NowThen – Page 23

February 7, 2008

Microsoft Update Faked Site Offers Trojan

Here, Have a Trojan.

Thanks to Mikko, over at F-Secure, we learn that someone is running a Microsoft Update site lookalike, trying to get you to download a trojan. Here’s a picture of the site:

Right off, the site is suspicious because of the huge “warning” across the front. Microsoft never does that. And notice, the word is spelled “intall”. Secondly, the button itself: MS doesn’t do that either. Finally, look at the address bar. The actual address of this site is on cfm48.com, not microsoft.com, even though the update.microsoft.com string does appear inside the address.

According to Mikko,

“If you click the Urgent Install button, you’ll get a file called WindowsUpdateAgent30-x86-x64.exe, which is not signed by Microsoft. (i.e. Click the button — Download a Trojan-Dropper.)”.

Next week is MS Tuesday, and many of us will be trudging off to get the latest updates. Take the extra half a second to look at the address bar and make sure you are where you think you are. And, if you have automatic updates turned on for notification or automatic install, just smile and go on about your business. You have little to fear from the fake update guys.

I am Jon, and I’m kinda surprised this took so long to happen.

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February 6, 2008

Welcome To The Machine

In The Pipeline, Filling In Time

Michael Wesch, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University posted this video a little over a year ago, but I have just found it. It’s an interesting display on Web2.0, semantics and the evolution of the web in general. I found it while looking through last week’s posts by Nick Carr over at Rough Type. Thanks Nick.

The Machine Is Us/ing Us

It moves kinda fast, but then again, don’t we all nowadays? Still, it takes under 5 minutes to view the whole thing. I hope you’ll check it out and tell me what you think… do we need to rethink ourselves?

I am Jon, flesh and blood and clicks and keys.

February 6, 2008

Toonlet

Have you ever wondered what the world be like if everything was a cartoon? I know I have. The guys over at Toonlet have headed out in that direction.

The whole site is cartoon strips. If you’re really big on text-only interfaces, this isn’t for you. But if you like sneaking a peak at the Sunday comics, you really ought to check this out.

When you click the link, you’ll be on the home page. Just below the google ads at the top, there is a little banner that starts a tutorial for the site. Click on that and keep going, you’ll be up to snuff in just a few short minutes. This is a little toonlet guy I made in just about 20 minutes.

This in no way looks like me…. really.
I don’t even have a shirt like that.
Well, not anymore I don’t…

Check it out if you have some time. It’s a neat way of looking at things, and it’s creative and fun.

I am Jon, and that guy’s name up there is Werdy.

edit:
I’ve added an RSS feed to Werdy Toonlets in the sidebar. I hope you’ll check it out and leave me Toonlet reply!

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February 5, 2008

Immortal Muse – Bite Me! (oh, you did already…)

I apologize for the vehemence displayed in this piece, and I apologize for interrupting the series “Catastrophe!”. I will finish it up hopefully within a day or two. I also apologize for the incredible (even for me) length of this article. I hope you’ll take the extra 60 seconds to read it…. I thought I fell for a scam… here is how it happened….

What The “Artist” Published

I can’t remember exactly how I found it, but I was over at LibraryThing doing a bit of research and I clicked on their blog. Reading through the top post, I noticed the following update:

“Update from Tim: We’ve removed one book. As a blog comment pointed out, there is said to be controversy over whether the publisher has the right to publish the book. The publisher puts this front-and-center on their website, claiming the consent is “expressed, albeit obliquely, in the book itself.” If the controversy is real, it’s clearly in violation of copyright. If false—as I suspect—it’s an irritating promotional stunt. Either way, we don’t want to have anything to do with it.”

So I decided to follow this little path for awhile.

A quick search on Google for the word “zireaux” gave me a few good hits. At zireaux.com I found this:

“November 28, 2007

It has recently come to my attention that one of my poetic works — which I had composed in personal notebooks and read at public recitals — has been copied and published in book form, under the title “Kamal,” without my permission.

My legal council has contacted the publisher and demanded that all distribution activities concerning the book be stopped immediately and that all copies of the book be destroyed.

I was also advised by legal council to publish this statement declaring my objection to the book. I request anyone who has purchased a copy of the book to destroy it, and anyone who is considering purchasing the book to desist.”

It’s signed: Sincerely, Zireaux.

There are no other links there. It’s a static page. This is all Zireaux wants to say here. This is all I could find that he has published. Time to move on.

Moving On, The “Thief” Emerges

And so I did. Clicking on the next Google link took me to a page on yahoo.net, where I found my first introduction to ImmortalMuse Publishers Ltd. Allow me to give you some of my first, and lasting, impressions.

The page at first appears to be a nice “About The Author” type of thing, but within literally a couple of seconds exposes itself for what it actually is. In the first paragraph we find this sentence:

“And even though a poet may be well-known in New Zealand, there’s still ample opportunity for an American scholar and editor to be the “first in the world” to discover him and publish his works.”

Basically, this guy is saying right there that he is stealing the work of the artist, simply because the artist is not well-known in the thief’s geographical area. Yeah, jerk, based on the information available… I’m calling you a thief. “Ample opportunity” does not give you the right to publish anything against the will of the artist. If you were in front of me right now, I would have “ample opportunity” to explain this to you in a more substantial and physical way. But that opportunity would not give me the right to hit you. So. I will take this “ample opportunity” to say I think you are a thief, and “Bite Me”.

Reading further, we find a section titled “About The Editor”, wherein it is claimed that this guy, Bernardo Winson, lives in the USA and holds a PhD in English Literature. It further states that he “discovered” Zireaux on a visit to New Zealand. I searched for about an hour, using every engine I could think of, and I couldn’t find any references to this guy that he didn’t write himself. Usually, the holder of a PhD in any discipline can be found by searching Google alone. Why, you say? Because to get that title, they have to actually publish something new. This guy appears to have published nothing.

