Metamedia

Sir Tim Berners-Lee warns against third-party internet snooping

Web inventor warns against third-party internet snooping Sir Tim Berners-Lee speaks out against collection of users' data by commercial companies

"The power of this information is so great that the commercial incentive for companies or individuals to misuse it will be huge," he said. "It is absolutely essential to have absolute clarity that it is illegal."

[From UK Guradian - Web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee warns against third-party internet snooping | Technology | guardian.co.uk]

Smart man, Sir Berners-Lee, and I am glad to see someone of his stature is speaking out, and that many concerned politicians - at least, ironically, in the UK, are speaking out as well.

In the US, I think it is time for an explicit amendment to the constitution declaring a fully excplicit Right to Privacy for actual people (as opposed to corporations), including rights to control of the digital information about us.

Of course, the real issue is: who will define "misuse" ??

GTD for Bitheads

I am not just a GTDer, I am an orthodox GTDer. I can quote chapter and verse from the Book of Allen. I don't like heretics.

So, naturally, few things annoy me as much as applications claiming to be GTD but then fail to implement basic elements of it.

If you're developing an application, you can of course do whatever you want. But if you are going to call it GTD, get it right.

There are few applications - in fact as far as I know only one - that fully and correctly implement GTD. That one is Thinking Rock. The online application Vitalist comes pretty close (at a cost.)

Some other applications have good qualities, but mysteriously fall down on some basic ideas. For instance, Omnifocus, Things, and Nozbe all seems to lack or misunderstand the concept of Waiting/Delegated.

Allen says of Waiting/Delegated (Getting Things Done p. 135):

This of all the categories in your personal system, is the most crucial one to keep tabs on.

There are flowcharts on pages 120 and 139 which clearly show the place of delegation. It is one of the seven primary types of things to keep track of (p. 140).

So, to help out application designers and programmers, I have decide to create a PURELY BINARY decision tree of GTD.

This is the primary flow of handling new incoming items. (There will be other flows, such as handling contexts, projects, and reviews.)

There are different ways to do this flow, but this how I think of it: the flow is binary, and as a result some of the phrasing is not so felicitous, but creating pseudo-code from it should be trivial.

Click on the chart below to enlarge.

The Facebook TOS Rebellion

[UPDATE: One week later I have heard nothing from FB customer support on my name change request, which normally "takes 24 hours"]

I removed all the data from my Facebook account today - it took about an hour to delete the items one by one by one, as there is no way to remove them otherwise.

Whatever the results of this latest rebellion, and whatever cosmetic changes (if any) in the Facebook Terms of Service, it does not matter to me: Facebook is a company that is inherently (and by that I mean in the character and attitudes of its founder and principal board members) disrespectful of its users and has shown itself to consistently be so.

Rather than deactivate my account, I am leaving it active so I can post items of interest there about Facebook's essentially duplicitous business model and the fundamental attitude of information sharecropping which it embodies.

As a protest, I changed my photo to the default blank with an 'X' through it, borrowing this idea from those whose names were given by their masters when enslaved. And I have formally requested - as is required by the TOS - that Facebook customer service change my last name to X.

[UPDATE:  Some Useful Aftermath Links 

• http://amandafrench.net/2009/02/16/facebook-terms-of-service-compared/
• http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#/group.php?gid=77069107432
• http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/02/facebook-battle-ends-major-victory-users

]

Making SENS - Facebook as a Secondary Emergency Notification System

In the wake of the incidents at Virginia Tech, colleges have revamped -- or creating -- ways to manage information during a local crisis, including notification of students, faculty, staff and parents.

While there are numerous primary methods of communicating, there is also an important secondary one that should not be overlooked: Facebook.

Facebook has many advantages as system for communicating to students during a localized emergency. Here are a few.

• Everyone is already in it. Why build or extend another database system ? Students are already in Facebook, know how to use it, and do use it every day for communicating with one another.
• You can text message any friend through it. Students can enter in the cell phone numbers and have control over the privacy of that info in FB. Unless your college already collects (and updates?) cell phone numbers from students, you will have to invest in doing that. FB already does it, and in a way that gives users the privacy control they need.  And you can bet this is one place that will have the correct number, too.
• Campus wide messages can easily be posted. Facebook makes each college its own "network" in FB, and users can and do post all sorts of notices to the whole network.
• Post info and get feedback. The FB Groups feature can be used to post ancillary information about policies and procedures, and is a great way to get student feedback on them.
• Viral communication spreads. FB's many ways of communicating allows information to be spread rapidly in viral style. You don't have to worry your news getting stuck on one channel - everyone will get the word through at least one of many channels.
  
