Insurance Firms Agree to Back E-health Standards.
All 1,300 members of the America's Health Insurance Plans trade
association have agreed to support selected industry standards in
personal health record systems for their combined 200 million clients.
It’s been an unusual week. On December 3 I turned 50. On Dec 8 I
announced that I’m leaving InfoWorld and joining Microsoft. It’s not a
coincidence. When I saw 50 looming, a couple of years ago, I started to
get really clear about what I want to do with the next 25. I’ve been
laying out the vision to anyone who will listen, and I’ll continue to
do so here, but first things first. Yesterday’s announcement left a couple of questions unasked and unaswered, so without further ado:
Q: Are you relocating to Redmond?
A: No. I’ll continue to work from my home office in New
Hampshire. At first I’ll be spending maybe one week in four in Redmond,
because there’s a lot of connecting to do. In the long run I may wind
up traveling almost that much, but I hope to locations elsewhere than
Redmond as often as not.
In January, for example, I’ll be speaking at Techology, Knowledge, and Society in Cambridge UK. And in May, at GOVIS in New Zealand. As was true for my recent talks in Guadalajara and AnnArbor,
I don’t expect to encounter any Silicon Valley regulars at these
events. I do expect to give and to receive important insights about how
people everywhere can use infotech to further their occupational,
educational, personal, social, and civic agendas.
Q: What will happen to your weblog.infoworld.com/udell archive?
A: I’ve experienced namespace disruption
before, and am very keen to avoid it this time around. Fortunately it’s
in InfoWorld’s best interest to preserve my blog archive. Worst case,
the material will be rehosted because nobody else at InfoWorld uses
Radio UserLand anymore. In that case, I’ve offered to help redirect the
current namespace to a different one. I’m keeping my fingers crossed,
but I hope there won’t be a problem.
Q: Why would you work for them? Not since Standard Oil has such
a brutal vicious rapacious thuggish company with such power existed.
A: That question, in private email from someone I deeply
respect, reminded me that yesterday’s Q and A left some important
things unsaid. In particular, although I mentioned Ray Ozzie and Kim
Cameron and Jean Paoli and Jim Hugunin and JJ Allaire, I egregiously
failed to mention such equally important folks as:
Tim Fahlberg, who wants to use screencasting to reinvent math education,
and who was thrilled that I picked up on his mission and amplified it
in InfoWorld, but who because of that only gained a tiny bit more of
the exposure he deserves.
Dan Thomas, who’s pumping the operational data of city government out onto the web where, despite all my efforts so far, nobody except me sees that it’s there or imagines what to do with it.
To these stories I’ll add my own NHPR commentaries
about online-map-enabled community work, rediscovery of the local
library, and the social capital we can build when we work from home.
My proposal was to be an evangelist for the Net, to continue
discovering and telling these kinds of stories, and to use them as the
framework within which to explore and explain Microsoft’s current and
emerging technologies.
When I met with Jeff Sandquist I had just finished this podcast
with Jim Russell. It’s a story about migration and the mobility of
intellectual capital, refracted through Jim’s experience with the
Pittsburgh diaspora. Neither Microsoft’s nor any other vendor’s
technologies are discussed. I’m certain that the ideas Jim lays out in
this podcast will inspire new business models for social software, but
it’s all rather speculative.
I explained to Jeff that it had taken me most of a day to interview
Jim Russell, then edit our rambling two-hour discussion down to
something more coherent. And I said: “Reality check, you’re OK with
that?” He said yes. I do not regard that answer as evidence of
thuggishness or rapaciousness. I regard it as a sign of enlightenment,
and I am calibrating my expectations accordingly.
The culture at MS is very F2F-oriented…if you’re out of sight, you have to work hard not to be out of mind.
But then he adds:
Geographic distance will help keep you from getting
sucked into the groupthink of whatever group you’re in. Microsoft
collectively needs to be constantly reminded what the world looks like
to people whose view isn’t fogged up by our typical drizzle or
distracted by the scenery on the sunny days.
We’re entering an era in which our personal, social, and
professional lives are increasingly network-mediated.
Trust-at-a-distance is a new possibility, with economic ramifications
that everyone from Yochai Benkler to Jim Russell
is trying to figure out. As someone who’s worked remotely for 8 years,
and is about to work remotely for a company with relatively few remote
employees, this question is extremely interesting to me.
