I’ve taken my photo gallery offline. It’s seeing constant comment spam attacks, and there appears to be no easy way to stop them. I’ll probably move the content elsewhere, either on a platform that allows disabling comments effectively, or move to the “cloud” via flickr or some such crappy site.

To give you an idea of the magnitude of this attack – the legitimate traffic on my gallery is between 10-20 hits a day – almost nothing. The comment spam bots hit it with 2000 hits a day. What’s worse, is that this loads the mysql server at media temple such that they’re requiring that I pay an additional $20/mo for a mysql “container” – some sort of extra virtual machine. I run a Captcha, and I’ve turned off access to comments. There must be some
hole in Gallery 2, as I’m still getting spam.

This is all because of spammers attempts to get page ranking on their scam sites by inserting links in comments on my gallery. The fact that Google is onto this gaming, and the comment spam has no effect doesn’t matter.

So, I’m annoyed at having to take time out of my day to address this, and ultimately lose the ability for independent participation on the Internet via my photo gallery. The Internet as an open, independent, non-commercial medium is at risk without regulation and enforcement to stop these chilling effects. Without regulation, all the internet will be is Google, flicker, Facebook, and MSN, soon to be mega-merged into a single AOL-like “service” .

The document metaphor paved the way for the mass adoption of personal computing, providing a set of concepts and language that most users were already familiar with. This metaphor is so pervasive it’s really hard for us to step aside from it now, roughly 30 years later. Even on the web, where we’re being weaned off of Documents little by little is still primarily built around the transmission of documents at its core.

Early on, Documents solved the problem of user adoption and translation of work processes to computers and networks. But since then, work process and users have evolved, and the problems preserved become more and more onerous. It’s time to take of the training wheels and ride the bike.

The biggest problem with Documents is managing the copies. The web grew out of hypertext and networking as a means of solving this problem, providing URLs as a way of safely referencing remote documents, rather than having to have copies locally available. This grand vision has been partially successful in reducing the need for copies. But some copies are made to preserve various states of documents over time, resulting in version control issues that are solvable, but introduce a level of complexity that is difficult for most users to manage.

In practice, documents are created, forwarded via e-mail, editing, forwarded again, creating a sea of mostly-redundant documents riddled with small changes, some irrelevant, and some of critical importance. The e-mail trail leaves little or no meta-data to distinguish one copy or set of changes from another. Software developers have used source-code control systems to manage copies and versions with great success, but these systems are difficult for non-programmers to use.

Another problem with Documents is a multitude of formats and media types, and lack of accepted standards for them. This means that many documents are only usable for users on specific computers with specific software packages installed. Once again, the web has partially solved this problem with standard formats and rendering definitions, though it has been a constant battle to preserve a universal standard, with competing corporations intentionally departing from standards to stake out their territory. This is a particular problem with media such as sound and video.

What does the world look like without documents? For the most part, it’s already here: Wiki’s, Blogs, and search engines. Sharing information via a wiki is really the most effective solution. Search engines solve issues about cataloguing and largely eliminate the need for taxonomy.

Web applications such as wikis and blog software help with the format problem by relying on web standards, and can also streamline version and change management, as well as attribution. Information can be copied from these sites for convienence or off-line reference, but there’s not any doubt about where to find the authoritative version.

What does this mean for Microsoft Office, OOXML, Open Office and Google Docs? It’s means they’re a waste of time, a large vestigial organ of computing. The key problems going forward are Internet Standards, better connectivity, security auditing, support a diverse set of devices, and backup and archival of information on the web.

I frequent various on-line forums to follow my interests, and much of the interaction is participation in forum or discussion software. One example is Seasoned Gamers, and community founded by a group of adults that played Halo 2 on XBox Live. Seasoned Gamers has since taken on a life of its own, beyond Live, Halo, and even beyond gaming. Due to its origins via Live, member’s identities use a gamer tag, which is required to be unique across all of XBox Live.

My Live gamer tag is gregnnn, a minor variation of my real name. Most folks use gamer tags that are completely different from their real name. I’ve interacted with this group for a bit more than three years now, and I identify members by gamer tag. Both Season Gamers’ forums and Live use avatars – small-ish icons or pictures to visually identify individuals.

There are a couple of problems with the use of gamer tags and avatars as on-line identity. The biggest of these is that people change them. People change avatars from time to time, and some folks even change their gamer tags. This can dilute or destroy identity, in the same way than changing your name and your appearance periodically in real life would make it hard for your friends to keep track of you. Given the global uniqueness requirement, many gamer tags are unpronouceable and hard to distiguish. This makes it hard for me to recognize some folks, and I often find myself mixing up identities.

The other problem is that this on-line identity is separate from your real identity. Maintaining some anonymity has it’s uses, particularly if you don’t want to suffer the consequences of your on-line persona’s actions in real life. But the downside is that you’ve diluted your presence and subjected everyone to a mapping problem between your identities. I wouldn’t depend on the use of an on-line persona as means of protecting your personal privacy, or insulation from you behaviour on-line. Most people do not have the knowledge, skills and discipline to stay completely untraceable on-line.

So, I’ve come to some conclusions about on-line identity and its uses:

Pick One
Don’t dilute yourself across multiple identities. I’d go with your real name unless privacy is really important to you. Whatever you pick, use it everywhere, that is, one user name, one e-mail address. Mine is: Greg Nichols/gregnnn/greg@atomicspatula.com. If I could own nichols.com I’d buy it in a second. Note: Atomic Spatula isn’t me, it’s a place.

