Communications

Who will unify my communications?

2 email accts/ 7 email aliases/ 4 IM accts/ SMS/ this blog/ Bloglines (238 feeds)/ BlogRovR (480 feeds)/ LinkedIn/ Facebook/ Myspace/ Twitter/ 23 other "social" networks/ 3 PSTN accts/ 2 mobile accts/ Skype/ FWD/ ... 

...accessed via 3 different PCs and 2 different mobile handsets, at least on most days.

These are not just information flows — most have associated directories of friends, business associates and other acquaintances.

One year ago I wrote:

...  I already run four instant messaging clients on my laptop.  A single client would be nice, but it's not that important.  Once we finally learn how availability should work from an existing player like Skype or from an entirely new overlay network (as Skype was a few years ago), then we can worry about consolidation.

Now I'm not so sure. 

Who will aggregate this flood for me, in some convenient and semantically meaningful way?

Where is the tool that lets me organize my diverse connections?

There's an opportunity here for a new class of solutions...

Benoît FELTEN – Mr. Fiberevolution

Well, I'm still without a working computer of my own, but I've borrowed an office at our Paris facility that has a PC with a French keyboard layout, so let's see if I can type anything...

It's been a fascinating week with a some interesting meetings and a few new learnings from the AdvancedTCA Summit Europe, but best for my personal interests was a meeting with Benoît Felten who's blog, Fiberevolution, I've followed avidly since I discovered it last spring.

I hadn't realized Benoît is a telecoms consultant whose work has ranged over a wide variety of telecom topics.  Indeed, it appears his avocation, i.e. broadband access, is one of the few telecom areas not part of his day job.  So we had wide ranging discussion across all of telecom – really fun!

I also got a much better sense of what going on with FTTH in France.  I'd read individual blog posts (e.g. this, this, this, this), but I didn't grasp the extent to which the French have enacted laws and regulations that ensure local authorities are allowed to build telecom networks.  Boy, would the folks in Lafayette Louisiana have loved that.  But of course I've written on this subject before.

The only curious thing was we chatted in a French bistro in the plaza by the Arch at La Defense, but the house red wine was from Chile – that's a first in my book.  :)

Laptop crash - expect email delays

Upon arriving in France on Monday my laptop crashed.  Luckily I already had copies of my presentations for the AdvancedTCA Summit Europe on a memory stick:  But, I've been disconnected from email and my blog (and the web) since then.  I expect to get an hour or so per day on other people's PCs, but if you are awaiting something from me, it could be mid next week before I'm home, have my problems sorted out and then catch up.

What a nightmare  :(

Following more feeds in less time — BlogRovR

I'm a feed junkie.  Perhaps not as bad a some, but at one point my Bloglines account peaked at over 250 feeds.  Meanwhile, I keep stumbling on additional feeds I wish I could follow, but there's just no time.  Long ago I established a "Probation" folder for feeds I might want to follow and a "Too busy" folder for feeds like Slashdot where even scanning headlines is a problem.  Gradually more and more feeds ended up in "Too busy" or just unsubscribed. 

Now I've found an interesting solution — BlogRovr from Stickis.  They advertise themselves as:

the perfect companion for blog reading. Tell Rovr which blogs you like.  From then on, as you browse, Rovr fetches from them stories that link to the what you're browsing and shows them to you right on the page.

This happens via a tiny tray that briefly slides in from the right when you hit a new page (blog or otherwise) for which there is related content in any of your BlogRovR subscription. See the example on the right.

After two weeks of use, my BlogRovr subscriptions now include not only the feeds I subscribe to in Bloglines, but every other RSS feed I've stumbled on that looks even mildly interesting.  The net effect is that, if a mildly interesting blog covers a subject I otherwise happen read about, I find out about the related article(s).

I'm now removing overlapping coverage from my Bloglines subscription.  Who needs to see everything from all top 30 VoIP bloggers when most (certainly the top ten) present slightly different shades of opinion on the same set of stories?

I now follow the busiest sites in headlines-only mode and rely on BlogRovR to point out related articles.

So far, this appears to be a winning combination!

Mobile phones & economic growth

It's great to see something I'm interested in, and have written about, picked up by The Economist. 

Of course the question is, why did it take nearly 16 months from the Robert Jensen's presentation and Ajay Shah's write up, until it was picked up by The Economist?

It appears that's how long it's taken for Jensen's study to make it's way from a conference presentation (here are the original slides) to publication in a peer-reviewed journal, i.e. “The Digital Provide: Information (technology), market performance and welfare in the South Indian fisheries sector”, by Robert Jensen, to be published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, August 2007.

Not to boast, but the graphics in my original post beat the text in the Economist article although that text is good:

...starting in 1997 mobile phones were introduced in Kerala. Since coverage spread gradually, this provided an ideal way to gauge the effect of mobile phones on the fishermen's behaviour, the price of fish, and the amount of waste.

As phone coverage spread between 1997 and 2000, fishermen started to buy phones and use them to call coastal markets while still at sea. (The area of coverage reaches 20-25km off the coast.) Instead of selling their fish at beach auctions, the fishermen would call around to find the best price. Dividing the coast into three regions, Mr Jensen found that the proportion of fishermen who ventured beyond their home markets to sell their catches jumped from zero to around 35% as soon as coverage became available in each region. At that point, no fish were wasted and the variation in prices fell dramatically.

Missing from the Economist article were some significant results Jensen provided in his January 2006 talk.  At that time, he concluded by pointing out other impacts, beyond prices and reduced waste of fish.  The advent of cellphones also led to a 6% increase in educational enrollments and a 5% increase in the probability of using of healthcare when sick.  All this with no government programs and no new funding of existing programs.

