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AT&T Data Scampaign 
I was just one of many AT&T customers who received the now infamous 'throttling' threats.
In today's WSJ the company uncloaks their ultimate goal
They plan on offering big media companies a reverse billing service for bandwidth.
Not unlike a toll-free telephone number, the cost of the bandwidth used can be billed to the provider
Once implemented, you could watch a Netflix movie via 3G on your tablet without it affecting your personal bandwidth usage.
This cost I believe will of course be passed on to the media companies customers one way or another, as they are now effectively paying for the bandwidth twice.
The biggest problem with this Scampaign is that smaller and independent media companies will start to get squeezed out of the market.
NA-386-2012-02-26 No Agenda Show for Sunday February 26th 2012
Balochistan Baloney
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Executive Producers: Alexandr Seleznyov, Sir Sid Icognito
Associate Executive Producers: Sir Jason Hoffman, Chris Mail, Gary Y, Christian Herzog, Sir Dr. Nenninger, Michelle Figueroa
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World Outline Podcast What's this? A New Podcast? Huh?
I was listening to the podcast I did with Dave Winer this morning and realized that it is out of context for most readers of my blog and many listeners of the No Agenda Show.
This particular podcast isn't a show per se. Its a companion to the work we have been collaborating on for the past 2 years.
The context is development of the World Outline, an application that runs in the OPML Editor.
We expect the audience to be small, initially only for users and developers who have been following the work on the mailing list.
So what is the World Outline? I"m not sure either of us can explain it and pass the elevator test. I have written about it here and here from my perspective, but I would probably have written a different piece if I were to do that today
And that's also what this podcast is about. It is a conversation that rarely happens in software development. A discussion between the developer and the user.
There's no production other than the recording of a skype call we do regularly anyway.
Historically speaking this is an interesting moment. The last time we did this together was in 2004. At that time we had similar conversations about a project we were working on that evolved into a media shift known as Podcasting.
What's nice now, 8 years later is that we are both older, and have learned a lot about each other and are in different phases of our lives.
Where this will take us, I have no idea. I guess we're just Startin' Somethin'.
The BBC did something similar to what I'm hearing us do here when they made actual profgramming for radio and television about their personal computer
Personal Data Vault It may be time for a New Deal in online marketing
With all the talk about online 'privacy', and how there is a trade-off between users of the web and providers of 'free' services, I finally installed a plug-in to my firefox browser that blocks all cookies, unless I specifically whitelist themu
I don't play games, so I don't need any scores stored locally and the Firefox password manager does a good job at remembering passwords for sites that need them, and I have no problem whitelisting my own servers and those I really trust
This led me to a thought, which although not new, warrants re-thinking.
I want to consider tracking all of my online behaviour, locally or in a data storgae that I manage and own.
Appparently from all the chatter, its quite valuable.
If my trail of usage is so valuable, I want to be able to package this and use it in fair and open commerce
What a market that would create! A fair one at that.
Sure, maybe its only worth a couple bucks to twitter and a couple to google, but if you add it all up, and judging from the amount of cookies I just deleted, hundreds of companies are actively engaged in collecting my data.
I'd like to help them, I can collect more than they can covertly, and I can do a much better job of sorting and managing the connections they seek to make.
Then I'd like to sell it to them, or barter it.
I'd need a good contract of course, one that explains exactly how my data will be used, and my counter-party should be able to be held accountable.
Such a Personal Data Vault could be implemented for many different uses. It would certainly be interesting to historians in decades to come.
I don't know if a system like this has been designed or tried, but I'd love any pointers if it exists.
[postscript]
Judging from the amount of Firefox anonymizers and proxy add-ons, there seems to be a lot of knowledge on how to block things and 'cloak' yourself while online. Why not store all this valuable data?
This stuff is worth money. The first company to create this product will be building it for their first customers. I certainly would barter some of my data in exchange for being able to make more money by reselling it to other companies. Over, and over, and over again.
An example:
"Hey Paperboy!" (New York Times) "I'll give you a month's worth of data for a month of access to your news"
Riding the Goat I'm winding up the first work week of using Ubuntu exclusively on my work machine. The back-story of my switch to 'Mountain Goat' is here
The experience has been nothing but pleasurable. There is very little difference between working on OS X and Ubuntu. This is good.
