Welcome
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 08/06/2006 - 14:24Welcome to Orient Lodge, a literary outpost on the internet.
This site contains a collection of thoughts and other writings. Recent posts will show up on the front page, and other posts can be found through links on the right.
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#NaNoWriMo Scamming the Nigerian Scammers
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 11/08/2009 - 11:08Today, I received an email from Flora Abed, a twenty year old girl living with her younger brother alone for fear of being found by the people that killed her father. There is $9.5 million dollars in a trunk in Sierra Leone that she needs me to help get out of the country. What should I do?
Well, normally, I hit the delete button, which I did quickly on this email. However, I stopped at thought. Perhaps the person who wrote this email can help me after all. I'm writing a novel for NaNoWriMo and have thought about adding a Nigerian scammer or two into the novel, so I sent this reply:
Hi. Thanks for the email.
I'm in the process of writing a novel about Nigerian, or 419 scams. In particularly, the heroes of the story create a fictious person. A Nigerian scammer attempts to scam the fictious person. One of the heroes decides to play along and try to outscam the scammer. Essentially, he provides banking information so that the first scammer can make sure they can transfer the funds necessary. When they raid the account, they find there is no money there to raid. However, the hero gets the scammers banking information. When the next scammer comes along, the hero gives the second scammer the bank information of the first, pitting the two scammers against one another.
I'm interested in your thoughts about this scenario. Does it seem believable? Feasible? How do you think the scammers would react? What other fallout do you think would happen? As an aside, one of the characters in the novel is an FBI agent working with IC3. How would you imagine the FBI agent getting involved with this would react and how it would play out?
Any thoughts you can provide would be greatly appreciated.
What do you think? Will I get an interesting reply? Do you have thoughts on the plot twist? Any feedback is appreciated.
Righting the System
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 11/08/2009 - 09:39A few weeks ago, I went to a pig roast in New Hampshire organized for bloggers to get to know Rep. Paul Hodes who is running for U.S. Senate in New Hampshire. As part of the gathering, Rep. Hodes gave a variation of his stump speech, citing examples of people who have not been treated fairly and his efforts to intercede on their behalf. At the end of each example, he would bring home the point by talking about how the system is upside down. I wrote a little bit about this in my blog post Representative and Participatory Democracy.
This point came home to me yesterday afternoon. Friday, I received emails from many different organizations urging me to call my congresswoman, Rep. Rosa DeLauro, and urge her to support the health care reform bill. I felt very confident on how she would vote. I had heard her speak at various events promising a good health care reform bill, but I had also heard she was getting a lot of calls against the bill, and I wanted to make sure she knew that she was strongly supported in her stance. I tried calling her Washington number repeatedly, but could not get through.
Then, Saturday morning, my wife Kim and I were racking off our Oktoberfest Cider. We had brought some of our previous batches of cider to the pig roast in New Hampshire and it was well received. We were in the middle of making a new batch. The cell phone rang and my daughter Fiona ran to get it. It was a New Hampshire area code, but not my brother-in-law. Fiona didn’t get the phone in time. Kim called back and we found it was Rep. Hodes. He was calling to thank us for driving up to New Hampshire for the pig roast. I told him that I really liked his message and we chatted briefly about the importance of social media.
Now, I’ve been evolved enough in politics to understand the importance of politicians going down through their list of potential supporters and asking for support in one way or another so I kept the discussion brief. Later, however, it struck me. Here he was, in preparing for a historic vote, and he took time to call a blogger from Connecticut, two states away from his home state. I had been trying to contact my Representative and couldn’t get through, but here was a Representative two states away, commented to righting the system, who turned things around and contacted me. I kicked myself for not making comments about how important the health care vote was, but I was distracted.
Yet when I got home, I was relieved. I received an email from his Senate campaign, in which he explained why he was voting yes. “I take my responsibility to you and all Granite Staters very seriously, which is why I’ll be voting ‘Yes’. Yes for you, yes for our children, yes for real health care reform.”