“But Look How Hard I Had To Work To Steal This Stuff!”

Reading onward through the page, we find a section called “A Note about the Transcription of Zireaux’s Work”, wherein the thief tries to justify his crime by showing the amount of work it took to produce the book. By his own description, the work was never intended for publication.

“A Note about the Transcription of Zireaux’s Work:

The works published by Immortal Muse were recovered from a box of 198 small, red-covered, 100x160mm spiral notebooks, each with 50 leaves, or 100 pages which flip nicely over the top, the kind of notebook which once used to identify newspaper reporters (a stubby pencil behind an ear). These notebooks, at one time, were the property of Zireaux, whose writings they contain.

The leaves of these notebooks are neatly ruled in blue (21 rules per page) and Zireaux seems more or less frugal with space, only occasionally skipping lines. A typical Zireauxian stanza of just 12-14 lines, however, can end up scattered across 15 pages or so in a tangled wreckage of arrows and scribbled deletions. To further complicate one’s attempt to rescue these lines, whatever text survives – often circled or starred or just laying there quivering beyond the crash zone – is further crippled by Zireaux’s atrocious penmanship. And even then, even once a stanza is compiled and stretchered to safety, Zireaux rarely composed his verses chronologically, forcing one to decipher his unique numbering system in order to rehabilitate the stanza to its correct position within the larger context.”

Notice that we are never told how he came to be in possession of the notebooks. Notice how he insults the true author, how he exposes the author’s creative process and ridicules it. This is the work of a true loser. Not only is he insulting the author whose work he has stolen, we find him here trying to manipulate us into somehow justifying what he has done. Let’s look a bit deeper, shall we?

The Publishing Company? Where Are The Rest Of The Books?

On the homepage for Immortal Muse there is only one focus, and that is this book I am talking about here. I am reprinting the text here for you all to see:

“Dear Potential Reader,

Kamal, Book One, is a novel in verse of five cantos, in structured, mostly iambic tetrameter or pentameter rhyme, totaling 5,472 lines. For more information about the book, click here, or you can download a pdf copy of the first 27 pages.

Kamal was written by Zireaux, a fact I would never deny. He is the true creator, the official birth-parent so to speak. Nor would I deny him the legal copyright to this book, as you can see in the copyright notice on the title page.

To those readers and critics who may question my decision to publish Kamal without its author’s permission, I implore you to proceed with your reading and interpretation of Kamal as a work of art rather than to allow myself, or Zireaux, or anyone else to sully your experience with questions about the legitimacy of this book’s existence.

I think you’ll find that even if Zireaux claims I have no rights to publish his work, his consent, in fact, is expressed, albeit obliquely, in the book itself – through its narrator, its main character and themes. And whether or not the right is granted, it remains incumbent upon us, as compassionate beings, to preserve a specimen made vulnerable by its beauty (even if we aren’t its original creator!).

In this regard I believe my publication of this book and my accompanying footnotes – meant to make Kamal accessible to readers from even the remotest outposts of the English language – represent the least I could do to fulfill my most basic obligation as a literary scholar and human being.

— Bernardo Winson, Ph.D.
Editor-in-Chief
New York City”

His most basic obligation being, it would seem, to feed his bank account with ill-gotten earnings from another’s dedicated work.

This is just some guy. His top level website uses only one page, which links to a Yahoo page which he calls Immortal Muse Publishers Ltd, where he hawks ONE BOOK. The entire site is devoted to it. Where are the other books, Bernardo? And you received your PhD from which school? And the Ltd in your name means … what? Do you even know? And why can I not find ANY information on you ANYWHERE on the net under that name, or with those credentials? Are you even who you say you are? I, for one, doubt it. I welcome your response, which I will publish here for all to see.

The Wordout Response To Losers

I’d like to say a couple of things to this whaledung-on-the-bottom-of-the-ocean type of mentality.

I have a few boxes of notebooks full of things I never plan to publish, too. And yes, these notebooks have words crossed out, underlined, parenthesized, arrowed to and away. They are full of cryptic abbreviations and symbols that you will never decipher in a million years. These notebooks are practically unreadable to anyone else but me. Those who have seen or read the finished works that came from these notes have formed their opinions of the work. But they did so without having been exposed to the inner workings of my process, without being tainted by the chaotic and messy structure of me talking to myself within my notes.

Regardless of whether my name is known in New York or not, you do not have any right to publish these books without my consent. You do not have the right to ANYTHING belonging to another person, regardless of what it is, without their explicit consent.

You, jerk, are a thief. You say that the permission is implicit within the words of the narrator character in the book? Come on, who do you think you are fooling? A character in a story now has legal rights? You’re just trying to sell a copy of the book by baiting us on something that cannot possibly be there in the way you say. I call BULLICUS on you, Bernardo Winson! You are a thief. Everyone sees the huge “L” on your forehead. You must see it yourself, each morning in the mirror. And what the hell does that last sentence in that paragraph mean? The only thing that remains incumbent on us is that we respect the wishes of the author and follow the laws of our land. You have done neither.

If Zireaux wants his work published, on a page or on the web, he will have it done or do it himself. From what I can find, Zireaux is more of a “performance artist”, delivering his works to his audiences in person. He uses words, yes, but they are spoken by him in the way he wants them heard. He may feel that the words need his own voice, or the presence of his own body, his own facial expressions… whatever. For some reason, Zireaux has decided that this is his method. That is his decision to make, and ours to accept whether we understand it or not.

