PassingNotes.com

okay, so i’ve got a new beef with wikipedia - the absolute and total lack of adult content warnings…so let me tell you this little story, it’s kind of funny…

my older son and i have developed (as of late) a bit of a mildly raunchy rapport, something his mom might not go for..i remember what it was like to be in 8th grade, to see the nude scene in the movie while sitting in the same room as my parents, squirming, adjusting, hoping that the glow of the screen wasn’t bright enough to show the red face sitting just a few feet away…didn’t want to go through that exercise with the fruit of my own loin, so yeah, i told him about the shenis…

at any rate, i’m reading this book - fucking brilliant btw - called ‘foreskin’s lament’ by shalom auslander…about half-way through he uses this random expression during a diatribe on circumcision, jokes about having to shave his son’s balls and give him a prince albert…never heard that one before….

…so my boy is on the machine with his friend and i shout out, ‘hey, do me a favor, hit elgoog and type in ‘prince albert‘…he does, and voila, the first result up links to wikipedia! wikipedia is, of course, a favorite research tool used by all junior high (and elementary) students, teachers even talk about it as a resource, how to cite articles if used…

but do me a favor, would ya’? take a look at the entry for prince albert that turned up as the first result on google…

does it bug you that there’s no adult content warning on that? does it bug you that the real prince albert turns up halfway down the results page after the wiki article? are you wondering just how cozy wikipedia and google have become?

exactly….

so naturally i hit wikipedia and did searches for all sorts of shit (nipple piercing, mutual masturbation, anal sex (which leads to tons of shit, no pun intended), blowjob - which led directly via link to autofellatio and so on and so on and ditty ditty so on)…

is it time for wikipedia to enlist their editors to mark content as adult?? anybody listening???

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a few months ago i talked about this article i was putting together for “competitive intelligence magazine” (from scip.org) about finding sources online - it finally went to print this month and will then go up on the scip site later, as well as on my own corporate site…

at the time, dozens of you requested copies (drafts/previews) and on a very positive note, scip has agreed to let me post it online at the same time as the print version as a guest editorial on profy.com

this is actually nice because it includes dozens of links and while displayed online, every link is ‘live’

…and as an added bonus, it’s now entered into profy.com’s ‘iphone’ contest - meaning that if you have any comments, questions or thoughts about the article then *please* feel free to post them directly at the article on profy because apparently that’s how they’re ‘calculating interest’ (soft science if i might say so myself, but whatever)…if i win, the plan is to swap the iphone (no interest) for a new ipod for my 8th grader (ipod touch is very cool stuff…)

so at any rate, the link to the article (full path) is:
http://www.profy.com/2007/09/26/how-the-social-internet-simplifies-source-identification/

or the tinyurl:
http://tinyurl.com/38ha8j

…for those of you who would like a copy in PDF format (for printing or whatever), just drop me a note at “dcarpe@gmail.com” - it will be up on clew.us in a couple of weeks as well under publications - as well as here on passingnotes.com…

thanks - and i hope you enjoy it! and again, i’m certainly happy to discuss and field questions about the dozens of resources covered here, though i welcome the opportunity to answer them within profy’s commenting system so that a) others can read them (tons of non-scip and non-aiip folks will be reading it) and b) it’ll improve my winning odds ;) (that last part is shameless, i know, bear with me…)

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well, back from summer fantasy land and immediately hooked into this little conspiracy theory that bubbled up a while ago on socnet, the listserv of insna - comment had to do with the nsa’s foray into sna back in the 70’s through promis (the “prosecutor’s information management system”)…promis was authored and created by inslaw inc, a software co run by bill and nancy hamilton who both (according to legend) worked for the nsa…”In March 1982, the Department of Justice awarded INSLAW Inc., a $10 million, 3-year contract to implement a version of PROMIS to which the government had already obtained a license in the 22 largest United States Attorneys Offices.” (from wikipedia) - if you go to archive.org and plug in this page, http://www.webcom.com/~pinknoiz/covert/inslaw.html, you will find all of the house proceedings and hearings summaries (page went offline in early 2005, ain’t that odd?)

