dubious.biz(ness)

Not blogs, though it have been over a year since I have written here. A year that but .

I’m moving! From Richmond to Shepherd’s Bush. In fact, this blog has not even received a single entry while I was in Richmond, so let’s pretend it just never happened. Well, let’s say that Richmond, like Zurich, is a place that one goes when one has to be in London but does not particularly want to be in London. Which is to say it is not London. Not by a long shot. It is charming, attractive, fun, and quiet. Oh so, so, quiet and as a consequence, expensive. Richmond is rich, mon and Zurich is zu reich (too rich).

Which is not to say that either is without their charms as well as charges. The charms are: tube access (though at the end of the line where you “always get a seat”… for your > 45 min journey), mainline access, the biggest, bestest park with the coolest deer on one side, the river on the other, and bordered again by the aristocratic charm of Kew and Ham House. A river view that led to many other Richmonds being inspired by this one (which is itself inspired by Richmond, Yorkshire). A high street full of high-end high street shops, buggies, mummies, buses, while devoid of any real culture, colour (and coloured people, I might add), locally owned businesses, and community. In fact, the community of Richmond is simply a community of exclusivity. Richmonders look down on pretty much everyone save Belgravians and perhaps endowed country estateholders.

Which is not to say we are anything like Richmonders. We live in what is perhaps the most overpriced flat in the world, with certain the worst landlord I have ever heard of. Our flat did not have heating from the time we moved in until September, 5 months in total. Albeit they should have been hot months, we used space heaters for at least a month on either side. The house is slowly falling apart, the weeds are slowing encroaching on us, the landlord is always on holiday (you’re welcome!), the floor is so uneven that rounded thing will actually race away from you if left unattended, and warp furniture so that doors don’t close, and so on. Which is to say I have been fantasizing about leaving.

Yet leaving is an exercise in triangulation for Jane and I. Jane wishes to live within an area bounded by access to a rowing club, i.e. west of Kensington and near the river, and access to a job (which admittedly has changed more than once during our stay in Richmond) while I basically want to live anywhere but here, ideally near the centre as possible while minimizing commute.

As such we’re basically limited to west and southwest of the city, which offers such choices as Pimlico (too expensive), Kensington (way too expensive), Battersea (cats, dogs, disused power stations and council flats), Clapham (a expensive sprawl and hideous to boot), West Kensington (a vague and unknown quantity), Fulham (poshish, expensive, cramped), Chiswick (why not stay in Richmond!), Balham (like Clapham but worse), Streatham (like Balham but much, much worse), and… Hammersmith. Well, the vague area around Hammersmith because if you exit Hammersmith station and walk until it’s not crap anymore, there’s a high chance you end up in Fulham.

Hammersmith Station does no favours to itself. It is a new build mall surrounding the station area, which has the convenience of being at the station but the ugliness of being at the station. When you exit, there are more malls. City malls are always built to the highest spec, and almost immediately their white stone is tarnished by grit and soot, and ends up being a place where only a discount left sock retailer would put up shop, and even then only during Christmas. Or so it feels from the outside. In reality, Hammersmith, for reasons I can still not really understand, houses more high street retail footage than anywhere else in West London, maybe all of London period.

So once you pull yourself away from that retail paradise, you’re in housing. And if you happen to head north, along the route of the Hammersmith and City line, you end up approaching my new haunt, which could call itself Hammersmith, could call itself Goldhawk Road, and could call itself Shepherd’s Bush.

Shepherd’s Bush is not a place most people think is nice. Because of the retail sinks on either side of Hammersmith and Westfield (which we will discuss in a mo), there is no interest by high street retailers in setting up shop in SheBu, particularly not Goldhawk Road. There is, as a consequence, the very kind of commerce that excites me: a dingy but fun market that sells TVs, burqas, rugs, jewelry, candy, and falafel. There are shops that seem to sell exactly the same things but in a different place (which is also impenetrable to me, sure I can pick out the breadfruit, but how do you know which whole cloth guy is any good?). This, I am certain, frightens Jane. As do the men who have dogs, although they are on leashes. With spikes.

And further along we have SheBu proper, specifically SheBu Green and it’s massive O2 Empire and Walkabout. You think, “but you said there are no big chains around”. This Walkabout is no chain. It is a place of holiness, a palace of Fosters and cricket and fights. And overcrowding. It is absolutely enormous. Jane says it used to be a firehouse. I think it used to be an army depot, and is now an Aussie depot.

SheBu is not really about being safe, though it is safe. In fact, given the community feel, as indicated by a hundred shops selling the same things, it is probably safter than Richmond, where an attack is more likely to get a noise complaint than a good Samaritan. And anyway being safe is exactly not what the city is about. It’s about being a little bit edge, hanging it out, communing with the devil, etc. Or so I think.

As a result, I am overjoyed by this move, I finally get the city life I wanted, and fewer prams. Anyway none containing any saviours of man and pushed by indignant WAGs. We shall see how Jane finds it. I suspect less well than I do. Apparently, she needs a new wardrobe. We found this out when we passed a queue for a Metronomy show (!) at the Empire and the inferioritydar spiked. This new wardrobe is easily found, because just beyond the Green is the largest mall in London, the Westfield White City. Which is to say the least a Mecca, and at least while it’s fresh and white, it is stuffed full of high streetness in a way that make the denizens of Hammersmith Station and Richmond High Street ill.

Which, to summarise, is why I am so damned excited. In a single 30 minute walk, you can go from the riverside pubs and bridge views of Hammersmith to the convenience of the Hammersmith station, to our flat, to the happy slum of Goldhawk to the hipster scene of Shepherd’s Bush, to the high temple of retail of Westfield. Keep going and you’d end up in Notting Hill, and god help you if you went in other directions.