The Source

In case you want to do a little investigating for yourself, here is the contact info published on the Immortal Muse site:

info@immortalmuse.com
immortalmuse@yahoo.com
Phone/Fax (UA): +1-661-452-1599

Interesting way of writing the phone number, isn’t it? Almost like this guy has no idea how to annotate a phone number for the USA. UA is the international abbreviation for Ukraine, but the number appears to belong to a company called Ammas, an Indian search firm.

Many of you know that I believe in going directly to the source to find the real info, so feel free to send emails to Immortal Muse to get their opinions, reactions, and philosophy concerning publishing raw notebooks dubiously found in a box belonging to a successful, contemporary artist. If they give you anything interesting, come back here and share with the class! I’d recommend calling them, but it’s just a machine hosted by another company. Of course, if he has to pay them by volume….

Whatever you do, please, do not buy this book from anywhere.

I am Jon, and I’m no friend of Immortal Muse Publishers Ltd.

UPDATE:(edited)
It appears that, as Tim has noted in the comments, I have been had.
Check out these 2 whois reports:
http://whois.uberdose.com/zireaux.com
http://whois.uberdose.com/immortalmuse.com
LOOK FOR “IMMORTAL MUSE – REVISTED” FOR AN UPDATE TO THIS STORY!
Definitely do not buy this guy’s book.
And Tim, Thanks for the heads-up from all of us reading Wordout!

I am Jon, and THIS STORY AIN’T OVER, either…

We now return to our original programming…

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January 21, 2008

OpenID: Why Passwords Just Won’t Cut It

Passwords, Passwords, Passwords

I’d bet you have passwords scattered all over the net. It starts when you login to your ISP account. Then one each for all your email accounts. Then your Facebook, your MySpace, your iTunes, all your IM accounts, your twitter, your Flickr, your Amazon, the list goes on virtually for miles. And each one unique, with at least 8 characters, using a combination of upper and lower case, numbers and puctuation symbols.

Hate having to keep entering that over and over and over? Services like OpenID promise to get rid of that headache. With backing from giants like Google, Yahoo! and AOL, just to name a few, OpenID will most likely grow to become the standard by which all the others are judged. But is this a good idea?

Super-Duper Master Password

It’s nearly impossible to remember all those passwords. That’s why most of us, myself included, use what I call “variations on a theme” passwords. It limits the number of passwords we have to remember. The truth is, though, that these kinds of passwords are not that hard to guess or work out with the right software. With OpenID you could generate one really great password and use it everywhere. Up front, it seems like a great idea to reduce the load on your memory while still improving your security.

The problem is, there is no really great password. Especially if it’s being used to authenticate so many services. With each authentication, there’s the chance the password could be intercepted. A successful phishing attack could leave you with every account you have on the web, stolen from you. Your entire online identity, gone.

Passwords: The Wrong Way

In “The Beginner’s Guide to OpenID Phishing“, we find 3 easy ways to perform these “man-in-the-middle” attacks. The first two are pretty easy to code, and fairly easy to protect against, but the third is the real reason why OpenID, and any password-based login application, will fail every time. In the third example, the “phisherman” simply causes a standard login box to appear on the screen. Two fields are required, the Login and the Password. To quote from the article:

“At Level 3 we simply cut the provider out of the game. For a moment, consider how users think of authentication. In 99.99% of all cases they will think of entering a username and a password. Then how will grandma respond to the following little box once you have given her OpenID?”

The box shown requests the standard stuff, and I’m sure that nearly everyone reading might have fallen for it. If it was done well enough, I would fall for it. It’s just the way we’ve been conditioned to think. On the web, you need a username and a password. It’s always been that way, hasn’t it?

Passwords? A Better Way

What’s needed is a better way of authenticating ourselves. Back in the old days, your password was never actually sent anywhere. Again, from The Begiiner’s Guide:

“Web security has more or less become an oxymoron, but lets try really hard to remember how authentication used to be done. Alice and Bob shared a key. Alice would send a challenge encrypted with the key to Bob. Bob would decrypt the challenge, do some computation on it, create a new challenge, encrypt both using the shared key and send it back to Alice. Alice verifies Bob’s response, does some computation on his challenge, encrypts it using the shared key and sends it back to Bob. Bob verifies the response and they now both know that they are talking to the right person and not some man-in-the-middle (phisherman) called Eve. It is not trivial to get this right using shared keys, but since the arrival of public/private key pairs it has become fairly simple.

The point of challenges is that obtaining a single message doesn’t help Eve at all. Only the secret would help her, but that is never put on wire.”

Personal online identity verification is going to continue to pose a problem. From targeted advertising to online services, we need a way to identify ourselves securely from wherever we happen to be. We need to be able to control this information, to possess it like our drivers license, and it needs to be portable. As the web encroaches into our everyday lives, it will be more important in more ways and in more places. I’ll conclude this post with a quote, again from The Beginner’s Guide:

“In practice all of this means the web user will have to generate and respond to challenges and therefore will have to use some separate authentication mechanism. We can not rely on the webpage to compute challenges as the webpage may easily have been bugged. This could be done with a browser-toolbar or built-in, a program on USB stick, or a part of the Operating System such as Cardspace. Users will only be tempted into this way of authentication when such tools have become mainstream. Firefox 3 and Windows Cardspace are about to give a boost, but at this moment we’re simply not ready yet.”

I am Jon, really, I am.

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January 19, 2008

Which Came First?

The Chicken Or The Egg?

I think that implicit within the chicken is the egg.
The real trick sometimes is getting it to cluck.

I am Jon, and that’s not a chicken.

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January 18, 2008

Save Windows XP Online Petition

Choose XP
Wordout is jumping on this bandwagon right now.