More importantly, Rep. Hodes is working on righting a system that is upside down.
At one conference several weeks ago I met a voluntarist. He believed that Government should be completely voluntary, including using public resources and paying taxes. He tried to do as little of both and still be able to function in society. He disliked the libertarians, because they believed in too much government. He position was consistent. Government is the problem, so you should not vote, you should not get involved, and he did everything he could to have no involvement in the system. He believed that the system was irrevocably damaged.
Rep. Hodes, on the other hand, appears to believe that government does serve an important purpose in our lives, but that it has been turned upside down and too many people’s interests are being ignored by large businesses that support a large government friendly only to their interests. Instead of saying the government is the problem, Rep Hodes believes he can help right the system and help government be part of the solution.
I believe he can do this too.
(Cross posted at BlueHampshire.)
Understanding Google Wave Preview Hype and Testing
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 11/07/2009 - 06:31My blog post yesterday Looking for Google Wave Invites? generated about three times as much traffic as a typical blog post does for me on its first day. It appears as if everyone is searching for Google Wave invites. Over on one of the mailing lists I’m on, there has been a lively discussion. One person posted information about a wave they were on and others asked to join the wave or to get Wave invites. Others spoke derogatorily of Google Wave and all the hype. One went so far as to suggest that Google was creating a new digital divide between those that have been invited to Google Wave and those that have not been.
I have a fairly different view and expressed some of it in a response to the list. I’m expanding that response into this blog post.
The 'new' digital divide
Google Wave is still in preview. That's Google speak for 'not ready for beta testing'. It is sort of like some late stage alpha testing. They are being wise in attempting to limit the use to people who are going to try it for alpha testing, find bug, develop use cases, etc. Many software firms do this for many products. It does produce a divide, but it is not new.
It goes back to the old technology adoption lifecycle or technology diffusion model, mostly based on work in the 50s. The first people to use technology are the innovators. Rogers suggests that this is about 2.5% of the population. With around 227 million Internet users in the United States alone, that would mean that there are about 5.7 million Innovators. I don't know how many users Google wants during its preview testing, but I suspect it is less than 5.7 million in the United States.
So, we have a limited resource within a specific cohort. Google attempts to find those in the cohort that will be most beneficial to their testing.
The Hype
Innovators are often typically champions for the products they are testing. They are innovators because they like to experiment with the new and shiny and talk with friends about what they are doing. They also like to find other innovators to share their experiences with, hence referencing back to some of the discovery issues the mailing list. The problem is that with the way we are all connected these days, innovators often have a lot of followers on various social networks and everyone piles on fighting for a limited resource they might not even understand.
This leads to a backlash by people who have not been invited, and especially by members of later cohorts that have not been invited. It often rings of sour grapes.
The Hope
One member of the mailing list said that she was not really seeing what Google Wave does that existing tools don't already do. I have to agree with her on that, with a couple of caveats. She went on to say that the real potential benefit of Google Wave being a convergent technology might turn out to be its best feature. Personally, it is this convergence that I find so interesting and is the reason I've been trying to find people that are interested in collaborating between Google Wave and other forms of computer mediated communication (CMC).
However, this gets to another part of the innovators. Some innovators are the geeks, the folks setting up and hacking FedOne servers. Other innovators are those that develop use cases. How could Google Wave interoperate with other CMC systems? What are the implications of this for other CMC systems? How could Google Wave be used to facilitate education? If I had any invites, I would be inviting people that are doing serious testing of the limits of the technology or are seriously thinking about use cases including the sort of questions I posed above. Unfortunately, I don't have any invites to the Google Wave Preview server.
Will the convergence that Google is trying achieve with Wave end up being the best thing since sliced bread? It is too early to tell. Instead it is time for innovators to explore if that is possible. One thing that I like is that it is a fairly open standard. The communications is done via extension to XMPP servers, making it easier to create additional interoperation.
