• Be Good
  the best way to run a start- up is as if it were a charity. actually makes sense. VRM Hub and VRM NEA have no business model as such, trying to make something work first. Make something work, money will follow. The trick is spotting where.
  (tags: paulgraham non-profit charity startup business craiglist google success)
• Does She Look Like a Music Pirate?
  “The RIAA is fighting very hard to make sure that [Andersen's case] never reaches a jury,”
  (tags: RIAA music piracy lawsuit classaction)
• The Great Ubuntu-Girlfriend Experiment « Content Consumer
  I want ubuntu to be successful and user-friendly as I intend to turn my windoze laptop into a ubantu run machine. I had a similar experience with the previous version of ubuntu and really glad someone wrote all this down. Please ubuntu people take note! I
  (tags: ubuntu user-friendly OS linux)
• Make Marketing History: The Top 5 Made-Up Words Of Web 2.0.
  brilliant and overdue analysis of terms bandied about the Web 2.0 crowd. Must read.
  (tags: web2.0 words language marketing johndodds)
• The guide to corporate Twittering
  this is a nice guide but why does everything have to be corporate? Blogging or twittering? individuals communicate, corporates ‘message’ at us, so how can they do either?
  (tags: blogging corporations business twitter guide communciations individuals)

• Amazon.com: Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things: William McDonough,Michael Braungart: Books
  recommended to me to read, in return for my recommendation of Postrel’s Substance of Style.
  (tags: book reading recommendation)
• Occam’s RazR » Blog Archive » The End of Identity Politics
  interesting stuff, brings in another aspect of the net – tagging and taxonomy – to politics.
  (tags: individual taxonomy tags politics internet web URL dewey information network)
• Reputation taking center stage | Between the Lines | ZDNet.com
  Why separation? “One of the key features of federated identity systems is a separation of the identity provider and the relying party. How does a relying party know which identity providers to trust. How do users know which relying parties they can trust.
  (tags: identity federated identityprovider trust relyingparty)
• The Web 2.0 Social VRM impact on Insurance and Financial Services
  even insurance can be changed or impacted by VRM and the ability of people to take charge of their data
  (tags: insurance VRM mydata feed Mine!)

• How free is “free”? | rare pattern
  lots of thoughts bound by same underpinning one – how does individual avoid and benefit from the ‘free’ exchanges of data and attention going on online. Seems most don’t know or care. I’d say, give them something useful that doesn’t lock people in and the
  (tags: free attention data freeconomics web google privacy facebook beacon Mine!)
• Couple Sues Google Over “Street View” – April 4, 2008
  (tags: privacy google streetview online maps property)
• The Casablanca Weblog: VRM TiddlyWiki
  (tags: VRM tiddlywiki directory RFP)
• Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business
  this is basically ‘because effect’ model. you don’t make money with something (that can be or is free) but because of it. See blogging bring money not via ads but reputation and its application elsewhere. “But free is not quite as simple — or as stupid
  (tags: becauseeffect freeconomics chrisandersen wired free web business models resources scarcity waste)
• OpenID: intro & howto for non-techies – A Consuming Experience
  for those who haven’t followed the debate surrounding OpenID and just want to know what it’s about. OpenID servers for hardcore geeks possible but most need providers
  (tags: openID introduction application identity web SSO)

