Why are people so disturbed by the occasionally remarkable relevance of Gmail’s ads? It seems the better Google (and advertisers) get at matching key phrases to context ads, the more it makes some folks think something scary is going on.

I saw this on a mailing list recently (paraphrased to protect the worried):

I like gmail too, but lately they’re starting to scare me lately. The amount of information they collect and how they use it is startling.

I e-mailed a friend talking about some symptoms of a medical condition, and Gmail served up a sponsored ad offering a diagnosis and selling a solution for the condition.

So this puzzles me a little.

First, GMail has done this since day 1. And people have been worried about this since before it launched.

But why is this so troubling to people? This recent email was just one example; I read lots of people who seem bothered by this. It’s often occasioned by an ad that seemed to “know” about a recent email conversation the user had.

I don’t know what nefarious things Google may be doing with my Gmail behind my back; I can’t say that they’re not doing something wrong.

But all they’re doing with the ads is keyword-matching, just like they do with Adsense on a web page.

Companies “bid” on words and phrases, and when those show up in a context where Google serves ads, by some magic algorithm (Google for “how does adsense select ads”) Google serves up matching ads from its pool of bidders.

If an ad appears on your Gmail page, it’s not because Google is matching your *identity* and then notifying some other company that “Hey, Ryan was talking to Joe about spontaneously erupting super-vision-itis” so they can jump in and prepare an ad for you personally, cackling maniacally. It’s because the magic matching key-phrase is somewhere in that web page, and that ad was automatically chosen from the pool of available ones that matched *some* text in your current page.

Keep in mind that the page loaded by Gmail is huge; there’s a lot more text transferred to your browser than what you see on your screen at any given moment.

Gmail pre-fetches a lot of stuff to make the Javascript-based navigation smoother and faster. So just because you don’t see anything about that message you just sent on your screen doesn’t mean
that message is not in the window.

Now, for all I know, Google may be wiretapping our cell phones and selling the content to the North Koreans to kill puppies with. But highly relevant contextual ads on Gmail don’t seem to me very strong evidence of anything alarming.

Or maybe I’m just insufficiently paranoid.

Mack Collier’s Are You Curious was uncannily timely for me. I’ve been thinking a good bit lately about fear and new trends and the pace of technology.

It feels like things move so fast that there’s simply not time to take a week, or a month, or a year, off. We worry that we’ll get left behind if we slack off for a bit, that technology will move on and we’ll never catch up.

Even if we’re trying to keep up it can feel like things are moving ahead faster than we can move ourselves. But it’s not true; there’s always room for good work and good observations.

Pick something and start talking about it. Say something stupid: it’s okay. You’ll find out more by getting involved in the conversation (even by being clueless) than by sitting on the sidelines wondering if you know enough to contribute anything.

Talk to people, learn stuff, get on board and move. You can always catch up, you can always contribute. You just can’t sit there on your butt, paralyzed by fear of irrelevance, and let the world move away from you and leave you behind. If you want to do the work, there’s always something new that you can become an expert in that no one else has done before and so no else has known before.

There’s always a new trend, there’s always a new revolution around the corner in technology or business. There’s never one last chance.

After the bubble burst in 2000, there were a lot of gloomy voices acting like that was the end. Technology was gonna be a commodity. The land grab was over, the dot com rush was finished, blah, blah, blah. There was a great malaise for a few years for a lot of people who didn’t know what to do.

Of course, some people just kept on working. Too young or too dumb or too focused on their work or plans or dreams to be put off, they were too busy creating interesting things to bother with joining the Malaise.

So they created the current revolution, and sure enough, a lot like before, the money and buzz have returned. This one will crash too, eventually, but there will be another one after that.

So don’t sweat it. It’s OK to miss out on things, especially if you’re doing other worthwhile things with your life. There will be another exciting train along shortly to hop aboard. In fact, one’s usually at the station just waiting for another clever passenger.

While looking for this Fast Company article, I ran across someone named ‘Miro Slodki’ asking for a link to this very article. Since I had the link handy, I pasted it into the ‘Comment’ field and hit ‘Submit’, and was sent to FC’s “Here, create an account and tell us lots about yourself, agree to our ToS, etc.”

I just wanted answer Miro’s question. So I googled ‘Miro Slodki’ and found his blog. “A-ha!” I thought. “I’ll just zip over and email him directly, and in less time than it would take to fill out FC’s ‘new user’ form. Take that, Fast Company!”