So what’s the catch? Well, there’s no park. In fact bang for buck would put you smack back in Richmond Park if you had a bike. Pubs look a bit sparse, though a few good candidates are within crawling distance. It’s not a hugely better commute for me (same walking time to the station, same slow District line to work), and potentially worse for Jane. It’s not really “near” rowing, though it turns out that Jane commutes 30 minutes to rowing anyway, so it couldn’t be worse, right?

Location is of course, the thing. But the flat is another, and while I have told you how awful the Richmond flat is, I probably should disclose the other upside of our new flat, the lovely newness.

Well, it finally happened. In the 21st century, Apple released a flop. Oh, it hasn’t been released yet, but the fact remains, it’s a flop. In my circle of tech fiends, some Applistas and some immune to the “reality distortion field”, only one (and a distant one who I don’t always agree with) was passionate that this is a great product.

Sure it’s thin, light, and functional. But do you want it? No, you don’t. It’s the third device. Apple milked us for two devices, and that’s pretty impressive: you have a laptop and a phone. Chances are if I know you, at least one of those is an Apple product. Great work. But the third has to be better than the other two for a task that you desperately want to do, and given that this is Apple, everyone expected this third device would change the entire way we thought about… well we didn’t know. I guess we just thought it would blow our minds. But it didn’t and suddenly everyone I know is back where they started: they don’t want a third device.

Jobs wanted a third. An intimate piece of technology you would put on your lap while you sit in a comfy chair. And he embodied that in his announcement, taking us on a browse, a surf, rubbing and stroking the iPad so delicately in front of a huge audience and now the entire world. The subtleties of this device are many, and the demo was more like the demo of Jobs’s ill-fated NeXT computer than the iPhone or any MacBook launch. Watching Jobs sitting on the stage, he is stripped bare of his “Fake Steve Jobs” jackass domineering attitude, and his passion is splayed out across this piece of technology he helped wrought. We are watching him interact with his own child, and like most children, he loves it so much and is so impassioned that we too should appreciate it as the very best of all but to us it’s just a strange box on his lap.

This is clearly Jobs’s last big innovation. He doesn’t look great, and the elephant in the room is what future his company may have without him. Well, I will say this: Apple is the same company with him and without him. He has instilled his essence into the products and for the next few years we can expect more of the same. But he does not have the golden touch, nor did he ever. What he does have is a sense of what he wants, and an uncompromising will.

What is the iPad? It’s what Jobs has always wanted: it’s the ultimate personal computer. It is the final crescendo of the PC: the Apple, the Macintosh, the Powerbook, and now, this is it. He has, as Bill Gates also wanted, to make the computer so personal that you could stroke it and interact with it as if it were your own flesh and blood.

Unfortunately, the world isn’t the PC anymore (and I don’t mean John Hodgman, I mean Macintosh), and this device is lost in a networked world where interactions take place between users and users, and at worst, between users and services. What it is not is between users and applications. And so we have, with Steve Jobs’s last, brilliant efforts, the ultimate personal computer born into a world that no longer needs it.

Apple, the organisation, knows this, and this gives me the greatest hope for Apple’s future as an innovator that pushes the limits of what is possible. They know their future is not in this device. How can I split Apple from Jobs? First, watch the money: the price is ridiculously low. This device must have the lowest margins of any device I have seen from Apple, especially a first release. It uses a custom chip. It is the same unibody chassis manufacturing process started on the MacBook Air, which has now moved down to the MacBook Pro. It uses a very expensive and beautiful screen. It has a prodigious battery. It has all the bits and bobs that up the price of the iphone, and yet it costs relatively less. Only with the fully spec’ed out package do we get to “normal Apple prices”. Why? Because people will spend a load on their “work machine” (i.e. Laptop) that they use to make money. People will spend a lot on phones because it’s with them all the time. But this tablet thing? Nobody needs it, and the price point says it all: “I’m cheaper than you thought, why not give me a go?” Who sets that price? It’s not Jobs. Jobs may give the direction up and down, but ultimately it’s the combo of market research for the upper bound and cost for the lower. This device is so close to cost it’s a Dell, not a Mac.

Who else in Apple hasn’t gone ga-ga over this thing? The marketers. Another friend pointed out that this is the wordiest slogan an Apple has ever had. Let’s review:

Think Different.

Wow.

The ultimate all-in-one.

The fastest, most powerful iPhone yet.

Say hello to iPhone.

Introducing the Macintosh. For the rest of us.

iPad
Our most advanced technology in a magical and revolutionary device at an unbelievable price.

It’s advanced, maybe, but who cares? It’s not magical, at least not outside the reality distortion field. I think you can see I don’t find it revolutionary. And last, the price is only unbelievable because we have come to expect huge prices from Apple. What that all says is that no marketer could figure out why she or I would want this thing, and went to adjective land to try to find a savior, and came back with advanced, magical, revolutionary, and unbelievable. Apple doesn’t need adjectives. The iPhone ad might as well have said, “Screw your vacation, buy this.” Or better yet, “I will make you happy.” Or nothing. You don’t have to sell perfection, and it doesn’t need any adjectives.

So this isn’t it. And somebody else gets a shot. What I can say is that even here we were pulling for you, Steve. And we love you and we’re all a family here: we’re trying to pull the world forward one giant leap at a time. This is a miss, but you are Dylan, you are Elvis, you are Michael Jackson. You’re just a guy, but you’re more. You rock. And seeing you on stage showing us this thing, this new amazing thing you created, with such pride… it is moving. You are the guy every guy like me aspires to be. Even if I wasn’t with you on all the adjectives.