Of course there's a learning curve, keyboard shortcuts are different for one, and as I decided to not customize the out of the box interface and apps, there's been some learning there as well.
But learning new apps and work flow is fun and often rewarding. It challenges my brain and gets me thinking of new ways to manage things.
As you can imagine, I've received many offers of help and suggestions from the global Linux communities. I like this about Open Source. Yes, the Mac has also has a community vibe to it, but the vibe on Linux is more Punk Rock to OS X's Disco feel.
I'm really impressed at just how much great work a worldwide decentralized group of people can achieve.
NA-385-2012-02-23 No Agenda Show for Thursday February 23d 2012
CIA vs DIA
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Executive Producers: Shawn Potts, Frank DiZoglio
Associate Executive Producers: Sir Dirk, Joseph Lake, Sir Dean Bertram, Sir Bean, James vo Achen, Matt Harley, Frank Ajzensztat, John Naegele, John Harrison, Sir Greg Birch, Patrick Brennan, Sid Icognito, James Cherf, Kevin Liang
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Knighthood: Frank DiZoglio
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Thunderbird One of the advantages of my MacBook Air Mountain Goat migration is that I am being exposed to new applications.
Whenever I need an app, I just grab whatever Ubuntu offers as the default before I go looking for an alternative, if needed.
Enter Thunderbird
Hallelujah, where have you been all my life!
Of course Thunderbird has been around for a while, but I hadn't tried it out in several years, and had pretty much become a slave to Apple's "Mail" program.
The list is too long to mention, but Thunderbird really ticks all the boxes for me.
Most impressive is how it archives all my email and folders from the server and stores it in a local database that has blazingly fast contextual search. Beautiful.
T-Bird's spam function is also outstanding. It outperforms all programs I've used before and even lets you train it's filters before you enabled the filing/deleting of spam messages.
The only weird thing I've noticed is that the default setup places your repliy to an email at the bottom of the original, which does not seem standard email practice. It is easily changed in the Account Prefrences pane.
Bravo to the Thunderbird team. You are kicking ass on helping simple Human Resources manage the biggest info glut in our digital lives.
Moving to Mountain Goat 
I've been a user of Apple computers most of my life.
Over the course of the past 2 decades I have attempted to become a Linix user many, many times, but it just never was quite ready for me, or perhaps I wasn't ready for Linux.
I've built kernels, tried several different 'distros', but the experience never came close to anything I witnessed on a Mac.
This week I am giving it another try, and so far it looks like it might stick.
I use 4 main machines in my computer life;
-A MacBook Air for day to day writing and managing my 'stuff'
-A MacBook Pro, which doubles as my 'road machine' for my podcast. It has very specific software installed that has taken me years to collect and configure.
-A Mac-Mini that runs my studio, it has a lot of the same traits as the MBP.
-A Mac Mini for my home server. It runs my Mail server, DNS and a few other typical server functions that I no longer trust 'the cloud' to provide me with.
The road to moving entirely to Linux is a path to be travelled cautiously. And I'm starting with my MBA, the machine I use most on a day to day basis for my 'life stuff'.
Why? Because its time.
Not only did Apple's true business model really start to become visible for me with AddressBookGate, but the proposed changes to the Mac 'Experience' are no longer on par with what attracted me to the Mac in the first place.
Outside of the hardware, which I still love and cherish as a work of art. The MBA is beautiful and nice to operate.
I've installed Ubuntu 11.10 on the MBA and am delighted with the speed and experience. The apps I need are perfectly suitable versions or alternatives, and since my main app: The OPML Editor now runs smoothly and stable in wine-1.3, I'm good to go. Murphy willing.
So while Apple moves towards a more iOS experience with Mountain Lion, I'm moving in another direction.
I'm calling my system Mountain Goat.
I'm documenting everything as I go, and once I'm fully satisfied with my MBA, I'll probably look at the server next, since Linux is very appropriate to run in that environment.
Explaining what I mean by 'experience' is not only difficult, but very individualistic. I like keyboard commands, using the mouse as little as possible. I like speed. I like a high level of customization and organization. I want the operting system to get out of the way of what I'm doing, but being able to lift up the hood when I need to and dismantle the chassis if I feel like it.
I like choice.
I'm also not afraid to try things out and break stuff in the process, certainly if that will ultimately give me the results and 'experience' I desire.