Only…I couldn’t find an email link. Now stubbornly in pursuit of my prey, I spent 5 minutes wandering around the site, even visiting his LinkedIn profile, only to by stymied. Nowhere on the site (that I could find) was there any way to just contact Miro directly (even via a web form), other than posting comments on actual posts.

I even found that Miro is looking for interesting work:

PS. At the moment I find myself seeking new challenges and contracting assignments. I would appreciate if you could extend a kind word on my behalf and send the referrals my way.

But how could I do that if I can’t find how to contact him?

I searched for a while, but Google and I couldn’t find him. I found other places that Miro had joined and commented, all of which jealously guarded any way to contact him directly. So eventually I gave up. We’ll see if, in an amusing irony, the linkback to his blog that Wordpress will auto-generate will draw him here to see the link he’d asked for a week or so ago.

Hey, I’m not picking on Miro, by any means. I don’t even know him (though I know him better than I did 20 minutes ago, that’s for sure). I’m just pointing out what I think are two serious problems companies and people share when trying to use the web to achieve their goals:

• Trying to enforce behavior on people that I have no relationship with, and to whom I offer no benefit. I wasn’t trying to get something from Fast Company; I was trying to help out one of their readers, on their site, by linking to one of their articles.
• Seeking visibility and opportunity without giving it a way to knock. I know spam is a problem, but being permanently incommunicado is worse. You don’t have to go as far as Scoble. But if you want contact, you have to throw me a bone.

“Good writing is partly a matter of character. Instead of doing what’s easy for you, do what’s easy for your reader.” - Michael Covington (slide 8, “The unselfish perspective”)

It seems the collective heart of the social media crowd has been stolen away by video blogging, which appears to them more or less The Ultimate Tool. I can see why some might think that. But I hate it, and you should, too.

With some great bloggers, like Jeff Atwood and Steve Yegge and Marc Andreesson and even Mark Cuban (who’s a great blogger w/o being a particularly good writer), I know what they do. Their ability to blog intensely interesting pieces is just part of the unfair measure of talent they’ve been given in a field other than their primary one.

But there are lots of people making lots of social media noise whose actual profession I cannot figure out. I enjoy reading Chris Brogan, Andrew Chen, Kevin Lim, etc. - I just can’t for the life of me figure out what they get paid to do, and by whom. (OK, I think Kevin’s a grad student, but the others - no idea).

And they’re the tip of the iceberg. There’s apparently a semi-closed system of maybe a hundred or more of nearly-A-level social media butterflies out there blogging and twitting and flickring and who-knows-what-else-ing each other, all while getting more and more excited about the “possibilities”. But possibilities for what?

My impression is that right now it’s sort of a blogorrheic derby, to see who can output the fastest, most nearly stream-of-consciousness flow of stuff, to “make people think” and “examine the issues in social media”. Right. Make noise, get attention. I have a 3-year-old. Some of this is not unfamiliar to me.

That brings us to video blogging. When someone sits down to write a blog, unless they’re just compulsive, they have to at least be aware of the idea of editing or re-reading before posting. They may not do it much, but at least the idea’s there. Most people, even in the blogosphere, still seem to at least recognize the notion that ‘better’ writing is something different than ‘first draft’ writing.

But this doesn’t seem to be the case with video blogging, where immediacy seems to be one of the Primary Virtues, and where editing, even cutting out sections altogether, is verboten.

Most video is like bad writing: lazy, self-indulgent, flabby, poorly arranged, flaccid and pointless. Bad writing used to be much easier to make than bad video. But suddenly it’s vastly easier to produce video than to write. After all, you only have to manage to get the button pushed to make video; you don’t even have to type words. But good video production is much harder than it looks. It’s tempting to confuse visual quality with content quality.

When I’m reading a great post, I don’t have to read through 47 lines of “um…um…um…um…” that were auto-generated while the author was gathering his thoughts. But when I’m watching (heaven help me) a video, all those stay in. Each little 3-second pause, or 2-second nervous laugh, or irrelevant aside that seemed funny at the time, but, well, you had to be there, is left in, and then you and I and every other poor sap trying to extract value from it has to sit through them.

