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jonathan – Page 16 – jstrauss

Author: jonathan

Odds & Ends

I am trying to be productive by sorting through all the miscellaneous crap (like expenses, taxes, bills, etc) that you manage to justify ignoring when you are super-busy. I should have taken a before picture of the coffee table in my room that was piled high with the paper detritus of a modern life unattended.

As part of the process, I finally bought a bunch of things I had been meaning to get from Amazon. And as lip-service to the notion that I’m going to improve my record of bi-polar behavior in dealing with personal matters, I threw in a copy of David Allen‘s Getting Things Done. I hope I have better luck with it than Russ has had. For those of you not in the know, David Allen is like the Malcolm Gladwell of personal organization — they have both become famous putting common sense into book form. That alone has been enough to keep me from joining the GTD cult thus far; then there’s the small matter of the GTD cult itself, which I was exposed to in its full glory at BarCampLA.

But despite my self-righteousness, I can admit that I have an issue dealing with the mundane but mandatory administrative tasks of our age. Plus, as one of David Allen’s minions astutely paraphrased, getting things done just feels better than procrastinating. The scary thing is that I can’t really remember a time when I didn’t feel like there was something else I was supposed to be doing (I always *HATED* homework, and rarely did it).  And if that isn’t enough, Ian recommends this book and he is astonishingly productive. So, we’ll see how it goes.

As part of my productivity spree, I am also catching up on the charitable donations I’ve been meaning to make. The Yahoo! Employee Foundation will match any employee donations up to $1,000 per year if they are made through the GivingStation (internal link). So, I have spent a few minutes navigating through the clunky GivingStation UI adding my charities. And even though I already knew to which charities I wanted to donate, I spent some time surfing around Charity Navigator, which does financial analysis of non-profits’ public filings (check out the CEO pay numbers!).

The charities I am giving to are:

And finally, there’s a little newspaper clipping that I have been carrying around for months. It’s from a NY Times review of a book called The Big Why by Michael Winter. The review was lukewarm, but it excerpted the title passage from the book, which I vowed to blog:

The question is not were you loved. Or did you love. Or did you love yourself. Or did you allow love to move you, though that’s a big one. Move you. The question, Rockwell, is did you get to be who you are. And if not, then why. That, my friend, is the big why.

How do we know if we are really being ourselves? That’s definitely one to ponder.

 

“PRIVACY…IS…A…DREAM.”

The title comes from another cool blog post that I found through Kareem’s blog (are you subscribing yet?).

The premise is simple: digital commerce and the surveillance society have made the ability to hide information about oneself something that is surrendered in our decision to participate in modern society.

The answer, according to this post, is equally simple: stop trying to hide, and take control by jamming the system – drown out the things you don’t want people to find in the noise of the things you do want them to find. Or, as Kareem put it: “the more you post about yourself online, the fuller the picture you can paint about yourself, and the more people you will reach.”

This is actually pretty good advice. The people (government, companies, P.I.’s) you don’t want to have access to the information (tax records, credit reports, travel itineraries, credit card bills) you don’t want them to have access to already do. So, why not embrace the system that is enabling this elimination of privacy and use it to your advantage? When you think about it, the inability to hide is the equal and opposite reaction to the ability to self-publish.

Privacy is dead, long live privacy!

This is your invitation to start making the system say what you want to whom you want. If you aren’t doing really bad things, then you should be able to derive more value from this situation than it costs you.

That’s a big if. What’s a really bad thing? Who gets to decide? The government has one idea. Your employer has another. Your bank’s loan officer. Your kid’s private school admissions committee. Your co-op board. Everyone who can use a computer is in a position to pass judgment on you, and some of those judgments may have real impacts on your life.

IMHO, a big part of the solution is in your own control. If you are doing things of which you are ashamed, either stop doing them or stop being ashamed and prepare to defend them. That will probably get you to some 80/20 solution. The unsolved remainder is the scenario in which your defense of your actions is insufficient to prevent the penalties of judgment.