Testing from Ubunto/Wine This is being written in the OPML Editor running under Wine-1.3 on Ubuntu.
Did it work?
Indeed it did!
More info Here
NA-384-2012-02-19 No Agenda Show for Sunday February 19th 2012
No Specific Plot
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Executive Producers: Firas Al Thibani
Associate Executive Producers: Joseph Lake, Marco van Veen, James Sherer, Sir James Howard, Bryan Mancuso, Phil Rodis, James Cherf
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Art By: Nick the Rat
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My iPhone Is Compromised! I just ran the AdiOS app on my Mac. It accesses info on apps that you have synched through iTunes and provides a list of apps that have the ability to access your address book.
Here's a PDF of the print-out. The list is rather long and disturbing.
NA-383-2012-02-16 No Agenda Show for Thursday February 16th 2012
Hot Rods
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Hot Rods
Executive Producers: Anonymous, Andrew Valencia
Associate Executive Producers: John Henry, Mark Meyers, Mark Smith
214 Valentine Donations: Mark Meyers, Mark Smith
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Knighthoods: Joe the Dish Slave
Art By: Silicon Spin
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An Interview with Rob Tannenbaum, co-author "I Want My MTV" This interview is one I've been waiting for, as co-author Rob Tannenbaum interviewed me for the book
The interview turned out to be a great primer for those who want to read this oral history of the music television revolution, filled with quotes and stories that are in the book as well as some that aren't.
Purchase a copy of Rob & Mark's book in multiple formats on Amazon
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Presidential PR Watching the President in this video, I question if the executive branch should be promoting twitter or any other competitive service over another.
Why should we only use twitter to communicate to our representatives? What's wrong with email, telephone, letters (remember those?) or for that matter any other multitude of social networks like Facebook and Google+?
Why not suggest people blog about it on Wordpress or Tumblr?
Surely we can't rely on only one means of getting the attention of our elected representatives?
Or is this some form of Public Relations push for the twitter company?
I don't see this form of preferential treatment coming from the Whitehouse for any other industry, like the automotive, or airlines. "Take your Ford and go to the mall this weekend to support the economy" would certainly raise concern, so why not in the technology industry?
I'm sure its related to the equally unjust practice of archiving all tweets sent (evah!) in the library of congress.
Manipulating Ratings The story about Oprah breaking the Nielsen ratings agency's rules reminded me of an old radio trick we used to use back in my New York Z-100 days
The ratings agency for radio is called 'Arbitron'
So around the time that the diaries were being distributed we would start up a contest giving away 'Armitron' wrist watches, done to hopefully 'help' the listener associate the station with the diary.
Old school compared to what goes on these days I'm sure :-)
NA-382-2012-02-12 No Agenda Show for Sunday February 12th 2012
Apathy Syndrome
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Apathy Syndrome
Executive Producers: Dame Astrid
Associate Executive Producers: Kethylee Simunich, Sir Scott Hankel, Chris Eisbach, Brad Dougherty, Tom Trobaugh, Devon Ostendorf, Gil Freund, Harvey Lee, Jasen Brooks
214 Valentine Donations: Sir Scott Hankel, Chris Eisbach, Brad Dougherty
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Art By: Nick the Rat
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Testing the new rules feature Just trying out the new rules feature with the rules provided in the test1.opml file like I did yesterday on my world outline server. Thisis now on my Scripting2 Blog
Did it work?
This should have a different icon instead of the wedge and be collpased
Wow
If you want to learn what is happening on this page, look here
NA-381-2012-02-09 No Agenda Show for Thursday February 9th 2012
Acquisition Malpractice
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Acquisition Malpractice
Executive Producers: Moiz Kahn, Sir R. Daniels
Associate Executive Producers: Eric Wilka, Joe the Dish Slave, Sir Scott Hankel, Allen Cavedo III, Andrew Gardner, Christopher Skalenda, SId Incognito, Mark Morley
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Art By: Thoren
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NA--380-2012-02-05 No Agenda Show for Sunday February 5th 2012
Trusted Beduoin Sources
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Trusted Bedouin Sources
Executive Producers: Anonymous, Sir Melancon, Sir Paul Schneider, Sir Austin Voss, Scott, Robert Slaght
Associate Executive Producers: Sam Leung, Robert Rinehart, Bryan Smith, Sir Lawrence Roik, Robert Burgess, Kent O'Rourke, Anonymous, Wayne Harvey, Fishguy, Sir David C Pugh, Joshua Poulson
380 Club Members: Sir Melancon, Sir Paul Schneider
214 Valentine Donations: Bryan Smith, Sir Lawrence Roik, Robert Burgess
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Knighthoods: Matthew Becker, Austin Voss, David C Pugh
Art By: dmacdonald
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Going Google I just used a term in a tweet that needs to be re-codified.