Microsoft has decided to stop selling Windows XP at the end of June. Here’s the story, as found over at GeeksAreSexy:

“Alas, if things do not change, Windows XP may currently be enjoying its last few months of existence. Even if it still dominates the market (76%), Microsoft has decided to stop selling the product starting June 30. From this point, updates and support for the OS will slowly start to fall into Microsoft’s room for retired projects.

As we all know, many people still prefer XP over Vista, and the Euthanasia of the OS is far from pleasing everybody. Fortunately, a bunch of journalists from the InforWorld magazine have decided to take the matter in hand and launch an online petition to keep XP from disappearing into Limbo.

For the magazine and many, many other Windows users, XP remains at the top of the hill when it comes to performance and stability, so why force people to adopt the newer, performance-gobbling OS? Of course, we all know the answer to that question, but this is not the subject of this article.

If you are interested in signing this petition, head over to Infoworld.com. Do your moral duty and help our old friend XP. It’s the least we can do! He’s been doing a hell of a good job after all.”

So let’s get over there and put in a word for XP. As a pc tech, I can tell you that Vista still isn’t ready for prime time. Maybe in a year or two, then again, remembering Windows Millenium Edition, maybe never. XP is the best Microsoft has ever come up with. Give it some support.

Unless you want Microsoft to tell you which Windows will be on your next pc. Right now, you could still buy one with XP. If they go through with this, soon you will have no choice but Vista.

I am Jon, and I already signed the petition.

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January 11, 2008

If You Don’t Do Anything Else Today

If you don’t do anything else today, take 2 minutes and go to Lauren Weinstein’s blog and read this.

Lauren Weinstein

Lauren is one guy I have respected since the first time I found him, a long time ago. He’s been a part of this net mess since way before it became so messy. Please read what he has to say. You will find it, at the least, thought provoking and perhaps enlightening.

I am Jon, and I agree with Lauren.

p.s. if you’re from LA, be sure you check this out on Lauren’s site, about the upcoming February ballot. seems the local politicians out there have a neat little tax setup for you guys to vote on. geez, even if you’re not from LA, read it, and see how evil our elected officials have become. they do this stuff right out in the open, as if they don’t care if they’re caught…

January 8, 2008

Surface – Taking Touch To A Table Near You

Spaghetti
The poster child for how not to make an operating system has been, for almost a decade, Windows ME. I hate trying to make that pile of spaghetti work, and I know lots of pc techs who feel the same. With all the problems surfacing in Vista, there’s a chance that Microsoft might have to share that singular distinction with itself. I’ve seen at least one prominent writer compare Vista with a collander. And with all the recent hoohaa about moving everything onto the web, you might think MS is on its last legs.

Meatballs?
Well, don’t count Microsoft out just yet. They might actually have something with Surface. Surface is a slightly different way of looking at user interaction. No more mouse. No more keyboard. No more wires. No need for the ubiquitous pc desk. All that stuff, gone. Instead, there’s a table, the top of which responds to your touch. Like you see in those iPod commercials, point-and-click becomes just point.

From the Microsoft Presspass (May 2007):

“Picture a surface that can recognize physical objects from a paintbrush to a cell phone and allows hands-on, direct control of content such as photos, music and maps. Today at the Wall Street Journal’s D: All Things Digital conference, Microsoft Corp. CEO Steve Ballmer will unveil Microsoft Surface™, the first in a new category of surface computing products from Microsoft that breaks down traditional barriers between people and technology. Surface turns an ordinary tabletop into a vibrant, dynamic surface that provides effortless interaction with all forms of digital content through natural gestures, touch and physical objects. Beginning at the end of this year, consumers will be able to interact with Surface in hotels, retail establishments, restaurants and public entertainment venues.”

“The intuitive user interface works without a traditional mouse or keyboard, allowing people to interact with content and information on their own or collaboratively with their friends and families, just like in the real world. Surface is a 30-inch display in a table-like form factor that small groups can use at the same time. From digital finger painting to a virtual concierge, Surface brings natural interaction to the digital world in a new and exciting way.”

And from the Executive Q&A:

“As our world continues to be permeated by digital content from music and photos to games, surface computers will put users back in control by making it easy and natural to interact with the digital world. Over time, we envision a wide range of surfaces with surface computing technology and believe that this will become pervasive both inside and outside of the home.”

Point and click the Surface link up there and see for yourself.

I am Jon, and I don’t hate Microsoft.

January 6, 2008

Winter Berries Puzzle

Winter Berries

January 6, 2008

Three Things

Sears Spyware

“It’s not that Sears fails to notify users it intends to spy on them. Indeed, the email sent to users states that the application “monitors all of the internet behavior that occurs on the computer on which you install the application, including…filling a shopping basket, completing an application form, or checking your…personal financial or health information.”

The rub is that this unusually frank warning comes on page 10 of a 54-page privacy statement that is 2,971 words long. Edelman, who is a frequent critic of spyware companies, said the Sears document fails to meet standards established by the Federal Trade Commission when it settled with Direct Revenue and Zango over the lack of disclosure about the extent of their snoopware.”

Secret Crush on Facebook

“Unlike many social worms, the ‘Secret Crush’ propagation strategy does not rely on phishing or any sort of user-space customisation feature abuse. Rather, it relies on pure social engineering which is based on simple manipulation strategies such as ‘escalation of commitment’. Since users have freely chosen to install the widget at the cost of disclosing their personal information, psychologically speaking it is difficult for them to stop the process at that point.”

And now, something completely different from Mr. Cringely.

