This looks good to me. Feels like good to blog here

I became convinced today that our biggest problems are monocultures. What's bad for lawns and farms is also bad for classrooms, churches, industries, governments, political parties, banks, credit card companies and every other organization that lives by controlling and isolating its members. In other words, silos.

Today there's been some interesting back and forth between Steve Gillmor (to whose gang I belong) and myself on the subject of what Steve calls the "page view model" vs. the "attention model". I've been representing the former and Steve the latter.

Background is provided by Dave Winer, who writes, Links are now devalued. Page-rank is under attack and the attackers are winning. It won't be long before Google itself is infested. Tim Bray is right, below, it's time for Google to get on top of this. They're both the victimizer and the victim. The spammers found a huge hole in Page-rank. You could drive a truck through it. I was the early warning system on this, the canary in the coal mine. They don't like to listen to me, maybe they'll accept Verisign's help. (Context: Dave just sold Weblogs.com, the ping site on which all RSS search engines rely, to Verisign.)

I believe links are devalued because Google has become a monoculture, both as a search engine and as an advertising system. Blog spammers, or sploggers, are taking advantage of that monoculture in the same way boll weevils take advantage of a cotton field.

I know a fair amount of what the RSS engines are doing about blog spam, or splogs. And I salute Mark Cuban for being the first search engine honcho (he's an investor in IceRocket) to call major attention to the problem, and for coining the term "splog".

But I don't see much sign that Google is doing more than putting a little notification flag on blogspot blogs, to allow readers to notify google that the blog in question is possibly a fake one. No doubt they are dealing with the problem, though. So is Yahoo, from what I'm told (and see in results). But we need to hear more (perhaps from Google's AdSense blog?).

But is any of it enough? I don't think so. The bigger question is, Can anything be enough to thwart a blight in a monocultural environment?

The real answer to the link devaluation problem has to come from outside Google.

I just got off an unwelcome call this morning from one of my credit card providers, which was paying a clueless telemarketing drone to sell me "identity theft insurance". I guess "credit life" (or whatever euphemism they call it now) isn't selling well enough.

Anyway, it occurs to me that what they call my identity isn't what I call my identity. Also that what I call my identity isn't what anybody else calls me, exactly. To most people who quote or point to me, I'm Doc Searls. To my sister and older family members, I'm Dave Searls. To some of the organizations issuing the identities in my wallet, I'm David A. Searls. To others, David Searls. There's even one with David Searles.

As of today, Google finds 3,210,000 results for "Doc Searls", and 66,600 for "Doc Searles", including this one from Answers.com, which also includes a misspelling of Gillmor Gang.

Do any of these define me? What does?

In two words, my body.

"The mind is inherently embodied" is the first sentence of the first chapter of Philosophy in the Flesh, by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (Basic Books, 1999). Reason and morality proceed from an embodied knowledge of the world, Lakoff and Johnson say. (For example, we produce moral metaphors that equate light and up with good and dark and down with bad because we are diurnal animals that walk upright.)

Identity is embodied. Here's Walt Whitman in Song of Myself.

Urge and urge and urge,
Always the procreant urge of the world.
Out of the dimness opposite equals advance, always
     substance and increase, always sex,
Always a knit of identity, always distinction, always a breed
     of life.

Later he adds,

I know I am solid and sound.
To me the converging objects of the universe
perpetually flow.
All are written to me,
and I must get what the writing means.
I know I am deathless.
I know this orbit of mine cannot be swept
by a carpenter's compass,

I know I am august,
I do not trouble my spirit to vindicate itself or be understood,
I see that the elementary laws never apologize...

I exist as I am, that is enough,
If no other in the world be aware I sit content,
And if each and all be aware I sit content.
One world is aware and by far the largest to me, and that is
     myself,
And whether I come to my own to-day or in ten thousand or
     ten million years,
I can cheerfully take it now, or with equal cheerfulness I can
     wait.

My foothold is tenon'd and mortis'd in granite,
I laugh at what you call dissolution,
And I know the amplitude of time.