Look, it’s no accident that Scoble, the human content cataract, has moved so eagerly from written blogging (which at least allowed him the *opportunity* to gather and edit his thoughts before publishing) to twitter/pownce (which actively discourages either gathering OR editing of thoughts) to audio (which lets you just conveniently babble) to video (which is just audio with more let’s-face-it-do-we-really-need-to-see-that video of the mugs of the babblers).

Just click, chatter for a while, and upload! Woot! I’m adding content, I’m creating value, I’m re-conceptualizing our paradigms! Except I’m not. What I’m doing is blowing out 20 minute chunks of crap with an occasional nugget of goodness buried inside. Then I’m asking thousands or millions of people who want the nuggets to go spend 20 minutes each to find it, rather than doing the work once, digging out the nuggets, cutting out the extraneous and self-indulgent stuff, properly framing the remaining pieces so that the nuggets are presented in a reasonably fair way, and saving (18 minutes) X (however many viewers) = a lot of time.

It gets worse with every shiny new VC-backed way for people to put up endless video streams of the minutiae of their lives. Think about this: how many live-action 24×7 streams of video can you watch? The answer is 1. Only one. And you can only do that by expending an exactly equivalent stretch of your own life.

And here we come to the fatal flaw of web video (and audio; let’s not forget audio, though it seems to be passing away as passe so quickly that it’s barely worth mentioning): you can’t scan or compress it very much.

Now, you have to understand, I read fast. Not as in “fast for a trained speed reader”, but much faster than an average reader. That includes many of you who think that you’re fast readers, but are really only high-functioning average ones. But while I read pretty fast, I scan like a demon. If it’s in text that I don’t need to absorb in detail, I can move through it at a scorching pace, and generally catch and either slow down and “zoom in” on, or revisit later, most of the important stuff. And it makes yummy things like Google Reader a veritable buffet of information and knowledge and (mostly) reading pleasure.

But what happens when I see a blog entry in Google Reader that consists of “Hey, this is great, watch this” and an embedded video (or worse, a link to a video)? What are my choices? For many of the various sucky video services on the web, it’s not even readily apparent how long this piece of crap is going to be before I start.

Apparently, it’s the purpose in life of a lot of the chuckleheads who write these players to keep you from skipping even one second of the Blessed Incarnation of Video that is this particular video. These brain-dead Flash-based players that can’t even do basic things like FF and REW usably. Pausing, while iffy, at least works more than not. But fast-forwarding or skipping to specific points in the video? Right. So it’s either press play and stare for however long it drags on and hope that somewhere in there is a payoff, or skip it.

So most of the time, I skip video posts to written blogs, and ignore “vblogs” entirely. And the more people post video instead of taking the time to write the #*&$#*&% essay so I can read it (quickly) or scan it (ridiculously quickly) and get what I need, the more I ignore them.

What’s needed is for people to compress and edit and excise and eliminate and then post it. Just like with your blog. Don’t make me watch what wasn’t useful. Only show me what was good. Cut it down to size. Then re-arrange it so it’s better organized. Then cut it down some more.

Do the hard work once, at your end, on behalf of every consumer of it. Don’t make your many viewers each duplicate the work or spend the time that you should have invested once for everybody. Don’t think that because you’re slamming out hours of video and audio that you’re adding any value to the world or the lives of those trying to pan through your stream of nonsense for the elusive golden nugget.

I may be in the minority. I suspect that I am, at least amongst a populace with a demonstrated affinity for “less reading, more video”. But I’m guessing that my view is more common among influencers or any people whose time is more valuable than pretty much any other commodity (note: I’m not claiming here to be an influencer, only that I suspect that we share this view of reading vs. video).

And that’s the thing video abuses: my time, and yours.

This past weekend I finally got my hands on a MacBook Air. I wasn’t prepared. I thought I’d like it; I thought I’d be impressed; I assumed that I’d want one. But wow - I had no idea how utterly attractive the thing would be. I didn’t realize just how light 3 lbs is, or how thin the thing is, or how fantastically it all works together.

There are so many little, tiny design choices that are just sooo correct, and that I wouldn’t have known I wanted until I saw them, that it’s just amazing.

Now, I’m not about to give up my MacBook Pro for the little guy. I love screen real estate (lots of it) and while the MBA keyboard is spifftacular, it’s not the perfect laptop keyboard that the MBP’s is. Still, it was an incredible piece of hardware, and I want one. Or two. It’s much more impressive in person than in any ads for it, which is saying a lot. If you haven’t touched one, held one, then you don’t really know what the thing is like.

