Can Google Measure up to Technorati?

Google has acquired Measure Map, a service that tracks visitors and links to blogs. This is of double interest to me.

First, because like all that pathetic crew known to the wider world as bloggers, I am hopelessly addicted to learning who has visited and linked to my blog (this sad human need will surely form the basis of several killer business applications - if only I could think of them...).

This acquisition places another company offering similar services, Technorati, squarely in Google's sights. It also makes Technorati rather more desirable to Google's rivals - no names, no pack drill, but you know who you are. Which brings me neatly to the second reason why this move is of interest to me, since I have an interview with Technorati's founder and CEO, Dave Sifry, in the Guardian today, which touches on many of these points.

I first interviewed Dave some six years ago, when I was writing Rebel Code. At that time, he was riding the dotcom wave with his earlier company, Linuxcare. This had come up with the wizard idea of offering third-party support for all the main open source programs that were widely used in business at the time. As a result, it had mopped up just about every top hacker outside the Linux kernel - people like Andrew Tridgell, the creator of Samba, a program that allows GNU/Linux machines to interoperate with Windows networks by acting as a file and printer server.

There is a certain irony in the fact that Google will now be a competitor to Sifry's Technorati, since in two important respects Linuxcare anticipated a key Google practice: mopping up those hackers, and then encouraging them to work on ancillary projects on company time.

Sifry's explanation back in 2000 of the logic behind this approach throws some interesting light on Google's adoption of the idea:

Number one, it encourages us to get the best developers in the world. When you are actually telling people, hey, I want you to work on open source software while you're at work, , that is pretty unique. And then once you get some [of the best coders], you end up getting more. Because everybody wants to work with the best people. Number two is, the more good open source software that's out there, the more people who are using open source software [there are]. And guess what, that means the more people who are going to need the services of a company like Linuxcare. Number three, when you encourage people to work on open source software while they're at work, you end up getting leaders and teams of open source engineers who now work for your company. And then lastly, but by no means least, it's great PR.

It was good to talk to Dave again, because I found that he hadn't really changed from the lively, enthusiastic, generous individual I'd discovered those years ago. It was particularly good to find that success - as I say in my Guardian piece, Technorati is either going to be bought by someone for lots of money, or make lots of money with an IPO soon - hasn't changed any of that.

More conclusive proof, if any were needed, that free software really is good for the soul.

Microsoft and Open Source: Two Tales

One is about Microsoft joining with SugarCRM, which produces open source customer relation management software, "to enhance interoperability between their respective Windows Server and SugarCRM products." A key point of this "technical collaboration" is that SugarCRM becomes "the first commercial open source application vendor to adopt the Microsoft Community License."

The latter is an interesting beast. It forms one of several Shared Source Licenses - "Shared Source" being Microsoft's attempt to counter the good vibes and reap some of the proven benefits enjoyed by open source's development methodology. Despite its name hinting otherwise, the Microsoft Community License is not included in the official list of open source licences.

One of the most interesting documents to come out of the Shared Source initiative is called "Microsoft and Open Source". What it presents is Microsoft's public analysis of free software; particularly fascinating is the wedge that it attempts to drive between what it calls "commercial and non-commercial segments". The key paragraph is as follows:

A common misperception about software developed under the open source model is that a loosely-coupled group of distributed developers is creating the software being adopted by business. Although this is true for some smaller projects, the reality is that professional corporate teams or highly structured not-for-profit organizations are driving the production, testing, distribution, and support of the majority of the key OSS technologies.

What Microsoft's document fails to note is that those "professional corporate teams" and "highly structured not-for-profit organizations" are largely filled with hackers: the fact that they are in some cases receiving good salaries instead of the usual love and glory is neither here nor there. The hacker spirit is not tamed just because it wears a corporate hat (just ask Alan Cox).

What is interesting about this is that it shows Microsoft attempting to co-opt the bulk of open source as part of the commercial world, implicitly arguing that it is the commercialism, not the open sourceness that really counts when it comes to great coding. Microsoft, needless to say, has commercialism in abundance, and so - the fallacious syllogism implies - it must be knocking out some damn fine code.

