Curiouser and Curiouser!

Your glow stick could land you in jail. The latest incarnation of the RAVE Act punishes drug users and bystanders alike -- and tramples civil liberties. [Salon.com]

All together now... "Land of the Free, Home of the Brave."

We are proud to announce the launch of the Social Software Alliance

The brainchild of the pioneers at SocialText the alliance is intended to be a place where the developers & users of social software can come together to create open standards, and, contribute industry best practices.  Our initial aims are:

• aid discovery of developers working on synergistic projects and standards
• assist in shaping open standards that mesh well with other alliance and Internet standards
• help promote each standard to gain wider adoption

Quoting from the call for discussion:

"The fast-paced nature of the social software space now argues for developing light-weight, easy-to-implement standards, following the Internet tradition of rough consensus and running code, but perhaps moving faster than the larger standards bodies. It is expected that those standards promulgated by the alliance which become widely adopted will be proposed to the appropriate general standards body or bodies: W3C, IETF, ISO, etc. "

There will be a SocialText sponsored Happening tomorrow (see the site for more details) and we hope that anyone who is interested in the development of social software will come and get involved.

Following up on GlobeAlive I've found a few more interesting things:

• The desktop client really needs to go.  Trillian will be supporting the Jabber protocol soon, so Jabber as a replacement for the desktop client will be fine.
• The system saves the transcript of all chats & offline Q&A -- something to remember.  I'm not sure what the copyright is on material I write in either.

Perhaps the system should allow me to choose a Creative Commons license to be applied to everything I write on GlobeAlive?

Also I wonder if those transcripts and Q&A are searchable?  One possibility is that they should be indexed by matching keywords found in the original question (& transcript) with keywords attached to the expert in question.

Another question that occurs to me is: "How does the rating system work?"  I can't find it explained on the site.

I really do think this is an interesting idea.  So far I've already been asked one real (& tough) question.  I guess I will get both sides when I try using it as a user.

Yes, there are more of us.

I'm a lot more careful than I may seem, at least when it comes to other family members. So I've been slow to blog about the good work my older son, Allen (who is, like, 24 years older than the younger one), has quietly been doing on a project he only told me about a month ago, long after it was well underway.

The project is GlobeAlive, the slogan of which is The World Live Web. It's basically a 'live' search engine: one that finds human beings who might be available to answer questions in real time. There's a lot of synergy with what Britt is doing with Xpertweb, and what Mitch has been saying about the Strip Mall Infomediary, both of which also, like GlobeAlive, could stand to benefit from the kind of identity infrastructure I wrote about in Making Mydentity, and expect to see coming out of SourceID and similar efforts. There are also natural synergies with smart mobbery, social software, moblogging, and most of the stuff in Marc's blogrolling column. And, of course, instant messaging with presence detection, which is why Allen and friends are currently developing a new client that uses Jabber.

What prompts me to start talking about Allen's work with GlobeAlive is Britt Blaser's post yesterday, What's That In Your Genes? Britt does a nice (and flattering) job of explaining the fertile ground where the Xpertweb and GlobeAlive circles overlap.

Some interesting context: Allen isn't your typical Web entrepreneur. He isn't even a techie. He's a writer and a philosopher whose research tends to want answers he found Google and other Web search engines didn't quite provide. What he wanted were the kind of answers you can only get from live human beings — real experts on, say, relativity theory or Ludwig Wittgenstein (two subjects he mentioned in recent conversations). Not finding what he wanted with Web search engines, he decided to invent an engine that searched for live people. Here's how he explained it to me on the phone a few minutes ago:

GlobeAlive is for when you want a person and not a site. If you want a site, Google's your engine. If you want a person, GlobeAlive is there for the job. Or will be. We're still in beta, although we have a very devoted group of people involved already.

Is it for when you're looking for experts?

It can be for any form of interaction; not just an expert answer, even though that's the most common use at this early stage. But I don't want this to be thought of as just another expert site. It's not just that. It's a live search engine. Later we may want to make a distinction between an expert, a conversationalist, or a somebody with something to sell. But for now the primary use will be to find experts, and get expert answers to questions.

Where does it stand technically?

We've been working and reworking it for going on two years now, but basically it's still in beta. Right now we're working with GlobeAlive desktop, which is a crappy instant messenger. That's why we're working on a Jabber client right now. What we're want next is to scale up on both the supply and the demand side. More experts, more participants, and more users doing searches. Right now it's like Google with a handful of Web sites to search. But we've been at this long enough to know that the idea does work, and it does scale. And it will grow organically, and in value. The bigger it gets, the better it gets.

How does an expert keep from getting bothered by the wrong questions?

You only come up in searches when you want to be found. Your keywords and nothing else. (It's a bit more complicated than that, I think; but that's what I wrote down.)

What about your business model?

Revenues come from paid placements. We've played with the word "chatvertising." In any case, appropriate advertising. Positive-value stuff. Nothing insulting or intrusive. And we want to put in financial incentives for participants in the form of tiered revenue sharing.

I'm intrigued by the idea that the Web, or the Net, is missing a live element, in spite of all the efforts going on with VoIP, instant messaging and other stuff. And I'm impressed that Allen has already taken this thing as far as he has, entirely on its own bootstaps. He's funded it himself, out of his own pockets, and with the help of many friends who believe in the idea.

He's also started a blog. That's in beta too, but coming along nicely for a rookie effort.

So check it out. Sign up, if it intrigues you. Since Allen's now out here in the blog world as well, I'm sure he'd be interested in all kinds of connections and constructive feedback.

[The Doc Searls Weblog]

GlobeAlive does look interesting so I signed up.  This is fairly simple although choosing the keywords to be associated with takes some time and is pretty much unassisted.

In order to be available to help people you need to run one of their desktop clients.  I'm doing that now but I will be glad when I don't have to because it's awful.  The proferred Jabber is no more convenient for me than their own client.  I want something that lets me continue to use my existing IM client Trillian.

Since nobody else seemed to be about to ask me a question I decided to try and chat with myself.  This experience has left me a little skeptical.  The client just connects, automatically.  There is no page-request, no introduction, the guest is unidentified and all I would get as a clue is their last search term (if any).

As a protocol I think that this leaves a lot to be desired of.  It would only take a few false and/or malicious connections before I might wonder if this is going to be a bother.

I think that the person wanting to chat should at least be asked their name, and a precis question.  Since I am, presumably, helping them for free I don't think it's too much to ask that I shouldn't have to do it blind!

Anyway, that said, I am ready to help anyone on my choosen topics.  Ask away!

Oligopoly Watch. Author Steve Hannaford has been a consultant and business analyst for a long time. I don't know how long, but I remember him writing business columns for MacWeek more than a decade ago, when getting on their "free" subscription list was still a big deal. Over the years he's published a variety of management newsletters and written a couple of books which are classic texts in the graphic arts industry. Steve and I have been friends for a long time too, and I've encouraged him to start a weblog. For the last few years he's been following the seismic shifts wrought in the business world by the Internet, technology, and globalization and he has some interesting things to say about business, markets, and the effects of global conglomerates. Now Steve's decided to take the plunge and launch a Radio weblog, Oligopoly Watch, as a precursor to a book he's writing on the same topic. He takes a look at current news items and provides some interesting insight into what they really mean. If you're interested in what goes on behind the scenes of your favorite multi-national check it out. You might be surprised at what you find. [b.cognosco]

Steve's blog was a fascinating read.  I shall be subscribing.