YouTube for Open Government Equals Clear Democracy

YouTube is great and Google got them for a sweet price (eh hem...). Just love watching dogs lick their privates, repeats of the Daily Show, and the Mentos and Diet Coke explosions is the most important contribution to art and society in years.

But how about using Web 2.0 and our billions invested in broadband technology for something as old-school as governance? In case you haven't heard about Halliburton and Jack Abramoff, or Tom DeLay and friends, start reading. Guantánamo Bay fiasco is a good story too. So what do we know about what our leaders are doing behind closed doors? Unfortunately we learn too much too late.

Well now there's an new idea to change that. Clear Democracy is the concept that we can use technology to "Get In Bed" with our congressmen and women and find out in real-time who exactly is calling the shots. It works like this. Savvy voters choose to only elect candidates who promise to abide by the Clear Democracy Manifesto which basically states that the candidates will record and broadcast all meetings, phone calls, financial transactions and the like during their time in office.

It's radical for sure - but maybe, just maybe...

Think "Pink Link"

Over the years,
and over some beers,
the hyperlink has made me think.

It's taken on a new hat.
Always blue? Untrue!
Could be a new pink format.

Lately we've seen,
on the screen,
pink highlighted links.

Confused and confounded,
with no clues around it,
I set off on my search.

Before I Googled,
I noodled and noodled,
then this is what I found.

In pink and blue ink,
the link says I think,
"Don't Follow" to bots and crawlers.

If this isn't clear,
I will put here,
a page that will do you one better.

Hi-Tech Cheatsheets

My wife is a 7th grade teacher and came home last week upset because it appeared a number of students were cheating. What's interesting is not that they were cheating, but how they were cheating. To get away with cheating in school today you need to have a good grasp of technology and you also need to play a good game of chicken.

To cheat in school today requires a good grasp of technology. The methods we used as kids just don't cut it. They're too transparent and other kids will rat you out. Last month my wife had caught a boy cheating, but he tried to cheat the old-fashioned way: he wrote the answers on the back of his schoolbag which lay in front of him during the exam. Another boy saw the crib sheets and informed the teacher. But when my wife made an example of the student, it sent a message to the other would-be-cheaters... stealth is the key. And so they turned high-tech. Instead of simply writing the answers on their backpack or the back of their hand, they recorded the answers in an MP3 audio file, loaded the file on their iPod, and listened to the recorded notes via a small wireless earpiece!

Pretty clever, huh? But since the earpiece was too small to be noticed easily, how did she discover it? That's where the game of chicken comes in. She noticed something fishy about a number of the papers, but didn't quite know how they had cheated, or exactly which of the suspects were involved. So she called ten boys in and told them, "I know many of you cheated on the last test. I have proof that shows you cheated, as well as informants that helped me figure it out." Mainly she was bluffing. She suspected foul play but didn't know exactly who or how. "So I'll give you a choice... I'll meet with each of you individually and give you the chance to fess up. If I feel you're being completely honest and telling the whole story, I'll treat you more leniently. If you continue to lie, the Principle and I have decided we will suspend you."

From there they fell like a house of cards. The cheaters confessed and ratted each other out, figuring they'd better fess up before their friends fingered them in the plot. The technical nature of the feat made it a collaborative effort. It helped that this is a wealthy school and the students could all afford iPods and wireless headphones.

Cheating has indeed become more Mission Impossible than when I was a kid. But in the end it was still the weakness of mind, rather than an error of the machine, that took these young miscreants down.

Video is the new graffiti

Since the dawn of time man has yearned to express himself. Think cave art. While Kings and movie stars never have trouble getting an audience, the masses always do. And their outlets haven't changed much since the cave men. Think graffiti.

Of course nowadays teens have MySpace and the rest of us have blogs where we are free to express ourselves. But it still doesn’t mean anyone's listening. And blogging in China or radical Islamic regimes aren't as free as blogging in more open societies.

But I'm here to tell you that the big news in free expression is not blogs, but video. Video is the new graffiti. If you're thinking, "Wait, camcorders have been around for decades - what's changed?" I'm going to tell you.

1. Creation. High quality video capture devices have shrunken and are available on phones, still digicams, and other low cost consumer devices. Example: Casio Exilim. For $400 you can have a 30 fps video camera slimmer than a pack of cards and fits in your shirt pocket. It also takes 7 MP stills, and virtually unlimited audio.

2. Compression. Just in the last year it's become extremely easy to create and host video that streams over the Web without any serious delays or issues. Anybody really can broadcast their own video. At just $7/mo a hosting company will provide 5 GB of space, and a quick Google search will instruct even an amateur on how to publish a video stream that starts on page load.

3. Platforms. Video is not confined to the TV anymore. Now it's downloaded off the web and transferred onto iPods, phones, pdas, and more. This has two implications. The first is that people are choosing their own content which can be very specialized, and not just waiting for NBC or HBO to launch a new series. The second is that it lowers the bar for video and sound production, since a $10,000 professional video camera and a $300 camera phone video can produce the same output on a 2" square screen.