More generally, Microsoft's continuing efforts to cozy up to open source - as with the SugarCRM announcement - are really just further attempts to blur the distinction between the two, to imply that it's six of one and half a dozen of the other, and so to diminish the attractive exoticism of what has hitherto been perceived as a radically different approach.

Which brings us to the second tale.

Daniel Robbins may not be the best-known name in the free software world, but his creation, the Gentoo GNU/Linux distribution, possesses an undeniable popularity - and a certain cachet, given its reputation as being not for the faint-hearted. So when he announced that he was joining Microsoft's new Linux and Open Source Lab in order to help the company "understand open source", there was a sharp intake of collective breath around the free software world.

The news that Robbins is now leaving Microsoft, less than a year after he joined, is therefore likely to produce some similarly audible sighs of relief from that community. Although it is not entirely clear what happened, it is not hard to guess that Microsoft's desire to understand open source was not with a view to entering upon a harmonious relationship between equals.

In other words, the two tales are but one: that Microsoft is applying its considerable corporate intelligence to the conundrum of open source - hitting it, probing it, squeezing it, stroking it, modelling it, copying it, engaging with it, even - to find out where are its edges, what it's made of, how it works; and how it might be defeated.

For all the sweet talk in Microsoft's open source document mentioned above, no one should be in any doubt about the company's real objectives in all this. Its view that open source is some crazy, anti-capitalist, crypto-communistic canker, though not expressed quite so vehemently in public, is surely just as deeply held in private by its core managers (though not necessarily but its coders) as it ever was. Everything else is just a story for the children.

XML Made Extravagant and Extraordinary

One of the most interesting areas in the world of open standards is the OpenDocument format, which promises to do to Microsoft Office what GNU/Linux is doing to Windows Server. I'm on various mailing lists related to this, and on one of them, from the standards body OASIS, a press release turned up in my inbox today. It proudly informed me that "its members have approved the Election Markup Language (EML) version 1.0 as an OASIS Standard, a status that signifies the highest level of ratification."

The OASIS press release told me that "EML provides a high-level overview of the processes within an electronic voting system and XML schemas for the various data interchange points between the e-voting processes," but naturally I wanted more than this dry description. So I went off to find out more. And the place I turned to was one of the most extraordinary sites on the Internet: the Cover Pages (hosted, in fact, by the self-same OASIS).

This, basically, is the fount of all wisdom for XML standards. And since XML lies at the heart of open data (and OpenDocument), this makes the Cover Pages one of the central sites for the open world. Naturally, it had all the details on EML. And here to whet your appetite are a few more of the XML Applications listed:

Weather Markup Language
Intrusion Detection Message Exchange Format
Historical Event Markup and Linking
Open Philanthropy Exchange
Green Building XML
Robotic Markup Language
Meaning Definition Language

The only question I have is how one man - since the Cover Pages seem to be the work of Robin Cover - can possibly stay on top of what seems to be all human life, neatly expressed as an XML application. Gaze, wonder and be grateful.

Scrying an Oracle

This story has so many interesting elements in it that it's just got to be true.

According to Business Week, Oracle is poised to snap up no less than three open source companies: JBoss, Zend and Sleepycat Software. JBoss - which calls itself the "professional open source company", making everyone else unprofessional, I suppose - is one of the highest-profile players in this sector. Not least because its founder, the Frenchman Marc Fleury, has a tongue as sharp as his mind (you can sample his blog with this fab riff on genomics, Intelligent Design and much else).

His controversial remarks and claims in the past have not always endeared him to others in the free software world. Take, for example, the "disruptive Professional Open Source model" he proudly professes, "which combines the best of the open source and proprietary software worlds to make open source a safe choice for the enterprise and give CIOs peace of mind." Hmm, I wonder what Richard Stallman has to say about that.

JBoss has been highly successful in the middleware market: if you believe the market research, JBoss is the leader in the Java application server sector. Oracle's acquisition would make a lot of sense, since databases on their own aren't much fun these days: you need middleware to hook them up to the Internet, and JBoss fits the bill nicely. It should certainly bolster Oracle in its battle against IBM and Microsoft in the fiercely-fought database sector.