As your product ages, there are two suboptimal models for continuing your product’s life: you can be Oldsmobile or you can be MTV. Oldsmobile, now dead, was once the most innovative brand under the GM umbrella. The Rocket V8 was a mass production overhead valve engine that was the technological envy of all in the 50’s. Oldsmobile also created the turbocharged car engine in 1962, the Turbo Jetfire, and first front-wheel drive car in 1967, the Tornado. It allowed for a flat floor and bench seats. Long story short, if you were a kid in the 60’s, an Olds was anything but Old. But by the time the 1990’s rolled around the Olds was a dead brand. It was getting all its innovation from the other models and rather than continuing to be a leader in front wheel drive, it kept its rear wheel drive coupe, the Cutlass, until 1988 (a 1988 Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme Classic, last of the RWD coupes, was also my first car).

Why did Oldsmobile lose it edge? It fell pray to aging with its customers. Its customers wanted the same car as last year, just slightly different. The definition of a coupe stayed as a 1960’s outsized behemoth. Today, coupes are cars for kids without families, sized at a Corolla, tC, or Neon. Instead a 1984 Cutlass was the sort of car a widow would buy. The same widow that would have bought an Olds 88 or a wagon in the 1960’s. It essentially followed its audience to the grave and to irrelevance.

Another model is to be MTV: MTV does not age. If you are 16, MTV is designed for you. You come of age into MTV at about 12, and you are dead center by 18. But at 22, you’re out of the demographic. Suddenly as you graduate college, you are no longer MTV’s audience, and MTV keeps charging forward and you start to distance. Eventually you pass into VH1’s market segment, 25 - 40, and you complain about how MTV used to be much cooler, with “all music videos” or “all TRL” or “all Road Rules marathons”. Either way, MTV is actively rejecting you, an audience member it worked hard to earn.

Thus far, nobody has been smart enough to segment the online market this way, including in social media. However, social networks are ticking time bombs: particularly for networks that put a big emphasis on real friends like Facebook. College is when people have the most real friends. You spend most of your day in a social setting, meeting new people due to the rapid turnover at schools, and colleges work hard to lower social barriers so you are less likely to reject friends.

After school, you go to work, and mostly meet people from there, with a few friends from elsewhere. If you don’t add those friends to your social network, the social network loses. If you don’t keep up to date with your old friends, the social network loses. In some ways, Facebook is the MTV of social networks. It is optimized for a college experience and after that point it starts to fade to uselessness.

Facebook, over the past two years has become less and less engaging for me, until recently I removed most profile information from it. It seemed anachronistic, like looking the decoration in my high school locker. I also decoupled my twitter feed (which is my most current social network) from my Facebook feed, which means there will be very little activity in my profile. I have never posted any photos myself, but if I look at the velocity of photos of me being added by others, it is rapidly decreasing.

Meanwhile Facebook is pursuing two strategies: “everything in the world has a Facebook page” and “always show new stuff to keep people on Facebook”. To be honest I am not interested in this at all. If Barack Obama uses Facebook to connect to his “fans”, I don’t want him to bother me. If Coke does, doubly so. I will follow their twitter because it limits their contact with me. All this media being crammed down my Facebook feed has made it impossible to find out what my real, current friends are doing. And it’s doing a terrible job of actually keeping me updated. When I go on the News Feed, I see hundreds of useless updates and the tiny “highlights” section tells me relevant actions for irrelevant people.

The end result of all of this grumbling is that Facebook is risks rapidly becoming an Oldsmobile or MTV because it isn’t making itself relevant to my post-collegiate social life. How would it become Oldsmobile? Well, first of all it could listen too closely to its users, which it absolutely isn’t. It’s viciously pursuing monetization and pissing nearly everyone off. However given that its popularity is still high with young, social people and no better competitor has emerged, it still has some time before it risks this. The first sign will be when freshman are no longer signing up for Facebook before they buy posters of Pink Floyd and get extra-long bedsheets. How could it become MTV? Well it could relinquish its efforts to be all things to all people and focus on the young and social. That’s an important demographic but a massive compromise: it’s multi-billion valuation would be cut in half, at least.

I believe that becoming MTV is actually not a bad strategy as a sure bet at half your valuation is a lot better than a big all-or-nothing gamble. I frankly don’t believe that their current strategy is going to engage them well with users, and I think they know it. I think they also know that if they don’t start making money off their site, they’re going to be screwed anyway so they’re willing to risk upsetting their users. Unfortunately for them, users do not accept monetization compromises in social media: they treat it as an incursion on a personal conversation. So Facebook’s attempts to depersonalize the conversation by inviting in the whole world are unlikely to succeed.

For me, Facebook has already lost the battle. I don’t want to spread my identity too thinly and I particularly don’t want to spread my identity out to sites which are getting desperate. So, you can keep up with me on twitter: I’m @kennystoltz, or right here on my blog.

I started to think a bit more about the banking and shadow banking system and I wanted to make a metaphor. Being a Kentucky boy, I started to try to form it around a thoroughbred track, because at a track there are a ton of ways to make money. The idea would be that the “betters” are a mix of the average joes, handicappers (hedge funds), the track facilities (government)… anyway it got too complex and obscured the real point.

But I will resurrect a stubby version of the race track metaphor for this thought: in horse racing you have “horse people” and “regular people”. The regular people are the major source of revenue into the system, and it generally gets distributed around to the “horse people”, because one way or another they know more about how to make money at a track. And more importantly, if it was only “horse people”, it would be a closed system and the “horse people” would just be trading money amongst themselves. The regular people are the influx of cash.

