Pitos Blog

Check this excerpt from a post by David Weinberger called Transparency is the new objectivity from Joho the Blog:

“A friend asked me to post an explanation of what I meant when I said at PDF09 that “transparency is the new objectivity.” [...snip...]”

“Outside of the realm of science, objectivity is discredited these days as anything but an aspiration, and even that aspiration is looking pretty sketchy. The problem with objectivity is that it tries to show what the world looks like from no particular point of view, which is like wondering what something looks like in the dark.” (from: Transparency is the New Objectivity)

Man, this is a a subtle area. but fascinating.

Over the years I’ve been convinced by David, (even though he wasn’t trying to convince me) by the idea that there are precious few (if any) ‘facts’ that are just simply ‘true’. Maybe that’s an observation about the world, maybe about how we think, or maybe about language, I don’t know. But for any ‘fact’, almost, I often can produce a counter example.

My current obsession is Voting Reform, and so I’ve thought a lot about how we cast votes on ballots and then how they are counted. You might think that given a particular ballot or box of ballots, asking “how many votes did candidate X get” is a factual question to which there is an answer. Not so.

To see why I say this, check out my post about the ‘true’ result of an election.

David Weinberger’s post Transparency is the new Objectivity tells a fascinating part of the story; you should read it.

Popularity: 21% [?]

Check out this post Meeting24.tv Keeps Online Meetings Simple:

"Like Utagoe Live 100, meeting24.tv also has a similar minimalistic feel to it, which is supposed to make it easy for anyone to use - even those with little web experience. The service is based on the assumption that other online meeting solutions such as TokBox (which we covered three times), Cisco’s Webex, Polycom or Skype are just too complex. " (from: from TechCrunch)

I tried it, at least by myself. It seems to work but I am not sure that I am getting the most performance out of my Logitech webcam. Pretty cool.

Popularity: 11% [?]

Check out this post Incommunicado, probably:

"I’m working at home today, waiting for the Fios guy. Which means that I’m probably going to drop off the face of the earth for much of today." (from: from Paul Krugman)

Popularity: 14% [?]

You might be interested in what BlogBridge is doing about twittering from more than one account:

“Sometimes I tweet on my own behalf (’the weather in Curacao is hot’) and sometimes I tweet on BlogBridge’s behalf (’can I help solve your problem?’) This poses a bit of a logistical challenge for me.” (from BlogBridge blog)

Please weigh in!

Popularity: 15% [?]

Check out this post Henry Blodget: Should You Really Panic And Sell Everything Like Cramer Says?:

"On the Today Show Monday morning, Jim Cramer told investors to sell everything and get out of the stock market. A Wall Street friend described this as the market’s "Munchian scream moment."" (from: from Huffington Post: Front Page)

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Popularity: 16% [?]

Check out this post If you think stronger regulation is a good answer, heed Buffett:

"Warren Buffett gave a three-hour interview in August. Here’s an interesting bit from the transcript:

QUICK: If you imagine where things will go with Fannie and Freddie, and you think about the regulators, where were the regulators for what was happening, and can something like this be prevented from happening again?

Mr. BUFFETT: Well, it’s really an incredible case study in regulation
because something called OFHEO was set up in 1992 by Congress, and the sole job of OFHEO was to watch over Fannie and Freddie, someone to watch over them. And they were there to evaluate the soundness and the accounting and all of that. Two companies were all they had to regulate. OFHEO has over 200 employees now. They have a budget now that’s $65 million a year, and all they have to do is look at two companies. I mean, you know, I look at more than two companies.

QUICK: Mm-hmm.

Mr. BUFFETT: And they sat there, made reports to the Congress, you can get them on the Internet, every year. And, in fact, they reported to Sarbanes and Oxley every year. And they went–wrote 100 page reports, and they said, ‘We’ve looked at these people and their standards are fine and their directors are fine and everything was fine.’ And then all of a sudden you had two of the greatest accounting misstatements in history. You had all kinds of management malfeasance, and it all came out. And, of course, the classic thing was that after it all came out, OFHEO wrote a 350–340 page report examining what went wrong, and they blamed the management, they blamed the directors, they blamed the audit committee. They didn’t have a word in there about themselves, and they’re the ones that 200 people were going to work every day with just two companies to think about. It just shows the problems of regulation.

QUICK: That sounds like an argument against regulation, though. Is that what you’re saying?

Mr. BUFFETT: It’s an argument explaining–it’s an argument that managing complex financial institutions where the management wants to deceive you can be very, very difficult.

" (from: from Newmark’s Door)

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Popularity: 15% [?]

The quote below is from this post from ReadWriteWeb

While we are certainly seeing more and more examples of products being given away for free, it is not necessarily a good thing. There are different aspects and faces of free. The Flickr free, which Fred Wilson calls freemium, is the model where the basic version is free and the premium one costs money.This model is very different from the GMail model where the entire product, with full features, is completely free. The downside of freeconomics is a monopolistic market, with barriers to entry, and little incentive to innovate. In addition the middle-man and transactional complexities are the other side effects of this new economic trend.

(Read the whole thing: Beware of Freeconomics)

It is of course on a topic that I’ve written a lot about, so I won’t comment on it further, just that I agree

Popularity: 26% [?]

Check out the latest summary of amazing feats by BlogBridge. I don’t want to be too cheeky, but there are some pretty cool things that you get from BlogBridge (for free) that you can’t get anywhere else.

BlogBridge is definitely a serious tool which is why I bit my tongue and marked this post ‘geeky’ but really it’s also, as you know, my labor of love, so I can’t resist showing it off. Hope you take a moment to try it!

Popularity: 16% [?]

Check out these 10 Commandments for Facebook Applications. They are pretty good commandments for software in general. I especially like:

“Make it simple. Users DO NOT read.”, from FaceReviews

Yup, I have seen that time and time again with BlogBridge. Hard to believe. But true. Of course there’s the 1 in a thousand who ask for more documentation, but they are very rare.

[if you are interested in Facebook, take a look at BlogBridge's Guide of Facebook blogs and feeds]

Popularity: 29% [?]

Check this post Life Lock’s CEO Identity Stolen from MetaFilter:

Life Lock CEO’s Identify Stolen Remember all those commercials recently tell us to steal Life Lock’s CEO Todd Davis’ Identity? Well seems as though someone did.

This is funny to me, because I am a Life Lock customer, and by coincidence I just received their email asking me to renew. Of course I am not sure of the overall significance of this news story. I guess that the fear of idenity theft that superstition takes over and anything that might help even a little is very tempting!

Popularity: 24% [?]