“Predictions 2.0: Things that will make you Cringe in 2008

It’s fun, it’s easy, and virtually everybody else does it, so why not Le Cringe? I whipped out the Oujia Board, spit into some tea leaves, examined a few goat entrails, and came up with some of the big trends in tech that will come to pass over the next 12 months. Some may surprise you; others are, well, utterly predictable…

…Apple goes bananas. The first phones based on Google Android will appear, though they will be easily outsold by Apple’s yet-to-be-officially-announced 3G iPhone. Steve Jobs will then sue this blog for revealing that piece of information, claiming it is a trade secret that could only have come from sources inside Apple. Shortly thereafter Jobs will shock the world by announcing that he is retiring as CEO of Apple Inc. He will name the Fake Steve Jobs as his replacement, who will then sue this blog for revealing that piece of information.”

I am Jon, and my vacation is almost over… thanks for waiting.

December 28, 2007

AdaptiveBlue In Action – SmartLink Feeds

How Do I Share Thee? Dozens Of Ways!

One cold November night, while looking for an alternate way to display my links, I found AdaptiveBlue’s site on the net. One look at the BlueOrganizer Badge widget was all it took for me to see its value. Not only was I able to display my links in a new and interesting way, but I could also provide some relevant information and options to my readers who chose to use them. (Plus, there are times when I am just a sucker for a pretty face (3am) and you have to admit, my badges are cute. You’ll see them in a minute, as I work them into this story below.)

AdaptiveBlue’s SmartLink Widgets create an RSS feed made up of the links you choose. There are 3 basic ways of using them. You can set up a personalized feed based on things which are distinctive to you, such as your Amazon wish list, or your Last.fm or Netflix histories. Or you could set up an automatic list, containing things like iTunes Top Albums or NY Times Bestsellers. Or you could do what I did here at Wordout and set up a custom widget with only the specific things you want in it.

You also get your choice of 3 ways to display them. Examples of all three are shown below. Different styles have different options, and different items within the styles change some of the options that are available. Regardless of which way you use them, and regardless of which style you choose, AdaptiveBlue’s SmartLinks widgets are the best way I know to display and share your favorite things with friends, family and the Whole Wide World.

List Widgets

The List style allows you to show a brief description of the item, if a description is available. The only drawback to this type of list is the amount of room it takes on the page, but if you’ve got the room, and you want to show as much as you can, these are a great choice.

The List and Grid widgets used here are generic feeds I found at the AdaptiveBlue site. Everything about these widgets is customizable, allowing you to make the widget personally yours.

Notice that the list feed on the right does not display descriptions. But it also takes up far less room on the page. These are great for themes with narrow sidebars.

The widgets you see on this page are all live. Click on the little blue SmartLink launcher next to any of the titles to launch the SmartLink and see the description of the item. You’ll also find relevant links to just about anything you can think to do with them. Go ahead and play around with any of them. See for yourself.

Grid and Badge Widgets

The Grid Widget, shown left, is great when there’s alot of items you want to show.

Once again, I recommend clicking on a few of these if they interest you. For instance, I just found out that I can hear Bowie any time on Rhapsody, for free. I happen to like Bowie, so that’s a good thing to know.

Over to the right, you’ll see the Badge style widgets that I chose to use here at Wordout. As you can see, everything is customized with my own choices. I think they’re beautiful. And they’re all mine.

What’s Mine Is Yours

Yes, they’re all mine. And they could be all yours, too. Any of the dozens of SmartLinks widgets can be grabbed with a click. If you like my “Wordout Favorites” enough to want them, take them! And every time I change them, you will see it. It works the same with any of the SmartLinks feeds. If you see one you like, just grab it and go. After all, isn’t that the point of sharing? So take it from me! Or better yet, go make one of your own and give it away!

There are literally dozens of widgets available on the AdaptiveBlue site. Choose from widgets based on lists from Amazon, iTunes, Epicurious, Yahoo!, Rolling Stone, Wallstrip, and many more. Each of them are completely adaptive to your needs, just like the ones I’ve shown you here. And, if you’re a member of Amazon, eBay or LinkShare Affiliates, just enter your id to make yourself some cash. For more information on setting them up, watch this video from AdaptiveBlue.

Here Now

Looking back over the past week, we’ve just barely scratched the surface of AdaptiveBlue, SmartLinks and BlueOrganizer. We’ve met the team, heard some of what they have to say, played around a bit with their stuff and maybe gotten a glimpse of what the future holds for smarter browsing. We’ve seen just a bit past the screens and touched a few things. Every day the team is out there, working to make the web open up to us in ways we’ve only seen in Sci-Fi. But it isn’t Sci-Fi. It’s something much better.

It’s the future, and it’s here, now, making itself right before our eyes. All we have to do is look.

I’ll be touching more on AdaptiveBlue and the semantic technologies that enable smarter browsing in future articles at Wordout. It’s probably a good idea to hit the FeedMe! button below or the RSS icon and subscribe to the feed. Or maybe you want Wordout sent straight to your email. I know you don’t want to miss a thing.

And while you’re at it, doing everything I say, post a comment on what you thought about the series this week. It’s the first time I’ve done a weeklong theme, and I’d really like to know what you thought, about AdaptiveBlue, SmartLinks, BlueOrganizer and the feeds, the Semantic Web, things behind screens and just anything else that’s on your mind.

I am Jon and my eyes and ears are wide open.

December 27, 2007

AdaptiveBlue – BlueOrganizer’s Semantic Stuff

The Bird’s Eye View

Ask most experts and you will hear that the Semantic web must be built from the ground up. Part of what that means is that, in places, we would almost have to start over. And other places would end up abandoned forever, like ancient ruins in the dust, or hand-scribed books, too old to open.

AdaptiveBlue’s BlueOrganizer looks at the web from the top, down. BlueOrganizer recognizes what you like. It understands things, knows the best way to manipulate them. When it sees a new CD on your screen, it knows which service you’ll probably want to use to listen to it, or buy it. Or maybe you want to add it to a wish list, or share it with your friends on your social network. BlueOrganizer gives you all these options and more, with a single click. DVD? Same thing, with slightly different, relevant choices. And books and wine and places and sports and artists and toys and video games and… well, you get the picture. The list keeps growing.

