The common element was easy; I wanted more than “scientists”, what I was looking for was that they all had elements named after them. Most of you got that.

The odd man out was a bit harder. There were some facile choices: some of you pointed out, correctly, that all bar Nobel had won the Nobel Prize. Some indicated that Nobel was possibly the only chemist; some that Marie Curie was the only woman. The best answer I saw was that the elements themselves were all synthetic except for Curium, so that Curie would become the exception.

But it wasn’t the answer I was looking for. Perhaps I have to take even more care with setting the question…. composing unGoogleable questions continues to be a challenge. My understanding is that all that has ever been seen of Curium in natural state is at “trace” level and nothing more than that, and that the way Curium is obtained is by bombarding uranium or plutonium with neutrons in nuclear reactors. But technically all your answers are correct, and I will find better ways of framing the question.

I was looking for more. I wanted to lead people down the rabbit holes of “appearing on banknotes” (neither Fermi nor Nobel have done so) or “appearing on stamps” (they all have). And the real answer I wanted was this:

While they are all craters on the Moon, only Bohr is fully visible from Earth; the remainder are at best marginally visible, and more often than not deeply rooted in the far side.

So on to today’s question.

Marshall is to Allen as Hercules is to what?

Name the odd one out as well as what they have in common.

Niels Bohr. Pierre and Marie Curie. Albert Einstein. Enrico Fermi. Alfred Nobel. Ernest Rutherford.

Getting the odd one out correctly means nothing. You must answer both parts.

Independently owned WFNX has been competing in the Boston market for nearly 30 years. Until yesterday that is, when Stephen Mindich notified his staff he was selling to Clear Channel. He then fired 17 of the 21 employees. Mindich said, “Despite its celebrated history, its cutting edge programming , its tradition of breaking new music, its ardent fans among listeners and advertisers, for some time it has been difficult to sustain the station  — especially since the start of the Great Recession.”

NECN reports,

The sale also means 17 of the 21 people working at FNX were suddenly let go Wednesday. The remaining three full-timers and one part-timer will keep the station on air until the sale goes through in next couple of months.

WFNX Program Director Paul Driscoll said, “I think of it as a two month Irish wake, so we’re going to send this legendary station off the right way.”

That will mean celebrating the station’s roots and its 29 year run – one that had a hand in bringing groups like Nirvana and Pearl Jam to wider audiences.

Driscoll said, “The community, the artists that we’ve developed relationships with, the listeners, it’s more than just a spot on the FM dial.”

No doubt the change has been coming for a long time. WBCN went away (actually to an HD subchannel, which is pretty much the same thing) a couple years back after 41 years as one of the country’s landmark rock stations. FNX was always more alternative than BCN. WBOS and WAAF still fly the rock flags; but there was only one FNX, and now it’s headed out the door.

Since coming to Boston in ’06 I’ve been surprised to see FNX continuing to make it. The signal is sub-second-tier. Licensed to Lynn with as a Class A station (maximum of 3000 watts at 300 feet), it radiates with 1700 watts at 627 feet (equivalent to 3000 watts, trading watts for height), from atop One Financial Center, but with far less power in most directions other than north:

Meanwhile, most competing Boston commercial stations are Class B: 50,000 watts at 500 feet, or the equivalent. (Most are fewer watts at higher elevations, on either the Prudential Building or out at Boston’s antenna farm in Needham, where a collection of towers exceed 1000 feet in height.)

Presumably WFEX, which simulcasts WFNX from Mt. Monadnock in New Hampshire, will also go to Clear Channel. (See the engineering and ownership details here.)

There’s a lot of tweeting on the matter. The most poignant so far is this one from David Bernstein (@dbernstein):

Why #WFNX mattered (photo taken by @CarlyCarioli) http://pic.twitter.com/dIjOjsfT

Flag this media • powered by Photobucket

Make that minus seven now.

… and, about 24 hours later (the second screenshot) I was back in the pack somewhere.

So now I’m done playing the leaderboard game. I’d like to say it was fun, and maybe it was, in the same way a hamster in a cage has fun running in its wheel. (Hey, there’s a little hamster in all of us. Ever tried to “win” in traffic? Same game.)