This morning I read Wil Shipley’s first impressions. They’re very Shipley-esque (read: funny and interesting), but the first one was exactly the feeling that I got when I saw it up close:

It feels really nice, like a pebble. A large, smooth pebble, from a stream. This shape speaks to me, like the MOTOPEBL did, except that was a crappy phone and not a really nice computer.

He also says this, which is not really MBA-specific, but certainly a problem I’ve love to see solved:

Jonathan Ive should design a laptop bag as beautiful as the Air, that just can contain the machine, a power cord, and a Wireless Mighty Mouse. I’d be in heaven. Nobody seems to have addressed the “I want a small, slim bag that can still hold a power cord without having a giant wart in the side” market. Like, duh, bag designers, STOW THE POWER CORD ABOVE OR BELOW THE LAPTOP, not STICKING OUT THE SIDE WHERE IT CREATES A TENT AND LOOKS UGLY AND BANGS MY KNEE.

To that I’d like to add a hearty “Amen!”

Chris Brogan and Clarence Smith Jr. (am I supposed to just say “@chrisbrogan and @dykc” to appear more ‘linked-in’ and whatnot?) just posted a collaborative piece about managing the (many, many) streams of information from sources like Twitter (or any aggregator, like Google Reader, I’d add).

My immediate thought is that this is a perfect task for adding intelligence on the client side. For instance, I would love to have more options in Twitterific for controlling the incoming tweetstream.

With a ‘pause’ feature, if @InterestingDude is temporary at ReallyBoringConfFest07, and will be until Thursday, I’d love to be able to put him on “pause” until then, so that I don’t see all his excited tweets about impromptu hallway meetings with ReallyBoringPeople and ReallyBoringProjects.

But I don’t want to quit following @InterestingDude permanently; I’ve just lost interest for the next few days. I don’t want to have to remember to re-follow him, either; I just want to skip the next couple of days (or hours or whatever) of tweets from him.

The problem Chris and Clarence are examining is how to get more of the info that’s interesting and less of what’s not, when the “interestingness” isn’t always determined by the person or the topic. The ability to follow tweets or blog posts by “interesting people” is a start, but only a very primitive one. There are lots of fascinating people doing fascinating work, but who have hobbies that bore me to tears (and vice versa). There are a very few people who write so well that it hardly matters what they’re doing, I just enjoy reading their writing. And there are many, many people who normally would not be of interest to me at all, except when they happen to have seen/talked to/read/bought/tripped over the very piece of information which is extremely relevant to something I’m working on or discussing with other people.

Perhaps I should just quote Chris and Clarence a bit:

The problem arises when the people you follow are initiating and participating in conversations that you do not find interesting at all. [...] Said another way: I might like YOU, but not be into every little thing you are into. [...] How can we catch your tweets about social computing but skip the tweets about being stuck at JFK for a 3 hour delay?

It’s not that YOU should have to twitter differently, but rather, we should have a way to adjust the lens on what comes through our “interestingness” gate. And of course, this is all relative to whatever you’re interested in, who, and often times where. For instance, if we’re visiting Seattle, we might want to get MORE about the area around us than less, in case something newsworthy is happening (like avoiding a traffic jam).

They also (briefly) consider the personal/social implications of such filtering:

How do we on/off the conversational flow of people in such a way that we receive more of what’s interesting to us (again, very relative), without it signifying anything negative about a person?

This I don’t find as compelling, partly (perhaps) because so far I only have an extremely limited scope of friends (in anything resembling the traditional sense) who are Twittr/Whatevr users. But I feel pretty confident that the notion of any social implications of being filtered or un-followed (is that a word?) will adjust with the tools. As people spend enough time swimming in the flow of social network infostreams, it will become more apparent that social standing with a person is largely disconnected from how much of your socnet output they’re consuming at any given time (perhaps it will always have more to do with which parts of our output they consume than how much).

C&C continue:

Why can’t we have a system that’s partly like Flickr’s “interesting” and “favorites” system, that helps train Twitter (and other networks) to predict which conversations will matter to us? Something more than keywords. How do we apply this same thinking to the people we currently “follow?” What if Clarence loves when Chris talks about data centers, but doesn’t care about Chris’s current trip to New York City? How could we “gate-on” based on information, and then “gate-off” when the interestingness vanishes? [...] How could we build tools that turn on and off our view of someone’s Twitter stream based on things like: location, context, content?