In this increasingly frictionless system, in which all laws (not to mention social conventions, prejudices, and personal opinions) are becoming enforceable, how do you fight back? On one end of the spectrum, there’s the example of a landlord or boss or admissions committee that finds out by reading your blog that you are Muslim and discriminates against you based on that. As offensive as it may be, if you decided that you still wanted to deal with said people, you have both social (boycotts, petitions, etc) and legal (anti-discrimination regulations, etc) means to inflict meaningful pain upon your adversary. On the opposite end of the same spectrum, is the case of an unrepentant murderer who is more than happy to get up in court and explain why he doesn’t believe his crime was wrong. This is why we have the rule of law, which takes the decision of whether the crime is right or wrong out of the hands of the judge and jury trying the case and only asks them to decide if the crime was committed.

Those are both pretty clear-cut examples of the system working. But, between them is a very slippery slope in which it starts to break down. What if you are discriminated against as a member of a class for which the legal process has yet to institute protections and is too small to wield meaningful social power? Or what if you are in fact guilty of violating the law, and you believe it is wrong? This question first occurred to me a little over 2 years ago, when I was living in Glasgow. I had to commute for a few weeks to Edinburgh every day, and my carpool refused to speed. This is because on the road between Glasgow and Edinburgh (and now across much of the UK) there are a series of speed cameras. If you get snapped, you not only have to pay a fine but you also get points put on your license. Enough points, and your license is suspended. Harsh! Without getting into the aggregate social value of traffic laws (in which I believe, despite my driving), this inspired an epiphany related to the enforceability of laws in the digital age.

I realized that many members of society like myself have hidden behind the inefficiency of enforcement when it comes to laws with which we do not agree. This is especially true in cases of what I will call statutory feature-creep: when reactionary politicians implement ill-conceived legislation to pay lip-service to a vocal minority (e.g. the DMCA or Can Spam). The means of affecting the legislative process is so convoluted and wrought with friction, that it has historically cost less for the silent majority to take the minimal risk that they would ever be negatively affected by the bad law than it would for them to stop it from being enacted in the first place. The rationale was essentially, “Let those [insert activist group here] have their fun shooting off their mouths, what does it matter to me?” Well, as technology makes laws more enforceable, it will start to matter to everyone. I’m interested to see what happens when the rest of the world wakes up and realizes that their lives are totally constrained by rules written by special interest groups.

I’ll wrap up with a real example that I think illustrates the dangers of statutory feature-creep in a perfectly enforceable world. I was in a cab a few weeks ago and the driver had Bill O’Reilly’s show on the radio (I guess he figures liberals are too bleeding heart to let a little offensive rhetoric overcome our natural tipping instincts). Bill was taking calls on Megan’s Law, which requires convicted sex-offenders to register and makes their presence known to the community via the internet and other means. I can see the argument that in the abstract there is more value to society in helping to prevent future sex crimes than there is cost to the convicts, and I’m sure that when I become a parent, I will see that value equation become even more lopsided. But, the devil’s in the details. A young man, I think he was 24, called into the show and told of how he must register under Megan’s Law as a sex offender for the rest of his life because he was convicted of statutory rape at 17 for getting caught sleeping with his 15 year-old girlfriend.

So, a law was passed that only affects and would be opposed by 17 year old boys, who are not able to vote, in an effort to appease fathers of 15 year-old girls. It is likely enforced arbitrarily in cases where the boyfriend is hated by the parents for some reason. Without getting rat-holed by a discussion about statutory rape laws, let’s say that this kid served his time. Then another law is hastily passed to gain political capital from a family’s tragedy, without fully thinking through the ramifications of the law or taking appropriate steps� (e.g. scrubbing the list of qualifying sex crimes) to mitigate unintended consequences. And finally, technology enables universal enforceability of this law, so that no one can hide from its ill effects. How is this much better than a preacher affixing a widow with the scarlet letter for spurning his advances?�

This may be a gross over-simplification, and I only use it to illustrate the underlying issue. The goal of the rule of law is to implement a common concept of justice and eliminate arbitrary rewards or punishment. No system is perfect, and there will always be boundary cases that slip through the cracks. However, the inefficiencies in our legal system have�been increasingly gamed by special interests over the past two centuries. And as enforcement becomes more efficient, we must strive to make participation more efficient as well. Lest we all find ourselves at the mercy of a system we no longer control.