The experiment was to see what it would take to reach #1 on the leaderboard, if only for a minute. The answer was a lot of work. For each check-in I needed to:

1. Wake up the phone
2. Find foursquare (for me it’s not on the front page of apps)
3. Tap the app
4. Dismiss the “Rate foursquare” pop-over window
5. Tap on the green “Check In” button
6. Wait (sometimes for many seconds) while it loads its list of best guesses and actual locations
7. Click on the location on the list (or type it in, if it’s not there)
8. Click on the green “Check In Here” button
9. Take a picture and/or write something in the “What are you up to?” window
10. Click on the green “Check In” button, again.

And to do that a lot. For example, at Harvard Square a few days ago, I checked in at the Harvard Coop, Radio Shack, Peets Coffee, the Cemetery, Cambridge Common and the Square itself. For just those six places we’re talking about 60 pokes on the phone. (Okay, some of the time I start at #5. But it’s still a lot of pokes.)

To make sure I had the poke count right, I just did it again, here at the Berkman Center. Now my phone says, “Okay. We’ve got you @ Berkman Center for Internet & Society. You’ve been here 45 times.”

Actually, I’ve been here hundreds of times. I only checked in forty-five of those times. The difference matters. What foursquare says in that statement is, If you haven’t checked in on foursquare, you haven’t really been there. Which is delusional. But then, delusion is part of the game. Being mayor of the 77 bus (which I have been, a number of times) confers no real-world advantages to me at all. I even showed a driver once that I was mayor of the bus. She looked at my phone, then at me, like I was a nut case. (And, from her perspective, I surely was.) Being the mayor of some food joint might win you a discount or a freebie if the establishment is so inclined. But in most cases the establishment knows squat about foursquare. Or, if it does know something, squat might be what it does.

That was my surreal experience after checking in at a Brookstone at Logan Airport last October. I coudn’t miss the large placard there…

… and asked the kid at the cash register what the “special” would be. He replied, ”Oh, that’s just a promotion.” At the other end of the flight, while transferring between concourses in Dallas-Fort Worth, I saw this ad on the tram:

On my way to the next plane I checked into as many places as I could, and found no “great deals.” (Here is my whole mini-saga of foursquare screenshots.)

But, credit where due. An American Express promo that I ran across a number of times at SXSW in Austin earlier this year provided $10 off purchases every place it ran, which was more than a few. (Screenshots start here.) We also recently got a free upgrade from Fox, the car rental company, by checking in with foursquare. And I agree with Jon Mitchell of RWW, in What Is the Point of… Foursquare?, that the service has one big plus:

Isn’t Foursquare just for spamming Twitter and Facebook with what Geoloqi’s Amber Case calls “geoloquacious” noise about your trip to the grocery store? It can be, and for too many users, it is.

But turn all that off. Forget the annoying badges and mayorships, too. There’s one useful thing at which Foursquare is very, very good: recommendations.

So I’ll keep it going for that, and for notifying friends on foursquare that I’m in town, and am interested in getting together. (This has worked exactly once, by the way, with the ever-alert Steve Gillmor.)

But still, you might ask, why have I bothered all this time?

Well, I started using foursquare because I like new stuff and I’ve always been fascinated by the Quantified Self (QS) thing, especially around self-tracking, which I thought might also have a VRM benefits, somewhere down the line. I’m also a born geographer with a near absolute sense of where I am. Even when I’m flying in the stratosphere, I like to know where I am and where I’ve been, especially if photography is also involved. Alas, you can’t get online in the air with most planes. But I’ve still kept up with foursquare on the ground, patiently waiting for it to evolve past the hamster-wheel stage.

But the strange thing is, foursquare hasn’t evolved much at all, given the 3+ years they’ve been around. The UI was no bargain to begin with, and still isn’t. For example, you shouldn’t need to check in always in real time. There should be a setup that keeps track of where you’ve been, without the special effort on your part. If there are specials or whatever, provide alerts for those, on an opt-in basis.

But evolution is planned, in a big way. Foursquare Joins the Coupon Craze, a story by Spencer E. Ante last week in The Wall Street Journal, begins with this:

Foursquare doesn’t want to be another popular—but unprofitable—social network. Its new plan to make money? Personalized coupons.

The company, which lets users alert their friends to their location by “checking in” via smartphone from coffee shops, bars and other locations, revealed for the first time that it plans to let merchants buy special placement for promotions of personalized local offers in July in a redesigned version of its app. All users will be able to see the specials, but must check into the venue to redeem them.

