“Oh, from RCN?”

“No, Verizon FiOS.”

“Oh. Just Internet?”

“That’s it.”

“No telephone?”

“We dropped it along with the television. We only use the Net.”

“Just Internet?”

“Just Internet.”

“What kind of speed are you getting?”

“We have 20Mb symmetrical service. Twenty up, twenty down.”

“We can beat that.”

“How?”

“We have fifty.”

“Fifty up and down?”

“Fifty. It’s expensive, though.”

“How much?”

“Seventy a month.”

“That’s not bad, if it’s symmetrical. What’s the upstream speed?”

“Fifty.”

“You sure? If you can tell me twenty up, we might have a deal.”

He wasn’t sure. “Hang on. Let me make a call.”

A conversation with somebody at Comcast followed. “Oh,” he said to the phone. “Okay… okay.” After hanging up, he said, “It’s fifty down and ten up.”

“Can’t do twenty, huh?”

He started to walk down the stairs in front of the house. “Only a tiny minority wants that,” he said.

“That might be the case nationwide,” I replied. “But around here with all these universities and businesses, you’ll get more demand. You might have sold me if you could have beaten Verizon’s offer.”

He shook his head. “It’s just a tiny minority.” And then he walked down the sidewalk, toward the next doorbell.

Bonus link.

I’m thrilled to have Rikke join me as a fellow voice in the wilderness of the Internet’s lack of clear definition. She outlines a huge greenfield for necessary discussion.

The consequence of this is a “plague of sameness” and the loss of a distinct species every ten minutes. Some types of fruits and vegetables have lost 90% of their variants. An entire language disappears every two weeks. “We are not gaining knowledge with every human generation”, Glavin says, “we are losing it”. “All these extinctions are related…and the language of environmentalism is wholly inadequate to the task of describing what is happening…It doesn’t have the words for it”. Wherever he travels, he says, he finds the overwhelming majority of people are troubled by this loss of diversity, but at a loss to know what to do about it.

Nobody knows anything. Excerpts:

Because of our horrific overpopulation and exhaustion of our planet and its resources, we have entered into a period of chronic, massive, global stress, and it’s made us all crazy, like rats in a lab fighting over the last few scraps of food. We’ve stopped listening to ourselves and started looking for saviours — ‘leaders’ and ‘experts’ to show us and tell us what to do.

The so-called ‘leaders’ and ‘experts’ I’ve met are mostly very intelligent people, but they haven’t a clue. They’re buoyed by their own press and by sycophants fighting their way up from the bottom or desperate to believe that someone is in charge, in control, and knows what needs to be done. These ‘leaders’ hang out with other people just like themselves, and their groupthink persuades them that they’re right, they’re important, that what they say and do and decide really matters...

We have destroyed this planet for future generations and for all-life-on-Earth, and the worst culprits are still doing it, while we sit around stupidly watching them, wondering what to do, waiting for someone, anyone, to save us from us.

We need to stop listening to these know-nothing, cowardly ‘leaders’. We need to stop paying them. We need to stop working for them. We need to stop investing in them. We need to stop trusting them, and stop believing the nonsense they are telling us. We need to stop voting for them, and paying taxes to finance their backroom deals. We need to stop buying overpriced crap from their fat, mismanaged organizations. We need to send some of them to jail for criminal fraud and the rest out to pasture, and take back our society, our economy, our Earth from these thieves, these self-deluded con men. No more leaders.

Just something to cheer you up on a Sunday.

It’s really wierd. While “real time” is heating up as a topic, real time search seems to have fallen off the radar of everybody other than itself.

Take this piece by Marshall Kirkpatrick in ReadWriteWeb. It begins, Web search, real-time search and social search. That’s a pretty compelling combination and it’s what both Google and Facebook put on the table today in a head-to-head competiton. Then it compares Google, Facebook and Bing at all three, in a chart.

Hey, why not the search engines that have been looking at real time for the duration? Here’s IceRocket on real time search as a string. You get blogs, Twitter, video, news and images. Fast, simple, uncomplicated, straightforward. Like a search engine ought to be.

Here’s the IceRocket trend line for “real time search”. And here’s the BlogScope trend line for “blogging”.

Earth to buzz: You’re obsessing on the wrong thing. “Real time search” isn’t just Twitter and Facebook. It’s blog search too. Always was.

