tech ronin

*Chaordic*

This graphic is from the Chaordic Commons website. It's derived from the thinking of Dee Hock who wrote the book called Birth of the Chaordic Age. Mr. Hock is the founder of VISA International. He invented the word Chaordic by combining Chaos with Order as shown above.

I read up on the history of the Chaordic Alliance - the people behind Chaordic Commons and, of course, it came out of Mr. Hock's work. I was impressed that Peter Senge, author of The Fifth Discipline hired Mr. Hock to help apply chaordic principles to what became his Society for Organizational Learning. Fast Company wrote about Hock in their 5th issue in an article entitled: The Trillion-Dollar Vision of Dee Hock.

Peter Senge, author of "The Fifth Discipline" and a leader in organizational redesign, brought in Hock last year to help reconceive his MIT Center for Organizational Learning, a consortium of 20 companies dedicated to cutting-edge work in corporate adaptability. "Dee is one of the most original thinkers on the subject of organization that I've come across," Senge says.

Here are the definitions:

chaord (kay'ord) 1: any autocatalytic, self-regulating, adaptive, nonlinear, complex organism, organization, or system, whether physical, biological or social, the behavior of which harmoniously exhibits characteristics of both order and chaos. 2: an entity whose behavior exhibits patterns and probabilities not governed or explained by the behavior of its parts. 3: the fundamental organizing principle of nature and evolution.

chaordic (kay'ordic) 1: anything simultaneously orderly and chaotic. 2: patterned in a way dominated neither by order nor chaos. 3: existing in the phase between order and chaos.

The Chaordic Alliance asserts:

Many leading scientists believe that the principal science of the next century will be the study of complex, autocatalytic, self-organizing, non-linear, adaptive systems, usually referred to as "complexity" or "chaos theory." They believe that such systems, perhaps even life itself, arise and thrive on the edge of chaos with just enough order to give them pattern, but not so much to slow their adaptation and learning.

This is not new news. The book came out in November 1999, but I liked the illustration and feel that the concept is in keeping with my passionate interest in emergence, self-organizing systems, collaboration, social networks, bottom-up, and chaos theory. It is interesting to think that VISA International may owe its success to some of these principles - perhaps understood after the fact.

Two great nuggets from Hock from another article in that same Fast Company issue above:

Creativity: The problem is never how to get new, innovative thoughts into your mind, but how to get old ones out. Every mind is a room packed with archaic furniture. You must get the old furniture of what you know, think, and believe out before anything new can get in. Make an empty space in any corner of your mind, and creativity will instantly fill it.

Leadership: Here is the very heart and soul of the matter. If you look to lead, invest at least 40% of your time managing yourself -- your ethics, character, principles, purpose, motivation, and conduct. Invest at least 30% managing those with authority over you, and 15% managing your peers. Use the remainder to induce those you "work for" to understand and practice the theory. I use the terms "work for" advisedly, for if you don't understand that you should be working for your mislabeled "subordinates," you haven't understood anything. Lead yourself, lead your superiors, lead your peers, and free your people to do the same. All else is trivia

I love ecto

I've been blogging online with TypePad ever since I switched from Movable Type back in August and the desktop blogging client I was using, Kung-Log, didn't support TypePad yet. Well, just in the last week or so, I found ecto, Kung-log's commercial successor.

This is so great. If you liked Kung-Log, you'll love ecto. It now works beautifully with TypePad by the way. The release version of ecto is for Mac OS X and there is a beta for Windows.

Here's my favorite feature of ecto so far (there are many cool features): if you've got the URL for the link you want to create in the clipboard, you can simply highlight the words you want *linked* and then choose *url with clipboard*. No more typing the html!!!

My second favorite is great too: the preview is MUCH better than what I get in TypePad. This saves me from posting early just so I can see how my post is going to look. Call me obsessive, but I like to be able to proof-read and edit while looking at the page the way it's going to look when posted.

As with Kung-Log, you get a bunch of html commands for starters *and* you can add your own. I've added color text for various colors. And then you get to add keyboard equivalents for them!

I like the Categories list. It's a bunch of checkboxes. So I just check the ones I want for a post. I don't have to select *multiple categories* and then command click the ones I want to include. Slows down the onset of carpal tunnel.

