Silicon Valley Himalayan Expedition

There is a bored investment banker!

I rarely go through my referral logs anymore, but I did this morning and I found out that this blog has the top google result for "bored investment banker" for this Apple-Nokia post here.  I get a kick out of the fact that either an investment banker searched google for "bored investment banker" or someone was looking for one. 

For security purposes, what is your favorite color?

Last week I called my financial institution to wire transfer some money and they asked me to verify my identity with a secret question:  what is your place of birth?  I responded with Williams Lake, followed by my classic joke; well, not actually in the lake, that's just the name of a town in British Columbia.

She didn't laugh, but she proceeded to let me know that they have since upped their security measures.  It seems they have learned that people can easily find out where their clients are born on the Internet.  Go figure.  She needed to have me create a new secret question so she asked:  what is your favorite color?

I thought it was a joke, but it wasn't. And the sad thing is that it reminds me of every single Internet password picking experience I have these days.  First, it goes, pick a password - make it something that no one could ever guess and something that you are not familiar with.  It should involve a number or a letter or sometimes a special character (ugh).  You are reminded that no one should be able to guess your password.  Sounds secure enough, I think, but that's until I read the next part:  in case you forget your password, you should now pick a question with an answer that you know you can remember, like your pet's name or the place you were born (I wasn't actually born in a lake). 

I've never understood that one, and it is perpetuated on every site with no logic to me (someone please explain).  But not my financial institution.  They just pick one question - something that no one could ever find out on the Internet.

Google's product design can be scary good

Google does a lot of things differently from other software or Internet companies.  I just noticed this with the new payment scheme implemented by Google for Picasa - check out this screenshot and you'll notice one thing missing from ordinary purchase screens, which was actually quite disconcerting to me.  There is no cancel button.   It's similar to Google's approach to Adwords where I realized after the fact the first time I used it that "saving" a campaign was the equivalent of telling Google "Ok, now go ahead and start billing the heck out of me."   I got used to it quickly, and both examples show that one of Google's main design principles is to break down barriers to adoption.

They take the same approach to software.  For me (I am a PC user), Apple may be one of the most frustrating companies because of how much I rely on iTunes.  It seems that I am asked to download a new version of iTunes once a month, it takes about ten minutes and they try to sneak in other software too.  Adobe and Skype are similar.  Typically they have to remind me 6-8 times before I eventually do it but my level of annoyance with them goes up every time.   The alternative of course would be to give up privacy to these companies and let them manage my software for me.

And that's what Google does.  It's rare that I have to download anything ever again and a reading of the EULA would show that I do in fact give Google the right to manage my software for me.  Do a search for the phrases - "'automatic updates' and 'terms and conditions'" and the first two results you'll find are, first, a warning from the Electronic Frontier Foundation that end users should never agree to automatic updates and, second, a link to download Google Desktop software.

I do see why automatic updates make sense for me and most users.  The truth is that I'd rather have automatic updates for software I want to have, but of course the question is who gets to choose which software I want and which I don't.  If automatic updates become the standard, the definition of a software upgrade will almost certainly change over time.  Just like the definition of a friend may be changing too.  Google's new embedded chat in Gmail does something eerily similar to its software, by automatically updating your friend's list with people you've emailed.   There are at least 2 people in my list a day who I barely know, and now Google lets me find out when they're checking their email.  When I pointed it out to an office colleague, his response was "Yeah, I've actually found that useful a couple of times for quick questions on some of the conference stuff I'm working on."

In my opinion, none of the above shows that Google does evil.  Google illustrates best why our largest threat to privacy is convenience.

Flickr Blog

Last week I downloaded Steve Jurvetson's interview with Bill Joy at the AlwaysOn Conference to learn more about the latter's view on the here web, and it started with Jurvetson responding to a backchannel comment that he doesn't blog enough.  His response:  I do, it's on Flickr.  I didn't check it then, but Paul Kedrosky happens to point me tonight to one of the best blog stories I've read this year.  Coincidentally enough, it's on Jurvetson' Flickr Blog.

Name this town

During the week of the company's first product launch, a CEO of an angel funded mobile start-up  is sitting on the floor at 8:30 at night putting together Ikea desks, not for his company, but for a venture funded wiki start-up, in exchange for free office space, when someone knocks on the window, asks to be met at the door, and when opened says "I am a Director of Product Management at [64.7 billion market cap company] and I am looking for  a cool startup company to join.  Any openings?"  "How fast can you put together a desk," I said.  You have to love Palo Alto.

More on blogging

I attended Jeff Clavier's talk last night on blogging for founders/ceos.  Jeff is an excellent speaker and provided a worthwhile seminar.  I'm going to encourage SD Forum to have Jeff back to host more of a roundtable discussion for founders/ceos that are actually blogging so that we can really dive into some of the issues that exist.  His presentation will be posted on his blog soon.

