TechBards

Tue, 19 Dec 2006 03:48:35 GMT

Insurance Firms Agree to Back E-health Standards. All 1,300 members of the America's Health Insurance Plans trade association have agreed to support selected industry standards in personal health record systems for their combined 200 million clients.

[Computerworld Breaking News]

Tue, 19 Dec 2006 03:46:15 GMT

Economix: What Money Doesn’t Buy in Health Care. What was in many ways a great display of American medicine was also an example of what’s wrong with our health care system. By DAVID LEONHARDT. [NYT > Health]

Tue, 19 Dec 2006 03:41:16 GMT

Turning 50.

It’s been an unusual week. On December 3 I turned 50. On Dec 8 I announced that I’m leaving InfoWorld and joining Microsoft. It’s not a coincidence. When I saw 50 looming, a couple of years ago, I started to get really clear about what I want to do with the next 25. I’ve been laying out the vision to anyone who will listen, and I’ll continue to do so here, but first things first. Yesterday’s announcement left a couple of questions unasked and unaswered, so without further ado:

Q: Are you relocating to Redmond?

A: No. I’ll continue to work from my home office in New Hampshire. At first I’ll be spending maybe one week in four in Redmond, because there’s a lot of connecting to do. In the long run I may wind up traveling almost that much, but I hope to locations elsewhere than Redmond as often as not.

In January, for example, I’ll be speaking at Techology, Knowledge, and Society in Cambridge UK. And in May, at GOVIS in New Zealand. As was true for my recent talks in Guadalajara and Ann Arbor, I don’t expect to encounter any Silicon Valley regulars at these events. I do expect to give and to receive important insights about how people everywhere can use infotech to further their occupational, educational, personal, social, and civic agendas.

Q: What will happen to your weblog.infoworld.com/udell archive?

A: I’ve experienced namespace disruption before, and am very keen to avoid it this time around. Fortunately it’s in InfoWorld’s best interest to preserve my blog archive. Worst case, the material will be rehosted because nobody else at InfoWorld uses Radio UserLand anymore. In that case, I’ve offered to help redirect the current namespace to a different one. I’m keeping my fingers crossed, but I hope there won’t be a problem.

Q: Why would you work for them? Not since Standard Oil has such a brutal vicious rapacious thuggish company with such power existed.

A: That question, in private email from someone I deeply respect, reminded me that yesterday’s Q and A left some important things unsaid. In particular, although I mentioned Ray Ozzie and Kim Cameron and Jean Paoli and Jim Hugunin and JJ Allaire, I egregiously failed to mention such equally important folks as:

Tim Fahlberg, who wants to use screencasting to reinvent math education, and who was thrilled that I picked up on his mission and amplified it in InfoWorld, but who because of that only gained a tiny bit more of the exposure he deserves.

Dan Thomas, who’s pumping the operational data of city government out onto the web where, despite all my efforts so far, nobody except me sees that it’s there or imagines what to do with it.

Mike Frost, who’s building out a version of the energy web today instead of waiting for government to never do it.

To these stories I’ll add my own NHPR commentaries about online-map-enabled community work, rediscovery of the local library, and the social capital we can build when we work from home.

My proposal was to be an evangelist for the Net, to continue discovering and telling these kinds of stories, and to use them as the framework within which to explore and explain Microsoft’s current and emerging technologies.

When I met with Jeff Sandquist I had just finished this podcast with Jim Russell. It’s a story about migration and the mobility of intellectual capital, refracted through Jim’s experience with the Pittsburgh diaspora. Neither Microsoft’s nor any other vendor’s technologies are discussed. I’m certain that the ideas Jim lays out in this podcast will inspire new business models for social software, but it’s all rather speculative.

I explained to Jeff that it had taken me most of a day to interview Jim Russell, then edit our rambling two-hour discussion down to something more coherent. And I said: “Reality check, you’re OK with that?” He said yes. I do not regard that answer as evidence of thuggishness or rapaciousness. I regard it as a sign of enlightenment, and I am calibrating my expectations accordingly.

[Jon Udell]

Tue, 19 Dec 2006 03:39:22 GMT

Being here, being there.

Mike Champion raises an interesting point that applies to Microsoft but also more broadly:

The culture at MS is very F2F-oriented…if you’re out of sight, you have to work hard not to be out of mind.

But then he adds:

Geographic distance will help keep you from getting sucked into the groupthink of whatever group you’re in. Microsoft collectively needs to be constantly reminded what the world looks like to people whose view isn’t fogged up by our typical drizzle or distracted by the scenery on the sunny days.