While many might regard the swallowing up of an ambivalent JBoss by the proprietary behemoth Oracle as just desserts of some kind, few will be happy to see Zend suffer the same fate. Zend is the company behind the PHP scripting language - one of the most successful examples of free software. (If you're wondering, PHP stands for "PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor" - employing your standard hacker recursive acronym naming convention).

Where JBoss is mostly key for companies running e-commerce Web sites, say, PHP is a core technology of the entire open source movement. Its centrality is indicated by the fact that it is one of the options for the ubiquitous LAMP software stack: Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP or Perl or Python. The fact that Oracle will own the engine that powers PHP will be worrying for many in the free software world.

About Sleepycat, I can only say: er, who? - but that's just ignorance on my part. This article explains that Sleepycat's product, Berkeley DB, is actually the "B" in LAMP. Got that? The Sleepycat blog may throw some more light on this strange state of affairs - or maybe not.

Whatever the reason that Oracle wants to get its mitts on Sleepycat as well as Zend and JBoss, one thing is abundantly clear if these rumours prove true: Oracle is getting very serious about open source.

In the past, the company has had just about the most tortuous relationship with open source of any of the big software houses. As I wrote in Rebel Code, in early July 1998, an Oracle representative said "we're not seeing a big demand from our customer that we support it" - "it" being GNU/Linux. And yet just two weeks later, Oracle announced that it was porting Oracle8 to precisely that platform. This was one of the key milestones in the acceptance of free software by business: no less a person than Eric Raymond told me that "the Oracle port announcement...made the open source concept unkillable by mere PR" - PR from a certain company being a big threat in the early days of corporate adoption.

Open source has come on by leaps and bounds since then, and these moves by Oracle are not nearly so momentous - at least for free software. But I wonder whether the otherwise canny Larry Ellison really knows what he's getting into.

Until now, Oracle has mainly interacted with open source through GNU/Linux - that is, at arm's length. If it takes these three companies on board - especially if it acquires Zend - it will find itself thrown into the maelstrom of open source culture. Here's a hint for Mr Ellison: you don't get to assimilate that culture, whatever you might be thinking of doing with the companies. You either work with it, or it simply routes around you.

Yes, I'm talking about forks here: if Oracle misplays this, and tries to impose itself on the PHP or JBoss communities, I think it will be in for a rude surprise. To its credit, IBM really got this, which is why its embrace of open source has been so successful. Whether Oracle can follow in its footsteps, only time will tell.

But the rumoured acquisitions, if they go ahead, will have one other extremely significant effect. They will instantly add credibility, viability and desirability to a host of other second-generation open source companies that have grown up in the last few years. Free software will gain an immediate boost, and hackers will suddenly find themselves in great demand again.

Given the astonishing lift-off of Google's share price, and the palpable excitement surrounding Web 2.0 technologies (and the start-ups that are working on them), the hefty price-tags on open source companies being bandied around in the context of Oracle have a feeling of déjà-vu all over again: didn't we go through all this with Red Hat and VA Linux a few years back?

You don't have to be clairvoyant - or an oracle - to see that if these deals go through, the stage is well and truly set for Dotcom Delirium 2.0.

Rich Media Search

Two rather large straws in the wind: Riya - which offers face recognition in pictures with automatic tagging - and Nexidia, which claims to be "the only technology to fully leverage the actual phonemes that define human speech", creating a "highly scalable tool for audio mining and speech analytics."

Assuming these deliver on their promises, they could be very big. Imagine being able to let your PC search through thousands of photos for people - or, more interestingly, groups of people; imagine being able to upload thousands of hours of recorded conversation, and find just the spoken phrase you were looking for.

Combine this with the continuing drop in the price of hard drives - and hence the ability to store as many photos and recordings as you like - and you are getting close to a situation where you could archive all the significant visual and aural moments in your life - and find them again.

