Bill Wishon’s News and Views

My First Homebrew in 6 years

It’s so awesome having more space in our new house.  One of the things that I had been looking forward to was getting back into homebrewing.  I started homebrewing about 15 years ago, but when I moved back to Santa Cruz in ‘03 we got a small place with no room to brew.

My first brew in 6 years or so is an organic IPA.  The pic to the right is during primary fermentation, this last weekend I racked it and dry hopped it with some NZ Hallertaur hops.  Just a few more weeks and it will be ready to drink!

This is a follow up to my previous post describing where I think social networking should go.  Karen Snyder pointed out Motion, a plug in for Movable Type that is very much taking the approach I was thinking of.

They’ve gone further and allow your friends to “log in” to your site with whatever other social networking site username and password they have and comment / contribute.

Unfortunately I’m way too deep into Wordpress to switch, but this certainly made me think it might be worth it.  Hopefully the wordpress community sees this and decides to build something similar.

It seems to me that not much has changed between the version of the bailout bill that got rejected in the house and the one that got passed in the senate except for the addition of some pork.

How about some real oversight?
How about some help for the people in the troubled mortgages that are causing this crisis of toxic debt?
How about some regulation to address the root cause of this crisis?
How about some rules about ceo pay with teeth for those companies seeking help?

Come on people take the time required to rationally think this through. Fear is not a good reason to pass stupid legislation.

Yesterday I went to another in a series of Product Management related breakfast discussions, the last one was on The Philosophy of Product, this one was about creating a value proposition.  Once again Ellen Grace was an excellent host and facilitator of a great conversation.

Here are some of the key take-aways I had from this discussion:

A value proposition is a multi-layered and multi-faceted thing.  Depending on what level you are at and what view you take the answer to “what is the value proposition?” may be very different.

Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s my idea for the day, “Distributed Open Social Networking” free for anyone to take and implement.

Take wordpress or similar self publishing platform and add a few features to it to make it into a distributed social networking platform.

• Make it easy to “add Bill as friend” from the DOSN enabled homepage so that when someone’s viewing your site they can add you as a friend to their DOSN enabled site.
• Create a common “app framework” similar to facebook’s app framework.
• Make arranging the site a simple drag and drop interface like iGoogle or Facebook.
• Provide a common template for “About me” (school, gender, pic, favorite lists etc…)
• Create a status update concept that is propogated to all friends (potentially ping each friend when the status updates and provide a status RSS feed)
• Through the app framework you could monetize your popularity yourself by placing ad “apps” on your page.
• Use the existing blog post and comment mechanism as the blog / wall

That’s it.  Maybe it exists, I dunno I haven’t gone looking for it yet.

One of the advantages would be that you own your own data, and you get to choose what platform to use so long as it complies with the open specification.  No more choosing what platform to use.

In my last post I made a key assumption, that piracy is stealing.  Recently I was in a conversation where someone challenged that assumption and made me think.

Laws around the world are, by and large, representations or codifications of our collective sense of right and wrong, our morals in other words.  In my previous article I built on the assumption that piracy was stealing and therefore bad and consequently laws would eventually catch up to technology and find ways to legislate enforcement theft related crimes online as well as they do in the real world and that would lead to a reduction in piracy.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Internet is not above or beyond the reach of the law.  Already we have laws in place around the world that address various aspects of the Internet and the impacts the Internet is having on existing laws.

In pretty much every country in the world stealing is against the law and people seem to understand this and generally don’t steal.  There will always be the ongoing cat and mouse / cops and robbers game, but that represents a small fraction of society at large.

Why is it then that people who have never and would never shoplift CDs and DVDs from their local store are doing the same thing online every day?  And what will happen in the future?

I see three main factors that drive the online stealing behavior, 1) the content is free, 2) the content is easy to get and 3) there is a perception of anonymity or at least some sort of security in knowing that “everyone else is doing it, and they can’t catch everyone”.

There are many companies and technologies that have benefited directly and indirectly from this wave of theft.  In this article I’m going to focus on BitTorrent, because they are the predominant protocol being used to facilitate theft and piracy of content online.  By various metrics BitTorrent traffic makes up somewhere between 40% and 70% of internet traffic and as far as I can tell the majority of those bits are from pirated content.

Read the rest of this entry »