Related link: http://simonstl.com/dryden/archives/000413.html

Thanks to free access to census and tax parcel data, I was able to calculate what the population densities are in a place that’s been proposed to have a significant increase in density.

The U.S. Census Bureau provides an enormous amount of information about populations, down to relatively small areas. Unfortunately, the lines they choose for census blocks are somewhat arbitrary, especially in rural areas where the distances between roads can be substantial. The Census Bureau does align its blocks and tracts with municipal boundaries, but the areas I’m focusing on are unincorporated. New York State refers to them as hamlets, built-up places with an identity but no government specific to that area.

In this case, the Town of Dryden, which contains these hamlets, is working on a Comprehensive Plan. The plan suggests increasing the density of these hamlets to eight housing units per acre, but doesn’t provide any baseline for what the density currently is. Figuring out that current density makes it much easier to have a conversation about what kind of change this means for the hamlet.

There are a couple of ways I could have figured this out. House-to-house surveys combined with surveying the areas involved was one option. Given the snow on the ground and the difficulty of showing up on people’s doorsteps asking questions, it seemed better to use existing data from the census.

Census data is available for the entire country, but I’m extremely lucky to live in a county which makes vast amounts of GIS data available. Both the census data and the county’s own maps are available through CUGIR, a GIS data clearinghouse for New York State. Having the tax parcel data available meant I could calculate areas that corresponded to the inhabited areas highlighted in the plan.

With the free data, I could calculate both populations for the hamlets, and, critically for the evaluation of this plan, their densities.

Free access to data makes figuring these things out much much easier.

Has free GIS data helped you figure out a community issue? Are there cases where you’d like to have more access to data for these purposes?

There was a WS-Notification/WS-Resource Framework spec authors meeting held at IBM in Chicago this week. (Public feedback meeting happening next week in California). After dinner Monday night Glen Daniels and I went over to “Buddy Guy’s” Blues bar to play some pool. It was open mic night, and Glen got together with a bunch of the locals and had a jam session! It was totally cool. He played harps and sang some tunes. They did “The Thrill is Gone”, “Feeling Alright” (as made famous by Joe Cocker), among other things. Here are some photos taken from my little camera phone -

BTW, you can’t tell from these tiny photos, but that’s a “W3C Technical Plenary” meeting T-Shirt he’s wearing.

Dave

Related link: http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/internet/02/14/glitch.reveals.ap/index.html

CNN reports that there was a glitch in Amazon’s Canadian web site, which revealed the identity of book reviewers for a whole week.

Apparently there were a fair amount of authors who were logging in anonymously and posting favorable reviews for their books.

I think that’s a sad state of affairs. I don’t agree with what they did. Although I can understand why the temptation is there. The problem with Amazon is that anyone can post a bad review of your book, and you really have no recourse. There’s no threaded discussion aspect of it. A single bad review from someone who has an axe to grind with you can bring an otherwise 5 star rating down to a 3.5.

My hats off to O’Reilly for disallowing anonymous postings on this web site.

FYI - Richard Monson-Haefel’s discovered this problem a few months ago. It seems some folks have taken this to a new level by impersonating well known public figures. His weblog has a good discussion thread on it.

Dave

Related link: http://www.routledge-ny.com/books.cfm?isbn=0415935709

While flying back from the Emerging Technologies conference, I stopped in a Philadelphia airport bookstore and found Silicon Alley: The Rise and Fall of a New Media District.

I lived in New York from 1993-6, working on a master’s at the New School for Social Research’s Media Studies program, which I never finished, working in HyperCard, writing strange hyperlinked rants, building a railroad under my bed, and creating a small TCP/IP network in the living room for good measure.

For better or worse, I missed the Silicon Alley scene when I fled the city in 1996, jumping to a job at a small web design company in Connecticut to escape an insane job building multimedia CDs for accountants. Then I worked at a systems integrator in North Carolina, even further from the excitement of Silicon Alley. When I came back to New York, I stayed away from the excitement, moving to Ithaca, far upstate.

All this time, though, I really felt I was missing something. Up until 2000, I felt I’d missed something good; after that, I felt I’d missed something, well, worth missing. I saw bits of it, as I participated in the WWWAC mailing list for a few years, and visited New York periodically. I apparently missed all the good dot-com parties; the only free drinks I had were at a party launching the web site for Newsday.

Michael Indergaard’s Silicon Alley: The Rise and Fall of a New Media District is a real shift from the WWWAC list perspective and the business perspective that dominated Crain’s and the Silicon Alley Reporter. It’s effectively a post-mortem, detailing how punk rock aesthetics combined with tech to form a money machine that just wasn’t sustainable. It has lots of stories, lots of tables, and enough cynicism to explore the mechanisms powering some of the more outlandish dreams.

