The Long Blue Tail
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 09/23/2008 - 15:36“Beware thoughts that come in the night.” That admonition starts off William Least Heat-Moon’s book, Blue Highways. He wrote those words a little over a quarter of a century ago as he set up on a 13,000 mile journey across America after separating from his wife and losing his job. I read Blue Highways years ago. It, together with Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, On The Road with Charles Kurault, and Then Came Bronson, weave together into a dream I’ve had of going on the road myself, in finding out a little bit more about me, about the people around me, and maybe, just maybe, being able to say a word here or there that might help someone.
Ten years ago, my first marriage ended, yet unlike the great travelers I so admired, I had kids to be concerned about. It is hard to hit the road with an eight year old and a five year old. So I stuck it out at my job for another few years. I remarried and we had a daughter of our own.
My second wife and I met online and as I look back over the past ten years, while I haven’t had the opportunity to write the next great American Travelogue, I have traveled extensively online. I sit in a small office in a rented house just outside of New Haven, CT reading what people around the country write, writing my own blog posts and doing consulting here and there.
At night, I toss and turn, looking for that path which will set things right. I continue to dream of travels, but Fiona is now turning seven and my responsibilities keep me tied to this town. Then, one night, came one of those ideas that Least Heat-Moon warns about, The Long Blue Trail. I could trace Least Heat-Moon’s travels, perhaps mix in a little Kerouac, Pirzig, Kurault and others into a journey into cyberspace.
I could find pictures, videos and blog posts, following, as closely as I can make out, Least Heat-Moon’s trip. I could include some Google Maps or other content to help tie it together in a mix of hyperlocal citizen media, placeblogging, and simple posts from regular people.
I would follow the Blue Highways of Cyberspace, not the Interstates. DailyKos and Huffington Post, these are cyberspace’s Interstates. Everyone goes there. You know what you get when you stop there. No, I’ll search out the websites with no page rank, the millions of bent and narrow rural American cyberroads.
There is where the Blue comes from. The Long Tail part comes from Chris Anderson where he talks about all those websites that aren’t on the A-List, that don’t have high page rankings, yet make up the majority of cyberspace.
William Least Heat-Moon hit the road in 1978 in a Ford Econoline van that he had outfitted for the trip. The book didn’t come out until 1982. Things are a little different these days and so I’m starting off my journey a little bit differently. I’m writing it as I go and posting it online. It may be harder to monetize this way. It may turn out to be another one of those grand adventures where I make it to the edge of the virtual town, and after a few posts, lose steam and abandon it. We shall see.
So, I’ll start off by posting it as entries on my blog, Orient Lodge. If I get past a few entries, it will become its own category, then its own website and we’ll see where it goes after that. Wish me luck.
Digging Deeper into the Bailout
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 09/23/2008 - 10:56(Originally published at Greater Democracy.)
Yesterday, a friend pointed me to Public Marketup, a website where citizens can read proposed legislation and add comments. It is a wonderful site, and currently has the Treasury Department’s proposal for ‘Authority to Buy Mortgage-Related Assets’ as well as Sen. Dodd’s proposal.
When I first started reading it, I added comments here and there about making reports available online. However, as I’ve thought more and more about it, I worry that no one really knows what they are talking about. What assets are being considered? How will the Treasury determine which assets get considered? To the extent that they are complicated derivative instruments, how will the Treasury determine an appropriate price?
Reading through the documents, I don’t find any real discussion of this. The Treasury Department of the bill says,
The Secretary is authorized to purchase, and to make and fund commitments to purchase, on such terms and conditions as determined by the Secretary, mortgage-related assets from any financial institution having its headquarters in the United States.
Are we talking about whole loans? Pools of mortgages? Tranches of collateralized mortgage obligations (CMOs)? The extremely complicated portions of CMOs called residuals that take financial wizards to analyze? Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDOs) that have mortgage related assets in their structure? Servicing Rights on securities?
How will these securities be priced, when purchased, on an ongoing basis and if every offered for sale? How will the determination be made about which company’s assets will be purchased? Will it be those companies most likely to fail? Will it those companies whose executives are close friends of people in the administration? Will it be fair?