On the one hand, I’ve learned that I can accomplish a lot because I spend an abormal percentage of my waking hours in flow
rather than in meetings. I’ve also learned that network-mediated
interactions can be more productive than F2F interactions. Consider my August screencast with Jim Hugunin, or my May screencast
with Anders Hejlsberg, or indeed any of the other screencasts in that
series. They’re all scheduled events, mediated by telephone and
screensharing. I can’t see how physical colocation would improve them.
On the other hand, there’s the “watercooler” effect: being in a
place, you see and hear and smell things that aren’t otherwise
transmitted through the network. I have no doubt whatsoever that shared
physical space matters in ways we can’t begin to describe or understand.
But as collaboration in shared virtual space takes its rightful
place alongside collaboration in shared physical space, shouldn’t a
company whose products are key enablers of virtual collaboration be
eating its own dogfood?
Of course things are never as black-and-white as they appear. So I’m
going to bookmark this posting and return to it in six months.
Hopefully by then I’ll know more about the value of being here and of being there.
One of the projects I’m tackling on sabbatical is a community version
of LibraryLookup. The service I wanted to create is described here:
an RSS feed that’s updated when a book on your Amazon wishlist becomes
available in your local library. Originally I planned to build a simple
web application that would register Amazon wishlist IDs and produce
custom RSS feeds for each registrant. But as I thought about what would
make this service palatable to a community, I saw two problems with
that approach:
Familiarity. Most folks will not be familiar with RSS. If
the primary goal is to get people using the service, rather than to
evangelize RSS, it should use the more familiar style of email
notification.
Deployability. A web application needs to be hosted
somewhere. In most communities, the library won’t be able to host the
service on its own infrastructure. But if it’s hosted elsewhere, there
will be a (rational) reluctance to take a dependency on that provider.
To address the first concern, I’m doing this as an old-fashioned
email-based app. You subscribe or unsubscribe by sending email with a
command and a wishlist ID in the Subject: header. And you receive
notifications about book availability by way of email.
To address the second concern, I’m doing it as a client-side Python
script, so that the only dependency is some version of Python and an
Internet connection.
Because a library might not even be able to dedicate an email
address for this purpose, I’m exploring the use of Gmail as the
communication engine. In order for that to work, Python has to be able
to make secure and authenticated POP and SMTP connections. Happily, it
can.
The recipe for connecting Python to Gmail’s POP service is trivial:
import poplib
p = poplib.POP3_SSL(’pop.gmail.com’)
p.user(’USERNAME’)
p.pass_(’PASSWORD’)
The recipe for connecting Python to Gmail’s SMTP service is less obvious:
This won’t work with no authentication, but neither will it work with the SMTP module’s login() which uses the wrong authentication type (i.e., LOGIN rather than PLAIN, I think).
Any POP/SMTP servers can be used, of course, so there’s no
dependency on Gmail here, but it’s nice to see that Gmail can easily be
pressed into service if need be.
It feels retro and trailing-edge to do an email-based app but, in
order to make it familiar and deployable that seems like the right
approach.
Working 2.0 – What’s Next?.
Patti Wilson published Careerzine, an email newsletter. The August
issues featured an article, Working 2.0: the Transformation of
Employment. (looking for the link? This is email but you can go to her
blog, Patti Wilson GIG, to find out to... [Portals and KM]
8:21:15 PM comment []
Thursday, October 05, 2006
Value Networks and Social Media Event in Dallas.
I recently participated in a stimulating event, the Value Networks and
Social Media sponsored by the KM Cluster in Dallas. Verna Alee started
with “Network Strategies for Managing Complexity: Organizational and
Value Network Analysis.� I have written about her comprehensive... [Portals and KM]
10:01:48 PM comment []
Sunday, October 01, 2006
Beyond Financial Performance: Q&A With Forrester's Paul Hamerman
(TechWeb).
TechWeb - You've checked the SOX (Sarbanes-Oxley) box and streamlined
financial budgeting, planning and consolidation in the process. So
what's the next performance management challenge? Paul Hamerman,
Forrester's vice president of enterprise applications, looks at
operational performance management and offerings from the likes of
Oracle, SAP and Microsoft. [Yahoo! News: Technology News]
4:31:50 PM comment []
AFP
- A 93-year-old resident at an old-age home plays tennis against the
wall of his bedroom, using a touch-sensitive glove and wearing a
virtual helmet.
UIE Virtual Seminar: The Visual Design of Web Applications.