In Praise of Google Utopianism

An executive at one of the main US telecommunication companies, Verizon, has decried the fact that:

"The network builders [i.e. telecommunication companies] are spending a fortune constructing and maintaining the networks that Google intends to ride on with nothing but cheap servers."

Excuse me, isn't that what Google pays for when it buys connectivity to the Internet, and what you and I pay for when we sign up for Internet access (like here, for example)? So, in fact, the networks are already being paid twice for this service. Isn't that enough?

The only consolation is that this bizarre accusation has given birth to the rather wonderful concept of "Google Utopianism" to describe this state of affairs. Me? - I call that the latest incarnation of the Internet, personally, where those naughty "cheap servers" - mostly running GNU/Linux - are creating a vast range of exciting new services.

If that's Google Utopianism, you can call me Sir Thomas.

Word of the Week: Podfading

Podfading describes the kind of burn-out that podcasters are prone to - when the effort of recording yet another podcast proves too much, and they just give up.

Of course, the same effect can be observed more generally in the blogosphere. According to Dave Sifry, in his latest State of the Blog Nation analysis, "13.7 million bloggers are still posting 3 months after their blogs are created." Since there are around 27.2 million blogs according to Sifry, this means that nearly 50% aren't still posting after 3 months. Blogfading, anyone?

The Horror! The Horror!

Can any fellow-countrymen (or anyone, for that matter) explain to me why the UK now sits wallowing at the bottom of the Firefox market share table? Only 11% of us Brits use Firefox, compared to 38% of the enlightened Finn nation, and against a Europe-wide average of 20%. Even the North Americans use it more than we do.

Why is this?

Mozilla Dot Party 2.0

For me, one of the most exciting chapters of Rebel Code to write was that called, rather enigmatically, "Mozilla Dot Party", which described the genesis of the open source browser Mozilla.

Thanks to the extensive historical records in the form of Usenet posts, I already had a pretty good idea where GNU/Linux came from, but the reasons behind the dramatic decision of Netscape - the archetypal Web 1.0 company - to release its crown jewels, the code for its browser Navigator, as open source, were as mysterious as they were fascinating (at least insofar as they went beyond blind despair). So the chance to talk with some of the key people like Eric Hahn and Frank Hecker, who made that happen, and to begin to put the Mozilla story together for the first time was truly a privilege.

But it was only the start of the story. My chapter finished in April 1999, at the point where another key actor in the story, Jamie Zawinski, had resigned from Netscape, despairing of ever seeing a viable browser ship. (Parenthetically, his self-proclaimed "gruntle" and blog are some of the most entertaining geek writing out there. His "nomo zilla" forms the basis for the closing pages of my Mozilla chapter.)

What I didn't know at the time was that Mozilla would eventually ship that browser, and that from the original Mozilla would arise something even more important for the world of free software: Firefox. Unlke Mozilla, which was always rather a worthy also-ran - fiercely loved by its fans, but largely ignored by the vast majority of Net users - Firefox showed that open source could be both cool and populist.

Given this background, I was therefore delighted to come across (via Slashdot) chapter 2 of the story in the form of a fascinating entry in the blog of Ben Goodger, the lead engineer of Firefox. What is particularly satifying is that he begins it in early 1999 - at precisely the moment that mine stops. Is that art or what?

Fixing the Fox

I love Firefox. It really does everything I need, in the way I need. I've been using it since well before it was called Firefox (judging by the names it has gone through, it seems to have a serious identity problem).

But.

Every single version I have ever used on Windows has had one, near-fatal flaw: a massive memory leak. Even the latest version, currently 1.5.0.1, has sucked 182 Mbytes out of my system (the GNU/Linux version seems fine), and it's still going up.

True, I like to have lots of windows open, with lots of tabs in each window - but isn't that point of the Internet? So, every day or so, I have shut down all of them, wait for the memory to suddenly remember itself, and then off we go again. Thanks to Firefox's tabbed bookmarks, such shutdowns are not too painful to cope with. But it does mean I tend to lose those transient, interesting pages you come across and leave open for later perusal - but which aren't quite important enough to bookmark or add to del.icio.us.