• Be Careful with Word – own – Data Sharing Summit
  ownership concept wreaking havoc in simple practical issues of the web. Rights is not a way to manage relationships, it is a way to potentially resolve disputes. I want to address this via the data as externality route to clarify some of the fallacies flo
  (tags: mydata ownership fallacy data user externality policy rights platforms value exchange)
• The Health 2.0 Blog: The Wisdom of Patients – Social Media In Health Care
  (tags: healthcare JNJ patients health2.0 report)
• Guy Fawkes’ blog of parliamentary plots, rumours and conspiracy: Harman Backing Boris on Her Blog
  Which of the two statements are more likely – ‘Harriet Harman is backing Boris Johnson on her blog’ or ‘Harman is locked out of her own website?’
  (tags: guidofawkes harrietharman politics security blog passwork hack)
• Doc Searls Weblog · BitTransmitters
  “CBC can go with BitTorrent because they’re not defined as just a collection of stations. That is, they have stations, and they produce and distribute; but they are not tied to any one band or medium for distribution.”
  (tags: bitTorrent media transmission distribution economics market network docsearls)
• Google Maps – torrents throttled
  a collaborative map of locations where torrents are throttled by network operators, such as Bell.
  (tags: bitTorrent map google collaborative bell networkneutrality)
• Michael Geist – Bell Secretly Throttling Wholesale Internet Services? – UPDATED
  Bell has now reportedly confirmed that full throttling will be in place by early April. It claims that it is entitled to do so based on its contractual terms. Note that several people have written to emphasize the anti-competitive effects of this policy,
  (tags: bell throttling bitTorrent anti-competitive market internet networkneutrality distribution canda)
• An Adoption-Led Business Model In Action [on Simon Phipps, SunMink]
  adoption led market. Love it. Almost as good as user-led adoption. “how a software vendor can build a business model that is designed for an adoption-led market…No lock-in. No hard-sell. Just a value proposition that can be calmly evaluated on its me
  (tags: sun javaSE adoption webmink market users model)
• The Wisdom of Patients: Health Care Meets Online Social Media – CHCF.org
  (tags: healthcare health2.0 patient report)

• OneSwirl – swirling your oceans of data together
  another ‘lifestream’ aggregator. these have privacy and info overload issues of their own. identity portal sounds so 90s dahling.
  (tags: aggregators lifestreaming socialmedia oneswirl mydata Mine! identity portal)
• scientific study about Debian governance and organization / Linux blog / Tech Force – Linux Blog
  “scientific study about Debian Project governance and social organization from the management perspective. How did a big non-commercial, non-paying community evolve into one that produces some of the most respectable Operating Systems and applications pac
  (tags: debian FOSS opensource governance organisation study)
• Space Time/No Time – Brightcove
  Matt Jones of Dopplr on SpaceTime. fascinating, worth watching.
  (tags: spacetime dopprl mattjones video)
• Noisy Decent Graphics: What social network web 2.0 type things would you drop first and why?
  look from the user side. will take into account when designing the Mine! not surprised dopplr comes on top.
  (tags: design user Mine! socialnetwork web2.0 dopprl applications tools)
• Vendor Relationship Management Continues to Evolve | Identity Commons
  (tags: VRMhub event)
• tantek wiki / CommunicationProtocols
  sayz human to human communications, at the moment it looks like geek to geek comms.
  (tags: communications protocols geek tantek)

• Privacy Disaster At Twitter: Direct Messages Exposed (Update: GroupTweet Is Likely Culprit)
  privacy hits the social web ‘headlines’ again, as expected. This will be increase with more aggregators coming our way, give me my space to keep my stuff and ‘expose’ it as I wish.
  (tags: privacy twitter aggregators friendfeed mine! ownerships mydata)
• Major Security Hole at Tumblr
  another one for the ‘privacy issues’ collection
  (tags: tumblr privacy exposed mydata mine! security platform)
• Battledecks II, Improv PowerPoint Karaoke at SXSW 2008 | Laughing Squid
  let this be an inspiration to all confined to powerpoint
  (tags: powerpoint presentation funny battledecks)

I particularly liked the Q&A session at the end.

via Pharma gossip

• The Insurance gap (pdf)
  vaguely relevant to conversations with Nilhan about applying VRM and Mine!/FeedMe to insurance. Easy case to make, once the infrastructure in place
  (tags: VRM Mine! infrastructure insurance business)