How will these purchases really make the financial system more secure? The further the assets are from the homeowner, the less effect it will have on a home owner. If the underlying mortgages are bought, and home owners in danger of foreclosure were given better refinancing opportunities or opportunities for short sales, that would have a direct effect on the homeowners. However, it might accelerate the decline in housing prices, as people who otherwise cannot sell their houses are now given a chance, which might compound the situation. On the other hand, that might get us out of the housing bubble sooner.
The Dodd bill is much broader,
The Secretary is authorized to establish a program to purchase, and to make and fund commitments to purchase troubled assets from any financial institution, on such terms and conditions as are determined by the Secretary, and in accordance with policies and procedures developed by the Secretary.
It isn’t limited to mortgage related assets, nor must the financial institution have its headquarters in the United States. Yet other limitations are added instead.
The Secretary may not purchase, or make any commitment to purchase, any troubled asset unless the Secretary receives contingent shares in the financial institution from which such assets are to be purchased equal in value to the purchase price of the assets to be purchased.
This makes the valuation of these extremely difficult to evaluate securities all the more important.
The Dodd bill does move in the direction of seek explanation about why we are doing this in the first place:
Before establishing a program under this Act, the Secretary shall make a finding that such program is necessary to provide stability or preventing disruption to the financial markets or banking system; and to protect the taxpayer.
Although, even this seems a tad vague, and perhaps a little bit after the fact. Maybe this finding needs to be presented in testimony before any such bill is considered.
The Dodd bill also has language about ‘Assistance to homeowners and localities’ and ‘Minimizing foreclosures’, but it starts drifting into legalese beyond the scope of this article.
So, must we move now as the Federal Reserve Chairman and the Treasury Secretary are urging? What sort of movement is appropriate?
Perhaps, we must move now, but perhaps that movement is getting everyone to start reading proposed legislation and thinking much more about the economic issues our country faces. If we move now, slowly and deliberately, we can all learn, and perhaps not fall into the traps that got us into this mess in the first place, making decisions without understanding the full ramifications of them.
Identi.ca, OpenID and XRI
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 09/22/2008 - 19:25Recently, there has been an interesting question about user nomenclature in federated micro blogging systems. By micro blogging systems, I’m talking about sites like Twitter, Plurk, Rejaw, and Identi.ca. Right now, Identi.ca is the only one that truly supports the ability to subscribe to be subscribed from other micro blogging systems, although there are some sites that that facilitate exchanging messages between different micro blogging systems.
So, the question of nomenclature: How do you refer to a person on a remote micro blogging system? Typically, users are referred to with an at sign prepended to their username. The problem is that @bob might be one person on one system and someone completely different on a different system. So, to clarify, people have been kicking around ideas of how to refer to people at other systems.
Personally, I like the format @username/system e.g. @ahynes1/identica Concerns are to keep the name short. After all you only have 140 characters to deal with in an SMS message and putting in full qualification can eat up valuable message space. Others have suggested using the at sign as a separator between the username and the system, e.g. @ahynes1@identica To me, that looks cumbersome and kludgy. On my cellphone, where spacing is harder to differentiate, I would be confused about whether this were to the user ahynes1 on the identica system, or to two people, ahynes1 and identica.
Another reason I like the @username/system format is that it fits nicely with XRIs which fit nicely with OpenID 2.0. @username/system is an accepted shortcut to xri://@username/system which can be accessed via the http protocol as http://xri.net/@username/system The at sign is an indicator of a company, which isn’t great. Registering a company in XRI costs $55/year, which is pretty excessive. Nonetheless, I thought it would be nice to register @ahynes1.
A long time ago, I registered =aldon.hynes. I never ended up using it much, other than for some software testing and as a forwarder so people could send me email without knowing my current email address.
As OpenID 2.0 came along and started supporting XRI logins, I found that I could login to identi.ca using =aldon.hynes. I thought that was pretty cool and changed my OpenID delegation to point to my XRI registrar. Unfortunately, many sites do not yet support XRI based OpenID logins, but it seems to be growing.
So, to test things out a little bit, I registered @ahynes1. Initially, I was going to use 2idi.com, since that is where I have =aldon.hynes registered. Unfortunately, for some reason, they wouldn’t take my credit card, so I checked out some other services and found that 1id.com took Paypal and would gladly take my money.