I was therefore heartened to find that people are seriously working on this problem (still): this entry at the excellent site from Jesse Ruderman goes into what's been happening, and what's being done. If you're a Firefox user (and if you're not, you should really give it a whirl), this is a blog that's well worth keeping an eye on. Maybe even bookmarking.

First Meta-Blogs, Now Meta-Podcasting...

I can understand why there are blogs about blogs, but podcasts about podcasts? Where will this meta-madness end?

"I Am Not a Number - I Am a Free Man!"

Tagging objects with unique, artificial DNA sequences that act as a barcode is not new; but I had no idea that it had progressed to the point where it was almost routine, as in this collectibles tagging service. It works by marking the object with an invisible ink containing small quantities of a synthetic DNA tag.

Although the collectibles story mentions using lasers and fluorescence to authenticate the tag, a more scalable approach would be to read the DNA directly: that requires fast, cheap DNA sequencers, and there's plenty of those under development.

As the cost of DNA synthesis and sequencing plummets, so this kind of barcoding is likely to become common. It's easy to apply, does not disfigure the object as a conventional barcode does (to say nothing of an RFID chip), and so does not need to be removed when the customer takes the item home.

But there is a dangerous downside to this ingenious approach. It will make the idea of DNA tagging uncomfortably mundane. And once people are used to the practice in their daily lives, it's only a short step for companies and governments to move on to identifying people by some very special sequences of DNA - their own.

The big advantage is that you don't even need to apply the invisible ink: practically every cell in our body already has the DNA tag. That tag is unique (modulo the odd identical twin), and you can't change your underlying genomic sequence (local mutations aside). In effect, this DNA forms your very own permanent identification number - written in the quaternary digits A, C, G and T - that is ideal for key documents like passports, driving licences and health cards. What government could pass up the opportunity to adopt such a logical approach?

Moreover, because the number never changes, you leave behind in your life a continuous trail of DNA tags - in the form of discarded cells (hair, skin, saliva, blood) - that forms a complete record of where you went. Put another way, for any given event, governments will be able confidently to assign names to most of the people who were involved, as well as to innocent witnesses - sorting out which is which is merely a forensic detail - on the basis of the genomic calling-cards they inevitably leave behind.

So much for freedom, Number 6.

Open Source's Best-Kept Secret

Ajax is short for Asynchronous Javascript + XML; it enables a Web page to be changed in the browser on the fly, without needing to refer back to the original server. This leads to far faster response times, and is behind many of the most interesting developments on the Web today; Gmail is perhaps the most famous example. Essentially it turns the browsers into a lightweight platform able to run small apps independently of the operating system (now where have we heard that before?).

The news of an Open Ajax project that will simplify the creation of such sites is therefore welcome. However, what is most interesting about the announcement is not the luminaries who are lining up behind it - IBM, Oracle, Red Hat and Yahoo amongst others - but the fact that it is yet another Eclipse project.

To which most people would probably say, Who? For Eclipse is open source's best-kept secret. It stands in the same relation to Microsoft's Visual Studio development tools as GNU/Linux does to Windows, and OpenOffice.org to Microsoft Office. Where these address respectively the system software and office suite sectors, Eclipse is aimed at developers. It is another example of IBM's largesse in the wake of its Damascene conversion to open source: the project was created when the company released a large dollop of code under the Eclipse Public License.

What's interesting is how Eclipse has followed a very similar trajectory to GNU/Linux: at first it was ignored by software companies, who preferred to stick with their own proprietary rivals to the Microsoft juggernaut. Later, though, they realised that divided they would certainly fall, and so united around a common open standard. The list of "Strategic Members" and "Add-in Providers" reads like a Who's Who of the world's top software companies (bar one).

This illustrates another huge - and unique - strength of open source: the fact that it represents neutral ground that even rival companies can agree to support together. The mutual benefit derived from doing so outweighs any issues of working with traditional enemies.

Even though Eclipse is relatively little known at the moment, at least in the wider world, it is not a particular bold prediction to see it as becoming the most serious rival to Microsoft's Visual Studio, and the third member of the open source trinity that also includes GNU/Linux and OpenOffice.org.