“We are building software that’s able to drive new customers and repeat visitors to local businesses,” said Foursquare co-founder and Chief Executive Dennis Crowley.

This tells me my job with foursquare is to be “driven” like a calf into a local business. Of course, this has been the assumption from the start. But I had hoped that somewhere along the way foursquare could also evolve into a true QS app, yielding lat-lon and other helpful information for those (like me) who care about that kind of thing. (And, to be fair, maybe that kind of thing actually is available, through the foursquare API. I saw a Singly app once that suggested as much.) Hey, I would pay for an app that kept track of where I’ve been and what I’ve done, and made  that data available to me in ways I can use.

Meanwhile, there is one big piece of learning that I don’t think anybody has their head fully wrapped around, and that’s the willingness of people to go to all this work, starting with installing the app in the first place.

Back in the early days of ProjectVRM, it was taken as fact amongst developers that anything requiring a user install was problematic. Now most of us have phones with dozens or hundreds of apps or browser extensions that we’ve installed ourselves. Of course Apple and the browser makers have made that kind of thing easier, but that’s not my point. My point is that the conventional wisdom of today could be old-hat a year from now. We can cite example after example of people doing things which, in the past, it was said they were unlikely to do.

Phil sums it up perfectly:

Just like we have a standard label for drugs so that people can more easily understand how to take a drug and what it does, we should have a standard label for sites that want you to share your personal information.

It won’t get us everything that the Respect Network will, but it’s a good step in the right direction. Move your cursor right on over to the project and show you care about seeing what’s really happening with your personal data.

(And what better time to show your support for the standard label than during Privacy/Identity/Innovation 2012 going on right now in my home city of Seattle. Hats off to Natalie Fonseca and Marc Licciardi for an outstanding set of talks on the first day.)

Some years ago, based on an idea that came up on a train ride to the airport from OSCON, Kaliya Hamlin, Aldo Castaneda and I put together a The paper for the W3C Workshop on Transparency and Usability of Web Authentication was accepted for presentation on identity rights agreements. The idea is that you ought to be able to mark up data you share to let people know how it can be used. Think Creative Commons for personal data. Recently a number of people, including myself, Drummond Reed, and Marc Davis, discussed a similar idea at a WEF Tiger day.

Joe Andrieu has a proposal that is slightly less ambitious and serves as the launching pad for more complete solutions. Joe's idea is simple and easy to understand. Just like we have a standard label for drugs so that people can more easily understand how to take a drug and what it does, we should have a standard label for sites that want you to share your personal information so it's easy to understand what's going to happen if you say yes. Contrast this with the current EULA model where people are faced with 70 pages of information in a non-standard format that they need to understand if they're to truly be smart about what they share.

Joe has a Kickstarter project for Standard Label to get money to design the label. If you care about understanding what you're sharing and think people should be smarter about what they share, then I encourage you to support this project, even if you can only give a $1, give something so show you're behind the work. Here's the video from the Kickstarter page.

Now, go and back the project!

Tags: identity sharing privacy identity+rights standard+label pdrl

Your famous blue raincoat was torn at the shoulder

Leonard Cohen, Famous Blue Raincoat, 1971

It was an itsy-bitsy teeny weeny yellow polka dot bikini

That she wore for the first time today

Brian Hyland, Itsy-Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polka Dot Bikini, 1960

Two songs from my childhood, both immensely memorable. One a novelty song that charted its way to the top, the other a haunting, lilting melody. Guess which one I had to learn to dance to at the age of 14? [I'll have you know that dancing to Leonard Cohen is no laughing matter!].

So what are these songs doing in “a blog about information”?

Let me try and explain. Famous blue raincoat. [Incidentally, it was a Burberry]. Not blue famous raincoat. Itsy-bitsy teeny weeny yellow polka dot bikini, not polka dot yellow itsy-bitsy teeny weeny bikini.

Why?

Because the other forms just don’t sound right, don’t feel right, there’s something you can’t quite put your finger on why, but they’re not right.

Because adjectives have an order, a hierarchy; an order that is tacitly understood, learnt and practised by native English speakers; an order that has to be explained explicitly to non-native speakers of the language.

An order that goes something like this:

Quantity. Opinion. Size. Age. Shape. Colour. Origin. Material. Purpose.

