digitaldust

There is one view that CMS apps and community apps are the same thing. They both deal with content and they both have users. There are a large number of people who I work with who tar both types of systems with the same brush.

Finally while in a meeting with Jim telling me what DNA is it clicked.

I can finally do a taxonomical classification based on physiological differences. I know the primary recognizable difference. It’s as obvious as vertebrates vs. invertebrates, you just need to look at the skeleton; the data structures.

The primary data element for social software is the user. The thing that everything else in the database will eventually relates to is the user. It’s the primary data element.

For a CMS the primary data element is a content item. It will then have metadata that relates to users and other data types, but the content item is the primary data element.

Simple yet powerful. There are a number of ways that this makes a difference, interaction design and basic database design being the two most obvious.

I’m just not sure yet whether a CMS or social software is the invertebrate.

I’m sitting here again listening to the Today programme - my god that’s starting to sound like a litany - and heard the usual mile high piece on viruses, spurred on by the latest and particularly virulent Mydoom strain.

They strayed off viruses themselves and talked a bit about hackers/crackers and the mindset of people who write them. The usual questions came up about whether we could ever have systems that were un-crackable, and it was interesting to hear from the interviewer that they completely understood that it was an ongoing and escalating battle between crackers and security folks.

Many views of security are that one should put in lots of effort to make whatever it is as secure as possible. My view is that all you need to do is make things slightly more secure but visibly more secure.

If I want to lock up my bicycle I can’t ever make it secure enough that it wont get stolen. A van full of power tools can cruise up and even with the best locks that money can buy they’ll have my bike in 5 minutes, or even worse just take off with bits. The only way to make it fully secure is to cement the whole thing 5 feet under the ground. Computer security is similar. To make it completely secure is to actually make it unusable, if people can get at it then by definition it’s unsecure.

But no bike is an island - unless it’s been thrown in a canal. If you make your bike more secure than its neighbours, and visibly more secure than its neighbours then prospective tea leafs will choose easier pickings. Computer security should work on the same principles of competition to ensure that they personally don’t get broken into, and play the principle by making sure that you only need to be more secure than easy pickings, and somehow communicate this to prospective crackers. Maybe they should send back a list of easier IPs to hack with every exploratory ping.

Now of course this doesn’t apply to viruses which are indiscriminate. And it wont help if your bike is much much nicer than the ones around it. Tall poppies need very strong stems.

I was listening to the Today programme this morning, as I usually do and was feeling morally outraged, as I usually do, by some of the backlash coming from the Hutton report.

One of the “suggestions” seems to be that journalists cannot report news based on the word of one person. They couldn’t just ring David Kelly get his (obviously biased, but then who isn’t) views and report on that.

Now a couple of things occur to me. Firstly, wasn’t that the justification for going to war. The whole 45 minute claim was unproven and came from one dissatisfied member of Sadam Hussein’s military, who was paid for the information. Now if the Intelligence Services were swayed by the government’s desire to justify themselves, who’s to say that some guy in Iraq ain’t swayed by a huge bundle of fivers.

On another point, all news is based on subjective reporting, rumors and hearsay. In fact the biggest and most interesting news and the stuff which sells lots of product is the stuff that is purely based on that: the plethora of Royal Family allegations, the leaked report 2 days ago, the Clinton scandal, any trouble that Blair has been in over the last decade… the list goes on. All some tidbit of information from a single source, maybe the truth comes out eventually by trawling through the evidence, but at the end of the day it usually comes down to nice, biased, subjective, personally interested individuals.

Anyway, here’s an interesting picture to put it all in perspective.

It’s a beautiful day today and I was trying to take pictures on the bus on the way in. I’m particularly enamored of the cranes by Spitalfields market; they have a strange insect like majesty; they lurk over their rubble like creations like a clutch of praying mantis’ discussing husbands over a few quick snacks. This got me thinking about Tarot (and especially about the Frieda Harris deck), and the Tower card; the downfall of the works of man.

I thought it might be a good idea to do a photo series or body around this concept; using the Tower card as a jumping off point, a conceptual muse. I’ve always found a close affinity to that card. In fact I think my domain name is a direct reflection of this. I see the card as a reflection of technology; it is the Tower of Babel; man’s attempt to become closer to god; our attempt to conquer ourselves and the world around us along with the inherent likelihood of failure, destruction, ruin and death.

This is usually the worst card to be dealt; it means an end to all your plans, though that obviously depends on where it is placed in the spread. But I like the promise of structures contained within building sites and the idea of that modern technology decays, which is contrary to what it itself believes; modern technology thinks of itself as immortal, along with those associated closely with it.

Interestingly enough I came across this site offering online Crowley Tarot readings in a Celtic Cross Spread. Does the spread for you, I’m not sure if it has all the minor arcana, as when I did a spread all I got was major arcana and royalty. Maybe I’m just in for some big events in the near future.

Crazy dada-esque web remixing site that I found via boingboing, Mina Naguib’s TopFX.com.

Just about anything mixed with the content from the stile project is good. New BBC editorial stile? or even me.

I’ve just scanned in and uploaded a bunch of photos from my trip to see Andrew get hitched in Tuscany.

Fotopic.Net: Siena and Tuscany

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I wonder how many CRT monitors there are out there?

Especially as they all seem to be being replaced with LCDs. Both computer monitors and TVs. I wonder what surface area all the screens in the world would cover, how big a TV could they all be if they were put together?

There are 484 million internet users in the world. Maybe half of them own a computer? Most probably have about a 14″ screen. A 14″ screen is about 100 square inches, about 0.064516 square metres. (Err on the conservative if erred on the optimistic before, there’s lots of bigger screens, but also lots of people who are more than doubled up on computers.)

That’s about 31 square kms. Or a square computer screen 5.5 km on a side, or 7.7km diagonal. It would look quite small from orbit and wouldn’t be much use for working with from there, plus the mouse cord wouldn’t reach.

James suggested that they could be used to make the world’s largest particle accelerator.

Yep we’re going back to the moon, well that’s us as in US and the free world behind them. I’m sceptical like Gavin, or any other right thinking person in the world.

So Bush is commiting a few billion to the Mars race, these are not numbers he fears, he’s a big spender, he’s had well over US$100bn for his wars, he got US$50bn for Afghanistan and US$68bn for Iraq as well as his beefed up defense budget and all the money he’s spending on “homeland security”.

Spend a couple of hundred billion Bush and we could fly to Mars and have money to solve some other problems that bombs and landmines are causing us. In fact lets spend a few billion getting everyone up into space and then no kids will have to step on landmines, only a few lost goats.

I’ve just swithced RSS-stylee feedreaders from FeedReader to Bloglines… all in all a much less painful experience than I was expecting.

FeedReader was desktop based and Bloglines is all web based, but from my quick play, quick and very usable. The other funny bit is the recommendations, I scrolled through the list bloglines presented me with and found bunches of people I work with. No doubt it must compare my list of feeds and do a comparison with other lists (possibly statistically, possibly collaborative filtering) to give me it’s recommendations. People who read what I read also read those colleagues and friends who I’ve not added yet.

Am now going to remedy and then see what else I get.