Make it Good
It’s fun to see people who start out with Live gamer tags come to grips with their mistake, realizing that ” xXx LeetSniper xXx” isn’t going to play well for a 30 year-old adult on a forum about gardening. If it’s not your real name, pick something that you’re comfortable with everyone using everywhere. As for avatars, I’d go with a reasonable headshot. I like Seth Godin’s recommendations on this, though I’d say there’s a lot more at stake than your “personal brand”. Us humans have invested millions of years of evolution into facial recognition. It would be silly not to use it. I use my real name where possible, and I really need a better head-shot avatar that I’ve got right now.

Don’t Change It.
Changing names or avatars is something you should do very rarely. It’s akin to plastic surgery or name changes in real life, and not something you’d do on a whim.

Finally, I’d consider what the goals are in maintaining an on-line identity. You’d like it to be the foundation of personal recognition that you build a reputation on, whether it’s for professional purposes or purely social interactions.

There’s something that bugs me about the idea of collaboration software: It’s the implication that it’s a new idea, and problem ignored by computing and software, that requires new applications and approaches. This is a silly idea. The Internet was constructed to promote collaboration. Computer networks, client-server computing, database systems, and other areas have always been about promoting collaboration. It’s hard to think of an area of software that is aimed at individuals to the exclusion of the working group.

The idea that Collaboration is a market vertical is more than wrong, it’s counter-productive. It ignores the history of computing, particularly how work and the workplace, and social practice has made use of computing and communications technology. That’s the important part, because while technology changes rapidly, the habits and practices of humans change much more slowly. As workers in an increasingly distributed and electronically connected workplace, we need to observe how the workplace is changing in the face of technology as an evolution, not as some revolution brought about by the installation of a new software package.

For example, the workhorses of collaboration within the software industry are some of the oldest tools: e-mail and source code control systems. It would be silly to ignore these tools in any new project, be it developing processes within a project, or developing tools to support it. Microsoft’s tools illustrate this problem pretty well. While their IDE’s are very powerful and productive for individual developers, group use of these tools are hampered by an extremely weak source code control system: Source Safe, and lack of e-mail integration. (Disclaimer: My last experience with the Microsoft development platform was in 2005 – perhaps they’ve improved since).

When I write about Virtual Work Groups, I want to make it clear that I do not see this as a problem solvable with some nifty software packages. It’s fundamentally a human process problem, with a mature tool set readily available for application. Folks interested in improving the tools should look for better integration, hopefully via open standards. The last thing we need is more walled gardens inventing new, unproven and untested ways of working.

One of the biggest challenges I face in my work is its lack of structure. I work from my home office on most days, connected to my work and co-workers via e-mail, IRC, bug tracking systems and other web applications. I have the infinite distractions of the Internet facing me from my three computer screens. Given the pragmatics of a two-career household and parenting, my work day is split into two or three pieces spanning all waking hours.

I wish that I could write about how I’ve beat this problem, and tell amazing stories about how productive I am. Instead, I’ll tell you about what hasn’t worked, and what seems promising.

To Do Lists

Making lists of things to accomplish, first thing in the morning seemed like a promising idea. I tried setting some goals for the day, striking a balance between the important and the immediate. But in practice, I find these lists too depressing to look at. Most items are there because I’ve been putting them off, and reminding me of them at the start of the day seemed to motivate finding distractions so that I didn’t have to think about them. The only success here was that it did help me get really important things done, such as daily exercise goals (top priority in any day), and some burning issues where I’d missed deadlines, or had them bearing down one me. But for the most part, To Do lists were slightly better than nothing.

Daily Schedule

After a day consisting mostly of meetings, I realised that I had been very productive. It’s sad, in a way, that a day of meetings seemed more productive than my average day. Perhaps that illustrates just how bad my problem is. But, it got me thinking: maybe I should attack the lack of structure directly by imposing a somewhat artificial structure on the day. So, I tried firing up my Google calendar, and scheduling events for myself to plan my day. I set aside a specific hour to two hours of the day for a specific task or project. I would schedule most of my day, and leave some time for breaks.

This has worked pretty well, for the most part. Even though it amounts to scheduling meetings with myself all day, I get more done with this structure than approaching each day ad-hoc, subject to any distraction that might occur. I’d like to set up a bit more of a pattern for what happens each day. For example, doing tasks in the morning that require more creative effort, and saving the “turn the crank” tasks for the afternoon. It would probably make sense to expose the daily plan to my co-workers to give them an idea of my plans as well.

I’ve got a long way to go. It’s 11:10 PM, and even without my calender I can tell it’s time for bed

As much as I like the look of red courier font on a black background, I finally had to admit it was impossible to read, particularly stretched across the whole screen. I’ve switched to “deep-silent” by MIF Design. I hacked in my logo, made a few other minor changes, and here it is. I really would like to design my own theme. I’ll add it to the list.

It looks like we’re down to 2 or 3 public internet service providers, depending on how you count. Comcast seems to be taking the lead on assuming ownership of it’s tubes, and redefining what “internet service” really means – web access and e-mail (httpd, snmp) to partner sites and services, using approved devices.

IP will transition from the defining protocol of the Internet, to being merely a convenient implementation of services. Independent web sites like this one will be replaced by Facebook pages.

Am I being alarmist? What about the FCC in the US? What about the rest of the world? Can these large media corporations be stopped from turning the Internet into Cable 2.0?

I don’t see nearly enough consumer unhappiness or even awareness of this issue. So long as these services are “faster”, “higher speed”, people seem to be happy.

At best, the present public internet will fragment into layers, some AOL-like services, some private corporate, and perhaps some underground networks beyond control of media corporations.