But you certainly don’t let the regular people make most of the rules and system at the horse track. You let the horse people do it. The jockeys, owners, the track itself, the bookies, etc. They all design the whole system because they know a hell of a lot more about how it works and more importantly, they’re most invested in the system. So it makes sense that those who know make the rules.

But the real authority doesn’t come from their expertise, but from their investment. If some other group of people (say, hot dog stand owners) were more invested in it, you’d expect that the rules would suit them more than anyone else. But hot dog stand owners don’t determine how far the horses run and what sorts of bets you can make. They determine how much your hot dog costs.

In our current banking system, we delegate nearly all authority to the “bank people” who know a lot about banks. However, we, as a whole, are actually the most invested. They are the hot dog stand owners in the metaphor. They should only determine the fees on hot dogs, but instead we’re letting them determine what sorts of loans can be made, who can intermediate, how that intermediation is handled, how those loans are accounted for, who gets paid the most and so on.

The crux of the problem is, we treat the banking system like a horse track, and it isn’t. It’s not a playpen for bankers. It is a common facility for connecting people with money and people who need money in the economy. People, as in regular people. So a technocratic approach has failed because the technocrats write the rules in their favor. And we are about to get back on the same roller coaster again. We’re not shining sunshine on the banking system, and we’re not simplifying it and we’re not establishing principles.

We are willing to give up simplicity if we “get out of this crisis in return”. I disagree vehemently. The banking system is not a race track, it is a common facility. We can let people make bets to win or lose but as we stray further from that easy to understand system we should stop listening to the technocrats and start tracking the money. When the money goes to a banker’s account disproportionately, something is vastly wrong.

Right now, Timothy Geithner is creating a banker’s dream plan. We previously had very few rules at all, but now we’re letting the banks write the rulebook so its in their favor. And they will return to profit. But frankly who gives a damn whether banks make a profit? Banks do. Banks must run on a narrow set of rails called common sense and public benefit. If the real economy is growing, banks should get a share. If the real economy is contracting in any way, banks should be punished severely. If the real economy is contracting and the banks are at fault, the banks should expect to have every bit of profit for the past several years clawed back.

Now before we raise our pitchforks: yes the banks should receive government investment because they have far too much debt. And no, government investment should not carry conditions. Instead a new framework for banking must be made with thought as to the public good and common sense. Banks must be bounded on all sides, as should anything that acts like a bank. If people want to make billions, they should go into any discipline other than banking. Bankers should again behave as facilitators to the public’s capital needs. We should act immediately and harshly to quash any hangers-on who still think that by creating a system in their own favor, whether by government assistance or by creating instruments so complex that themselves cannot responsibly wield them.

Simply put, the people most invested should run the show. At the horse track, that’s the horse people. We’re just there for fun. In the banking system, shadow banking or not, that is the public and corporations whose investment and capital needs are fulfilled.

Or, Travails in the Modern Political System…

Watching Obama and the democrats struggle to get a stimulus bill kills the post-election and inaugural euphoria and reminds me of what it is like trying to get politicians to do what I want. You may not know it but for a short while in 2004, I was on Kentucky’s Capitol Hill in Frankfort nearly every day. I was trying the impossible: I wanted to convince our legislature to do something in their citizen’s best long-term interest while two huge corporations (BellSouth and Alltel at the time) were trying to convince the legislature to make things far more convenient for them while lowering the likelihood that there would ever be consumer choice in broadband by stacking the cards in favor of the massive telephone companies. The story is a good one, and probably worth telling some other time.

What I’m most taken by today is how it was to talk to the legislature and try to get them to go my way. What strikes me as most memorable now is how absolutely slimy most politicians are. I have known many politicians via family since I was little. They have, without exception, struck me as friendly, gracious guys who are always jovial, always have good timing, sometimes modest, often appropriately inappropriate, and most of all “grandpa-ish”. Lively, earthy, and kind: definitely grandpa. Another thing: without exception, they are all old white men, of significant means, often ex-lawyers, and ex-farmers.

So you can imagine, seeing these guys, you start to talk and you instantly feel like you can lay all your troubles down at their feet. And that’s what you end up doing. If you’re walking, within a second they’ve got their hand across your back, helping you share the burden. If you’re sitting, they’re leaning forward listening directly to you. In the hands of a good politician, you know that you are important, you are making a difference at the highest possible level, and you are a smart, resourceful citizen. Politicians always smile and nod, interjecting with important supporting points, sighs of frustration at your frustration and vociferous agreement with your overall position. During the short time I tried to stop the phone companies from destroying cooperation clauses in state law, I have left many wood-paneled offices of politicians. I never left with any doubt. They were behind me 100%. Rookie mistake.

What didn’t I do? I didn’t seal the deal. I never got them to answer that they would support me. In politics, you can make all the other noises, but if you don’t quack you aren’t a duck. Nobody, it turned out, supported our side. Why? Well they were in the pockets of the phone company lobby which spends billions to make sure that their oligopoly stayed that way. They have a number of tools at their disposal: their own corporate lobbies, an association that lobbies for them, and most potent of all, a telecommunications workers union that lobbies on their behalf. For everyone one visit from me or one of my competitors, they received four or five visits from the arms of the telecommunications empire the Bells created. More importantly, I wasn’t carrying checks for campaign donations or promises of voting blocs from endorsements, which they were.