Oh yeah, we also need to PARTICIPATE!

When they came for the communists, I remained silent; I was not a communist. When they locked up the social democrats, I remained silent; I was not a social democrat. When they came for the trade unionists, I did not speak out; I was not a trade unionist. When they came for the Jews, I did not speak out; I was not a Jew. When they came for me, there was no one left to speak out.
– Martin Niemoeller

Community “Products”

Rant Alert!

I just finished the first of my three planned white papers last night, and decided to let it percolate a bit before moving on to the next two. It is currently a six-page screed on microeconomic theory in the digital age, and I will likely post some portions of it here soon. In the meantime, I thought I would catch up on some blogosphere surfing and MyWeb bookmarking (come on Yahoo! marketing, where’s the verb for that? MyWebbing? Gong!). And after reading through a couple of posts linked to from Kareem’s highly-underrated blog, something just snapped.

I work at Yahoo!. We are the leading community on the internet both in size and breadth of tools. And, we have some brilliant people who really get community (shouts out to: Ian, Michael, Russell, Randy, Stewart, Caterina, Danah, and Cameron, among others). But we also have some people who seriously don’t get it. They see community as a means to an end, not the end in itself. They are jealous of MySpace and Facebook and whatever the next big fad will be, because of their rapid audience growth.

Audience is what matters to these people because audience is what you sell in conventional advertising [oh, wtf…I’ll succumb to the 1.0/2.0 cliché – I guess it’s only a cliché because it works], let’s call it advertising 1.0. As Google has taught the world, advertising 2.0 is about selling intent. In the pre-digital age, audience put through a number of filters (like content association, demographic information, etc) was used as a proxy for intent. Advertisers weren’t really happy with this approximation, because they knew it was an inefficient means of buying what they really wanted – access to consumers with a certain intent. But, that was the best that conventional media could do, so advertisers settled. As John Wanamaker said approximately a hundred years ago, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is, I don’t know which half.” I won’t go further into advertising 2.0 other than to say that it is coming faster and faster. What makes advertising 2.0 relevant to this particular rant is the fact that it favors monetization of communities, not just audiences.

Getting back to the people who don’t get the “it” of communities; the way you can tell these people is that they talk about “user-generated content” way too much – they treat it as some kind of panacea that will fix the problems inherent with trying to port conventional media business models to the internet. The worst of these offenders use the term so much that they have taken to saving time by abbreviating it…from this day forth, I vow to walk out of any meeting in which someone actually uses the term “UGC” in anything but an ironic context. (Ok, I probably won’t really do that if there are executives present…but, that person will be put on my moron list).

Derek Powazek puts it much more eloquently than I ever could:

User: One who uses. Like, you know, a junkie.
Generated: Like a generator, engine. Like, you know, a robot.
Content: Something that fills a box. Like, you know, packing peanuts.

So what’s user-generated content? Junkies robotically filling boxes with packing peanuts. Lovely.

Calling the beautiful, amazing, brilliant things people create online “user-generated content” is like sliding up to your lady, putting your arm around her and whispering, “Hey baby, let’s have intercourse.”

Amen brother! Derek goes on to suggest the term “Authentic Media,” which I like a lot and hope gets memeified. Authentic media definitely jibes a lot more with all the web and media 2.0 theory around which people are beginning to coalesce.