Anyway, I think a lot of what we call "identity" is actually naming. The name that appears on my credit and membership cards is one that they assign to me. It's a database record. Of course, it's good for many uses (and bad for some too). But it is not who I am. It is a carpenter's compass within which my august self will not be swept. Whitman again:

That's what Dave Rosenberg wonders. He explains,

I consider writing a blog to generally be easier than what might be considered "traditional" journalism, which I also engage in. But, it's becoming increasingly difficult to find new trusted sources of information for discussion. The huge success of RSS is based on the blogosphere's need for more information, delivered easily, I believe in part because the majority of what's out there is redundant, trite or not well thought out. I am a big supporter of citizen journalism (call it what you want) but I am also a bit of a literary snob and extremely well-informed. It's getting harder and harder to find relevance through the haze.

The first time I went on a Linux Lunacy Geek Cruise, our hackers spent the first several days working to bypass the lame Windows-only Internet setup. They found a router, jacked a wi-fi access point into the thing, and provided much-needed wireless laptop service. Of course, they also pissed off the folks who ran the Internet cafe (which consisted of several dedicated Windows workstations with 800x600 displays, as I recall). These days the public areas of cruise ships (especially ones as immense and modern as the Carnival Miracle, on which the latest Lunacy takes place) are thick with wi-fi. But the connectivity isn't much better. Yesterday at sea it took me an hour to download this IT Conversation, which I needed to write my next column for Linux Journal. I watched the download rate vary from zero to 19Kbps in harmony with the horizon slowly moving up and down out the window. Latency times ranged from a half second to two seconds. Packet losses ranged from 15% to 100%. The file took an hour. At a rate that's hardly cheap.

Microsoft fails to recruit Eric S. Raymond.

They probably won't try that again.

With Latex Exam Gloves and Digital Identity, the Head Lemur takes an increasingly familiar problem, Digital Identity is getting way too complicated, and simplifies it, which he does with this plain (to borrow the arcana of IdentoLatin (see the pull-down menu defaulted to TechnoLatin) assertion:

Digital Identity is about sitting at a computer and swapping Money for Stuff from the comfort of your chair. Before the DI folks go crazy about how much more it is, credit scores, employment information, and yes even Medical Information, is reduceable into Money for Stuff.

Money for Stuff is the Prime Number of Digital Identity, it does not reduce any further than that.

He continues,

Whatever Digital Identity scheme gets adopted it must have two cardinal points.

One of the greatest all-time DIY IT stories is the one that will be told, and re-told about how DirectNIC stayed up and running through Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, which remains the greatest disaster to befall a major American city in the country's history: a catastrophe on par with the Chicago Fire and the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco.

Sigmund "Sig" Solares is a lifelong New Orleans native and the CEO of DirectNIC, a substantial domain registrar and hosting service headquartered in the Crescent City, close to the Superdome. While DirectNIC's data center, on the 9th floor of a large office building, was not flooded out, it was victim to the complete loss of infrastructure suffered by the city surrounding it. Gone were electricity, ventillation, elevator service, water and, well, civilization. Yet Sig and his crew kept the service running — while all hell broke loose outside. Literally.

Once it was clear that trying to contact and talk with Sig would not constitute bad manners or an unwelcome distraction, we got on the phone and talked for about 45 minutes about a variety of subjects, many of which I hoped would go beyond the kind of thing already reported (often very well) in the press and countless blogs, including Interdictor, the lifeline-blog operated by Michael Barnett, who serves as Crisis Manager at DirectNIC. Interdictor remains one of the clearest voices of sanity and competence coming out of the heart of New Orleans.

My conversation with Sig will inform an upcoming essay in Linux Journal. Meanwhile it is also serving as our inaugural podcast in a series produced in partnership with IT Conversations, which recorded and produced the finished result.

So here it is: Surviving Katrina with DirectNIC.

Marcus Ranum brings a strong analytical frame of mind in his brilliant analysis The Six Dumbest Ideas in Computer Security. You need to read it!

I have had it with MS and their Monopolisic ways.

Read my posting here: http://AgainstTheMachine.blogspot.com or at http://mgalug.org/rantagainst.

Nomasteryoda - out