So it ended how it did. But what I will never forget that these guys, some of whom I had known my entire life, would do everything short of lying to me to make me feel good and then after “weighing” the arguments in private, they voted unanimously to pass this bill out of committee. There was never any doubt in their minds. I was for the best thing for competition, for the state, and for the long-run. But I was worth $0 and one vote. So I wasn’t even worth disagreeing with because there wasn’t even a bridge to ceremonially burn. Despite being on the right side in our minds and, I believe, the minds of the legislators I visited for days on end, I and my ilk got what was coming to us: nothing.

The stimulus bill was caught the same crap this week. It is because politics at its natural peak of evolution is such a complicated calculation of money, power, votes, influence, and party platforms that the outcome is a foregone conclusion. Everyone does exactly what is in their best interest and no one, and I mean no one’s interests are best served. It is an offense to democracy that we are in the state that we are. The stimulus bill is a horrible mess. All those expecting Obama to use his mandate to steamroll through a sensible and responsible bill, good luck. Every vote that he needs to get this passed comes from politician. A $1 trillion dollar omnibus stimulus bill is a blank check. What are we getting for this? We’re getting guys reelected. How much is that worth? Well about $1 trillion dollars. These guys know that their performance is measured by what they bring back to their donors, so they’re bringing it all home.

And what of the Republicans? Well, they’re not in power, but their influence could have made this bill sensible. But the cost of getting one, just ONE Republican to switch sides is so high that the party considers it high treason to jump ship. Any Republican caught even contemplating a vote (in exchange for money to their district as well as some leeway on provisions) would be castrated on the spot by the party whip. So having a weakened Republican party has hurt the nation because the only votes left to get are the ones from the dems, and they can basically write their own ticket.

But don’t mistake this for high political theatre. No, this is dead serious business. These guys are operators and manipulators who have made it to the highest levels. Every single one of them could get oil from gold nuggets and comparatively a constituent is an easy mark. Next to a Congressman, the guys in the Kentucky Legislature are small fries. And the lobbyists in Washington, dear God, if they weren’t in it for the power any of them could make their first billion from selling Mary Kay in the greater DC area.

Plummeting back into reality after thinking that things could change, the whole episode with the bag of cats that is Congress and the stimulus bill makes me realize that it’s a continual, despicable calculation of who’s my friend and who’s my enemy. And my enemy’s enemy’s friends… well they’re mine too. At this point, I honestly believe that the solution is to wipe out the major source of revenue: campaign contributions, to zero the playing field. If these guys were just playing for votes without massive media boosts that campaign donations provide, the game would still be as dirty but at least it wouldn’t be hog wrestling in a hurricane.

The moment that lawmakers are forced to serve the nation’s best interests, the moment that their ticket to ride isn’t attached to serving the needs of the (rich) few over the many, that’s when we’ll see change. More than a stimulus bill, more than righting the wrongs of the Bush era, if Obama could produce these reforms, he’d have a real spot in the books. But remember again that the opponents of the bill would be exactly those who need to pass it before he can sign it. And so long as that happens, despots will continue to play the old game.

For whatever reason I read some blog post about the “semantic web”. Often, and my even greater annoyance, people capitalize semantic web as if it were a proper noun. It is not even a properly thought out idea, let alone a proper noun.

What is the semantic web anyway? Well the notion is that the internet is full of “stuff” most of it unstructured and hard to understand. Like web pages which contain text and images. So the semantic web is some sort of web of semantically connected ideas. The origin of the name is from Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web (which in contrast to the semantic web, actually does exist as a unique entity and thus deserves its capital letters). I don’t hold Berners-Lee in any particular high regard, and at the time (1999) he suggested there would be a “semantic web” separate or extended from the WWW the internet was a much stupider place and much less interconnected. Now most good sites have APIs, cloud computing is an everyday reality, and many people spend a significant part of the day inside web apps, which may use HTML as an interface but still are based on structured data.

So a combination of two things has happened in the past decade: the semantic web has happened without any lame W3C standards to guide it, and the semantic web is a dumb idea that will never exist and is used by a wayward companies to gain traction in a crowded market.

What really happened
First of all, let’s address why the semantic web has already happened. It’s called APIs. The real problem that the semantic web addresses is that there is little portability of data across the web. APIs of all types and interoperability solve this problem, but not through some grand plan of the W3C. Hilariously, the semantic web stack starts with “User Interface and Applications”, and then “Trust”. Those two items are basically most of the Internet. Worse than that, below this is “Proof”, a clear sign that this is in the dark realm of academics. If you want to create a Facebook app that shows you a map with travel videos from all our friends, you can use the Facebook, YouTube, and Google Maps APIs to achieve this. Why do you want to port everything down to RDF or whatever the hell the semantic web specifies and then build it back up? And with cloud computing tools that have great toolkits already built for them, you can manipulate the data in whatever language you’re using. You simply don’t need some lowest-common-denominator tool.

The second item, that the semantic web is a stupid idea is ultimately the real reason there isn’t and never will be a semantic web. So far all the specification work has been at the bottom but most businesses haven’t been leveraging this work, and yet a scant few actually claim to be “semantic”. Nearly all of these perform some sort of natural language processing, or NLP. This basically means that they analyze text (usually only English) to extract meaning (semantics) and then send that somewhere. This semantic analysis has far more history than the semantic web, which perhaps indicates why people want to associate semantic analysis with the semantic web. Good examples of companies applying the “semantic web” tag to their work are Powerset, Spock, and Tripit.

Powerset
Powerset is an NLP-driven search engine. I personally find their work within the wikipedia corpus to be pretty impressive, but there isn’t any demo outside that corpus because of the precise problem that it is hard to make NLP work for all domains. Semantic webbers might argue that if everything were to publish in RDF (aka do all the work of classifying the data and tagging it) then it would be simple to make Powerset’s NLP work everywhere. That assumes that Powerset isn’t really flexing its NLP muscle the way it claims to be and is instead relying on Wikipedia’s consistent structure. The reality is that Powerset has trouble applying NLP to the web as a whole because of the reality of NLP analysis: it is very compute-intensive and complex and does not scale at all.