With the bird’s eye view, BlueOrganizer can see the already established “verticals” in the internet. There’s no special work to be done on our part, because these columns of data are easily accessible to anyone willing to use them. BlueOrganizer takes advantage of these columns and provides you with certain options that are inherent in each. It knows that though you might want to download Red Red Wine, you certainly wouldn’t drink it. Using a top-down approach to the problems of the Semantic web allows us to take advantage of what we have available now, and build towards what we want in the future.

So How Do We Use It?

Here’s the best part. Just install it from their link on the AdaptiveBlue site (or you can use this one) . It installs as an addon to your Firefox browser, giving you quick and easy access to your options. You can create a BlueMark by just clicking the button or you can click the arrow to display a drop-down menu with options relevant to the thing you’re looking at. This works with any page you find yourself on.

Here’s a quick video (3 mins) to give you an idea on just some of the things you can get out of BlueOrganizer:

BlueOrganizer Introduction

Bookmark Hell, BlueMark Heaven

You’ll remember I have been referring to BlueOrganizer as the best way I know to manage your bookmarks. If you’re like me, you’ve built up so many that you can’t find some of them any more. Using BlueOrganizer to create your BlueMarks makes it easy. I could drone on about it, but Andy says it so much better in this short video (At least, I think it’s Andy). Watch to see BlueOrganizer in action:

Manage Your BlueMarks

Options – You Control Your Data

One more thing… once you’ve installed it, check out the BlueOrganizer Options panel in the BlueMenu. The MySites tab gives you control over how BlueOrganizer personalizes your sites. The SmartLink Feeds tab lets you setup how you want to share your Bluemarks with the world. Wordout happily displays 2 BlueOrganizer badges. You’ll see them over in the right sidebar. The Auto BlueMark tab does just what it says. That’s where you go to setup the automatic functions you want, if any. The Account Settings button gives you choices to change some information about your account. It also gives you the opportunity to login to another account. With BlueOrganizer, you can have any number of accounts. And you control them all.

That’s not all there is to BlueOrganizer. If you’re like me, you want to share some of that stuff with your friends, family and anybody-and-everybody else, and BlueOrganizer is the best way I know to do it. But it will take another full article to tell you about the BlueOrganizer SmartLinks Feeds, and the dozens of other widgets that are available from AdaptiveBlue.

I am Jon, and I am starting to see how this Semantic Stuff might be useful….

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December 26, 2007

AdaptiveBlue – SmartLinks And Things

Things, Connected To Things

You guys might wonder that I even care about SmartLinks, from AdaptiveBlue. I seldom, if ever, mention restaurants, books, recipes, movies, or any of the other things that Smartlinks are currently set up to work with. So why do I care?

Look at that last link up there again. Right there is your answer. I care because SmartLinks is about things, things you might already know a bit about, things you might want to know just a little more about. SmartLinks gives you that little more, just when you want it. And even on a site like Wordout, you never know when I might slide in some obscure Waffle House reference. Or I might refer to Hemingway, or decide to talk about how Google’s stock has never split. Yeah, I might do something like that.

Welcome To The Future

But that’s not the whole story. You see, the internet is more than just these screens flashing by in front of you. All these screens represent some thing, behind the images, beyond the words. It’s these things which are important to us, not these screens. And some things are connected to other things. We know that, but until now, our computers haven’t been able to make that distinction. SmartLinks begins to change all that.

AdaptiveBlue’s vision is to enable us to interact with these things, by providing quick relational links which understand that this is a book, and this is a movie made from the book, and this is the guy who starred in it. SmartLinks is the first tool to do that, and get it right.

In the email interview with Fraser Kelton, we talked a bit about SmartLinks. Here’s a short snippet:

Wordout: SmartLinks are automatically generated to find more info on the linked site. Does the linked site need to be a book, movie, music,stock, etc..?

Fraser: No, SmartLinks currently support 10 categories of objects. You can see the entire list here. We’re focusing on the most popular categories that individuals care the most about. Solving the semantic problem for the entire web, across all verticals, is difficult and won’t be realized for an awfully long time. We believe that bringing semantic understanding to a few critical, well defined, verticals isn’t just pragmatic but also delivers a lot of end-user benefit today.

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Wordout: Some people might think there’s money to be made off advertising for Amazon and the others. Can a SmartLinks user get in on this and share some of that bounty?

Fraser: Bloggers can enter a number of affiliate ids when they install the products on their site and earn 100% of affiliate revenue that is earned. AdaptiveBlue does not take money for placement of the links in the pane, we earn money from affiliate fees.

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Wordout: My site shows that nearly 70% of all my visitors are using Firefox. Can the BlueOrganizer addon enable a user to place SmartLinks on their MySpace or Facebook profile?

Fraser: Currently we support SmartLinks and SmartLink widgets on Typepad, Blogger, WordPress, Tumblr, general web sites, squarespace, etc. but we don’t currently support MySpace or Facebook. We’re working on a solution for these publishing platforms.

Verticals

Installing SmartLinks on your blog or site literally takes less than 2 minutes, if you really take your time. And you’ll never have to go back and mess with it. If you want to customize your links, you can. If you want to make money off your links, you can. If you want to know if anybody is using your links, with the new Dashboard feature, you can. If you just want to provide a valuable service to your readers, you can.

The future of the internet is in getting past the screen and touching things, manipulating them, using them. It will take some time and alot of genius and luck to make it work, but it will happen. SmartLinks scratches the surface, shows us what is possible, if we’ll just do it. Think of the “verticals” Fraser talked about as the pillars holding up a great roof. SmartLinks begins to build those pillars and fill them in with walls. One day soon, when enough of the pillars have been built, the roof will be set on top of them, and the world will have changed before us.