Going Google
This had a very different meaning a few years back.
Now we use it to describe a company departing form the core values it's users loved it for in the first place, in order to continue their growth as a company.
example:
"Search engine DuckDuckGo will be going google soon enough."
Back To The Future of Search [Google don't give me goats!]
Imagine you could control Google Search for an entire day.
Really run with this. Here's a list of possible preferences:
Make it return only the results you are interested in.No advertising
No gamed SEO results
Display perfectly for your screen or device
Give priority to websites, domains and other parameters you determine
Not push other Google properties like Google+into the results, unless it's from places there that you desire.
Not have Google track what you are doing to determine your next search
If you could have this for 24 hours, would you be willing to pay less than $2 for that?
You can come pretty close for $1.92 a day.
That's exactly the price I'm paying for all the features I listed above for running the my own YaCy search engine peer on a Rackspace hosted Server.
Quick History
Over the course of the past 2 years, I've slowly but surely been moving myself off all cloud services.
The backstory was the sudden shutdown of Drop.io, a service I not only supported and heavily promoted when it was struggling startup, but also used to store a lot of information.
Facebook purchased the company for it's programming talent and shut down the service.
The nature of the service (which I paid for btw) had resulted in an unorganized collection of 'drops' that contained audio files, shownotes, feedback from people and no way for me to find everything and download it, no matter how much time I had (they gave everyone 6 weeks.)
So I decided to learn how to run my own servers, services and infrastructure.
Its been quite a journey
Since then I have built, configured and learned how to run the following services
Mail Services (with sql based search)Blog
linkblog/tweeter
RSS feed generator
RSS Aggregator
Rivers Of News
Content Management System
Dropbox clone
Auto Syndicator
URL Shortener
DNS Management
I think its an impressive list.
Most of this came from following the EC2 for Poets program, which includes open source software and instructions on how to install and maintain it on solid infrastructure from Amazon or any other Hosting provider.
The only thing missing was my own search. (Well, maps are also a big deal, but that will be a future project)
Its hard to beat Google Search. For me GS had become an all you can eat command line natural language magic box.
Its browser integration is seamless, ubiquitous, and its fast.
But then things changed
Google Search started to suck.
Results became muddled with information gleaned from other Google services, like Google+
The interface became annoying, with javascript 'features' that pop screenshots if I'm not careful where I place my mouse.
Results are now filled with 'News', that I have no way of filtering out.
I don't get the same results as other people using the same search terms or in a different location, which means Google is making decisions for me that I may not want or agree with.
And the final straw is their new Terms of Service, that is clearly created to track more of my behavior for their profit.
All fine and dandy, but I'm opting out.
Since there's no option to pay Google for the actual service I want, as described in my wish list, I'm happy to pay for the joy of running it myself.
Enter YaCy
I first heard about the peer to peer search network YaCy about a year ago, and recently the got a lot of typical tech press that consisted of the usual 'Can it kill Google' bullcrap, written by copy/pasters who had never tried to install, configure and run the software themselves. I know this with certainty. Why? because it isn't trivial and probably won't work for most first timers out of the box.
I spent the past week, a lot of it in semi all-nighters figuring out how to make it work, scouring the wiki's, forums and blogposts.
No surprise that Google search results weren't very helpful :-)
But in the end, I persevered and have been using my own custom built and configured search engine for about a week now and am extremely happy with the results.
Weed Wackers
John C Dvorak invented a search engine test. He does a lot of gardening and has always wanted to find honest reviews on the best weed wackers. If a search engine can perform this task properly, without throwing a multitude of covert ads for wackers into the stream, then you have a properly configured and useful search engine.
Here's a screenshot of my personal search engine, which I've named ACYACY, next to Google, competing in the Weed Wacker test.
I like what I'm getting from ACYACY. In particular the real user reviews, information from specialists and even a suggestion to use goats. Although I appreciate Google's consumer reports link, the CR page and just about everything else on the page is trying to sell me a weed wacker.