In this Virtual Seminar, Hagan Rivers, a pioneer web application
developer, will cover strategies for creating both usable and
aesthetically pleasing web applications for your customers. (You can
find the virtual seminar details here. )
Cognitive Edge – A New Blog.
Dave Snowden is starting a blog. Who is left now? I talked with Dave
about blogs in Feb 2005 at Braintrust in San Francisco and he was very
skeptical. Now he has come over to the blogside with Cognitive Edge.
Dave has been on the conference circuit for years but now has settled
in Singapore for three months and started this blog. It will be
interesting to see what comes out as Dave has always been an
entertaining speaker. I see that he is moderating his comments
(actually he is see not moderating - my misunderstanding - see note in
the comment section) The blog is promoting his company by the same
name. As the site says, “Headquartered in Singapore, Cognitive Edge
Pte Ltd was created in 2006 to take on the work originally initiated in
IBM as the Cynefin Centre for Organisational Complexity. Cognitive Edge
has three main focus areas: 1. The creation of an open source approach
to the development of consultancy methods 2. The development of an
approach to research based on participation Portals and KM, September 22, 2006. [Conversation]
[Stephen's Web ~ by Stephen Downes ~ Edu_RSS Most Recent - RSS old]
10:33:31 PM comment []
Richard Sambrook breaks through the firewall.
For years, Richard Sambrook, the BBC's Director of Global News and
World Service, has been one of the most popular bloggers inside the
BBC. Now he's started SacredFacts, a public blog. As Euan Semple points
out, how Richard balances his private views with his journalistic
position will be fascinating to watch. This is especially true because,
despite the fact that he inhabits a position that is the exemplar of
what people mean by The Establishment, Richard is open-minded,
clear-headed about what's happening to journalism, a born little-d
democrat, aware of the power of the media to make the world better,
ready to experiment, and in love with the Web. I've gotten to know him
personally a little, so I'm willing to go out on a limb and add that
there's no one better to have a beer with. [Tags: media journalism
richard_sambrook bbc blogs] Joho the Blog, September 22, 2006. [Conversation]
[Stephen's Web ~ by Stephen Downes ~ Edu_RSS Most Recent - RSS old]
10:33:03 PM comment []
HP's CEO offers his apologies.
Video: HP's CEO offers his apologies. Hewlett-Packard CEO Mark Hurd
announced the resignation of Patricia Dunn as chairman in his first
public appearance since the controversy over the company's use of
pretexting erupted more than two weeks ago. But as he offered an
apology, Hurd also raised new questions about HP's investigation into
boardroom leaks. Join this week's edition of the CNET News.com
Reporters' Roundtable with Charlie Cooper, Jim Kerstetter and Ina
Fried.
[CNET News.com]
10:15:22 PM comment []
Saturday, September 16, 2006
The Rise of the Machine (and the social issues that will emerge).
The power of NewsmapAs I perused newsmap today (thank you SEGATECH!), I
came across the article which discusses the first thought controlled
prosthesis and I am struck by how rapidly things can change.The First
Thought Controlled ProsthesisThis first merge between human thought and
a robotic prosthesis suddenly blurs the line between human and the
machinery/robotics that until this point have been distinctly separate
from us.As we discuss the history of computing, my computer science
class has been talking about the next evolution in computing.And then
it happened under our nose. So, I posted this question for next week's
computer science consideration: An article appeared today about the
first thought controlled prosthesis that has been created by the
military.
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/nationworld/bal-te.bionic14sep14,0,5964038.story?coll=bal-nationworld-headlinesAs
we have begun to discuss biologic computing, I have the following
question.How will we classify things as human Cool Cat Teacher Blog, September 16, 2006. [Conversation]
[Stephen's Web ~ by Stephen Downes ~ Edu_RSS Most Recent - RSS old]
4:14:47 PM comment []
Sometimes the joy in reading news online is that you get to see things you never would have otherwise. Like this well-crafted obit -- especially the lead -- about the direct-television copy writer Arthur Schiff, who purportedly invented the phrase, "But wait, there's more!"
And
you've got to love the anecdote about the time Schiff's boss confronted
him about sitting in his chair, hands behind his head, smoking a pipe
and staring off into space instead of working. Schiff's reply: "I am
working. You pay me to think. What do you suppose thinking looks like?"
The boss said he never raised the issue again.
(Sounds
like a great line for a lot of reporters and editors to use. But of
course, in most places they couldn't be sitting at their desks and
smoking a pipe these days. Political correctness and all that.)
By Peter M. Zollman. [