New York continues, but Silicon Alley, as it was, has largely disappeared. I’m happy to have missed it, but also glad for the chance to look back.

Where were you during the boom?

We're part way through the third day already and I've been moving through the conference so quickly that I can hardly barely keep up with the action let alone sit to write something coherent.

Standing in line to buy a copy of Cory Doctrow's Eastern Standard Tribe to get autographed, fellow O'Reilly weblogger Robert Kaye and I began chatting on the difficulty of capturing the action here. Robert said the incidental conversations and meetings that take place during these manic days are in many ways the most interesting and valuable part. We both wished that we could effectively capture that in a weblog entry of any reasonable length and without seeming like we were name dropping. There are some problems technology has not and may never solve.

Microsoft's Marc Smith began the day with an interesting and entertaining overview of community interaction so far and several technologies and concepts that show promise as ways to enhance online communities.

Pertti Korhonen of Nokia Mobile Software presented the landscape of mobile devices and interactivity. What was profound, and I believe missed by most listening, is that the potential impact developers have through mobile applications and systems is exponentially larger then anything to date. Consider that Nokia alone, is expecting to ship 100 million programmable devices this year.

It was also exciting to that Nokia lists the Atom API in its future road map for mobile applications.

Moving onto the breakout sessions here are a few that I caught. (Many others that I couldn't attend.)

Danny O'Brien made a very entertaining presentation of his research of how uber alpha geeks get things done. The one word summary: shells. ("All $@?&*!% shells.")

Tom Igoe a professor at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program, Tisch School of the Arts and long with some of his students, presented a number of very interesting socially mobile applications that they designed. (See my SubEthaEdit notes for more.)

I sat in eBay's presentation of their revised Web Services interface. Good to see another Internet player follow Amazon and Google's lead. I'm personally looking forward to playing with those myself. (They're web services are even document literal SOAP and not RPC-style.)

Matt Webb presented his research and views on Glancing interfaces and their potential use in interactive environments. Later, Dan Brickley and Edd Dumbill lead an interesting discussions of FOAF including a round of lightning talks.

Next was the nightly take over of the hotel bar by attendees for more conversation. There many odd looks and double takes by the other hotel guests attending an event for Golf Pros. I suppose it was the sea of Powerbooks and iBooks over cocktails. I combination best left for professionals only.

Before nearly passing out I caught BOFs for Technorati lead by Kevin Marks and another for del.icio.us lead by Joshua Schachter.

So far today we've heard an interesting overview from Don Norman and our emotional responses to product design followed by Warburg Pincus's William Janeway spoke on technology investment trends and markets.

Afterwards I caught another presentation by Josh Schachter on one of his other free-time project, GeoURL, and the interesting lessons learned and uses of his work. Andrew Bunny Huang presented how the masses can hack their own hardware and encouraged us to have fun doing so.

Currently I'm listening Wei Meng Lee school us on personalized location based services. Later I have the tough decision between Edd Dumbill's Dashbord presentation and Tom Igoe's Networked Objects presentations. (The ETech paradox – which session to choose?)

It's been another great experience that I'm glad I got to participate in. (Now if only I didn't have to fold up my 6'5" frame into an airline seat for ~6 hours.) I'm already looking forward to the next time.

Another Emerging Technology conference is here and like last time I'm exhausted already. This much enthusiasm, creative spirit and technical know-how in one place should be illegal.

This year's conference picked where the last one left off with discussion of social effects of technology, hardware hacking, services and mobile. Apple Powerbooks and iBooks dominate the scene. The phone to have is the Nokia 3650.

Rather then real time blogging, I've been participating in collaborative note taking using the award winning SubEthaEdit. Combining elements of wikis and instant messaging, it's been a fascinating experience that is downright fun. I highly recommend you give it a try. (Don't have a Mac? BOO! BOO! Shame on you.)

Tim O'Reilly set the tone by kicking off the conference with his O'Reilly Radar talk. Tim returned to themes of the Internet as the platform and watching the alpha geeks which included an overview of the latest hacks to get his attention. He closed with a few wishes that technology

Helen Greiner of iRobot showed us the latest in robotics effecting our lives including a demonstration of the Roomba. (I think this is a vacuum that my wife won't kick my butt for giving her for christmas this year.)

I attended Dave Sifry's energetic presentation on Technorati – what's happened and what's new. He demonstrated a new feature that shows information people are linking to on Amazon in real-time and links to other bloggers. Neat. He encourages all to send them feedback on their service adn what users would like to see.