This is where I think there’s a big ol’ gaping opportunity for an interesting next-gen aggregator. How many different ways are there to arrange the panes in a blog reader? Well, OK, there’s a zillion, but the point is, how many of them are enough better to compel me to change to them? Just like with the mail client, the things that really are going to motivate people to change en masse will be the addition of “intelligence” to make managing the burgeoning information therein easier.

The “pause” thing would be cool; but man, a client that could determine what I was interested in at the moment, and help me find “more of this and less of that”, would really pique my interest. Whether it did it by reacting to explicit actions like tagging or even rating (3 stars or 4?) tweets or people, or by implicit observation of my behavior (in the same vein as how Google Reader’s “Select by Auto” works), it would be a great step in the right direction.

Plus, you know, a pony. And an aeroplane. And a perpetual motion machine. I mean, it can’t hurt to ask, right?

I’m a big fan of Google Reader. But one thing that annoys is that I can’t find a history view that would let me go back through my own reading trail. Shared items, sure, but while I don’t necessarily want my reading history public, at least I should be able to see my history, shouldn’t I?

I frequently read a post and then later decide I want to go back to it, and have no idea where it was. I often know about when I read it (if it was very long ago, I probably wouldn’t remember about it anyway), but that doesn’t help me without a history to browse through.

This is made worse by the fact that not only do I subscribe to more blogs than I can keep up with, I also frequently read links from other prodigious link sharers (like Scoble and Chris Brogan), and so there’s a good chance I don’t even subscribe to the blog where the item was actually posted.

That’s just a huge oversight. Or maybe I just haven’t found it yet. If you know of a way, please let me know. If you’re one of our Google overlords, please add it.

OK, I figure that 10+ months between posts is long enough. And that my old and static and mostly useless homepage was really pointless. So I’ve moved the blog from its old location right up to the main entry point of the site, and I’m going to try (he said, wimping out in advance) to post here more regularly. After all, it’s not like there’s not plenty of stuff to talk about.

There’s been a lot of interest lately in Wikipedia, the freely-available, freely-editable online encyclopedia. An awful lot of people are still unfamiliar with the power of collaborative anything, and simply can’t conceive of how Wikipedia could be what it is, or why it works.

Helpfully, Nature recently sponsored a comparison of science entries in Wikipedia and the Encyclopedia Britannica, which is still the gold standard in print encyclopedias. The results are here, and are startling primarily to people who simply Don’t Get It. In short, Wikipedia compared very favorably in accuracy to the EB.

But here’s the advantage to Wikipedia that makes it more or less inevitable that it will win, and that giant print encyclopedias will lose: if Nature chose to reveal what the specific errors in Wikipedia were, they’d be fixed within minutes. That is, by the close of the day in which the score was EB: 123 errors, Wikipedia: 162, the game would have changed, and the new score would be Wikipedia: 0, EB: 123.

The very thing that makes many people question Wikipedia’s accuracy - the fact that anyone and everyone can edit and update information - is the thing that gives Wikipedia an insurmountable advantage. It can be fixed, in real-time, as soon as anyone sees a problem.

I remember reading John Seigenthaler’s plaintive whine about the Wikipedia entry on him. It was immediately apparent that he Didn’t Get It. After all, if you find an article on Wikipedia that’s wrong - fix it! Instead of writing a long article in USA Today and complaining to Bellsouth and everywhere else, he could have just fixed the entry.

Update: Factual Error Found on the Internet!

According to this Auctionbytes article, Yahoo! has elimated ALL fees on their auctions - both listing fees and commissions.

Rob Solomon, Vice President and General Manager of Yahoo Shopping, said on Monday that Yahoo monetizes the auction platform with its core graphical media (banner advertising) and search-based services.

When asked about concerns whether free listings would actually decrease the quality of the listings since anyone could list an unlimited amount of items, Solomon said Yahoo Auctions is utilizing anti-spam technologies developed for all Yahoo properties, including Yahoo Mail and Yahoo Groups, and technologies that detect fraud.

I predict Google will show up in this space sooner or later, and with this exact model (since it is, after all, the model they apparently use for all their services).