Visit this site to see how non-natives get to learn the order and hierarchy. You may also find it of interest to read these posts on the subject. Other languages appear to be less hierarchical when it comes to adjective placement and order. [If you're interested, you can even take a look at Dalcurian adjectives :-)]

I had three reasons to write this post:

One, having known about this for some time, and having been reminded of it regularly more recently, I wanted to share it with you, in case you were as interested in it as I was. English is a wonderful, living, just-slightly-insane language.

Two, I think it’s a great example of tacit knowledge, something we need to understand better as we move forward with the web. We know it, but don’t know we know it. We use it, without knowing we’re using it.

Three, I think it’s a great example of how the web works, allowing me to write a post like this, linking to stuff that lets you dig into it if you choose to.

Incidentally, when people come and argue with me about apps and HTML5, I’ve tended to use just one word in reply.

Links.

The Social Web has shown us the power of connecting. Facebook has friends, LinkedIn has connections, and Twitter has followers. These channels allow their owners to communicate with others, although their capabilities vary greatly. But the resulting relationship graphs are stilted because their proprietary nature makes interoperation and extension difficult—in spite of all of the money and time invested in creating APIs to access them.

I look forward to a relationship network that is based on open standards just as the email network and indeed the Internet itself are. The power of the Internet to serve an untold variety of purposes in a flexible way is a direct result of the open standards upon which it is based. Relationship networks based on open standards will provide unprecedented value and opportunities for people because of the new applications it will engender.

This paper will describe something called a personal channel, based on open standards and protocols, that can form such a relationship network. Personal channels link personal clouds, the subject of an earlier white paper. This paper assumes a knowledge of personal clouds, their features and their capabilities. We will share that channels have properties necessary to induce rich sharing, a hallmark of flexibility without which they would not be able to accomplish all that is needed.

Personal Channels

Long ago, personal computers were interesting in their own right. That changed in the 90's with the emergence of widespread network connectivity. Anymore, a PC that's not connected to the Internet is not only boring, it's non-functional for many of the tasks that people perform every day. If you don't believe me, just turn off the network on your computer for a day. And of course, the modern personal computer—the smartphone—makes connectivity the very foundation of the platform.

Like personal computers, personal clouds are only interesting when they are connected. Personal channels link personal clouds. The collection of channels connecting myriad personal clouds form a relationship network. On an open standard relationship network, the attributes, permissions, and capabilities of a relationship are standardized and extensible. Every relationship is a link. A link may be a simple one-way (asymmetric) subscriber relationship that does not require involvement of the second party, or it may be a stronger two-way (symmetric) relationship in which both parties act as publisher and subscriber.

In either case, when data and messages can flow in one or both directions across a link, it is called a channel. The control each party has over the channel--the terms and conditions to which they agree over how it will work--is called a link contract. Control over the channel still resides in the link contract(s) with the connected parties. The following figure shows two personal clouds connected via a channel controlled with a link contract.

Channels exhibit the following properties:

• Personal channels provide separately revocable, separately trackable authority to share between personal clouds.
• Any given personal cloud can have any number of inbound and outbound channels. Any two personal clouds may share multiple channels for different purposes.
• Channels use a combination of the Event eXchange Protocol (EXP) and XRI Data Interchange (XDI) protocol that give them metaprotocol capabilities. Channels are ways of doing something instead of a place for doing something.
• Link contracts are a flexible means of declaring fine-grained access control to data and services. Link contracts specify the nature and behavior of a channel.
• Channels are the conduits over which messages pass between personal clouds. These messages include event notifications, data queries, and data transfers.
• A channel need not be restricted to just two parties. It may connect the members of a group (e.g., email distribution lists), or access may be fully public (e.g., blogs or Twitter feeds).

Like email, channels form a point-to-point network between personal clouds all speaking the same protocol. Unlike an email server, whose sole function is usually email processing, a personal cloud is more like a general-purpose computer in the cloud; it has an operating system that runs applications, processes events, and manages data under direct control of its owner.

This is why channels on the relationship web can be dramatically more useful to individuals and businesses than ordinary email or Web connections.

Rich Sharing

Marc Stiegler of HP Labs has written (PDF) and spoken about rich sharing. Alan Karp has written about PubShare, a system Marc built that demonstrates rich sharing. Alan relates two stories that contrast our expectations about sharing in the physical and online worlds. The first takes place in the physical world:

In an emergency, Marc asked me to park his car in my garage. I couldn't do it, so I asked my neighbor to do it for me and said to get the garage key from my son.