…the story actually got a lot more outlandish before it was all over, “In 2001, the Washington Times and Fox News each quoted federal law enforcement and/or intelligence officials familiar with the debriefing of former FBI Agent Robert Hanssen as claiming that Hanssen had stolen for the Soviet KGB copies of PROMIS-derivative software used within the FBI and U.S. intelligence agencies to track the intelligence information they produce, and used by U.S. intelligence within banks to track financial transactions. These reports further stated that Osama bin Laden later bought copies of the same PROMIS-derivative software on the Russian black market for $2 million and al Qaeda used the software to penetrate U.S. intelligence database systems“…

…and the mystery of the whole story grew following the death of danny casolaro way back in 1991, a journalist who supposedly got way too close to the secrest surrounding the inslaw/promis scandal and wound up dead in a bathtub (a suicide never accepted by his own family who had been warned by danny himself that he might die mysteriously)…danny began to call this big conspiracy “the octopus” (now does it ring a bell? there was an entire book written about his research and his death by two other writers, the octopus: secret government and the death of danny casolaro ) - bill hamilton chimed in the whole thing back in 1991 (audio transcript of interview is online) and in 1993, wired magazine ran an astounding article about promis, the octopus, danny’s death and other findings which is now in their archives…

why is promis of so much interest, and what the fuck is my point here? well, for starters, promis has the ability to combine far flung databases and track people by their involvement with the legal system…but the legal proceedings revealed suspicion that the doj modified promis to monitor intelligence operations, agents, and other global operations - not legal cases (israel has reportedly used promis, as has oliver north, supposedly) - think dbases from the doj, fbi, and so on, and not plaintiffs (”The software has reportedly been mated in recent years with artificial intelligence. PROMIS has long been known to have been modified by intelligence agencies with a back door that allows for surreptitious retrieval of stored data.“) and in the year of potential economic downturns, i suspect that we’ll all be hearing more about “the war on terror” to distract our collectively pessimistic selves, a grinding broadcast distraction from the weltschmerz that might otherwise consume us all and in turn, we’ll begin to all see exactly what it means to use social network analysis on a grand scale, thanks to a lot of open information channels, watchful eyes, boredom with consumer-oriented social networking (not at all similar) and a general interest in understanding exactly what is being done with the amazing billions of dollars being spent on national security…maybe promis is still in heavy use, a fully web based version…maybe an open source project?

…or think again, does a web based promis already exist!? duh. if you’re already connecting online (think myspace), banking online, buying online and using a credit card and a cell phone and have an ‘on-the-grid’ address that ties to your domestic expenses (utilities, rent et al), then i suppose it might be even easier to tie these disparate databases together and pull in requests for information through a promis “permission level access” interface (think gov agency, or better yet, think about recent approval for domestic spying…now are you catching my drift?)…or am i off the wall here? is 2007 or 2008 the year when we start to instill a new virtue in our children, something about privacy, suggesting that it’s as important as not stealing, not lying and all of that other important stuff? seems that divine inspirations and thousands of years of text never saw this kind of information exchange coming, at least not with this type of wanton access privelege provided to a select group of folks…whatever, now i’m just fucking rambling on and on…try reading those complete links up above to get some more insight into what i’m talking about…

…so, do you worry about using so much of elgoog? is it worth thinking about?

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hah…in mahalo’s dreams…what a stupid ass company…this is just a TEST post because i skipped all of august (very busy with iced coffee, work, a new dog, trip to maine etc)…curious to see if this backdates…

new post coming shortly.

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kidding! there’s no elgoog in this post, just thought the title would trick the clickers…and wow, haven’t written in a while, been busy with something else but thought it would be nice to do a quick roundup of some assorted tools that i’ve been dicking around with…generally speaking, most of what’s on the interweb either a) sucks, 2) has been done before or c) is crap (similar to sucking, being crap is also distinguished by a tendency toward browser compatibility issues)…enjoy…

myIPneighbors - got a site on a shared server and wondering why it’s soooo fucking slow all of the time when all you’re running is brochureware? hit this site and you may soon find a new person to send hate mail to!

call it fake - remember when i was talking a while ago about the stygian state of caller id spoofing? well say hello to the free pc-2-phone version…

fichey, whacked search thing.. - not sure what to say, but what the shit? is microfiche back!? have we all gone full circle on the interweb?

senduit - very cool, share files just like a buncha other services, but with very short expiration dates (as in, “dude, go download the song quickly, it expires in 30 minutes”)

50matches: search delicious, digg and reddit at the same time… a social bookmarking meta-search tool for the only sites that appear to matter anymore (sorry to those others who couldn’t keep it fresh, “yo, keep it real…worrrdddd”)

getgrandpasFBIfiles - concerned that you didn’t get that job because of your family history and not just because you suck at what you do? then consider following this dude’s cookbook approach to digging up family fbi files…

phone number geolocator - wondering where that call came from? hit this site, you’ll like it, trust me…

big list of best css design galleries - um, have you ever, uh, maybe, uh, ripped some other dude’s site design ’cause it was so cool? like sucked the whole thing down, pulled out the css in an editor and made it your own? this list will lead to you some awesome new site design ideas…got some favorites on this list, but there’s a lot to look over…

zniff, just iceland - yeah, here’s a nice search engine…might not matter much unless you are hjalli, and you launched this ages ago as a sister site to spurl…but i like it! just gotta find mo’ reason to use it…

and lastly: things you never knew existed - gotta keep my boys off this site, there is just too much cool shit for sale…what a way to waste a day or two…