Building on a previous post and reflecting after the meeting last night, I have made the following (sometimes painfully obvious) conclusions:

(a)  Blogging serves different purposes for different people.   The number one reason I started a blog was because I decided I wanted to be more in control of my online personality.  I didn't want a google search to limit a person to knowing that I had commented on two books on Amazon, made it into a twenty press releases unrelated to what I was doing now,  co-authored an article on directed shares/IPOs, and ran a 10k in 56 minutes at Stanford (I was sure it was 46).  I am primarily concerned with business, and I wanted to give contacts a little bit more insight into who I was as a business person, what I think about and what things I found important or relevant to the development of Mozes.

(b) I enjoy writing and blogging has simply made it a lot easier to "get published" than any prior media.   I do expect to be able to contribute to traditional publishers from time to time and I believe that blogging will keep my writing in practice and sometimes reveal some interesting prior work.  Further to an earlier post, I think some folks will get smart about subscribing to and incorporating the content of others (with permission) and integrating it into more focused blogs or publications.  There's just too much quality content being produced.

(c) I decided to keep my blog focused on business and I still believe that is what I should focus on for this blog.  However, what I am realizing as I go through this  is that I don't want my online personality to be all business or all about Mozes.  Just as in the pre-Internet world we all live our public lives in different ways.  Sometimes we like to have our opinions known publicly in subject areas outside our chosen profession and we do want to have other parts of our life be reflected.  I love photos and videos, for example, and like to share my work publicly.  There is no reason for me to avoid those components of my life and, in some respects, I equally want to be in charge of my online personality in how that stuff gets reflected.   As I mentioned earlier though, I personally don't want to force readers of this blog to hear about all that stuff.

(d) A single blog does not need to reflect all of the components of my life that I want to make public.  More importantly, a blog (that thing that all blog providers force you to put a title to) does not have to be a lifelong event and does not have to be your sole online personality.   It is ok to have a blog start and end, provided each blog serves a meaningful purpose.   For some people, a single, lifelong blog might be ok and their blog will be a fluid and/or diverse reflection of their lives.   I am going to take a different approach.  I envision having several blogs over the course of my life.  The first blog (this one) will be about the discovery and consideration of issues related to starting Mozes, including business issues, technologies & events affecting Mozes.  When starting this business moves beyond a mountain expedition, be that in 3, 7 or 20 years, then this blog should come to an end and sit as an artifact of my online personality.  I may start a second or third blog in the near term that may be unrelated to business and simply provide a forum for commentary on other issues or on a specific things like photography or video.  I could also see starting another blog with a small or large group of people.

(e) In all cases, the blogs I create or participate in will form my online personality and I will have to be mindful of that.  Outside of this point, I don't think it's a question of how many blogs I have or participate in, or how popular each one is.  The fundamental question is this:  what is the purpose of those blogs and how will their publication affect my online personality?  I don't want to make my online personality sound any more contrived than the public aspect of anyone's life prior to the Internet.  I do want my online personality to be a reflection of who I  am and what I truthfully think on public issues that matter to me.  The test for publication, however, should be no different than what a person would say standing on a soap box in the middle of the town square.

So how does all this get reflected going forward?  Yahoo! has just landed a great blogger and a great executive, and his site does provide some inspiration on where I am headed.  I promise to be creative and different, and I plan to incorporate password protected components for non-public information (family or private company information).    Again, stay tuned as it will take some time.

My Morning Jacket v. Porter

I finished the Barcamp video and had my first real run-in with creative commons.  Since Barcamp was so popular, I thought the video might get a viewing and I didn't want to use unlicensed music.  I went searching for something I could freely distribute and there wasn't much.  At one point, I was debating between America the Beautiful and Joy to the World. 

But then I came across the Wired CD and started listening.  I found One Big Holiday by My Morning Jacket and I was set.  The song simply rocks (concert schedule here - at the Fillmore November 11/12). 

Now, I am a lawyer and I have to say that it wasn’t as easy as the good folks at creative commons made it out to be to figure out my rights.   How confident am I that I am meeting the terms of the license?  Very.  The bad news is that I left the practice of law over five years ago after dwelling for three years on the words of one my first mentors: you don’t worry enough about your answers.   I welcome thoughts from those who do.  My legal analysis is here.

I am most hopeful that I am living up to at least the spirit of the license.  The point is that as video comes scorching to the web, folks with no intention of commercializing their videos need better ways to insert a little jazz singing now and then.  I want to encourage music artists to adopt creative commons type licenses that allow for easy access to and use of great tunes for non-commercial films.   You will keep your copyright, but you will make this new age of media and distribution a little more fun.

Navigating my first CC license

I used a song in a video that was licensed as non-commercial sampling plus under creative commons.

Of the 5 minute song, I cut about 1 minute in the middle.  Otherwise, it played as background music to the video unaltered.

The big question is whether I am allowed to use this music in the video as background sound at all under the terms of the license.  Here is the most relevant section:

2(b)  Noncommercial re-creativity permitted

You may create and reproduce Derivative Works, provided that:   

(i) the Derivative Work(s) constitute a good-faith partial or recombined usage employing "sampling," "collage," "mash-up," or other comparable artistic technique, whether now known or hereafter devised, that is highly transformative of the original, as appropriate to the medium, genre, and market niche;  and

(ii)Your Derivative Work(s) must only make a partial use of the original Work, or if You choose to use the original Work as a whole, You must either use the Work as an insubstantial portion of Your Derivative Work(s) or transform it into something substantially different from the original Work. In the case of a musical Work and/or audio recording, the mere synchronization ("synching") of the Work with a moving image shall not be considered a transformation of the Work into something substantially different.