I hope you’ll go back and read that last paragraph again, especially the last sentence. Take it with you. Walk around with it for awhile. Think about it.

Tomorrow we’ll be looking into BlueOrganizer, the best way I know of to manage and share your bookmarks and favorite places with the world. Click back to Wordout to see just a little more of the future unfold.

I am Jon, have been and always will be.

December 24, 2007

AdaptiveBlue’s Fraser Kelton Gets The Wordout

Team Focus On The Individual

If you haven’t read yesterday’s piece on AdaptiveBlue’s team, you really ought to go there and check it out. These guys are real rockstars of the web, innovators who strive for perfection with a vision that gives you, me and everybody we know, more control over our information, our web experiences, and in the end, our lives. The AdaptiveBlue vision blends the utility and entertainment of the web seamlessly, invisibly, with our everyday world.

I was lucky enough to get an interview with Fraser Kelton, Director of Business Development, via email as he was recently flying to New York. Here are a few highlights:

Wordout: I understand that there’s only 6 of you. Just who are you guys and how can you get so much done with such a small team?

Fraser: When I joined the team two things strongly resonated with me. The first was how proudly Alex spoke about his strategy of hiring the best individuals for the team regardless of where they were located. Members of our team live in New York, Maryland, and Paris and Hamilton. The second thing that resonated with me was how highly Andy, Rion, Karen and Jeff spoke of Alex and the teams that he builds.
Being dispersed has its challenges but we’ve adopted a number of new innovations to make our lives more efficient. Basecamp, by 37Signals, acts as our communication hub and is a hive of activity that hums with activity 24 hours a day.
If you read Alex’s latest post on engineering tips for startups you’ll better appreciate AdaptiveBlue’s approach to building out our vision. The biggest thing is that everyone on the team brings it in a big way and is passionate about the future that we’re building.

Wordout: Several companies provide similar products to yours. What sets AdaptiveBlue apart from the pack?

Fraser: First and foremost it’s the team.
On the technology side we have a few powerful pieces of technology that differentiate us. Our lightweight, top-down ability to understanding the semantics of every day objects across the web is huge. We’re able to understand meaning, and can then create contextually correct connections. Alex’s founding vision was to create a smarter browsing experience by leveraging semantics and personal attention – we continue to build towards this exciting future and the columns that form the foundation for the future of the company are starting to take shape.
We’re also focused on the individual, which is a major differentiator. Many companies focus on technology first, and people become secondary concerns. We believe that if high user benefit is not delivered then the value of technology is minimal. This belief about the importance of people is visible from the level of support offered (not many other company’s have the CEO handling front-line customer support chats) to how we handle an individual’s data.

Wordout: Alex has written about turning web sites into web services. Hasn’t that term been applied, for the most part, to online retailers who might gain by having more sales? By installing SmartLinks on a blog, doesn’t this essentially turn that site into a web service as well, with the product being the content and the payoff being (hopefully) an increase in readership?

Fraser: Turning web sites into web services is related to having an interface by which people can [interact with] it. In a way, we are doing that via both SmartLinks and BlueOrganizer but not as directly as something like Amazon. A better way of putting what we are doing is automatically connecting web sites via context.

Wordout: We hear alot about the Semantic Web but many of us are not really sure what that is. What is it, and where does AdaptiveBlue fit into it?

Fraser: So first of all the tech community is in an odd place around definitions when it comes to all of this. “Semantic Web” is one very well defined thing, whereas a semantic web and semantic apps have other, different, meanings. The real promise in all three is in the ability to understand meaning and providing correct connections. Understanding that a page on linkedin is about an individual – and the person happens to be the same individual on pages on facebook, on myspace or wherever… is a powerful and useful thing. The same is true about objects – knowing that an object on a blog is the same object that’s on Amazon, is the same object that’s on a completely different website, is a wonderful thought to play around with. As the web of pages fades away to a web of things the future becomes exciting.

Wordout: Does AdaptiveBlue collect information on how a particular user might be employing SmartLinks or BlueOrganizer? If so, what do you do with that information? Can you personally identify where the info came from?

Fraser: Yes, we are currently collecting several types of information. First we are collecting anonymous usage of the organizer, just to improve the use of the product. We are also tracking clicks on SmartLinks for the same purpose. In the future we will be doing more with attention information, but our motto is to always put the user in control – if they are not interested in utilizing their attention information we respect that.

Wordout: How will all this semantic web stuff affect privacy and security on the web?

Fraser: Implicit and personalization technologies are going to have a major impact on privacy and security and there will be a lot of interesting discussions and debate occurring around these two areas, moreso than semantics. The key to all of this is to make the user have control over their data and information. Take the recent issues around Facebook’s Beacon – an implicit technology – a major source of the backlash was the implementation. They made it opt-in for companies and opt-out for the individual consumer. That’s backwards from how it has to be; the users [need to] have full control over their individual data.

Wordout: What’s the next step for AdaptiveBlue? Where are you guys going with this?

Fraser: Everyone on the team – Alex, Andy, Rion, Karen, Jeff and myself – are deep thinkers and dreamers who find ways to implement the vision in a pragmatic way. We’re building a number of exciting columns that support a cohesive strategy right now. If you let your imagination wonder to the edges of what can happen when the potential of the columns are connected … you’ll start to see our vision.

Be sure to click back to Wordout Wednesday for the review of SmartLinks, and we’ll dig just a little deeper into this Semantic thing. Until then,

I am Jon, and I’m closing my eyes and letting my imagination wander, and wonder.