Ecto is a mature desktop blogging client. They call it the next generation blogging client. I haven't shopped the competition, but I seriously doubt anything can compete with ecto. It pings Technorati for you. It supports multiple blogs. It supports Atom. How about syntax coloring? Yes. It has all sorts of defaults and sophistication. Read the ecto list of features.

For OS X users, it also supports iPhoto, iTunes, uses Safari's Webkit to render previews and lets you drag your images in to select them for upload.

For TypePad users, the next upgrade will be using TypePad's Atom API to manage TypeLists and photo albums. Ecto is a major bargain at $17.95.

Many-to-Many Space is Up

If you haven't seen the news, Many-to-Many is celebrating their one year anniversary. At the same time, they have created a Socialtext *Space* called the Many-to-Many Space. This is my first exposure to Socialtext space. Fun to explore! I'm trying out the introductory tour now.

OK. I've done the intro tour - that took about 3 minutes. Then I nosed around and found a weblogs section with a just started post that Ross Mayfield had created and plans to post on Many-to-Many: Open Post. I tried my hand at writing some commentary there. It was hard in some ways because I am so used to blogging and saying I. On this fancy wiki, it didn't make sense to use the I word at least not if this is going to be a post on Many-to-Many.

Here's one result of all this. I'm learning better the benefits of and how to use a Socialtext Space and, more generally, a wiki. Clearly, I'll need to participate more and lurk a bit to really get it.

I also created a personal page called Janet Tokerud because Ross requested that contributors to his M2M post list our names as links at the bottom. Well, what good does a link do if there's nothing in it? That led to my double-clicking my name link back in the post so that I could put something on the Janet Tokerud page.

I had seen Ross' page earlier so went back to it and copy and pasted it into my page as a guide. I then replaced a link to his picture with a link to mine and replaced his links to his blogs and email with my blogs and email address. It seemed easier to copy Ross than to RTFM. I was being lazy. There was a wiki punctuation help link right beneath the editing window.

Somehow that page wound up as a separate *post* over in the weblogs Recent Changes area and I don't didn't know how to get it out of there so I left a message in my personal page about this issue and requested that if someone knows knew how to take my personal page out as a post to please do so.

As Many-to-Many is one of my favorite reads and I was curious about Socialtext, it was a no-brainer to play with this new space. I wonder what else I will learn if I stick around?

Was Gmail a Mistake?

No. Should you use it while it is still in Beta? It depends. I'm a software developer myself. I love technology. I love seeing companies try new things to push possibilities. I hate spam. I think we are at an early stage in the learning curve relative to both search and social software. I'm glad Google is pushing the envelope.

Google has raised the bar in the search space. I love their use of unobtrusive *Adsense* text ads compared to the intrusive advertising used on most websites. I'm glad that they've shown leadership here and others are following in their footsteps playing catch up.

On the other hand, I am an adamant advocate for the individual - the so called user or worse, consumer. I see the computer and Net as tools that help level the playing field between huge corporations and individuals or small groups that want to make a difference, innovate, adapt and prosper.

I don't regard most corporations as benign or helpful overall to society. They are entities beholden to Wall Street and the global market to maximize shareholder wealth first and foremost. Other important stakeholders like their employees, communities, environment, industries and customers are given short shrift and manipulated or exploited.

The current arrangement and competition in the business world pressures the small number of well-intentioned publicly held corporations to capitulate to a narrow-minded focus on revenue and profit.

Google is not yet a public corporation in the sense of having gone public, but their IPO is rumored widely. Their meteoric success in the last 6 years is unprecedented. At the apex of their success, they can afford to be generous. They can afford to innovate in ways that profoundly alter the status quo.

We don't live in paradise. We do live in a very competitive business environment. Every company has to have a business model that will make and keep them profitable so that they can stay in business, grow, innovate, and, hopefully, be good business citizens in their communities and on this planet.

The Net has struggled to find business models that work. Google has found many. Amazon has done well. EBay has had phenomenal success. Ads and placement of those ads have been major components of many Net business models.

Gathering information about site visitors has become the status quo. Cookies are everywhere. Privacy is lost with the justifications that (1) we can serve our customers better if we *know* them and (2) the information is useful to us and is a payback for the *free* services and content we make available - part of our business model.

I love software that helps me negotiate the Net with impunity, that helps me *manage* my privacy or see what privacy I've lost so that I can take measures to mitigate that loss. I equally love software that provides value like Amazon A9's ability to search within a book. I like it that we've got a lively discussion around Gmail ads and privacy issues.