• It is off-site. If an emergency effects your servers or network, FB can still be reached and still send messages to other computers and mobile devices.
• It is widely accessible. FB is now open to parents, faculty, staff, and others. One more reason for them to join FB is emergency information.
• It's free. The cost is basically some administrative attention to setting up and monitoring a emergency notification account in FB.  But then, you were going to have to do something like that anyway.
• It's easy. FB has an interface designed to be used without any training at all. All a college needs to do is create a FB SENS account and make itself popular.

Warning: YackPack Pricing Ahead

Once upon a time, beta in computer jargon meant the version of the software not yet ready for public use, but only for testing.

In Web 2.0 online apps, beta is often used to mean, "free at the moment, but if we get enough people using it so we can make money, we will start charging for it."

The good thing about this is that it forces a decision: is the thing I was using for free really worth paying for?  For instance, I used Vitalist for some time last summer and it was fine for what I wanted. When they recently decided to charge, I decided it was not worth the money for me: the interface had not improved at all and did not do certain things I wanted. I switched to using MonkeyGTD (alpha of version 2) based on TiddleyWiki hosted over at Tiddlyspot.

Which brings us to:

YackPack

If you or your foreign language or other faculty having been using YackPack, you should be aware -- or may have just found out -- that Yackpack has moved from a free to a pay service model. It is unfortunate that YP announced this over the summer, and then only on their web site without sending emails to its users.

Last week some faculty at my school and I had a conference call with B.J. Fogg, the CEO of YackPack, to get information about YP's rather sudden switch to a pay model.  What we learned:

YP has been free till now, but starting last August 1st it became a pay service.

Educators, however, can extend their free accounts until October 10th.

See http://www.yackpack.com/educators.html.

BJ said on the phone to us that they MAY consider extending this free period to December for all educators. MAY or may not.

So if you are planning on using it in your courses this term, be sure to go to Yackpack right away and apply for your Education Free Extension.

There continues to be a free version, but it can only record 10 seconds of sound per message, which is not useful in the real world.

The new cost is $5 per month or $34.95 per year, per account.

Per account means each separate YP account - so every student and every instructor have to have paid accounts.

There are unlimited Packs and storage as before, so an Instructor can have as many packs / courses as they want on their one account, but all the students will have to have a paid account too, though they can belong to as many packs as they like, as before. 

By account is the only way to pay: there are no other pay models, such as per course, and they do not have any site license deals yet, either.

You can buy a specific number of accounts and swap the student names in and out of them.

They will allow colleges to buy accounts in bulk on a yearly PO. So, say you buy 50 accounts yearly for a faculty member to use. They can assign them to any 50 (or less) students at a time in any courses they want during that year, adding or removing student names with an management interface tool that YP has that could be used for this.

FFF: More PocketMod

I've used the Pocketmod system for a month now and can safely say it will be a permanent part of my arsenal of organization.  I even took it out of town with me on a trip: no PDA, no laptop, no Moleskine, just a Pocketmod in my shirt pocket. Worked great.

Notes from my experience so far:

1) The other side is useful

You can unfold the Pocketmod and use the other side to write notes on, too.

I also tried to double print a Pocketmod, one on each side of the paper. In theory this sounds great, but in practice my printers don't line up the paper so well, so the formatting on the back side doesn't align properly when you fold it.

In the end I ended up putting some reference mods (eg yearly calendar) and lots of blank spaces on the back side. That works well.

2) A simple and useful Word template

I found a nice and simple Word Template at Feed My Pet Brain. I like it better than the more complex one at Eyes of Calvin mostly because I can type my text into it upright (for half of mods anyway, the others being upside down, so I leave those blank and lined). 

I put a weekly calendar in it and type in my current appointments, along with a to-do list, shopping list, and film rental list in the top four mods.

3) Weekly Review

Each Friday, I do a mod review, and put everything I need to from the mod to the computer. Then I edit the Word document and delete old things and add new things for the upcoming week.

Since the mods are simple tables, you can format and edit them as you wish. And of course, you can cut and past the images of from the standard mods and then paste them into a table as a mod, too. So you can create a mod from any picture you want. Very nice.

4) The Fisher Space Pen

I bought a Fisher Space Pen and now it goes everywhere with me, because it is small and sturdy enough for me to just toss in my pants pocket with my keys. I hate carrying stuff around with me, including pens, which are just too big. But the Space Pen when folded up is small and unobtrusive.

One change I recommend is moving to a fine point instead of the medium the pen comes with. I find it easier to write on the Pocketmod with it.

The little PDA that could...

While cleaning up and out at home last night, I found my old PalmPilot Pro PDA at the bottom of box of office supplies, ethernet cables, and software.

Just out of curiosity, I put some AAA batteries in it, and turned it on.

Lo and behold it worked just fine. After ten years.

I even remembered most of my Graffiti (the original one before Xerox's frivolous patent mongering.)