Bear in mind that my search engine is configured to my personality, it indexes and gives priority to sites I trust to link to valuable sources.
I really love the Goats idea. I think I'll give John one for his birthday.
Poets
My next steps will be to document the setup and configuration of ACYACY for folks like me. A poets guide similar to the one I enjoyed using so much for my other applications and infrastructure.
And I shall of course call it YaCy for Poets.
Super Centralized Service Are Not Good Facebook's Javascript API broke today, disabling 'Like' buttons on hundreds of thousands, if not tens of millions of webpages.
Worse, sites that use Facebook authentication for login could not authenticate/login users.
I'm not a developer, but even I can see where this is headed
To avoid future frustration, don't register with services and websites that use a centralized service such as Facebook, and you won't be disappointed.
An Interview with Joshua Cody, Author of "[sic] a memoir" I was very impressed by Joshua's 'stream of consciousness collection about his fight against cancer. Reading it had a similar effect on my as the first time I heard the Rolling Stones
Joshua skypes in from New York City. You'll like this guy.
Purchase a copy of Joshua's book in multiple formats on Amazon
This video has been rotated and formatted to fit a non smart-phone screen, it is best viewed in the free Big App Show app.
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Access this page directly at joshuacody.bigbookshow.com
An Interview with Sarah Levine, Author of "Treasure Island!!!" Sarah Levine is a first time novelist from Chicago who blew my socks off with her combination of the classic "Treasure Island" and her unnamed 25 year old protagonist who attempts to live life according to the 'values' of the characters in that classic
You'll instantly fall in love with Sarah, who joins us from her home in Chicago
Purchase a copy of Sarah's book in multiple formats on Amazon
This video has been rotated and formatted to fit a non smart-phone screen, it is best viewed in the free Big App Show app.
To view more interviews, app and book reviews, get the Big App Show app for free on Android and iPhone
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Access this page directly at sarahlevine.bigbookshow.com
An Interview with Joanna Philbin, author of "The Daughters Join The Party" Joanna Philbin may be a 'daughter of' herself, but she really has made quite a name for herself as an author. Her fourth novel in the 'Daughters' series proves just that.
Joanna joins the show from her home in Los Angeles where we tallk about her writing, her insights to celebrity and of course her father legendary television personality Regis Philbin.
Purchase a copy of Joanna's book in multiple formats on Amazon
This video has been rotated and formatted to fit a non smart-phone screen, it is best viewed in the free Big App Show app.
To view more interviews, app and book reviews, get the Big App Show app for free on Android and iPhone
You can also subscribe to the podcast feed on your mobile device.
Access this page directly at joannaphilbin.bigbookshow.com
Facebook IPO for Cocktail Parties One of my hobbies is reading legal documents.
Legislation is my favourite, but S1 filings also tickle my fancy.
Since everyone is discussing Facebook's IPO filing documents, I decided to parse through them. So you don't have to.
Perfect opportunity to create a little cheat sheet you can use to sound really knowledgable at cocktail parties when you 'expertly' explain why you won't be buying FB shares once they're on the market :-)
Now, I'm not a lawyer, and I may be wrong, but here's what I'm seeing:
1. An unspecified amount of their infrastructure, like servers and bandwidth are leased through outside financing and are 'off balance sheet'. Meaning they aren't really refelected in the numbers they report for cost of operating their business. This could be tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars a quarter.2. More than $1 billion of their reported cash 'revenue' in 2011 came from sale of shares in the company, not advertising or other business income. In fact only 56% of they $3billion+ in 2011 came from actual advertising, down from 62% in 2010
3. The documents make a lot of reference to "RSU's", a form of stock options that apparently will have an unknown tax liability to the company. Reference is made to several billion dollars. The company states that this is a potential threat to their ongoing operations throughout the entire document.
4. The company does not claim to have over 800 million users. Instead they speak of that number of Monthly Active Users (MAU's) which includes people who click on a like button once a month on any site anywhere on the internet.
5. The company makes zero dollars from mobile use.
Discuss :-)
NA-379-2012-02-02 No Agenda Show for Thursday February 2nd 2012
The Soul Train of Podcasts
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The Soul Train of Podcasts
Executive Producer: Lukas Teijema
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Art By: Kevin Thomas
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