Google won't draw the line where it *should* be without feedback. Neither will the rest of the industry. Each of us must make decisions every day as we sign on to the latest new service or choose to abstain.

Gmail: Back away slowly

OK. I really want better information and Gmail would give me access to Google's search engine to keep track of my email, thus allowing me to forget about email filing. It has potential to help with my spam problem. Google geeks are a lot more trustworthy than the credit info people for sure. And I am the adventurous sort and already reveal on my websites and blogs plenty of personal information that is being archived right now.

But even I was given pause today when I read Andrew Orlowski's April 3rd Guardian post: Google mail is evil – privacy advocates. These three excerpts raise four interrelated issues that worry me enough to back away slowly:

Issue #1: Privacy destroying power of combining so much personal data under one roof and #2: law enforcement access to it.

Google's cookie is an index for all your searches until 2038, and sits alongside an Orkut cookie that tells Google - or friendly law enforcement officials or marketeers - exactly who you are. Google's Gmail will complete the picture, indexing private electronic discourse under the main Google search cookie.

Issue #3: Residual copies that last far into the future. Gmail's privacy policy says:

The contents of your Gmail account also are stored and maintained on Google servers in order to provide the service. Indeed, residual copies of email may remain on our systems, even after you have deleted them from your mailbox or after the termination of your account.

Issue #4: What if Google merges with or is acquired by an *evil* company? Archivist Daniel Brandt:

While Google brags that no humans will read your emails, the entire Gmail program will involve extensive automated profiling of you as an individual. Google will be sharing the non-identifiable portions of your profile with anyone they choose. If the ownership of Google changes, or there is a merger, the entire personally-identifiable profile will be available to the new owners or partners.

Too bad. I'll keep you posted if I can't resist.

Trading Gmail text ads for spam

What if Google got so good at filtering out spam that the spammers gave up and decided to pay for Gmail text ads to get to their audiences? When you receive spam on Gmail, you are encouraged to report the spam as spam. It disappears from your inbox and Google gets a report for its spam database.

With all that spam information centralized, I would think Google could get pretty good at filtering out the spam. Users, especially those who like free email accounts, might be happy about exchanging (hopefully tasteful) sidebar text ads for (1) the outrageous torrent of spam we get these days and (2) banner or pop-up Ads. Google could get very rich indeed.

A9: Google's turn to cry?

I'm hustling to get up to speed on Amazon's new A9 search tool that just came out in beta Wednesday. John Batelle at Searchblog rocks and was targeted by Amazon to get the inside scoop rather than the Wall Street Journal. How cool is that? Score another point for grassroots journalism aka blogging!

John's got a short interview at Business 2.0 called Can Amazon Unplug Google?. He thinks A9 is a big, big deal. And I'm on board. Amazon is already at the head of the big-player pack when it comes to swinging out to create value for its customers, so we shouldn't be surprised. Regular readers know I've been calling for innovation in the search space since writing Google Sucks on January 19th.

Here's the quickie set of excerpts from B2:

A9 is a credible step toward making a search engine that knows you and acts as your agent online...

While others have tried to create personalized interfaces, none has worked so far...

the best part, from Amazon's perspective, is that the more things you buy at Amazon, and the more you browse with A9, the better the company will know you. Ideally, it's win-win -- you get better results, Amazon gets more sales.

it uses Google's search results -- Amazon and Google have a longstanding search deal -- but builds on them with an elegant set of features that, taken together, make A9 seem like a new way to search.

John is speaking my language. I still hope to see desktop search tools (with perhaps a web option when you aren't at your own computer or are running souped up cell phone as a browser) that do it my way. But the phrase "a search engine that knows you and acts as your agent online" is very appealing.

In John's interview with A9's leader, Udi Manber, Amazon's chief algorithms officer and Yahoo's former chief scientist, Manber says:

A9 is going to roll out features over time. This is our first beta test -- the result of a small team working over a short amount of time. We are growing the group as fast as we can. We have a large queue of very good ideas with the purpose of making search better. Our long-term goal is to improve search. We hope to invent new search technologies and use them on Amazon.com and other partner sites.

It looks like Amazon is leading the user experience pack again. With A9 and its offspring and challengers, we'll get more bang for our loss of privacy to places like Amazon and Google and all the other little sites that use cookies, user names and passwords to track our online activities.