Macromedia's Jim Morris demonstrated his company's forthcoming FlashCast server. FlashCast is a service that pushes Flash-based channels of information and applications over a wireless network to devices. Quite fascinating. I think Flash applications on mobile devices could seriously challenge J2ME. Getting the near universal deployment that the J2ME runtime has will be the deciding factor.

Mike Pusateri, Elizabeth Freeman, and Eric Freeman presented how Disney is levering weblog and wiki tools internally. It's great to see a company the size of Disney deploying such tools and to good effect. I hope more follow their lead.

Sam Ruby gave a presentation of his work as the lightening rod of the project that has come to be known as Atom. Based on his experience, he stated there is no one perfect single tool and suggested a mix of weblogs, wikis and mailing lists be used in such efforts. (Sam has already posted his slides here.)

For a little bit of geek fun, I attended Brian Jepson and Rael Dornfest's presentation on Mobile Hacks which could have been entitled how to trick out your phone and bring it to its knees.

Onward to day two.

In writing one of my chapters on protocols and messaging for my next book, I wound up writing up this on the subject of MOM and interoperable wire protocol… I’m curious what people think….

When using a Message Oriented Middleware (MOM), a sender and receiver need to have a piece of client software that is supplied by the MOM vendor in order to participate in a messaging conversation. Granted its a small piece, often less than 1 meg, but the point is not about the size but the fact that there is a piece of software on both sides of the wire. JMS is the only adopted standard for MOM, yet it does not define an interoperable on-the-wire format and therefore does not alleviate that situation. The reason for this is the internals of the wire protocol are part of a MOM vendor’s proprietary implementation for providing highly efficient reliable delivery of messages. I’m not talking about UDP vs. TCP/IP, vs something else. I’m talking about the next protocol level above that–the message transport layer–which has to do with what govern’s the behavior of things like message level acknowledgements and retries.

JMS does dictate that messages must be interoperable between vendors, meaning that a JMS message must be capable of being received from a Topic or Queue from one JMS vendor, and placed on a Topic or Queue of another JMS vendor implementation without modification. Most JMS vendors (and ESBs) provide bridge technology to do this.

WS-Reliability and WS-ReliableMessaging (collectively referred to as WS-Rel*) are industry efforts defining an open interoperable wire protocol for reliable messaging based on the SOAP protocol. It is conceivable, and also probable that a MOM implementation could be based entirely on one of these WS-Rel* specifications. However, that would still require a piece of MOM infrastructure be on both sides of the wire to handle behavior such as acknowledgement of receipt, message persistence, and recovery from failure. From that perspective, what you gain by having an open protocol is the ability to have the MOM piece of software on either side of the conversation provided by a different vendor. However this is at the expense of having less room to innovate on efficiencies of acks and nacks at the message transport layer.

There’s a 80/20 rule to be considered here. For the most part, you aren’t mixing MOM implementations on a regular basis, unless you are bridging together a new project with an old one, or if you are connecting together different departments, business units, or business partners who have their roots in one implementation or another. So for the 80% normal case, you are using one MOM vendor for a particular project, and for that it shouldn’t matter what the internal protocol is between the pieces of the MOM software any more than it would matter whether there was an open standard for how a DBMS writes and manages storage on disk (just my luck, someone will chime in an tell me there is one for that). For the 20% or less case, you are mixing MOM vendors via bridging technology or WS-Rel* endpoint implementations together

I think I’m actually being generous with the 80/20 ratio. I believe its actually 90/10, or even higher. I mean, think about how many applications that you have spread out across your company that could benefit by being integrated together using messaging as the core of an integration strategy. Compare that with how many instances of integration you need to do with outside entities where you don’t have any control over what software gets installed, and would therefore need to have an open reliable protocol like WS-Rel*. That would be your ratio. I would like to hear from folks what that is.

I am not trying to say anything negative about the need for WS-Rel*. I am a big proponent of both of the WS-Rel* specs, and have contributed to both. I am just trying to put it into the proper perspective. I’m not saying anything that’s contrary to the intent of WS-Rel* either. WS-Rel* provides much-needed interoperability between MOM implementations for the use cases where its applicable. And for that, we are all grateful (MOM vendors and users alike).

Dave

In working on my next book, which has to do with standards and integration, I recently wrote up a little sidebar rant about the state of standards, which I thought I would share….

When talking about the use and adoption of “Standards”, it is really hard to tell these days just exactly what that means anymore. We live in a world where there are multiple overlapping efforts from different standards bodies to define standard specifications. Vendor alliances are producing Web Services specifications outside of the domain of any standards body or consortia.