Why Powerset isn’t semantic
It’s tough to know what Powerset’s algorithms are actually doing but it’s clear that they are doing a lot of work on the wikipedia corpus. However I think they stop short of extracting meaning. They use the same techniques as any search engine to find your answer, and on top of that they use very basic and ineffective summarization. My single query to Powerset hints that they are trying hard but still not very far: “How many countries are there in the world?” yields a reasonable article as the first result: List of Countries. And the answer (one of the many possible answers anyway) is right in the article, but it’s not in the snippet under the search result but it can’t (using the right sidebar) find the answer on the page. Google, on the other hand, puts an answer in the snippet along with an indication that the answer is ambiguous. That’s because Google relies on information being duplicated across the Internet and assumes that somewhere someone will have phrased the question in the exact same way you have, and other people will link to it, so you’ll get the right answer. Powerset doesn’t have faith in people and their behavior, it places much greater faith in its machines’ ability to analyze text and pull out answers. That faith is misplaced, at least for the time being. At some point in the future machines may be able to answer questions by understanding the semantics of the question and all the information on the internet, but not today.

Spock
Spock and Tripit are similarly limited in domain. Spock is a “people search” that apparently thinks I am 51 years old and live in Nicholasville. Neither is true, but it’s scrapping through a very small number of sites trying to find structured bits of data to tie together and present to me. To say that it is useless is to be kind to it. It is absolutely filled with ads, and devoid of useful info. A google search tells you far more about me than Spock, and better yet doesn’t seem creepy. I’m not 51, but if I was, is that what you’d want to know about me?

Why Spock isn’t semantic
Spock looks through a few sites which tend to have people on them, looks in the typical spots where interesting points of data are and then constructs a profile. The best reason I can give why this isn’t semantic is that there is a ton of data on the net about me. You can quickly find out that I had trouble with an AIC7xxx driver for Linux in 1999 if you’re interested, just use Google. If you go one deeper and figure out all my aliases (not difficult) you can unlock reams of information. Spock doesn’t do that because it is stupid. It may aspire to actually construct a semantic profile but right now a human being and Google can do far better with fewer ads.

Tripit
Tripit is the only thing I vaguely like although I don’t use it. Basically you forward all your travel emails to tripit and it scraps them and combines them together. So if you are flying to Chicago, staying at the Hilton, and renting a car from Enterprise, it will tell you that in one place.

Why TripIt isn’t semantic
This is supposedly semantic because it extracts the text of the email and figures out where you are going and when. I think that stops pretty short of “semantic”. It knows a bunch of places and formats for dates and it scans the email for dates and places. I sent Tripit the plans of the trip I’m currently on and it didn’t combine together the hotel and flight, so I have two entries. It even has dates, one says San Francisco, and so does the other. Perhaps it expects that I will be in the hotel for the entire time when I only have it booked partially. That reason is that it has no clue of the “semantics” of a trip to San Francisco. If it can’t even combine a flight and hotel stay, good luck with understanding anything more esoteric.

Will anything ever be semantic
My gut feeling is that over time we’ll be able to leverage NLP and machine learning in more clever ways, but I actually don’t believe that it will be based on any type of semantic tagging, but instead loads of data and loads of processing time using relatively unsophisticated algorithms. Google has two parallel mechanisms for connecting search queries to the (regular) web: results and ads. Results are generated from analyzing the link structure and ads leverage the principles of economics and scarcity. If I want “Tumi T3 luggage” and I ask google for it, by damned, I get it. Google doesn’t need to know what that is ontologically (as in classifying Tumi as a manufacturer of luggage, t3 as a line that Tumi makes and using luggage to reinforce the previous two classifications) but it does know that there are images of Tumi T3 as well as a load of sellers who are willing to pay to be in front of me when I type “Tumi T3 luggage”. Simply put, there’s no additional value in knowing the semantics if you can provide me good links without them. I simply know of no situation where this sort of semantic information is hugely useful and I challenge someone to suggest one.

Finally I think the entire idea of structuring the data of the web to be more machine readable is a fantasy by lazy academics. Google has done fine without such structure and it’s not clear to me that it would any better with said structuring. Further if you are, say, Delta, there is little incentive for you to use some lame duck format like RDF to make it easier for TripIt. You want to make your customers happy, not TripIt. Customers want email and web sites, and care very little about RDF. If you do have data you want to share around, you create an API and require people to use it to access your apps because that puts the onus on them if they want to convert it out of some format convenient to you to a format convenient to them (including RDF).

It’s sad to say that the semantic web is empty except for academics and wishful thinkers, but that’s what happens when you take what one guy says too seriously. You end up chasing the rabbit down the hole without checking to see if anyone’s following or if it’s even worth the time.

Ok, this is fast turning in to a political blog. I’m trying to talk about interesting things, not just the political mudslinging that appears on the rest of the Internet.

This is for my foreign friends who are essentially baffled by the electoral college and electoral map. I personally find the electoral college system a very good one, save one little fact: electoral college members are under no obligation to vote with their state’s popular vote. This is a very thorny issue, but I think that at some point in the future it will become central to some electoral dispute. It was exactly the founders’ intent that the electoral college be independent of the people, and frankly at this point in the nation’s development, the concerns that led to this compromise (about dumb citizens, mob rule, and a deluded public) may be not be out of the question but they run against the spirit of democracy.