We’re entering an era in which our personal, social, and professional lives are increasingly network-mediated. Trust-at-a-distance is a new possibility, with economic ramifications that everyone from Yochai Benkler to Jim Russell is trying to figure out. As someone who’s worked remotely for 8 years, and is about to work remotely for a company with relatively few remote employees, this question is extremely interesting to me.

On the one hand, I’ve learned that I can accomplish a lot because I spend an abormal percentage of my waking hours in flow rather than in meetings. I’ve also learned that network-mediated interactions can be more productive than F2F interactions. Consider my August screencast with Jim Hugunin, or my May screencast with Anders Hejlsberg, or indeed any of the other screencasts in that series. They’re all scheduled events, mediated by telephone and screensharing. I can’t see how physical colocation would improve them.

On the other hand, there’s the “watercooler” effect: being in a place, you see and hear and smell things that aren’t otherwise transmitted through the network. I have no doubt whatsoever that shared physical space matters in ways we can’t begin to describe or understand.

But as collaboration in shared virtual space takes its rightful place alongside collaboration in shared physical space, shouldn’t a company whose products are key enablers of virtual collaboration be eating its own dogfood?

Of course things are never as black-and-white as they appear. So I’m going to bookmark this posting and return to it in six months. Hopefully by then I’ll know more about the value of being here and of being there.

[Jon Udell]

Tue, 19 Dec 2006 03:36:30 GMT

Trailing-edge requirements for a community app.

One of the projects I’m tackling on sabbatical is a community version of LibraryLookup. The service I wanted to create is described here: an RSS feed that’s updated when a book on your Amazon wishlist becomes available in your local library. Originally I planned to build a simple web application that would register Amazon wishlist IDs and produce custom RSS feeds for each registrant. But as I thought about what would make this service palatable to a community, I saw two problems with that approach:

Familiarity. Most folks will not be familiar with RSS. If the primary goal is to get people using the service, rather than to evangelize RSS, it should use the more familiar style of email notification.
Deployability. A web application needs to be hosted somewhere. In most communities, the library won’t be able to host the service on its own infrastructure. But if it’s hosted elsewhere, there will be a (rational) reluctance to take a dependency on that provider.

To address the first concern, I’m doing this as an old-fashioned email-based app. You subscribe or unsubscribe by sending email with a command and a wishlist ID in the Subject: header. And you receive notifications about book availability by way of email.

To address the second concern, I’m doing it as a client-side Python script, so that the only dependency is some version of Python and an Internet connection.

Because a library might not even be able to dedicate an email address for this purpose, I’m exploring the use of Gmail as the communication engine. In order for that to work, Python has to be able to make secure and authenticated POP and SMTP connections. Happily, it can.

The recipe for connecting Python to Gmail’s POP service is trivial:

import poplib
p = poplib.POP3_SSL(’pop.gmail.com’)
p.user(’USERNAME’)
p.pass_(’PASSWORD’)

The recipe for connecting Python to Gmail’s SMTP service is less obvious:

import smtplib,
s = smtplib.SMTP(”smtp.gmail.com”)
s.ehlo(’smtp.gmail.com’)
s.starttls()
s.ehlo(’smtp.gmail.com’)
auth = ‘x00USERNAMEx00PASSWORD’
eauth = base64.b64encode(auth)
s.putcmd(”AUTH PLAIN”)
s.putcmd(eauth)

This won’t work with no authentication, but neither will it work with the SMTP module’s login() which uses the wrong authentication type (i.e., LOGIN rather than PLAIN, I think).

Any POP/SMTP servers can be used, of course, so there’s no dependency on Gmail here, but it’s nice to see that Gmail can easily be pressed into service if need be.

It feels retro and trailing-edge to do an email-based app but, in order to make it familiar and deployable that seems like the right approach.

[Jon Udell]

Fri, 13 Oct 2006 02:21:15 GMT

Working 2.0 â€“ Whatâ€™s Next?. Patti Wilson published Careerzine, an email newsletter. The August issues featured an article, Working 2.0: the Transformation of Employment. (looking for the link? This is email but you can go to her blog, Patti Wilson GIG, to find out to... [Portals and KM]

Fri, 06 Oct 2006 04:01:48 GMT

Value Networks and Social Media Event in Dallas. I recently participated in a stimulating event, the Value Networks and Social Media sponsored by the KM Cluster in Dallas. Verna Alee started with â€œNetwork Strategies for Managing Complexity: Organizational and Value Network Analysis.â€� I have written about her comprehensive... [Portals and KM]