I bought it when it came out in March of 1997 and carried it everywhere, including a month long tour of Scotland later that year. It was a trooper. It was my second PalmPilot: I had the original one, too, but it was sadly crushed one night under the wheels of a taxi cab when it slipped onto a street curb.

But my second one has lived to tell its tale at the age of ten...

Email as Narrative?

Just by coincidence, these two items reached me about the same time.

One is a memelette (now reproducing) about the five sentence email,  attributed (by some; apocryphally? ) to Guy Kawasaki, which should have this structure:

All you should do is explain
who you are,
what you want,
why you should get it, and
when you need it by.

That's only four things of course, but you get five sentences in which to do it.

Compare this to an interesting article I was researching for faculty on helping students better structure video clips made as homework for foreign language courses, Bob Dotson's Essential Storytelling Tools via Poynter Online .

Dotson says every story should include these elements: "Hey," "You," "See" and "So."

Every story begins with a "Hey," as in, "Hey, give me your attention."
"You" is the reason why you should care about this story wherever you are.
"See" is the two or three facts you have in your story that nobody else knows.
"So" is why the viewer should care. In other words, "What does this story really mean?"

But, a limitation of both of these is they are only tactical.

Email messages almost always take place in a context of other messages, as do stories, broadcast or otherwise. In fact the above example from video broadcasting is usually referred to as a "segment." A segment is not a whole, just a part of a whole.

There is a larger structure, and it ought to be a strategic structure.

In broadcasting of course, there are well known strategic structures for various media. Dotson gives his in the article: based on good old drama all the way back to Aristotle.  And definitely see Neil Postman's book How to Watch TV News for an analysis of how television news does it. There is a lot of research done by marketers and advertisers to find and build effective structures, where effective means modifying viewer behavior they way they want.

But email is still tactical.

It does not have this strategic structure. If there is a strategy, it is in our heads, most likely.  About all we have in email is some folders or a rather inadequate thing usually called something like Conversation Views.

That's not good enough any more. Email needs strategic organizational tools.

We need to get those tactical messages, those segments, out of our heads and into our software, to document them and be able to deal with them objectively, as part of a larger whole.

Why do email programs have such poor tools for allowing us to have a strategic view of email ?  Just its history ? Perhaps. But why is email still tied slavishly to the postal metaphor ?

Why hasn't email evolved to have -- at the very least -- some of the social tools of Web 2.0?

It's a mystery...

 

FFF: PocketMod: The Free Disposable Personal Organizer

I think I have finally found the perfect PIM for me: PocketMod: The Free Disposable Personal Organizer.

And guess what, it's just sheet of paper!

A sheet of paper, folded in an ingenious way to make a booklet of 8 pages that fits in a pocket, and that can contain various types of template formats: lines, checklists, grids, shaded tables, daily or weekly appointments, and many more.

Pocketmod is a Flash application that runs over the web, though there is a local client version as well. In both, you arrange the 8 pages with the templates -- called Mods -- presumably short for modules. Then you simply print it, and then fold the paper in a special way to make the little booklet.

It fits in a shirt pocket, or even a wallet. And all you need to use it is a pen.

Now, I hate to carry stuff around. That's just me I know. In my decade of corporate scullery, I wore a suit and tie, and carried my PalmPilot with me everywhere. Suits have pockets.

Now that I work in a world of sweaters and jeans, I need an organizer to be both small and vital in order to convince me to spare the pocket space for it.

And Pocketmod fits the bill. In fact, in just a week, I have taught about ten people to use it and even to fold the paper.

One person I showed it to said, "That's nice, but I want to type in my lists in something simple like Word." I said, "Great idea, I'll just make a Word template for you..." but as usual, someone on the web had already done it by making a nifty Word template and blogged it (thanks, Eyes of Calvin!).

Even better, Pocketmod now has a PDF to Pocketmod convert on its site. So any PDF page of information can be turned into a mod.

And the mods on the site are expanding. There's a nifty storyboard mod (shown as the front page on the layout above), a music staff and a guitar tab, grids of varying resolution, and numerous references mods, including a very readable year calendar (shown above as the Back page.)

And even better still, some more or less traditional PIMs are now starting to use this as a printed format as well. For instance, both Thinking Rock (a nifty GTD java app I have started using on a USB drive) and Toodledo both can now output in Pocketmod format.

I've been converted.

After a week, mine is worn out: it has collected a shopping list, video rental list, a movies to see list I made while browsing in the video store, a couple of telephone numbers, some items to add to my to-do list for work, entries on the calendar, things to do around the house on the weekend, notes from a software training session I did. Oh, and a reminder to get the new Harry Potter book !

But I will only copy over just the stuff I need to the new one and put the rest where it belongs: in the computer or in the recycling bin.

Now if I could only remember to carry a pen around with me...