A business magazine has just published a cover story on the evils of blogs. I’m not going to name the magazine, because I don’t think their bad behavior deserves attention. The same can not be said for what must be half of the other bloggers in the world, each of whom have written one or more posts criticising the magazine and the story, all of whom have done the magazine a huge favor by naming the magazine and linking too it.

The media, like a dog, or a small child, absolutely craves attention. Most conscientious dog owners and parents know that when a dog or a child acts out to get attention, often the best thing to do is avoid rewarding that bad behavior with attention, even going so far as to turn your back on the offender.

Gods are much the same. They can’t exist without a particular sort of attention called “belief,” and so, sometimes, they act out, they unleash famines, or kill the young and innocent. When god’s act in such a cruel and arbitrary manner, their followers reward their bad behavior by praying to them or offering them sacrifices when what they should be doing is turning their backs on their ill behaving gods.

All those bloggers should be turning their backs on “that magazine” right now. One can’t engage in rational dialog with an ill behaving magazine any better than you can with a dog, a toddler or an unruly God.

It looks like there is a new company called “Riya”:http://www.riya.com that is creating a new photo management application that uses computer vision to help catalog your digital photo collection. The app should be going into very limited alpha in the next day or so.

I’ve been keeping an eye on Computer Vision for a few years now, and I’ve been carrying around an idea for a web app that would make use of it for almost as long. It’s a bit of a bummer seeing it reaching the consumer level, since I’ve been sitting on my ass for so long. On the other hand their service and my idea bare only the most superficial resemblance.

It sounds like Riya’s big feature is facial recognition. The application processes the photos to try to identify all the different people in the photos. You then have to train the application by validating or invalidating some of its guesses about faces from photo to photo. Then you can use the app to tag existing and new photos by the people present in the picture.

What’s both interesting and distrubing is that they are going to share training data across users. Each time a new user joins, they’ll benefit from faces already in the system, something that will be even more valuable as people learn about the service from their freinds, reinforced, no doubt, with weighting due to proximity in their social network.

TechCrunch » First Screen Shots of Riya
Riya leverages potent facial and text recognition technology with an intelligent interface to help people make sense of the thousands of untitled and untagged photos that are building up on their hard drives (and on the web).

I left a comment on a “blog entry about Apple’s new Aperture software”:http://www.sauria.com/blog/computers/operating_systems/macosx/1405 that got me thinking about the whole issue of product line segmentation and how it applies to open source software.

“Aperture”:http://www.apple.com/aperture is a new photo management and manipulation software package from Apple aimed at professional users. It runs $495. That’s probably not a lot of money for a pro photographer if it can save them 20-30 minutes a day, but it’s a bit of change for an amature who might also have his eye on a nice new wide angle lense. Of course, Apple offers iPhoto as part of the iLife suite for $99. In the past, there might be a chance that Apple would add some features to iPhoto that might address the needs of ambitious amatures on a budget. Now though, they have to worry about blurring the product segmentation between iPhoto and Aperture and eating into Aperture revenue.

Open source software doesn’t generally have these issues. A developer might still want to avoid throwing every possible feature into a piece of open source software for usability or quality control reasons, but they don’t have to worry about protecting profits on a higher-priced version of the software.

This can be a huge boon to the user. A debian linux user doesn’t have to worry about which of the “half million versions of Microsoft Windows Vista”:http://www.geekfun.com/2005/09/14/microsoft-seeks-to-maximize-profits-by-confusing-users/ they need to buy to get the features they want without spending money that might better go elsewhere. An IT manager or software developer using PostgresSQL or mySQL doesn’t have to worry that the particular feature of Oracle or Microsoft SQL server they are thinking of using to save a couple days of dev time might force them into a different licensing tier that might cost them tens of thousand dollars a year in extra license fees.

I stumbled across “Seattle Mindcamp” while looking at “Ted Leung’s post on Apple’s new Aperture product”:http://www.sauria.com/blog/2005/10/19#1405 and I’m intrigued. I’ve been thinking lately that I need to break out of the shell I’m in and enter into dialog with people who share my big-picture, forward looking perspective, but are coming at it from a different angle and Mindcamp looks like a great venue for that sort of interaction.

I’m not quite sure what to make of it though. “Blog entires”:http://www.seattlemind.com/index.php/mindcamp/article/time-to-take-mind-camp-public-10100248/ don’t have an obvious author associated with them, giving it a bit of an “in crowd” feel.

I guess I’ll just have to apply and see what happens.

Jakob Nielsen has been writing about web usability on his site for what must be close to a decade now. In recent year’s its become fashionable to take digs at him, even though his advice still makes sense to me.

I’m not trying to jump on the bandwagon here, but I do have to take issue with one of the items in his recent post on “weblog usability mistakes”:http://www.useit.com/alertbox/weblogs.html. Specifically: #7. “Irregular Publishing Frequency” where he talks about the importance of using a regular publication schedule so regular readers know when to check back.

He seems to be missing is the important and growing role of RSS in weblog publishing and consumption. I suppose this isn’t suprising, since he doesn’t appear to have an RSS feed on his site (at least not one that is easily discoverable). Still, RSS + RSS aggregators address the problem rather neatly. People don’t have to get in the habit of returning to your site to check for new content. They just have to get in the habit of adding feeds for weblogs of interest to their aggregator. When you publish a new item, an excerpt, or even the full text, shows up in their aggregator.

Granted, there are plenty of issues with usability around RSS subscriptions, and only some of them can be addressed exclusively by the publisher since the aggregator makers have to be involved. Still, I think it would have been better to talk about ease of discovery of RSS feeds for #7 in his article, and then put his money where his mouth is and implement a stellar example on Alertbox.

Other people have their own take:
* “Deane on Gadgetopia”:http://www.gadgetopia.com/post/4490
* “hyku.com”:http://hyku.com/blog/archives/000822.html
* “Philipp Lenssen”:http://blog.outer-court.com/archive/2005-10-17.html#n58
* “WeBreakStuff”:http://webreakstuff.com/blog/2005/10/jakob-talks-about-weblog-usability/

A recent issue of the New Yorker has an essay by Malcolm Gladwell about the values and value of a Ivy League education.

On the values side, he discusses how the admissions system at Harvard and other Ivy’s evolved over the 20th century, first as a way to keep the number of Jews in the student body down, into a current form that has as much to do with physical appearance, an outgoing personality and athletic ability as it does on intellectual or academic merit.

On the value side he talks about a new study that suggests that an Ivy League education, and the “connections” that come with them, may be worth less than many have previously thought. It looked at people who were accepted to Ivy League schools, and then compared those who attended the Ivy League schools to those that matriculated at a less prestigious institution. They found that among Ivy caliber students, attending Ivy League schools gave no measureable benefit with respect to earnings. The only students who benefitted were those from lower socio-economic classes.

He also explores other issues related to the branding of an Ivy League education.

I really liked this quote, but I suggest reading the whole article:

bq. The extraordinary emphasis the Ivy League places on admissions policies, though, makes it seem more like a modelling agency than like the Marine Corps

The New Yorker: The Critics: A Critic At Large