At any rate, the map as it appears on most websites is overwhelmingly red. This represents the fact that the center of America is both more conservative and much larger in area than in population. The electoral college assigns votes based on the total number of representatives in the House and Senate.

M. E. J. Newman in Michigan has created some cartograms that stretch the map based on population instead of based on land area. The most detailed of these (at the district level) clearly show that cities tend democratic and rural areas tend republican while suburban areas break either way.

Sized by state area equal to electoral votes

Sized by county area equal to population

Sized by county area equal to population, with shades of purple indicating close votes

If you’re familiar with America, the second map above basically has all cities, even those in the “big red middle” showing up blue. The states that voted red were often states without a significant metro area.

I was walking out of the Hauptbahnhof, the train station in Zurich, at about nine in the morning. Jane and I had taken the night train from Florence back to Zurich so I hadn’t stayed up all night waiting. The respectable broadsheets all had publishing deadlines before the election had been called, so they only published ambiguous stories about the election, not being able to call a winner. To my surprise though a winner wasn’t even on the sandwich boards they announce the papers’ headlines on. So I walked out of the train station in a near gallop to get to the house to turn on CNN, which happens to be the only channel in English on my TV.

I was waiting to cross the street when Jane pointed out a paper held by another man’s waist. It had a picture of Obama and a German headline, which included the word president. My heart sprung forward several beats. I couldn’t really trust this paper, it was free, called “20 Minuten” (20 minutes, i.e. the amount of time it would take you to read it), and generally contained email amounts of foam about fashion and sports as it did real news content. I also figured that it would have been printed before, not after, the presses printed the real papers. But the idea was in my head, it was at least a race close enough to call for Obama.

My fear for the entire election would be that this good man would implode. I have watched politics long enough to be completely jaded by the process, and never before had it been so explicit how the sausage was made, and yet Obama had never really been tarnished. I have a habit of couching my hopes in negativity (”He’ll be elected by everyone but the voters”) and even in the last week I had still had a pretty negative view of my fellow citizens (”They had better do what they say for once” was my response to good polling, and “He’d better fucking win” more frankly).

I wanted to ditch Jane and run home to confirm, but being wise in the ways of keeping myself out of trouble I walked at an agonizingly slow but reasonably brisk pace. Jane is afraid of crossing streets in Zurich. I got home, dropped everything on the floor, and at about 9:15 I turned on CNN and he won. I had thought about my reaction, I figured I might shed a tear as I assumed a lot of people had done. Or maybe hug Jane. Instead I just said something really lame, like “He did it”.

But inside it was the most fantastic feeling, it was the feeling of waking up refreshed, throwing open the curtains and feeling warm sunlight streaming in. I thought a lot of things later in that week. I walked down the street, and literally, smiled at the thought of being American. Maybe this is pathetic, but when was the last time somebody did that? I thought that finally we could do something with our country that I would be happy to defend instead just defending it because I thought I should.

For most people, the moment was more like “I had been watching the television all night and Obama got more and more states, and then at 11pm, he was predicted the winner.” So for most it may not be the generation-defining moment, because it was the result of a long buildup, without the sudden surprise. But for me it came almost at once, and I will always remember where I was when Obama was elected President of the United States.

I buy completely in to the story of America. I’m one of the most American people I know. I’m also extremely skeptical: of this choice, of myself, and particularly of the proclamations of messianic glory that surround our President-Elect. What I can say is that for the first time, as an American, I feel like it’s not business as usual, like it’s not going to get worse before it gets better. Most of all, I’m proud to be an American.

No one I in my family supported Obama and we’re an extremely political family. I am the black sheep in many ways. I live abroad, I am better educated, and I am more “intellectual” in a family where it might seem that being intellectual is related to being dishonest. Although none of them voted for Obama, none of them seem particularly disheartened that he won. Had McCain won, though, I would have been devastated. I was nowhere near as engaged in the past two presidential campaigns though I was extremely disappointed in the results.

I can’t help but think that this is a victory not for my parents or my grandparents. It is not a victory for any number of demographics who, while not necessarily opposed to the idea of an Obama presidency, have little interest in his victory or defeat. It is a victory for those of us who have never had an interest in the political process until this election, and who have never considered politics as a vehicle for change. That is social, political, and economic change. We have been lead to believe that government can provide little, because it represents someone else and is represented by someone else. Too long have we been convinced that the mechanisms of democracy themselves mean that we will never be satisfied, that we would receive less than a compromise. We have believed that government is equal to gridlock, inaction, and apathy.

So far as my political history tells me, this apathy stretches back to Nixon v. McGovern. The chance for change was thwarted by smoke-filled politics of the worst kind. Devising ways to slice Americans in to special interests, figuring out what every persons’ hot button issue was and courting votes by welding together a bunch of basically incompatible hot-button policies that would ensure victory, this has been the major political accomplishment of the post-Kennedy era. After the inspirational Kennedy dynasty fell so quickly there was no sensible opposition to this divide and conquer strategy. So we had Nixon. And we had LBJ. And we had Carter. And Reagan. And Bush. And Clinton. And Bush. All of them have been cut from the fabric woven by Nixon and his divisive politics. No democrat, certainly not Gore or Kerry, was able to divide people in any comparable way so Republicans usually won. But it wasn’t for lack of trying on the Democrat’s part. It took a once in a lifetime blundering of executive power, George Bush’s presidency, to open the way up for someone like Obama.

Obama represents little to my family. They are disengaged from national politics. My parents were in primary school when Kennedy was assassinated, and they may have sense of the mythos but they knew little of the politics surrounding him. Their experience of federal power has been of continual disappointment. So much so that any government or attempt to better the nation through federal power is wasteful and not worth attempting. He may represent change, but not for the better, because they would never believe that any president could change anything for the better.