The next step was to set up a few forwarders. I set up @ahynes1/identica to point to http://identi.ca/ahynes1 and @ahynes1/twitter to point to http://twitter.com/ahynes1. So, for any microblogging site that takes @username/system and uses it as an XRI reference, at least my name will resolve in both Twitter and Identica.
With that, I then tested an added benefit. Would @username XRI references resolve properly in OpenID? I logged into Identi.ca as =aldon.hynes and added @ahynes1 as a valid alternate OpenID. So, now I can log into my Identi.ca account by using the OpenID @ahynes1 Pretty cool.
Now, there are people that have voice concerns about XRI. Why do we need XRI if we already have URIs? For me, XRIs are how we identify resources. URIs specify a transport to get to the resource. So, =aldon.hynes, or xri://=aldon.hynes identifies me. http://xri.net/=aldon.hynes is how to get to my identification information over the http protocol. Nice and clean in my name.
The other issue is pricing. $55/year is very steep for registering an XRI corporate domain. I can register a corporate DNS domain for something like $10/year. If XRI is going to take off, the pricing structure will have to change. At $12/year for an individual I-name, it is still a tad expensive, but a little more reasonable.
So, Identi.ca, OpenID and XRI work nicely together. It will be interesting to see where things go from here.
Looking at the Bailout
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 09/22/2008 - 10:10(Originally published at Greater Democracy.)
Last Friday, I wrote about understanding the global financial crisis. Now, a new bailout plan has been presented and we should look at the heart of the matter, the housing crisis. I would like to start off by going into a little more detail about how the mortgage market now works. As I noted in my previous article, I worked with software to analyze various forms of mortgage-backed securities for many years on Wall Street.
Refining A Digital Dunbar Number
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 09/21/2008 - 16:30A little over a year ago, I wrote about a digital dunbar’s number.
Dunbar’s number, “the number of individuals with whom any one person can maintain stable relationships”. This is typically set at 150, based on the size of the neocortex. However, it doesn’t take into consideration that when you are working online, you can page in and out sets of people, so while your neocortex may only be able to maintain stable relationships with 150 people at a time, using a good digital rolodex, that number can expand considerably.
This raises a new question. Is there a Digital Dunbar’s Number? A number at which point you start getting overwhelmed with spam or declaring email bankruptcy?
It would seem as an expanded Digital Dunbar’s Number would be based, in part, on how well social media tools interoperate and allow you to organize your contacts. Unfortunately, so far, they don’t do all that well.
I explored the interconnectivity of different social media tools a bit last month. Rafe Needleman explored a similar idea this week as he pondered if we were heading towards a crisis in personal syndication overload.
So, we see continued refinement of various microblogging and life stream management sites. Laconi.ca seems to have constant development. New sites seem to emerge every day, and older sites, like Twitter and FriendFeed are coming out with new layouts.
FriendFeed now has features to show the best of a feed and the ability to add items to different feeds. I’ve been doing something similar by using rooms in FriendFeed. One group of friends are people that I know who are interested in blogging about progressive politics at a statewide level. Another group is people that I know who use Twitter from Connecticut and Rhode Island. I’ve set up rooms so I can see what they are saying, in the context of their groups.
It seems as if I’m not the only person interested in this. On Twine, yet another attempt at organizing social media, I was pointed to an article on TechCruch about a group of Mom’s using Twitter and using Ning.
I had a good discussion about this using another social media tool earlier this week. It seems like the tool that many of us want is something like this: Take something that gathers contact information, such Plaxo Pulse, Spock, Spoke, LinkedIn, etc.. Have it include the ability to group people, probably ideally by tags. Have it pull together all the social media for a person within a group, or with a common tag. Ideally, a user would be able to do it for people that are in a persons own universe, or across the whole universe, the way del.icio.us or Flickr handles tags. For the media gather, it should automatically eliminating duplicates, such as what happens when I use sites like ping.fm, posterous, or hellotxt to send my message to multiple sources. Then it should present a nice consolidated display, where comments can be added that are sent back to the original site as well as being posted on the consolidated feed.
Is that really too much to ask? With such a tool, we could see a giant increase in the possible Digital Dunbar’s Number.