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okay, so i just wanna put this out there for reactions and for you to noodle over…short: google and apple are in bed together for a reason. google will use safari on windows and mac to control ‘web as desktop/os’ (not mozilla)…read on…

first - we already know about the big apple/google relationships (schmidt on the board and all of that)…and here’s a very nice and clean visualization of that web of relationships for you to look over (apple/google)…

…but some lesser known and KEY relationships here? okay. first off there’s ann mather - she’s a director of google and the former evp/cfo of pixar and a former right hand gal to steve jobs…next up is jamie dinkelacker, a guy who was hired last fall as ‘program manager’ for the enterprise engineering efforts of elgoog, an agile software guru, and an all around super smart guy - why mention him? oh yeah, he was a former senior scientist at apple - also the dude behind the first calendaring app (netscape) and so on…

…oh, but i digress - the point (!) of all of this: in order to really succeed, google needs one standardized browser to enable and support all of their online and offline services, api’s, coming-stuff (offline synch etc) and given mozilla’s lack of interest in seeing another ‘fork’ emerge (yet again, please, no more flock) it will be a long while before google can control their directions (yeah, even with dibona running open source at elgoog, i find it hard to believe that he gets to set priorities, plus he openly admits that goog doesn’t like people to know what they’re doing, hence the interest in open source inside their walls and their ability to control shit - another mozilla fork would fuck it all up)..

shit, yeah, got distracted again - so yeah, if you roll up windows and mac, you’ve basically covered every consumer and business user in the mainstream world (sorry, ubuntu cronies, you just don’t count as mainstream) - so what’s a big company like google to do if they wish to control the browser experience, specify functions/calls and maintain absolute secrecy over any such plans? answer: partner with the other most secretive company out there, apple computer, and co-opt safari to put embedded solutions directly inside the browser (the one that handles java quite well mind you), and now runs across platforms…

…does that make sense? fuck ajax apps on the iphone, i am talking about all of the apps on the internet…so now, does that “ iGoogle offering’ make a little more sense to you? does it feel a little personal as well as a little appley? maybe it’s just me, but elgoog doesn’t need to buy apple, they just need to control and influence core partners across the board and push for one browser to rule them all…btw, if you can build that app for iphone, you can sure as shit get it to run on safari - wouldn’t this offer a nice channel for google into the mobile market without making a phone or any of that bullshit?

think about it: apple is the comeback kid with safari on windows, but they NEED the presence of google to expand the ‘mainstream’ user base, integrate with their own services (think ‘.mac 2.0′) and in turn ride the elgoog wave into the shore of the interweb-as-desktop while yahoo and others lay about, beached whales who either didn’t see this coming or just couldn’t shift adroitly enough to respond to the changes…

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Okay, the rumor starts here (my theory, duh)…Short version: elgoog (Google) is planning to launch the world’s largest social networking site ‘overnight’ and at the flick of a switch and will become the Mitsubishi of the internet.

Huh? Exactly. Let me explain…while yahoo and others continue to explore acquisitions in the social networking space (e.g. bebo et al), and the “buy-me-i’m-facebook” dance continues, stop and ask yourself a question: having already built or acquired every relevant component of a consumer and enterprise social networking solution, why has elgoog not postured in this space beyond orkut? alternatively: with billions of free working capital for acquisition, why has google ignored social networking site acquisitions beyond the super-niche (e.g. dodgeball, now dying on the vine)?

the answer: because elgoog is planning to launch the world’s largest social networking application within 12-18 months on its own. it will dwarf everything else out there and rattle the entire internet and new media landscape. facebook gets it, hence the “we’re now an OS” dream…but they’re far too small to matter. ‘some people in the world‘ use facebook right now - but ‘over 60 percent of people looking for anything online‘ use elgoog (compare those numbers)

…ever hear of mitsubishi? cars, electronics, all that shit? did you also know that they’re making and moving over one-third of the world’s fertilizer? (hey, this is going somewhere)…mitsubishi believes in a philosophy called “insiderization” - think of it this way: why make fertilizer and then sell it to others, or why simply trade the commodity and let others move and sell? why not just BE the maker, the market and the buyer and move inside, up and down the market? that’s what they’ve done over the years…fertilizer is a great example, just look at how they work with monsanto and others to control all angles in the channel..

…as for elgoog, well, they’ve already got every targeted service (messaging, voice, mail, video, pictures, payment, data storage, collaborative apps, et al)…and they’ve got a simple publishing platform in place (think ‘google pages 2.0′) - now all they need to is flick a very small switch: you log in and are presented with an option to ‘publish your google profile‘ and in doing so elect to include select apps/services and make all/some available to groups/user across the ‘google network’ - very simple for elgoog to execute.