Syndication and real time will matter long after “social” goes passé. (And “social” will matter long after the next buzzthing goes passé.)

For whatever reasons, Google and Bing don’t get it. There are better tools out there for Live Web search. Check ‘em out.

Bonus graph.

Over the years, however, Technorati came to value popularity and buzz more than the kind of stuff I was looking for. Some of the same functionality was there, but it was buried deeper and deeper. For example, feeds of searches. If I wanted to subscribe to feeds of, say, a search for Nokia N900, I could click on something that said (or meant) “get a feed for this search.” Google Blogsearch had the same feature, and made it easy. Still does, giving me a choice of Blog Alerts, Atom and RSS, under a heading that says “Subscribe”. Twitter search, similarly, has “feed for this query”.

Without being able to find that feed easily, I lost interest in Technorati, only going there when I couldn’t find the results I wanted elsewhere. By that time David and most of the other people I knew at Technorati had moved on, so I didn’t have much interest in volunteering advice.

But I learned this morning (via Twitter, naturally) that Technorati had gone through an overhaul. It’s certainly faster and less cluttered. But I still can’t find feeds for searches. Trending seems to be gone, or hidden where I can’t find it. And I have no idea how to do tag searches with it. Maybe that’s because, as CEO Richard Jalichandra explains here, “We’re eliminating many of Technorati.com’s annoyances and some features, especially ones people didn’t use enough to justify the cost. Instead, we’re focusing on delivering the value people really want from us: instead of boiling the ocean to make coffee, we’re aiming to deliver the non-fat soy latte you asked for.”

Well, that “you” isn’t me. Which is cool. Technorati has become less a search company and more a media company. They launched Technorati Media at the same time. It’s a way to buy and sell ads. I wish them well with it. (Hey, Techcruch likes it.)

Meanwhile I’ll stick with Google Blogsearch for my live Web searching.

Wonder what the rest of ya’ll think.

Near the start of his Institutional Corruption talk the other day, Larry Lessig sourced the quote above, from Thomas Jefferson. Larry was making a point: that the Framers were interested in personal independence, and not just that of a former colony. The Framers operated, however, in advance of the Industrial Revolution, which was won by Industry and lost by the rest of us — or at least by some of the roles we play in the marketplace.

Such as our roles as customers. While being customers gives us choices among products and services, many of the companies behind those products and services make us dependent on them, in ways we would not prefer if we had a choice. For a measure of how little choice we have, ask yourself how many times you’ve clicked “accept” to “Terms of Service” that typically give all advantages to the seller. Or look the number of cookies stored in your browser.

Well, the tide is turning. We’re finally starting to see a few tools that give users control over how data is collected and used. We’re working on some of those in the VRM community. And they’re a subject of discussion at

at 9:30am on Tuesday, at Harvard Law School, starting with the panel in the title graphic above. You can register here. Even if you show up only for the panel, it’ll help us know how many will be there.

There’s lots more about it at Civilizing the Personal Data Frontier, over at the ProjectVRM blog. Hope to see you there.

You might say that fresh radio moved in where stale TV moved out.

Here’s some background. When TV in the U.S. finally went all-digital several months back (June 12, to be precise), one wide hunk of spectrum, from 54 to 88Mhz—where channels 2 through 6 used to be—turned into “white space“. In other words, empty. For most of us this doesn’t matter except in one little spot at the very bottom of the FM dial: 87.7 FM. It’s the first click on nearly every FM radio, yet the FCC licensed no FM stations there, because that notch belonged to TV channel 6 audio. From January 1963 until June 2009, you could hear Channel 6 (WLNE-TV) at that spot on the dial, across much of Southern New England, including the Boston metro. When analog television shut down in June, WLNE moved to Channel 49 with its digital signal. After that, 87.7 was white space too. (Some more background here.)

In a few cases (New York and Los Angeles, for example), somebody would get a license (New York, Los Angeles) to operate a low power analog Channel 6 TV station, leave the picture off and just broadcast the audio, creating a virtual FM station that most listeners didn’t know was licensed as picture-less TV. (LPTV stations are exempt from the digital requirement.) That was pretty clever, but it was also pretty rare. For the most part, 87.7 was all-hiss, meaning it was open for anybody to put up anything, legal or not.

Such as here in Boston. It was a matter of time before somebody put up a pirate signal on 87.7. That happened this week when “Hot 97 Boston,” an urban-formatted Internet station, appeared there. Hot 97 is also known as WPOT, according to this thread here.