The Mesh Behind the Mash

Great article by Jack Schofield on mashups. The journalistic detail it brought to this amorphous and currently very trendy Web 2.0 idea helped me understand something that I'd vaguely realised before, but hadn't fully been able to articulate.

The reason that so many mashups use Google Earth (aside from the fact it's a clever application and freely available) is that to bring together information from different sources you need something in common - a kind of peg on which to hang the data. Location is a very natural peg to choose, since everybody carries around in their heads a representation of the physical world, which they use to navigate through it. Moreover, we instinctively use it for our own mashups - the experiences and knowledge of life that are tied to locations. Google Earth therefore provides a convenient and very natural mesh for mashed-up online data.

In fact, it's hard to think of any other mesh that combines such fine granularity with this ease of comprehension. Perhaps something similar could be done with time (which, anyway, is simply the fourth dimension, and very similar to space) or Wikipedia entries (or subsets of them), since the latter are effectively a mesh for the non-physical world of ideas.

Update: I've now come across this interesting matrix of mashups. It shows that Google Maps is indeed the most popular mesh; others include Amazon, Del.icio.us, Flickr and Technorati.

Spreading Spread Firefox

Most computer users by now have heard of the Firefox browser. This is hardly surprising given the extraordinary rate at which it is still being downloaded and diffused around the world well over a year since its formal launch.

Given that there have now been nearly 150 million downloads (converting that into a meaningful number of users is probably impossible), it is only natural that people think of Firefox as an incredibly successful free browser. It is that, certainly, but it is also much more.

After all, the open source community has shown time and again it can write great code: Linux, Apache, The GIMP, OpenOffice.org - choose your own favourite. But Firefox has done something else - something that has never been done before by a free software project.

It has translated the secret of open source's power - a huge, distributed and connected development team - into the sphere of marketing. The Spread Firefox site has mobilised tens of thousands of users - not as beta testers, as has been the custom previously, but as a guerrilla marketing force.

Most famously, that force was mobilised to pay for the double-page ad in The New York Times. Through the aggregation of many relatively small donations it was able to take out some high-price advertising. In other words, the approach scales.

But the real achievement of Spread Firefox is much subtler, and more diffuse. The tens - hundreds? - of thousands of active Firefox supporters are Microsoft's worst nightmare: a completely invisible - because distributed - team of product evangelists that it can never hope to pin down, let alone match.

This is such an important step beyond the traditional open source process that it is tragic not more has been done with it. For example, although there is a Spread OpenOffice.org, it is only now that a Spread KDE site has been created; both seem in their early stages. But where are all the others? Where are Spread Linux, Spread Thunderbird, Spread GIMP, Spread Audacity and the rest?

All these programs have enthusiastic users who could be directly mobilised across the Internet to spread the word about how good these applications are. Relying on old-fashioned, uncoordinated word-of-mouth is simply to throw away everything that has been learned from Spread Firefox - and to discard one of the strongest trumps in the free software hand.

Contrapuntal DRM

DRM is one of the central themes that has been weaving in and out of many of my posts here; this well-written piece from Sun's Simon Phipps brings in plenty of other related topics too, and provides an interesting take on the issue (via Groklaw).

(It also includes a link that reminds me why I don't have an iPod - and why I hate the word "Podcast".)

Words - Fail - Me

Amazon is being accused of infringing someone's patents.

For inventing a Web registration system.

What can you say?

Microsoft is Right - No, Really

At first sight, the $100 laptop has everything going for it: it is based around open source software, uses renewable energy (you wind it up), and is trying to do something really worthwhile - put computing into the hands of children in developing nations.

But I have to say that, even though it is being done for all the usual wrong reasons, Bill Gates's alternative solution - to use a mobile 'phone to provide the processing power - seems spot on to me. As prices continue to plummet, mobile 'phones will soon be affordable even in countries with very low per capita incomes.

Moreover, today's mobiles are already computers: they play music, take digital photos, and often run office-type software (to say nothing of games). And they just keep on getting smaller and lighter. Convergence from the other end - putting a 'phone into a portable computer - does not lead to the same end-result for one simple reason: there is a limit to how small you can make a keyboard.

