanded use of cloud automation, monitoring, and analytics across their virtualized datacenter environments, according to IDC.

So in other words, existing VMware customers adopted VMware's new product at the expected rate.

This is not the first time I have seen revenue and market share metrics trotted out like this. What I don't understand is why customers are expected to care. Market share might be expected to have some influence on a customer's decision process, since a popular product brings a larger ecosystem of skilled staff, support, and third-party product integrations. But revenue? A high-grossing product could just as easily be overpriced or sold to a captive customer base lacking real alternatives. Not saying VMware does either of this things, mind.

The bottom line is that product revenue is a bad metric for customers, and as an industry we should stop using it.

Marco also has strong opinions on the Flipboard-as-scam discussion:

They promise "reach" or "distribution", but usually, they’re just filling their monetized product with your content for free.

He makes the example of Business Insider (no link), which I agree is the classic example of this sort of thing. Medium is a less-egregious example. Both subsume the original sources and insert their own branding, so I agree with Marco that I doubt either drives much traffic to the original source.

(That said, on the few occasions I followed a link to Business Insider, the BI article often proved to be an incomplete summary of the original piece, so I did in fact follow the link just to get the real story. But BI had already got their page view out of me, so I suppose they win.)

However, I don't think Flipboard falls into this same category, because it leaves the source branding very much intact. Flipboard is the convenient portal through which I read recent content from many sources, not an outlet at all. This is why I compared it to RSS in my original piece, something that I hope Marco is still in favour of!

Quindi quando Fastweb scrive:

ti informiamo che abbiamo ricevuto la tua richiesta, entro 24 ore un operatore ti contattera' secondo la modalita' prescelta.

bisogna sapere che:

1. Le 24 ore iniziano quando lo decidono loro;

2. E comunque nessuno ti contatterà mai.

Buono a sapersi.

I'm an avid Flipboard user. Together with e-mail, RSS via Newsblur, and NextDraft, it makes up my everyday breakfast reading. You'll notice that Facebook and Twitter are missing from that list; that's because I rely on those apps to notify me of any events from my close friends or interactions with me, and otherwise consume their output within Flipboard itself - or via Siftlinks.

I saw this interesting article by Matthew Ingram.

In a nutshell, some publishers see Flipboard (and to a lesser extent Currents, which isn’t as popular with users) as middlemen that piggyback on their content and siphon off value — including a relationship with readers — that would otherwise go to the publisher.

I couldn't disagree more. The entire premise of being against aggregators like Flipboard is that without the level of disintermediation that the aggregator inserts in the relationship, we the readers would be spending our time directly on the originating sites. This is simply not the case. I don't have time to open up 61 browser tabs - that's how many RSS feeds I have in Newsblur, without even counting Flipboard - and check each one for updates, and filter any updates for relevance and interest.

I have honed ("curated", I suppose, although I dislike the associations of that word) my Flipboard sources and RSS feeds so that I can usually open those apps and have interesting content surface for me. The key point is that this is not restricted to sites like GigaOM or The Economist, which each get a dedicated section in Flipboard. I also get to see all sorts of content from outlets that I don't subscribe to, that has been shared, retweeted or commented upon.

The key thing is that I am also extremely likely to share or retweet that content myself, because I'm already in Flipboard and it's easy: it already has the ackles to all my social accounts, so it only takes a couple of taps plus the time to pare down my comments to 50 characters or so. This provides the source with traffic, and high-quality traffic at that because it comes from a personal recommendation, rather than fighting for precious pixels on the home-screen or trying to get newsletters through spam filters or whatever other way of attracting off-site traffic.

The likelihood of me spontaneously visiting Talking Points Memo, whose editor triggered the linked GigaOM piece with his anti-Flipboard comments, is vanishingly small. However, if someone I follow tweets something of theirs, there is a good chance I will engage, and I might even browse around their site a bit looking to see if there's anything else interesting.

As it is, though, feel free to build a wall. The thing about walls, though, is that they keep people out.

Image by Charlie Foster via Unsplash

"DevOps" seems to have overtaken even "Cloud" in recent rounds of Buzzword Bingo.

say 'devops' again

say 'devops' again, I dare you

I double dare you...

— Andrew Clay Shafer 雷启理 (@littleidea) October 10, 2013

(Still messing with Markdown. Obviously.)