But the nitty gritty on A9 and what's happening in the Search space is on John's blog: NEWS: A9, Amazon's Search Portal, Goes Live: Reverberations Felt in Valley:

A9 is a very, very good service, and an intriguing move by Amazon. It raises a clear question: How will Google - and more broadly, the entire search-driven world - react? ... If A9 is as good as it seems to be, every customer that uses and/or switches to A9 becomes an A9 search customer, and, more likely than not, a deeper and far more loyal Amazon customer ... A9 is built quite literally on top of Google. In short, Amazon has taken the best of Google, and made it, to my mind, a lot better.

And then getting really interesting More on A9:

the idea of a complete, lifetime record of a person's searches and browsing history - which by the way that person can edit - is an extraordinary concept. It's taking the idea of the database of intentions to the utmost granular level of history - the individual. What, I wonder, happens to a person's search history when they die? Do they have a right to own it? Does it get passed down as a keepsake to his or her children?

Amazon is not known for its timidity. Udi makes it clear that they are serious about search. Recently Yahoo dumped Google's search engine for their own.

Google must be enormously profitable by now with their long uncontested run at the top of the search engine heap. Yahoo and Amazon's entry into the Search space can only be good news for customers. Google's new Gmail is exciting - if they can work out the privacy and advertising issues (See Tim O'Reilly's pro-Gmail post and Danah Boyd's con-Gmail post for good analysis). It looks like good times ahead for adventurous customers who don't want to wait for the innovations we know are possible.

Blogs Beat Websites Hands Down

As you probably know, I just created a second blog called FileMaker Fever and about two days later upgraded from the Plus to Pro level of Typepad. Upgrading, by the way, was a bit of a shock, but that's another story. Starting a new blog, I'm faced with how to get the word out and build a readership for it. I've already got a bunch of content and links there, but I'm linking almost 100% to plain old websites, not blogs.

What a difference a blog makes! In the blogging world, if I link to someone's blog, they'll find out about it in a hurry probably with technorati and come over to my blog and probably link back to me. With non-blog links, I have to write to people and tell them I'm linking them etc. It's just not as slick.

FileMaker consultants seem to all be back in the era of websites and haven't progressed over to weblogs. The reason I know this is that I used Technorati's search feature to look for "FileMaker 7" and my new blog was listed as the first 3 links out of a total of 8 links for the last week. FileMaker consultants and developers aren't blogging - yet.

At first, I thought, oh great, I won't have any competition! I'll become *the* source for current news about FileMaker 7. But then I realized a very cool thing. I want FileMaker consultants and developers to blog too. Then we can link each other, have some great conversations either in comments or by trackbacks and raise all of our profiles on the web. I'm hoping that my colleagues will see what I'm doing on FileMaker Fever and try it.

I guess I'm leaving out the biggest advantage of blogs over websites, the ease with which you can do chronological entries which make it much easier for your readers to see what's new on your site. Now that I've upgraded to the Pro level and can do whatever I want with my Typepad blogs, I'll be exploring how to make my blog more like a website (they have a couple advantages too, see my earlier post Weblogs vs. Websites).

FileMaker Fever launched

I did it! Ever since FileMaker 7 came out on March 9th, I've been thinking about starting a blog that is tightly focused on FileMaker 7 and I just set it up based on my templates here, colored it a bit differently and wrote my first introductory post. If you are a FileMaker fan, you should track FileMaker Fever along with Tech Ronin. I know FileMaker is a topic of interest only to the FileMaker users of the world, so wanted to spare the rest of you from the possible flood of announcements, discoveries and tips that I'll be wanting to include there.

An aside - setting up this new blog based on my existing Tech Ronin templates was a five minute process. Unbelievably easy. Instant gratification - the way I like it! Oh, and it doesn't hurt that I didn't have to pay any more to create a second blog - I get up to three blogs with my $8.95/month intermediate level *Plus* TypePad account.

Since I'm becoming a fanatic about this stuff, I'm wishing that TypePad would offer a fourth level in between the intermediate Plus level and their Pro level for $10.95/mo. It would let me do just about everything the Pro users do but set some limits on blogs - say 6 - and disk space and usage. Perhaps they could call it the Power-User level. I would bump up right now because I want more flexibility but don't think I should have to pay the full $14.95/month like a big company or high volume site would gladly pay.