I checked here and here to see if it’s legal (on FM), and can find no evidence. But it does sound like a real station. If you’re into urban radio with a local Boston flavor (also with no ads), check it out. The signal isn’t big, but it’s not bad, either. And it’s worldwide on the Net.

[Two days later...] I figured by now the Boston Globe and/or the Boston Phoenix would pick up on this story. So I just tweeted a bulletin. Let’s see what happens.

[Later still...] Dean Landsman reminded me that Brian R. Ballou of the Globe had a report on TOUCH-FM in June 2008. TOUCH is another pirate that appears from its website still to be active, at least on the Web (though at the moment I can’t get it on either FM or the station’s “click here/listen now” link). [And later again (October 13) ...] TOUCH-FM is still on the air. It’s pretty obliterated by other signals here in Cambridge, but I got it well enough to follow this morning in the car when I drove to Boston and back.

The column title refers to the last line of this bit of Whitman:

I think I could turn and live awhile with the animals.
They are so placid and self-contained.
I stand and look at them sometimes half the day long.
They do not sweat and whine about their condition.
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins.
Not one is dissatisfied.
Not one is demented with the mania of owning things.

(For some reason most of those lines didn’t make it into the published piece. So, when you look at it, bear in mind that the top text is part of Whitman and none of me.) Some exerpts (from me, not Whitman):

Ambition and industry in the face of inevitable destruction is the job of life…

I believe in ownership—not for economic reasons, but because possession is 9/10ths of the three-year-old. We are all still toddlers in more ways than we’d like to admit—especially when it comes to possessions.

We are grabby animals. We like to own stuff—or at least control it. Where would a three-year-old be without the first-person possessive pronoun? No response is more human than “Mine!” And yet possessions are also burdens. I have a friend whose childhood home was burned twice by the same nutcase. He’s one of the sanest people I know. I can’t say it’s because he has been relieved of archives and other non-negotiables, but it makes a kind of sense to me. I have tons of that stuff, and I’ve thought lately about what it would mean if suddenly they were all cremated. Would that really be all bad? What I’d miss most are old photos that haven’t been scanned and writing that hasn’t been digitized in some way. But is my digital stuff all that safe either?…

I’ve just started backing (it) up “in the cloud”. But how safe is that? Or secure? Companies are temporary. Servers are temporary. Hell, everything is temporary.

When I was young, I acknowledged death as part of the cycle of life. Now I think it’s the other way around. Life is part of the cycle of death. Life generates fuel for death. It’s a carbon-based refinery for lots of interesting and helpful stuff.

Think about it. Marble. Limestone. Travertine. Oil. Gas. Coal. Wood. Linoleum. Cement. Paint. Plastics. Paper. Asphalt. Textiles. Medicines. Even the heat used to smelt iron and shape glass comes mostly from burning fossil fuel. The moon has abundant aluminum ores. But how would you produce the heat required for extraction, or do anything without the combustive assistance of oxygen? Ninety-eight percent of the oxygen in Earth’s atmosphere is produced by plants. Most of the sources are now dead, their energies devoted to post-living purposes.

The Internet grows by an odd noospheric process: duplication. In “Better Than Free”, Kevin Kelly makes an observation so profound and obvious that you can’t shake it once it sinks in: “The Internet is a copy machine.” As a result, the Net is turning into what Bob Frankston calls a “sea of bits”. This too is an ecosystem of sorts. Is it, like Earth’s ecosystem, a way that death makes use of life? I wonder about that too.

Anyway, the rest is here.

Well F*&% me. Dude, after all of these years, you are still micro managing the Windows release!

Now I know why Microsoft is now been relegated to insignificance in the identity market.

The reason is simple. Internal policy, managed by you, prohibits product mangers from keeping up with trends and innovation.

Let me repeat, if the Federated Identity Group made the required changes to the CardSpace selector today, it will be two years–maybe longer–before it makes it to the market.

The bottleneck to this problem–and I suspect a slew of others–is you.

As your friend and long-time competitor/advisor on these issues, I urge you to rethink how this is works. Because it isn’t working.

Craig has such a gentle way of being blunt. My fave line from Craig, addressed to a lame consulting client we shared many years ago: Put down the customer. Step away from the marketplace. I believe that’s what Craig is saying Microsoft is doing here, even if they don’t mean to.