I’ve always been something of an anti-Apple bigot. It started in the early days, when as a TRS-80 CoCo owner, I had a healthy dislike for Commodore-64s and the odious Apple II. When the first Mac came out, I remember thinking, “How can anyone do anything without a command line to type in?” Yeah, one of those. Over the years, I lost some of the hard edge to my dislike of Apple, partly because I always thought Steve Jobs had a lot of style, and partly because they gradually eased over the line marginally onto “my” side in my eternal, bottomless pit of white-hot loathing for the Evil Beast of Redmond, Micro$oft. But I still wouldn’t have considered actually owning an Apple thingy. Heavens, no.

This has all changed somehow. Early this year, I finally bought an iMac for my wife: she liked the cool, translucent white, the near-total lack of cords, the nice keyboard, etc. I chuckled, being the geek that I am, and how someone might get attached to all those silly aesthetic things about what is, after all, a computer, not a decoration.

By the time I had hers out of the box, installed and running, I wanted one for me. I wanted two, actually. We now have 3 (an iBook and a Mac Mini). The Mini is mine; the others she claims are hers, and can I please move so she can use them.

I’ve been in computing a long time. CoCo, Amiga, PCs, now Linux: I’ve run them all. I’ve never seen a user environment so amazingly well-done as Mac OSX. It’s astonishing. I’m not saying anything new, I know. And the fact that I once hated Macs and now love them is an old refrain, and probably (I said probably) says more about me than it does about the Mac.

But the main reason for this post is really that I’m trying out the new WordPress dashboard widget I found, and I’m staring at a screen so full of eye-candy that I’m seriously contemplating buying a bigger monitor.

Zealot, indeed.

It never ceases to amaze me, perhaps because I’m learning-impaired, that people continue to try to rip off Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) and then sell it as proprietary commercial software. Is there some alternate universe in which this is clever? Or is it really possible to be so completely devoid of any semblance of ethics, to the point where you actually believe this is OK?

Well, in a delightful cautionary tale involving CherryOS hotpants, borrowed Porsches (shades of Magnum, P.I. - even a lovely Hawaiian setting), painted nipples, mysterious Ukrainian hosts, annoyed Pakistani CEOs, and a whole lot of rather pathetic lies and deceipt, Drunken Batman nails the offenders’ bodies to the city walls.

Interesting article here on a Seattle-based organization called Community Voice Mail that provides free voice mail to homeless and “phoneless” people.

“The intangible that Community Voice Mail provides is hope,” said national spokeswoman Patricia Bonnell. “No one e-mails you to tell you you’ve got the job. They call you. Without a phone number on your resume, you can’t get a job.”

Serving 37 cities in 19 states, CVM officials say they helped more than 47,000 people find jobs and housing last year. Helped by a $2.5 million grant from Cisco, they hope to expand into all 50 states.

Do I need to explain why I think this is so cool? OK, then. (1) Private organization (i.e., not a gov’t agency), (2) helping needy people solve their own problems and get jobs, housing, medical care, etc. That is, if you don’t want a job, aren’t looking for help, aren’t trying to get back on your feet, then who needs to call you? But if you are trying to get out of the hole, how do you do it without a phone? So CVM, a relatively small organization, is making a very large impact in a lot of people’s lives by focusing on solutions rather than the problems.

Inspired by Minion’s brilliant Does your candidate stink? (complete with nose-holding graph), I was inspired to try to turn Google to my own nefarious research purpose.

Since the cracks in the wall of media silence on Kerry’s Cambodia winter wonderland are starting to spread (see my other two posts from this morning), I thought I’d see whether the erstwhile “Paper of Record”, the NY Times, had discovered there was a story here yet.

The total count of mentions of “Christmas” and “Cambodia”? Zero. Well, what about “Swift Vets for Truth”? Surely they’re “in the news”? Total count: Zero.

By way of comparison, let’s check out “Bush National Guard Service” at the Gray Lady. Total count: 491.

Nope, nothing to see here. Move along, that’s right. We’ll let you know when there’s something to report. Pay no attention to the men behind the curtain (of media blackout). Bias? What bias?

Recently, a small testing company published the results of a privately commissioned web server performance test in which Micro$oft’s NT and IIS beat the pants off of Apache running on Red Hat Linux 5.2. It subsequently came to light that the test was commissioned by Micro$oft. And perhaps needless to say, it has touched off quite a furor.