Mixi.jp social networking going public

While I'm on the subject of social networking, Kenji Mori reports that mixi.jp, a major Japanese social networking site (Wikipedia info here) is going public on the Tokyo Stock Exchange in September.  While the potential valuation (over $1B US) seems absurd, at least as a public company we should get some insights into the inner workings of one social networking company - all the others I'm aware of are private of captive of a larger organization.

Fukumimi is already dissecting their prospectus (and reporting in English!).

Cyworld US goes live, but who will use it?

The major, major, Korean social networking site, Cyworld, has versions in Chinese and Japanese and, beginning today, in English.  The US site has been in alpha for many weeks, but today it's open to anyone, so I tried it out.  My new "Minihome" is here.

Looking around, i.e. sampling other members via the "Random Minihomes" button, the current US members are predominately Asian Americans.  Quite a few members list their MySpace and other contact info prominently on their Cyworld Minihome, but this may be a reflection of the alpha test policies and the familiarity of the Cyworld brand in Korea and Chinese communities.

A key feature of Cyworld in Korea, mobile access, is either missing or downplayed on the US site.  That's too bad.  Other than that, it was easy to get started and I think I prefer the look of my Minihome to that of my entry on Myspace.

If Myspace didn't already exist, Cyworld US might have a chance, but to go against Myspace at this point they will need a distinctive product position.  I don't see at it, at least at the moment.  As I commented in July, Facebook is taking the elitist position and thus growing their niche of college kids and college-bound high school kids.  Cyworld has an enormous, profitable business in Korea and they are owned by SK Telecom, so they have the resources to stick it out.  I'll be interested to see how their product position evolves.

Inevitable failure of Internet censorship (at least long term)

I'm disappointed that another day has passed in India with no apparent Indian press coverage of their ongoing blog censorship, e.g. search "blogs" at any of the Hindustan Times, the Times of India, The Hindu or the Khaleej Times.

On the other hand, a trackback to yesterday's post from Letters from China led me to this post quoting the Guardian quoting an unnamed Chinese official  (in February 2006):

Even with an estimated 30,000 internet police, he said it was difficult to monitor bulletin boards. "The technology hasn't reached a level that will allow us to control them. And we must also consider the trend of democratisation, which cannot be stopped," he said. "China is very big. If you want to control such a large country, mere politics is not enough. You must control minds. You need to win the battle for ideas."

As I've commented in the past, the Internet is as significant in its long term benefit for humanity as were the advent of speech, writing and the printing press in their epochs.  Each has allowed a greater number of people to connect with other people across distance and time.  The sharing that results is natural, enormously beneficial and unstoppable.

India blocking blogs - following path of China, Iran and the like

China and Iran I expect.  I commented the last time I passed thru Beijing.  Pakistan is not that surprising, but India?  Apparently Indian ISPs have begun blocking access to Blogspot and other blogging services. A story on Rediff News, already referenced on slashdot, and another on WebProNews have good coverage.  There's rather extensive detail from the Indian blogosphere in this post and this wiki.

It appears the Indian Department of Telecommunications has given Indian ISPs a rather extensive (several pages long) list of specific blogs to be blocked, but that some ISPs have reacted by blocking all blogs at popular hosting services like Blogspot and Typepad.  Rumors are flying.  The "Great Indian Mutiny" claims:

Two sources, one inside the Government of India and the other kind of inside/outside have confirmed to the Mutiny, that ISPs are being instructed to ‘control’ access to blogspot. It seems that some blogs are being used by some terror units (read SIMI) to communicate.

There is a crack down in place. IP numbers are being physically located and identified. All should come back to normal once this operation is over. There is no ban in place.

Of course, if the goal is to catch terrorists, leaving blogs alone and secretly tracing specific people and specific blogs would seem to be a much more effective strategy.

What I find disappointing is the mainstream Indian press.  Where is the outcry? Where is the discussion?  This situation has been visible in the Indian blogsphere since Saturday morning Indian time. It's now (very) early Tuesday morning in India and yet I haven't seen any coverage in the mainstream Indian press beyond the Rediff article mentioned above. 

What's up with the "world's largest democracy"?  Why no discussion?

China blocking access to Blogspot blogs

Just catching up on the blogosphere from my hotel room at the Kerry Centre in Beijing.  Unfortunately I can't read various specific blogs.  Other web addresses seem fine, my Bloglines reader is accessible and I can read postings in the blocked blogs through my subscriptions at Bloglines. What the blocked blogs have in common is they are all hosted in the blogspot.com domain, i.e. they are run by Google using software from their acquisition of Blogger.com.  Blogger.com (the software) is reachable but any reference to blogspot.com (the blogs) times out.

I knew there were problems in 2002-2005, but I thought China had gone to more fine-grained filtering of individual blogs, allowing access to the rest of Google's Blogger service.  Of course I haven't paid a lot of attention - I'm only in China every couple of years - but I do skim Rebecca MacKinnon's RConversations which provides good coverage on censorship issues.  However, Rebecca's recent discussions have focused on search engines kowtowing to the Chinese government, not wholesale blocking of blogspot.

The other thing I notice that different from 2003 is that all the readily available web proxies - those you can find with a simple Google search, even those that require a human to type a password - also appear to be blocked.  Finally, the Google secure VPN client which I used once a few years ago, is now only available at a few locations in Mountain View.

I don't have a lot of time right now and I'm off to Singapore tomorrow, so that's it for experimentation on this trip.