For me, for my generation, he represents our chance to take hold of government and make it function for the people once again. After years of pathetic and petty politics, we are beyond outsiders, we are the completely disenfranchised. We see our vote not as a birthright but as some sort of free prize that comes included in our US citizen happy meal. After the gross devaluation of our votes in the 2000 and 2004 elections, we have considered government worthless and our votes as well. But we’re young enough to still hope, and young enough to realize that we actually should care. After months of having it drilled in to us that Obama = change, we finally believe that if we can vote just once more, it might actually be worth something.

That is what it is to believe in this man, as a young American. We desire and we desparately need government to be worth something. Our identity as a people and as a nation is intrinsically linked to it. It is clear that there is little difference between Clintonian and Reaganian politics, between Democrats and Republicans. The young believe that essentially both parties get screwed both ways, that it is the essence of a mud fight with other people’s money: everyone ends up dirty. All we do is become more divided, and agree on less and less until there is nothing any two Americans can discuss any longer without either completely agreeing or disagreeing.

This is to say, I have great hope for Obama. I also have great fears that he will squander his chance to create a new political climate. After the twin fists of the Republican and Democratic parties pummeling the honor and soul of public duty to complete emptiness, perhaps no single man can change American that much, or that quickly. But he might.

And that is the olive branch that I extend to my family, to those who voted for Obama and those who didn’t. Like him or not, he is the once-in-a-generation chance we have to make public service serve the public. And I believe that specifics aside, politics aside, it is an undertaking that all Americans should support. Whether you agree or disagree with his politics and policies, give him the chance for change. And let him preside over the nation with the honor that his position deserves.

Obama Speech: ‘A More Perfect Union’

This speech, along with Obama’s campaign will go down in the history books. Recently Palin has taken to calling Obama un-American, which is a disgusting claim. Obama has sacrificed his life and his career to America. So has McCain. So has Palin. You can call any politician a lot of things, but un-American isn’t one of them. I don’t expect much from Palin but calling someone unamerican is pretty low.

If you haven’t listened to this speech in full, listen to it. Most of the press I see would like to focus this election not on the whole of America but on some over-pandered, over-represented, over-mediafied subset of America. That includes the “liberal elite” as well as “hockey moms” as well as “ the s” and all of the other demographic cutlets that our electorate is carved up into.

This speech may be about race but it isn’t about blacks, whites, latinos, or asians. It’s about America, as a nation. It’s about healing the deepest, most damaging divides, together. Sure, there may be a policy there you disagree with, but certainly the very fact that Palin can use codewords like “unamerican” to suggest that “Obama isn’t like me, and I don’t trust that” should make it clear that this is bad for everyone. Not just blacks and latinos, everyone. Why are white people scared of black people walking down the street at night, downtown even during the day, or in parking lots at night? Because this chasm is deep, getting deeper, and nobody wants to fix it.

So you can focus on the fact that Obama is black and not vote for him because of that. Being racist doesn’t fix itself overnight. But don’t lie to yourself or anyone else and say that Obama is un-American. And don’t think for a second that he Obama doesn’t understand race and racism and what “being un-American” really means. And don’t think for a second that it doesn’t hurt him, whites, blacks, and America.

If you’re racist, either in the closet or openly, Obama knows why you’re not voting for him. And that’s exactly what he hopes to change.

In the best interview ever, Palin talked about why she only just got a passport. Fast forward to exactly 1:00 in (after the ad).

Palin: I’m not one of those who maybe came from a background of, you know, kids who perhaps graduate college and their parents give them a passport and give them a backpack and say go off and travel the world.

No, I’ve worked all my life. In fact, I usually had two jobs all my life until I had kids. I was not a part of, I guess, that culture. The way that I have understood the world is through education, through books, through mediums that have provided me a lot of perspective on the world.

Let’s talk about the facts of what Palin did do for her education, according to sources including her wikipedia entry she left Alaska at 18 to go to school in Hawaii and dropped out. She went to school at a community college in Idaho next, and then dropped out again. Then she went to University of Idaho and quit again. Then she went to some tiny college in Alaska for one semester, then she went back to Idaho for 3 more semesters. Finally she graduated with a degree in Journalism.

Ok so you “didn’t come from a background who perhaps graduate college and the parents give them a passport and a backpack and tell them to travel the world”. Well neither did I. You’re a redneck from Alaska. I’m a redneck from Kentucky.

You’ve worked until you had kids. Well, between when you graduated and when you had kids, that was 2 years. Maybe you worked through college. To keep up with your travel expenses, you probably did. Well, so did I. 2 jobs? Poor thing. I’ve worked 3. And you had kids and then quit to raise them. Good family mom! So that gives you, what, 6 years of work? Well I’ve been working since I was 14. And I’m 26. That means I’ve been working 12 years, twice as long as you. And you were about my age (25) when you had your first kid.

And you spent time in Hawaii, but not out of the US for school. Well unlike you I wasn’t looking for some holiday when I made my education plans, so I went to England. While you were busy failing out of college in the Hawaiian sunshine, I was working my ass off in the famously absent English sunshine.

So again, why didn’t you have a passport? If you can see Russia from your house, why didn’t you ever go there? Or anywhere? Or read a newspaper? Or watch the news? When people want to be President so badly they usually put in the work, years of building experience. You haven’t put in any, and you want the 2nd most important job in the world.

You are not only unprepared to have anything to do with the United States government, you are one of the snobbiest rednecks I know. And I am one.