Convergence
Content
There are a couple of areas of convergence that I am particularly interested in. The first is convergence of content. When I write this blog post, it will propagate across the Internet. Twitterfeed will check the RSS feed post the title and a link to Twitter and Identi.ca. Friendfeed will pick it up from RSS, Twitter and Identi.ca. Facebook will pick up to the RSS, Tweets, and Friendfeed. It probably gets picked up by several other sites via RSS as well. For a graphical image of how complicated this can become, check the Social Media Map that I created over a year ago.
On many of these sites, people comment. People reply to my tweets. They comment on the tweet as it becomes a status message on Facebook. They comment on the blog post as it becomes a note on Facebook, and so on. It would be very nice if all of this could be consolidated into a single wave where different comments from different systems could converge and be looked at together.
Contacts
I’ve written in the past about how I wished I had a good Social Network Contact Management System and I’ve written about trying to build one using Semantic Mediawiki. To the extent that Google Wave can interoperate and bring in my blog posts and the comments from various systems, my Tweets, my IMs, my status updates and Facebook, and all the conversations I have around them, I then have the basis for my much sought after Social network Contact Management System.
To make this work properly, I would want to be able to have my contacts have not only their contact information on the Google Wave Preview, but also their contact information; their wave addresses on various federated wave servers, their various email addresses, their various microblogging addresses like on Twitter or identi.ca, their IM addresses, and with the possibility of Google Voice integration and Asterisk integration, their phone numbers.
With that, each conversation that they participate in would be a wave, and I could search for all of my contacts with any of these people with a simple search on Wave. Perhaps the people that need to worry most about Google Wave are companies like Salesforce.
Other Wave Servers
All of this leads back to my current key interest. I've setup my own FedOne Wave Server. I've federated it with the Google Wave Sandbox server. A few other people have done the same thing. Right now, it is very difficult to do and the client for these federated servers, with the exception for the Google Wave Sandbox server, is very limited. I am glad that one person from the mailing list recently tested my wave server, and others are welcome to do the same thing. Just remember it is a very limited client and the user experience is much different that with Google's Wave Preview server or their Wave Sandbox server.
So, those are my additional thoughts on Wave, other forms of CMC, and perhaps even a little bit on education. Thoughts?
Final FTC Comment How Will Journalism Survive the Internet Age?
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 11/06/2009 - 12:33Today is the last day to submit comments to the FTC for their Public Workshops and Roundtables, “From Town Crier to Bloggers: How Will Journalism Survive the Internet Age?”. When I had written about this previously I noted that there were only two comments. As of this morning, there were eleven comments and the response that I received from the submission form indicated that my comment was the nineteenth.
The comments are text comments, with the option of adding attachments. The text is unformatted and can become unreadable for long comments. So, I wrote an abstract which I pasted as the text, and the provided the details of my comments as a PDF file.
If my comment gets processed and the system behaves as it has for previous commenters, my comment should be at 544505-00019.pdf. However, as of yet, the most recent eight comments have not appeared.
That said, I would like to highlight a couple comments that struck me is particularly noteworthy. Mark MacCarthy, whom I believe to be an adjunct professor of Communications, Culture and Technology at Georgetown has a long interesting comment about increasing federal funding for public service media. I’ve only scanned it briefly, but hope to find more time to read it in detail before the workshops.
Mark Nadel, of the AEI-Brookings Joint Center for Regulatory Studies, has a very interesting comment on
Limor Peer from Yale’s Institute for Social and Policy studies, together with Pablo Boczkowski from the Department of Communications Studies at Northwestern share a thirty seven page working paper, The Choice Gap: The Divergent Online News Preferences of Journalists and Consumers. It looks like fascinating research that I hope to delve into in much more detail.
All of this dwarves my brief three page comment. Yet I hope I’ll have added something to the discussion. If you can’t read the final draft of my comment at the FTC website, it isn’t substantially different than my earlier draft.
I look forward to reading other comments and perhaps even getting a good online discussion going before the roundtables. Let me know what you think.
Update: The Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) has posted SPJ’s DMC FTC Statement statement on their blog. It is another long and interesting comment.