The second involves an online file sharing scenario:

In an emergency, Marc asked me to copy a file from his computer to mine. I couldn't do it, so I asked my neighbor to do it for me and said to get access to my computer account from my son.

The second story is ludicrous to us because we can't see a reasonable way for it to work even though it closely resembles the scenario from the physical world.

Rich sharing characterizes what makes human communication in the physical world work. Using this model, we can determine how to create better online communication systems. Communication systems, like email, that embody rich sharing feel natural to users and thus succeed. Systems that don't feel stilted or unwieldy and thus don't scale the way their designers intended.

Sharing is easy and technically uninteresting in situations where the shared item is public and there's no need to authorize access to it. Similarly workgroup-style sharing is relatively straightforward and the tools for protecting resources in workgroups such as role-based authorization control (RBAC) and access control lists (ACLs) are well understood. For purposes of contrast, let's call unprotected and workgroup-style simple sharing.

Sharing becomes much more nuanced when access to the shared item must be restricted and the players in the sharing scenario operate in independent security domains. Many real-world scenarios require rich sharing. Stiegler and Karp demonstrate why workgroup-style sharing can't accommodate rich sharing scenarios.

Rich sharing is characterized by six key features:

• Dynamic—Sharing can be done without reconfiguring the system or having other work done by the sharer's IT department.
• Attenuated—Sharing happens with the right permissions on the right items.
• Chained—A shared item can be reshared in appropriate ways. Authority can be re-delegated. Building attenuated chains of delegated authority is difficult in simple sharing architectures.
• Cross domain—Sharing can occur across security domains without the user linking the domains in an ad hoc manner or the IT department having to setup special purpose federated identity systems.
• Recomposable—The shared item or service can be used in conjunction with other resources and services even if those documents and services exist in a separate security domain.
• Accountable—Even though sharing can be re-delegated along a chain, the original owner must maintain the ability to audit and track the use of the shared item and hold the appropriate parties accountable for misuse.

Stiegler and Karp make a case that email succeeds because email demonstrates these six attributes. In contrast, it's easy to find examples in other sharing architectures that fail to incorporate one or more of these and thus become difficult to use as the sharing scenarios get more complicated. Today's popular social networks all fail to meet one or more of the above attributes.

Personal Channels Support Rich Sharing

Personal channels exhibit rich sharing. We mentioned in an earlier section of this paper that channels provide a metaprotocol for interaction. Thus they represent a way of doing things rather than a place. Rich sharing is more easily supported by ways—protocols—rather than by places. In fact, I argue that properties of rich sharing such as being cross domain and recomposable are nearly impossible to achieve using a place such as a Web site.

Let's examine the attributes of rich sharing and see how channels stack up:

• Dynamic—A personal cloud can use a personal channel to send a message to any other personal cloud that subscribes to it at any time. Subscriptions can be formed between two personal clouds or between a cloud and another network service at will.
• Attenuated—Link contracts provide a means of fine grained access control that enables attenuation.
• Chained—Upon receiving a message on a channel, a personal cloud can delegate that message to other personal clouds. This delegation may be algorithmic, but is always under the ultimate control of the personal clouds owner.
• Cross domain—Each personal cloud functions as its own domain in the same sense that an email inbox represents an independent domain controlled by its owner. Thus a channel carries messages from one domain to another.
• Recomposable—Messages sent along a channel, be they events, queries, or data are composed with other information from other sources (e.g. APIs, other channels, etc.) as part of the processing done by a personal cloud.
• Accountable—Channels are uniquely identified and individually revokable. The unique identity combined with the ability to declare authoritatively the nature and behavior of the channel via link contracts provides flexible accountability that can be tuned to a given purpose.

Conclusion

Rich sharing requires that the sharing be dynamic, accountable, recomposable, and cross-domain, while enabling the chaining (repeated redelegation) of attenuated access (including separable revokablity). We have shown that personal channels exhibit these properties and thus enable rich sharing.

Because channels support rich sharing, they are extremely flexible and can be used for many purposes. Personal channels provide a messaging system for personal clouds that provides access-controlled, filtered, trustworthy notifications, data exchange, and sharing. Future papers will expand on these benefits of personal channels.

Tags: krl personal+clouds personal+channels personal+events rich+sharing