The first question raised is whether the combining of the song with a video constitutes a good faith recombined usage employing "sampling", "collage" or "mash-up" that is highly transformative?  Derivative works are intended to encompass integrated forms of media, and it seems that combining a song with a video is highly transformative of the song (i.e. it becomes a music video).   Although I only spliced the song in one place, it was a good faith effort to recombine the song with the video footage, and in fact the only guide I used to determine what and how much to cut was the overall feel of the finished work.

Someone could argue, given references to “sampling,” “collage,” “mash-up”, that it is intended that audio stay only as altered audio.  But the language in 2(b)(ii) above indicates that synching the song to video was definitely envisioned by the licensor.  While it says the mere synching of the song to video is not a transformation of the song into something substantially different, the substantially different language is only relevant in paragraph 2(b)(ii), not 2(b)(i).  Thus, the license itself appears to concede that synching the song to video is accepted as highly transformative, but not as substantially different.  And because I only make partial use of the song in the video, the substantially different language and its conditions would not apply to me.

One final point, this was not intended as a promotional video, but a piece to be enjoyed by those who attended barcamp.   Neverthelees, the cc deed says that it can't be used to promote anything, but the license itself is silent (and by its language the license is the only agreement that matters).  Is that an oversight, or am I missing something?

My point is that I think we need ways to make things even simpler than this license.  I'd like to continue to explore the work of the creative commons and get involved when time permits, as I think there's something definitely there that is needed to make sure our culture continues to flourish.

Revamping the blog to prevent a fad (for me)

Since starting to work full-time on Mozes, I have also spent some time trying to understand the  relevance of blogging both to me as an individual and to the new company.  As many of my posts have indicated, I am fascinated by the topic of personalization and especially personal web-based RSS readers.  The publish-subscribe model is fundamentally changing the landscape of information flow in ways that we have yet to comprehend.

I started this blog as a business blog because after spending some time reading other blogs, I honed in on some  likes and dislikes about blogs.  I especially like blogs with narrow areas of focus, for example.  I read John Battelle's Searchblog because it informs me about what's going on in the fast changing search marketplace.  While broader in coverage, the Silicon Beat keeps me informed about technology rumors and other goings on in the valley.   Fred Wilson gives the entrepreneur a VC's perspective on the world with a lot of insight.

I'm starting to realize that most blogs I read and like, and the most popular blogs in general, are really well edited newsletters.  I rarely subscribe to a blog to hear about everything that goes on in someone's life (to be clear, if my wife published a journal, I would most certainly subscribe).  Yet it seems that when I want to subscribe to an expert on a certain topic, I also must accept that I am going to learn  about their long weekends or see pictures of house projects on a lazy Sunday afternoon.  That seems wrong to me, and the option of skipping right past it will become horribly inefficient over time as the scale of  content continues to increase.

At the same time, we know that everyone in the world has lots to contribute on a range of topics and that blogging should and can enable that voice.  Increasingly I feel trapped by my "business blog".   From time to time (albeit it's a bad time now with the start-up anyway), I know I'll be interested in participating in other web conversations about politics or culture or hockey, but I don't want to lose the focus of my current blog or turn away readers who care only about my business views.  That raises the question about whether I need to start separate blogs, but I don't  have enough to say or enough creative energy or time to maintain them so that they are truly relevant efforts.   Yet I want to publish and manage my own content.

There has been a lot of publicity around blog ranking lately.  But if content is king,  I wonder if we need to start downplaying blogs altogether.  By example, I would rather collect commentary from 20 different people on "mobile technology" than to review the blogs daily of those same people who are covering a range of topics (like Sunday afternoon projects).  Search is good at discovery of content, but self-defined feed subscription is critical to helping me manage my content. 

The general excitement around blogs and the massive adoption rates show that it has far more promise than being a newsletter.   But I believe it is at risk of being a fad if most individuals feel that their voice will only be heard if their blog in its entirety is the measurement of their success, and not the meaningful, smaller pieces of content that they contribute on a range of topics.   My suspicion is the vast majority of folks tinkering with blogging have no intention of managing or promoting a newsletter, but every blogger wants the opportunity for their voice to be heard when so moved.

I'm going to re-organize my blog for the future.  It will take me some time and experimentation on exactly how to do it and it will evolve over time.  I think I will be playing catch-up to others and re-living past mistakes, but I also think I can (in a small way) contribute to the overall evolution of blogging.

I see the addition of several types of RSS feeds (Silicon Valley Himilayan Expedition remaining as one) as important to this reorganized blog.  Fred Wilson already does what I am thinking to some extent by offering an RSS feed of "VC and technology posts only".   I'm going to establish many categories.  I also see password protected RSS as playing a role, where several feeds may only be accessible by family, friends or  business colleagues.   I want my blog to be the means by which I express myself publicly or privately on all topics (from book reviews to business to photos), but the reader should get better control of what's relevant to them and to what they will subscribe.