4. Distribution. New content discovery tools like Digg (for blogs) and a host of upstarts trying to do similar things for video (Grouper, YouTube, Stickam) give content publishers a more populist shot at getting an audience. Anyone can publish a link to their content and then the “masses” vote for what’s important, cool, or just whacky enough to be interesting. These get promoted to the top.

5. Filtering. Video can't be filtered so easily like blogs can. It's easy to block any blog that has the words "Free Tibet", but it's hard to find all the videos that contain the same words in the audio track or displayed visually on a sign by a protestor caught on tape.

The biggest obstacle right now is psychological, not technical. We don't yet think of ourselves as cameramen, producers, or reporters. But in time we might. Everyone with modest means and access to a high speed connection can express more complex and controversial ideas in the video format. And you don’t need a degree in non-linear video editing. Video - the "idiot box" format - isn't looking so dumb after all.

Plaxo's hidden gem...

I signed up for Plaxo a while back, thinking it'd be cool to have a "professional" email signature. That was a good marketing trick because I could have created the same professional looking business card signature without Plaxo. But they packaged it up and gave it away. So there I my in.

Then the next feature I knew about - and the one I thought was their core draw - was getting these updates so you're always up-to-date with your friends' contact info. Except that's proven to be of minor value. Most friends are not on it, and every time I update my contact info I fear it sends everyone an alert. That's fine if I really did move or change jobs. But it does it when I merely change a fax number or add an icon.

But recently I figured out the money feature. Don't tell them, but I'd actually pay (some small amount) for this feature: syncing Outlook between 2 computers. Now they don't shout about this feature from the hilltops, nor do they have any decent documentation on it, but I don't know why.

Doesn't everyone nowadays have a work computer and a home computer? And furthermore, doesn't everyone have a Palm, PocketPC, Treo, Blackberry, or whatever? And how in the world do people keep all their calendar items and contacts in synch?

So enter Plaxo. You can still use Outlook on both machines, and you can use Plaxo Online if you wish. And you can synch them together. But how?

The secret is this... If you already have different address books (or calendars) on each computer, when you try to synch it, it will create separate folders and both machines. You'll never be able to combine them. Some people might want to keep their work calendar and home calendar separate. I can see the value in that, except that when in comes to syncing everything with your handheld device, if you're using a PocketPC with ActiveSync like I am, it's only going to let you sync with the main Outlook folders, now the secondary folders that Plaxo creates. [If I'm wrong on this, please email and tell me how to do that.] Even so I think there are many benefits to just using one folder for all the computers, albeit with Categories in case you do need to view just one type (work or personal).

So what you need to do is on one machine, copy your folder to some other renamed folder. Then delete all the contents of that main folder. Now it is a completely "empty" folder. Now when you sync it with Plaxo, it will really sync - not create a second folder. So it'll download all the items from the folder on the second computer. Now that you've got that worked out, you need to drag and drop all the events or contacts from the duplicate folder you moved into the main folder. Sync again, then sync on the second computer, and you're all done.

Firefox - smoke and mirrors?

I've been a devoted user of Firefox for the past year, and have joined millions of others in declaring to friends, "It just seems faster and smarter." Did a browser magically make my DSL line actually go faster? Did it make my processor speed rev? No. While they did cut out some bloatware, it's a bit of well designed smoke and mirrors.

If I had to boil it down to why I use it, it's the feature that lets you open a link in a new browser. Now the trick to the way Firefox did it - and what got me hooked - is that it opens it in a window that is hidden behind the current window. So you can still read the page you're on while it loads. So you waste less time staring an empty browser. Therefore it "feels" faster. Nice trick.

It reminds me of a story I heard when I was a strategy consultant at R.B. Webber & Co. A major downtown skyscraper is getting a lot complaints about their elevators being too slow. They call the elevator company and they say it'll cost millions to rip 'em out and install hi-speed ones. So next they call a consultant in. He says, "I can solve your problem in under $10,000." They say, OK and he goes to work. A month later the building reports that the complaints have all but stopped. What did the consultant do? He installed mirrors on the outside elevator doors. People still waited the same amount of time for the elevators to arrive, but they so enjoy looking at themselves that they barely noticed the wait.

Tracking email opens

My company wants to track how many emails we send out, how many get opened, how many click-through, and what the conversion is on those emails.

We use WebSideStory and we send out our own emails, without the help of an agency. We already track the emails a Campaigns in HBX, so we know the click through rate. What we don't know is how many get opened.

Step 1 is to either place a tracking gif in the email or take note of an image that's already there. In our case, the banners for all our emails are unique, so all we need to do is count how many times our servers received a request for that image. The catch is that emails don't have the HBX javascript file, so we can't track it in HBX.

Step 2 is to get reports from the log files that show how many they were requested. So here our engineers need to be involved since we primarily rely on the ASP model web tracking of HBX.

Step 3 is figuring out what the "open rate" really means. Here's a good article that describes what "open" actually refers to.

Here's someone who's offering up their custom code for free.

If you're sending text-only emails, read this.