In fact, so much furor-touching has it done that Mindcraft has taken the unusal step of proposing a second benchmark, this time inviting in participants from both the Micro$oft and Open-Source camps. The idea is that if experts from both sides are brought in to do their best at tuning their respective systems for optimum performance, then the cacophony of voices crying “foul” will quiet somewhat. (One has to presume that underlying this is the fervent hope that NT will win anyway, and that this will provide some annoyed Redmondian parties a brief respite from the past few months of glowing press coverage about the emergence of Linux.)

But what should really expect from this re-test? Matthew Chappee makes a very salient point in passing in his article (not currently available), “What if Microsoft is right?“, when he says:

“This is a golden opportunity for the Open Source movement. … There will be areas where Linux will rule, but there will also be areas where Linux will lag. I can guarantee this, within one month of seeing these benchmark results, Linux will ‘correct’ and smash NT on the next pass. ”

I can’t predict the outcome of this second test. But the immediate results are only of passing interest to me. The real power of the Open Source movement is not revealed by a snapshot of results, frozen in time at a given moment. The Open Source model is superior to other models, but NOT because all Open Source software is always better at any given time than an older, more mature, better-funded closed-source competitor (it’s not). It’s superior because continuous improvement is built in. Open-Source software behaves like an organism that desires to survive, and is almost infinitely adaptable. Challenges make it stronger, because it forces the organism to morph and evolve and adapt and improve to survive.

And that is the real reason that the Open Source movement is a threat to any closed-source competitor. It evolves so much more rapidly than any observed closed-source model in existence, that it’s simply impossible to stay ahead of it indefinitely.

So from where I sit, this “open benchmark” will certainly be of interest. But as an Open Source advocate, what I’m looking forward to are the changes and releases it engenders within the next 3-6 months, and the tremendous performance gains we’re likely to see in that time period. Within a matter of days after the initial results were announced, I have seen the Linux community adapting to the charge that tuning information is hard to find by beginning to collect and publicize extensive collections of performance tuning tips and resources. Code is already being scrutinized, and changes are already underway to meet this latest challenge.

The job of those who have an interest in the advancement of all that Open Source represents will be to point this out 6 months from now, and to show the tremendous evolutionary gains over that period of time. It will be our job to point out that this is the standard course for active projects in the Open Source community.

This is easy to overlook, and is going to be missed or ignored by many in the mainstream press. If we’re not careful, it will be easy for the Open-Source community to let this slip between the cracks and focus on some new challenge or FUD-attack or whatever is current around the end of the year. But we need to bring this back up after a few months and to point out that, as it always does, Open-Source software continues to raise the bar.

So let’s do the test, let’s talk about the results, let’s crow loudly or eat crow as the immediate result may require. But let’s
keep working, keep focusing on the real strength of the movement. And let’s keep writing software that quietly overcomes and displaces all contenders. Meanwhile, Micro$oft will continue to slip on their promised delivery of Windows2000, will continue to throw money at a development model that is ultimately doomed. They will continue to lose ground in the Internet server market, and increasingly on the desktop by the end of the year, and they’ll continue to wonder why. “But we were faster in those test results we bought back in April,” they’ll say. “We won, didn’t we?”

Ed Muth, described in the article as a “group product manager” is fairly well-known in the Linux community as one of the least clueful of Micro$oft’s talking heads. There are quite a few folks at M$ with a much better grasp of what the whole open-source/free-software movement is about than his. Nevertheless, he makes some comments in this interview which I think further indicate his (and possibly their) utter lack of understanding of what they’re really dealing with.

“I find it hard to believe that some of the best scientists in the world will want to do their work for free,” he said. “Without a long-term technical road map, without multimillion-dollar test labs, someone wants me to believe these visionary programmers and developers will want to do the best work of their lives and then give it away. I do not believe in that vision of the future.”

He could not have more succinctly demonstrated the chasm between the Micro$oftian worldview and the one they’re dealing with behind projects like Linux. I think this paradigm may be the hardest one Bill Gates has ever tried to grasp, because it runs diametrically counter to everything he believes in. Even as a pimply-faced kid, Bill wrote a now-legendary “open letter” opposing “sharing” of software, because he knew even then that he wanted to “own” something which was intuitively non-ownable.