…so while facebook dreams of some bullshit world where third parties clamor to build shitty little apps inside their cluttered networking space which reaches only a minority of global interweb users, elgoog is just going to “be the entire space” and throw networking into the mix to expound the details and nuances of services and features…there will be a consumer version and an enterprise version…

goodbye myspace, goodbye linkedin, facebook, bebo and all of the others (yahoo and wallop included for now)…you’ve all completely missed this dark horse running in the social networking universe - the interweb IS just a social networking infrastructure, and all elgoog is doing is building a simple utility to search and connect users with increasingly finer gradations (e.g. collaborative apps, calendaring and other ‘group/singleuser’ services) until one day - poof! - the dark horse emerges.

…oh, and btw, in my opinion the only (and i mean absolutely the only) player that can rattle and compete is microsoft - with the largest installed sw user base in the world, all they need to do is allow for the same profile publishing services as they already do for enterprise, roll it out to consumers at zero cost and integrate a world of online apps and services…

so yeah, that’s what was on my mind earlier this morning, just wanted to throw it out there because i have not found ANYBODY ELSE talking about it yet! what the shit? am i the only one who really sees it this way?

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…has the whole world of startups turned into a vanity contest? a cradle for investors low in self esteem? for real, just when i though the vc’s couldn’t throw money at anything more stupid (200+ photo and video sharing sites funded last year? duh), along comes the ultimate insult to the collective intelligence of internet users everywhere, a site that aims to take us all back in time to the late 90’s, when about.com helped ‘do the thinkin’ for us’ and told us what mattered, a new ass-kissing machine that brought up half of my chicken tikka masala lunch within 30 seconds of use: welcome to mahalo

what’s mahalo? haven’t you heard about this? this dude jason calcanis, formerly from the team at netscape that sorta copied digg, well he joined a vc firm as an “AWMIR” (’affluent white man in residence’) trying to figure out what to do with his time and somebody else’s money and along comes a new “human powered search engine” led by 40 guides who have managed to focus on “what’s important to internet users” by visiting (gasp!) the search engines themselves…

what do you get at mahalo? uh, how about shit with large fonts? seriously, these “guides” if you will, for it’s a formidable task to unearth the biographies of all, they are much smarter than you - they know, for example, that people looking for information on iphones need a new site, a new way to quickly find links to apple.com, wikipedia.com, some competitors (pick a phone manufacturer, any manufacturer) and that these same people want it all on one page. fucking briliant. geniuses. how did i ever live without you? how do you do it over there at mahalo? who can figure out such devices?

…the real magic is how they figure out what’s important, and then waste time building shitty little one page summaries of this crap…why use it? because they have very, very carefully figured out within a seven day period of furious editing that apparently “internet users” really want to know about every A-list blogger who might conceivably write about or otherwise promote “mahalo goodness”

don’t believe me? here, check out this page for one of the main guides and mahalo’s editorial director who goes by the name “CK” on mahalo - now scroll down through his list of major edits between may 21st and may 29th (yes, last week)…notice anything unusual about that list? are those all things that you’ve searched for yourself? here’s a hint: go click through on each of those over-inflated pages describing each major blogger, then visit the blog and look for a positive note on mahalo…do you smell an incentive structure here? for example, arrington at techcrunch couldn’t help but write gushing words about the launch, and oddly he’s what everybody on the internet is looking for these days!

…sorry dudes, but as somebody who actually has to get real research done on the interwebs, i can only tell you that:

a) sequioa capital apparently does make some stupid fucking investments…(did i mention mahalo’s plans for actually separating people from money? exactly…)

a1)..as do elon musk and news corp (other investors) - what are you thinking elon? did you lose a bet or something?

b) nobody is gonna want this product, period. you are breaking a cardinal rule here: trying to create a solution (which sucks) and then trying to manufacture a problem through a poorly executed perception exercise (as in, “oh, thanks, i didn’t realize that google, yahoo, msn, wikipedia and those others didn’t work! thanks! really!)

c) the race to beat jimmy wales to the finish line with an alternative entrant in the “human powered search engine” was in fact over long ago, back when about.com got tired…nobody’s gonna want what wales is selling either, but yet, it’s your money…

d) something else, i forget (but it was important!)

hmmm, so yeah, my impression of this site is that even if they get past the amazing 10 thousand pages of information goal in 2007 (could you imagine that? over 10 thousand pages of information on the internet all just at one site? wow!), they will never be able to recruit a series of guides capable of delivering superior quality information aggregation in a uniform fashion (and it must be superior) who are also interested in doing the whole about.com thing all over again (or should i say dmoz.org?) to help some other white dudes make more money by creating a bullshit solution to a bullshit category in a one-size-fits-all craposphere of lookalike startups championed by the same golf players from the same zip code…

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