• Jeff Jarvis on the transpatent corporation | Media | The Guardian
  not sure we need customers designing stuff by default, sometimes I want to rely on others’ expertise for products and services. VRM to me is about redressing the (im)balance between customer and vendor, and individual and a system. And in commerce relatio
  (tags: vrm jarvis buzzmachine docsearls guardian starbucks dell)
• Presentations & Webcasts / Resource Center / Home – Liberty Alliance
  Webcast: Liberty Alliance Privacy Summit #1 of 3-part series audio, Robin Wilton, Lead Architect of Sun Microsystems. Looks at why privacy an issue, got me thinking, privacy post brewing.
  (tags: privacy libertyalliance robinwilton sun identity)
• Twitter / comcastcares
  Comcast reaching out to customers via twitter. Getting a lot of flack but there is a real person behind this and I kinda like him.
  (tags: comcast communication twitter customers business perception)
• Glue – Own Your Identity
  “we should help people curate and cultivate their social lives. Let them go granular, reuse bits, and, most importantly, remix and reglue those bits in contextually powerful ways. Such nuance is likely to come from users.” Give me the Mine!
  (tags: users tools context glue identity lifestreaming mydata social)
• Unit Structures: Social Software’s Curation Era
  interesting point, i think gets the general trends and inclinations of users, not sure about some of the details.
  (tags: socialsoftware curation individual mix aggregation)
• Loic Le Meur Blog: My social map is totally decentralized but I want it back on my blog
  “while I really like all my services gathered in one place, I would rather that these would be centralized on my blog instead of a third party service. Yes you can cross post or add badges, but it’s not really like a center feed in your blog. What I like
  (tags: mine! socialnetworks feed aggregation identity socialgraph)

I get edgy when I hear people talk about being user-centric. I once fell for it, thinking that they saw users’ wants as their starting point. Well, user-centric is an improvement on the system-centric approach where the top-down design forces users into a slot of whatever is built, no matter whether it works well or not. (Hence the phrase user-friendly applies mostly to things not designed for the user. I don’t talk about del.icio.us as being user-friendly, because its simplicity and functionality allows the user to drive the use, not the designer.)

User-centric says – ‘we are going to build a system, put the user in the centre instead of the system’. So far, so good, but this sits uncomfortably with me as a user especially as one that is used to the online tools that have changed many an old way. The tools – blogs, wikis, feeds and feed readers, BitTorrent, Flickr, Dopplr, Twitter etc – are revolutionary not just because of their functionality, bits of code or their interface, but their design for usefulness, their modularity and constant evolution. There is an element of open-endedness in their design, either accidental or deliberate, recognising that the designers cannot foresee all the uses to which people will put the tools to. The simplicity is the key, the complexity coming from usage rather than the design. In other words, they are user-driven.

A simple test of user-driven design is in the answer to a question – Can the user add value to it? Without users del.icio.us would pointless, BitTorrent empty and Flickr dead, Twitter silent.

Last year at the IIW in Mountain View, I got talking to Bob Frankston about the difference I started to see between the user-centric and user-driven. Bob, in his inimitable fashion, used the tuna salad we were having for lunch during the conversation to coin an analogy. A ready-made tuna salad is user-centric – it has been decided what goes into it, in what proportions and what order. It has been designed around me and for me but I cannot add anything to it.

Giving me ingredients, utensils and a recipe suggestion and letting me get on with it, leads to user-driven design- it can still be meant to become a tuna salad but I get to put it together, determine the proportions, skip or add ingredients. The process is driven by me and the experience makes me (hopefully) better at making the dish.

Of course, there are times for user-centric and there are times for user-driven. Not everyone wants to make everything themselves and neither is it the best or most effective way to design all systems or tools. But there are cases when only user-driven will do. And VRM is one of them.

• Where’s Our Real World Data Portability? – ReadWriteWeb
  classic fallacy around ‘who owns data’ debate. companies do not ‘earn’ our data by providing services. we pay for those. our data is a) often extracted from us with no choice (fill in forms etc) b) a positive externality to the company of the transaction
  (tags: data ownership externality dataportability attention web offline access)

• Warning on Storage of Health Records – New York Times
  can’t believe am quoting MS exec positively: “Philosophically and politically, I am skeptical of the concept of paternalism. It never turns out to be ‘limited.” Peter Neupert, VP healthgroup
  (tags: health medical records googlehealth microsoftvault storage VRM paternalism)
• How to Personalize the Web – GigaOM
  “But what if all this stuff [online tools] adapted to you, rather than the other way around?” Amen, brother.He’s talking about portable ‘identity’ and touching on what the Mine! aims to do, give you reasons to collect, manage and share your data by being
  (tags: web tools application flexible adaptable userdriven portability Mine!)