I think the biggest single flaw in Mr. Ed’s argument is his clear view that these “visionary programmers” need a “long-term technical road map” to be motivated to do their work. But whose road-map are they supposed to follow? Bill’s? Microsoft’s? Of course not. The very definition of “visionary” is “having a vision”, and people with vision specifically do not follow someone else’s roadmap, they follow their own. And that happens to be the precise reason why some of the very best and brightest and most visionary developers in the world are drawn to open-source projects (not just Linux) like moths to a flame.

And as Micro$oft has realized internally, you just can’t build a “multi-million dollar test lab” as effective (and fast) than the de facto one which the Internet provides. Basically, there’s a constant, 24-hour-a-day (literally) community of thousands and thousands of hardcore geeks who are just panting to download, break, shakeout, fix, and compete for geek glory over every new point release of software packages, in every conceivable environment and scope of operation. Most people would be shocked to see how much activity and participation happens on even small project mailing lists. The numbers of people working on testing product releases is just staggering.

I can’t tell if Ed Muth just is blissfully unaware of Eric Raymond’s Homesteading the Noosphere and The Cathedral and the Bazaar, or is simply unable to escape his Redmond mindset long enough to understand them. Nearly every argument that he attempts to make in this interview, apart from having been made before, are actually reasons behind the growth of the movement. If you have interest in understanding the differences, I highly, highly recommend these two documents.

I’m not a prophet, and I can’t say that Micro$oft is going to lose to Linux, or what. And Micro$oft being what they are, their attempts to destroy the Open Source movement with FUD tactics will improve as they get their bearings. But if Ed’s views truly reflect the “corporate” mindset about Linux & Co., then they’re in for a very rough road indeed.

From email to Mr. Abate:

I read with interest your article in the SF Chronicle regarding Ken Hamidi and his dispute with Intel. My perception was that you have some more than passing familiarity with the particulars of Hamidi’s case, and lean toward sympathy with him in his dispute with the chip giant. I am not familiar with any of the information about his termination, though I don’t think it relevant to the spam issue.

Your article focused specifically on Intel’s attempts to prevent Hamidi from spamming Intel’s employees, using Intel’s own email system. You have portrayed it as a vaguely moralistic, First-Amendment sort of thing. I think it’s just a spammer doing what spammers do. Whether or not the content of his spam is legitimate, or his firing from Intel was legitimate, or a host of other questions about his motives or situation, are simply not relevant to whether spam is OK. It’s not. Ever.

You see, principles exist outside of specific instances. That is, whether it’s poor Hamidi (little David) against rich Intel (big, bad Goliath), or Hamidi (little David) against Joe Blow (another little David), the principle involved in spamming, as a practice, is the same - theft of service.

The key to the whole issue is right there in your article. I quote:

“Ken Hamidi, who’s lost his home paying legal bills to fight Intel, could never have afforded the $6,000 cost of dropping 30,000 postcards in the mail.”

Right. So he chose a medium whose delivery *Intel* was required to pay for, against their will. That’s the key to spam. Unless what he said was libelous, and thus actionable under normal law, Intel would have no recourse if he was sending postcards, because *he paid for delivery himself*. But just because he can’t afford (or won’t) to send postcards to all of Intel’s employees does NOT constitute a justification for him to use someone else’s property (Intel’s email systems and software) to deliver his message to all their employees.

And that’s the key - while the 1st Amendment guarantees his right to SAY things, it does NOT guarantee his right to “be heard” or “get his message out”. It most certainly does not require a corporation to subsidize his efforts to do so. For good or ill, that’s not what the Constitution offers.

What if it was not a disgruntled ex-employee with a potential case against Intel’s dastardly deeds. What if, instead, it was a racist child molestation fetishist who felt strongly that everyone at Intel should get to hear what he wants to do to a variety of minority children, in graphic detail, with drawings attached? There’s nothing illegal about that (presuming, of course, these were just his fantasies). His First Amendment rights guarantee his right to say it. But should Intel (or anyone else) have to allow him to use their internal messaging infrastructure to efficiently distribute it to all their employees?

For good or ill, Ken Hamidi’s inability to afford to pay to get his own message out never translates to his right to force someone else to pay for it. No matter how rich they are or how poor he is. Theft is theft, whether it’s Robin Hood or Robber Barons doing it.