.Find another great Fraser interview at leonho.com

December 24, 2007

AdaptiveBlue – One Cold November Night

One Saturday Night In November

When Alex Iskold found me, I was messin’ around with his stuff. I don’t know how long he watched me there, or how he even knew I was there in the first place, but eventually he sent me an email that paraphrased, politely said, “Hey, what’re you doin’ with my stuff?”

A Quick Bit Of BackgroundSeveral readers had told me they never looked at my links because the links looked like ads, so I was trying to find a better way to display my links. I had come across SmartLinks, which led me straight to BlueOrganizer and the BlueOrganizer Badges. You’ll see one in the sidebar here, down below. I quickly grabbed the little badge and started toying around with it. I’m like that sometimes. I get wrapped up in seeing if I can make some piece of software do what it wasn’t exactly designed to do. I can’t write the stuff, but I can certainly drive it around the track.

The BlueOrganizer Badge from AdaptiveBlue seemed to be exactly the thing I was looking for, but for some reason (most likely a result of my fiddling) it just wouldn’t load the images. By the end of the night Alex had gotten several other key team members from AdaptiveBlue on the problem. I walked away from it about 2am, with this vision of people being dragged into the office on Sunday morning, bummed at having to be there. Little did I know how wrong that vision was.

Sunday morning I overslept and was rushing to catch up all day. I didn’t get to work at Wordout until about 3pm. I sat down and pulled up the site. The BlueOrganizer Badge splashed all 4 windows and, whoa, the images were there. Alex, Karen, Andy and the team at AdaptiveBlue had worked some magic and this little jewel was doing exactly what I had hoped.

So Just Who Are These Guys?

Rockstars. That’s who they are. These guys are the best in their field, each with a rare drive and determination to make a difference. Of course, I may be biased. You tend to get that way when you engage this team.

Theirs is a vision where the end user is in control of their own information. In the AdaptiveBlue universe, the experience of the web is determined by people, interacting with columns of interconnected things. Life on the net takes one step closer to becoming transparent in our real lives, becomes a tool for efficiency, choice and entertainment.

As Fraser says in our interview (tomorrow), “Everyone on the team – Alex, Andy, Rion, Karen, Jeff and myself – are deep thinkers and dreamers who find ways to implement the vision in a pragmatic way… If you let your imagination wonder to the edges of what can happen when the potential of the columns are connected … you’ll start to see our vision.”

The AdaptiveBlue Team

AdaptiveBlue is headed up by visionary Founder and CEO Alex Iskold. This isn’t his first time around the block. His previous startup, Information Laboratory, was later acquired by IBM. Alex is a regular contributor to the influential blog, ReadWrite Web. He also publishes his own Technology Blog and regularly posts on the AdaptiveBlue BlueBlog. He does all this when he’s not solving weird customer service problems on the weekend.

Chief Quality Officer Andy Roth troubleshoots, tinkers with, smashes and generally does his best to break the BlueOrganizer. A frequent speaker at trade functions and with 10 years of experience, he’s just trying to make sure we never have a bad BlueOrganizer day.

Rion Nakaya is VP of Design and User Experience. That’s short for saying that she’s the one who looks at the products, the website, every-public-thing that you and I ever interact with, and then she works with the technical, design and business sides of the company to make every experience we ever have with AdaptiveBlue a great one.

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As Director of Engineering, Karen Teng “leads the development effort on their mission to add to and improve BlueOrganizer.” So that’s who fixed my Badge that Sunday, a month ago. Thanks Karen!

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Software Engineer Jeff Condal joined the team after spending his early career writing Enterprise Java Applications for large banks. I am starting the rumor right here, that he may have been born with a microchip in his brain, bringing with him “programming experience that dates back to childhood”.

Fraser Kelton is Director of Business Development and may be the only competition I have in the “Who can write the longest sentence?” category, but he writes them so well, I just want to quote him here, from the AdaptiveBlue website:

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As Director of Business Development Fraser is passionate about building. He spends his days building community, relationships, strategy, and, well, a business. He joins AdaptiveBlue from Trivaris, a Canadian seed-stage investment firm, where he was Director of New Ventures and developed strategy for portfolio companies as they commercialized innovative ideas into scalable businesses.
Fraser holds a degree in Applied Economics from Queen’s University, blogs regularly at his personal blog, Disruptive Thoughts, is a marathon runner, and struggles to write third-person, ~~100~~ 80 word bios.

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I love his humor.

I was lucky enough to get an interview with Fraser Kelton via email as he was recently flying to New York. Be sure to come back later for the highlights of that interview, and all week for Wordout reviews of SmartLinks, BlueOrganizer and the BlueOrganizer widgets.

I am Jon, and oh yeah, I’m a fan.

December 23, 2007

Singin’ Penguins – The Puzzle

(And A RuffPC Contest Update)
I am extremely impressed and thankful to all you who have voted for my RuffPC contest entry. I’ve decided that if I win the laptop, I will use it to maintain this site and its sister site, Private Preview. Right now I am sharing that duty with another very overworked machine that has an extra hard drive hanging out of it, attached only by the cables. Ask my sisters. It’s a mess.

So anyway, thanks to you folks I have a reasonable chance of winning the contest. As of 7:30pm Sunday here on the east coast, there’s only 3 votes separating me from the leader, so every vote counts. Get your friends to look at the entries and vote. Vote for the Wordout video of your choice, but vote!

I won’t give you 10 dollars of free advertising in my free advertising section, but I will give you this puzzle:

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(And An AdaptiveBlue Christmas Plug)

Don’t forget: Tomorrow begins the AdaptiveBlue Christmas Week at Wordout! I promise that by the end of the week, you’ll not only know who these guys are, but you’ll know what they do, and what that blasted Semantic Web thing is anyway… at least, what it could be.

I am Jon, and I thank you for your support.

December 23, 2007