Every once in a while I will get challenged on referring to the use of a Java specification as a “standard”. The argument being that since the Java Community Process (JCP) is owned by one vendor (Sun Microsystems), the specifications that come out of that process are not really considered “standards”. They are just specifications.

I tend to use the words “standards” and “specifications” interchangeably. As far as I am concerned, any specification that has been through the JCP should be considered standard enough in that it has gone through some sort of formal process where it was jointly defined by a group of independent companies and/or individuals, and was posted for a public review process prior to ratification.

There are “defacto standards” such as open source implementations, many of which invented their own ways of doing things, or that conform to industry accepted “standard” specifications. The Apache SOAP and Apache Axis toolkits are examples of that.

The evolving WS-* stack of specs from the vendor collaborations which usually include Microsoft, IBM, and sometimes BEA should also be considered as “defacto standards” in that they represent the work and statement of direction for a meaningful constituency of the largest platform vendors. Some of these WS-* specifications have been submitted to an official standards body already, and the rest have been part of a program which involves public feedback sessions.

In short – the word “standard”, in the terms of standards based integration, refers to either a specification or an implementation that has gained enough traction in the industry to have long lasting staying power, and is open enough for multiple vendors to be able to implement it or repackage it.

- Dave

<a href="javascript:window.location='http://www.google.com/search?as_lq=' +  window.location.href">Backlink</a>

Do you know any variations on this trick?

Related link: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/4345

Tim O’Reilly notes that “Howard Dean’s disappointing performance in the first two primaries has come as something of a shock to people who think that blogging is the answer, whatever the question.” I agree with Tim that blogging alone isn’t necessarily the right answer to mobilizing a national political force, and I also think it’s important to take a hard look at places where blogging opens up new possibilities in politics.

The piece in the Pittburgh Post-Gazette that Tim points to provides a lot of explanation about the strengths and weaknesses of the Dean campaign’s strategy, especially in contrast with that of the Kerry campaign. To summarize brutally, Dean’s Internet-based approach did a fantastic job on the fund-raising end, tapping into deep frustrations held by people around the country, as well as in disseminating a message. Kerry’s more traditional approach mobilized networks of people, not their computers. Reaching voters, especially voters in geographically specific areas, is still better done through networks of people.

This excerpt seems perhaps especially damning, but I think it also offers a glimmer of how to do better next time:

Mesmerized by their own Internet wizardry, the Dean organization, on the other hand, appeared to forget that politics is about listening — in diners and church basements — to the concerns and ambitions of real people. Excited by the virtual conversations on their Internet blog, the Dean campaign failed to appreciate the critical role of effective, local organizing.

The result was a self-congratulatory echo chamber populated by thousands of untrained, highly dedicated Dean partisans. It was a society committed to reinforcing the beliefs of its creators. This organization’s inexperience did not prepare it for the predictable media pounding that Dean encountered as the Democratic front-runner.

By focusing on the excitement that technology made possible rather than on building excitement on the ground, blogs created new problems. Despite their veneer of newness and their demonstrated ability to build both buzz and an impressive war chest, blogs alone are definitely not enough to motivate voters or create experienced groups of volunteers with far-reaching social networks. (No, I don’t think Orkut will help in that regard.)

At the same time, though, the timeframe for all of this has been very very short. Social networks take time to develop, whatever the technology. Blogs still have tremendous potential to create these networks, but it will take longer to build these networks than to process credit-card transactions for donations.

I also worry that bloggers risk limiting their effectiveness by talking constantly about the same themes. How many people writing about national politics is anyone but the most hardened political junkie going to want to read? Even the best writing is likely to disappear into the Googlearchy.

In my experience, everyone in the United States has opinions about politics, but not everyone is excited about hearing everyone else’s opinion. If blogs are going to create connections between people more rapidly than trackbacks between entries, bloggers need to find ways to develop audiences of people who have something in common.

Developing those kinds of committed audiences may involve geographic location, something I’m trying myself, and something which certainly makes it easier to meet people locally, or it could be through focus on a single issue, uniting people who are especially interested in one aspect of the conversation. Issues and places seem to drive long-term interests better than candidates; even when the elections are over, the issues and places remain.

These kinds of approaches also seem more likely to accomodate listening, a crucial political skill, given the time and focus to adjust messages over time.

It doesn’t seem to me like it’s time to write the Dean campaign’s work off as a failure. It does, however, seem like it’s time to consider a course correction, one which focuses on how to collect votes over time rather than blog entries and dollars quickly.

(And why, in the end, don’t I blog about Dean? Covering national politics doesn’t fit well with my approach of blogging locally at all.)

Can technology bring people together to work effectively on common causes?