Mobiles get round this problem by ignoring it: keyboard entry is done either in a minimalist form (texting) or not at all. As I've written elsewhere, once voice recognition systems are good enough to cope with breathless speech on the move with significant background noises, nobody would even think of using a keyboard; typing will become some ancient art like thatching or dry stone walling.

Better, then, to work out ways of turning what will soon be the ubiquitous mobile into a teaching tool. Better still, if that tool were based on some form of GNU/Linux for mobiles rather than Microsoft's proprietary solutions. But I fear this is unlikely to happen: the MIT project has achieved a technical, economic and political momentum that means it will carry on regardless of whether it is actually the best solution.

ODF Gets Interestinger

Who would have thought file formats could be such fun?

The great battle over whether the OpenDocument format should be adopted in Massachusetts has taken another dramatic turn with the appointment of a successor to Peter Quinn, the man who took most of the flak for introducing the policy in the first place.

What's most striking is that the press release announcing the new CIO goes out of its way to emphasise that he will be "responsible for overseeing the final stages of implementation of the state's new Open Document format proposal, to go into effect in January 2007" (via Andy Updegrove's Standards Blog). In other words, all the talk about how the ODF decision was being rolled back was premature, to say the least.

Microsoft is unlikely to take this lying down - too much is at stake. If it loses Massachusetts in this way, it will create a terrible precedent for the company. It will reveal that that there is, in fact, life after Microsoft Office. And once users start to experience the huge benefits of employing open formats - freedom from vendor lock-in, the ability to deploy a range of different applications on several platforms, easy archiving etc. - the trickle of defections will soon become positively Amazonian.

Expect things to get even more interestinger.

Open Access and Earwax

Nicholas Wade in the New York Times has an interesting article about earwax. It seems that there are two types, wet and dry:

The wet form predominates in Africa and Europe, where 97 percent or more of the people have it, and the dry form among East Asians, while populations of Southern and Central Asia are roughly half and half. By comparing the DNA of Japanese with each type, the researchers were able to identify the gene that controls which type a person has.

Of course, this makes you want to get the full details - not least because it turns out that this is "the first example of DNA polymorphism determining a visible genetic trait." That is, for the first time, researchers have pinpointed a single letter change in the DNA (out of 3 billion), from a G to an A (the "polymorphism"), that alters something directly observable (the "visible genetic trait") - earwax consistency.

You can read the abstract, but - guess what? - only subscribers get to see the all the gory/waxy details. Surely, when it comes to something as quintessentially human as earwax, we have a right to open access?

Wikipedia: not Right, but Might

If you ever wondered why, in the age of the global Internet, local newspapers still existed, read this. It begins as precisely the kind of small-scale story that someone like, well, me, for example, would have thought unworthy of much attention. It's about some small, local politician somewhere in Massachusetts (don't ask me, I'm British), doing something small and local, right?

Wrong.

The basic story is simple. A US politician (or probably someone on his staff) came across this wacky Wikipedia stuff, and noticed that anyone could edit it freely. So, being a politician (or the hired hand thereof), this person decided to do the obvious thing: edit out all the embarrassing bits in the biography of this politician.

Alas for this individual, in the wacky world of Wikipedia, nefariousness is not so easy. Certainly, you can edit away to your little heart's content - but do remember that you will leave behind a nice audit trail for everyone to see exactly who did what.

Following that trail, this particular enlightened journalist (step forward Evan Lehmann) discovered that more than 1,000 changes had been made by "congressional staffers at the U.S. House of Representatives in the past six month". So this little local story turns out to be something very big. In fact it turns out to be two very big things.

The first is that traditional politicians do not flourish in an open context: when everything they do can be traced and and tracked they are in trouble. The second is that Wikipedia is now so important even the politicians want to subvert it (or at least try). This makes recent discussions about whether Wikipedia's entries are right somewhat moot: forget right, Wikipedia is officially might.

Update: Wikipedia has now started taking corrective action.