Anyway, back to the rant at hand. The reason I ironically titled the post “Community ‘Products'” (yes, my over use of quotation marks is often meant to denote irony), is that I don’t believe big companies can succeed at community products. Big companies, like Yahoo!, Google, Microsoft, and even AOL, contribute most to the community value chain by building community platforms, on which the community builds its own products. Isn’t that the real underlying goal of online communities, to incite scalable self-sustaining user-behavior? If you define the product as what the end-user actually consumes, the value of any community product to a given individual user tends to be proportional to its focus on his interests. On social networking sites, like Friendster, Yahoo! 360, MySpace, Facebook, etc, what the end user consumes is a combination of content produced by the host, the community, and himself. The more that product management rests in the hands of that user, the more focused the product will be on that user’s

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Phone Bill Update

So, a few people have been asking me what happened with my now world-famous  (thanks entirely to Russ and his PageRank of 7)  $1,790.84 mobile phone bill, per the update I promised in my original post. But the truth is, I don’t know yet.

What!?

Yeah, I haven’t called back yet. I can tell you that according to the Cingular site, I now only owe $1,056.22. I’m not entirely sure where that number comes from, but at this point I don’t really feel like calling to find out.

I never feel like calling the phone company (or anyone else who keeps me on hold for 20 minutes at a time), but I particularly haven’t felt like it the last few days. Why should these days be different from any others? Well, I’m on what I have been calling a mini-sabbatical.

A lot of the people at work are at CTIA this week and I didn’t have a lot of meetings scheduled, so I asked my boss if I could take a few days off from coming into the office. So on Monday night, I headed down to LA to spend the rest of the week at my parents house. I put up an out-of-office notification, but I am still answering emails and dialing into our daily staff calls. The rest of the time, I have spent working on some white papers based on various ideas that have been percolating in my head for some time, but which I just haven’t had a chance to write down. These are mostly for my own edification, since I don’t really expect anyone else to read them (like much of what I write). But, I am having a good time feeling productive for the first time in a while. And that productivity doesn’t include sitting on the phone with Cingular for another half hour plus.

I am almost through with a big chunk of one paper that isn’t really proprietary at all. So, maybe I’ll post some excerpts here once I have proof-read.

I know, I know, you can’t wait!

Live-blogging my $1,790.84 mobile phone bill

DISCLAIMER: The graphic was too good to pass up. But, I am pretty confident that this was an honest mistake that will be remedied. And, I am overall pretty satisfied with Cingular’s customer service.

I do a quintuple take when I log into the Cingular site this evening to pay last month’s bill. Yes, it says one-thousand seven-hundred ninety dollars and eighty-four cents…WTF!?

It takes me a couple of minutes of browsing through the details to figure out where this insane figure is coming from. But, I had already dialed 611 and am on hold for a customer service rep before I even click through to the detailed statement. I know that I could not possibly owe that amount (more importantly, I know that I could not possibly pay or expense that amount), and I know I will be on hold longer than it will take me to figure out where Cingular had gone wrong. Of course there is this creeping fear that it was I who had screwed something up, not them. And so in the back of my mind, I am also preparing my preferred corporate customer speech – even though I know no one who would fall for that would be authorized to refund the kind of money we are talking about.

I had spent 2 weeks in Europe on business and I had to use my phone a lot while I was over there, but I had made sure to get the special international roaming package ($0.99/minute is hardly a discount, but it’s better than how they try to rape you if you don’t pay the $5/month for ‘discount international roaming’) before I left. It turns out that I had 517 international roaming minutes for a total of $527.25 (yes, I know that’s not $0.99/minute, but I have bigger fish to fry right now). Ouch!

But, that doesn’t get us to $1,790.84.

Then, I see it. $1,154.99 in data usage. Woah! The primary reason I have this phone is to use Yahoo! Mobile products (like Yahoo! Go Mobile), and they can be pretty data intensive. So, I have had an unlimited data plan since I first switched over to AT&T Wireless almost a year ago. Wait, where’s my $19.99 unlimited data charge in the “Monthly Service Charges” section?

Shit!

A few months after Cingular acquired AT&T Wireless, they abandoned support for users on the legacy (Blue) system in order to drive them to migrate to the new (Orange) Cingular system. But this transition was so painful and inelegantly designed (you had to cancel your AT&T Wireless account altogether and then open a new Cingular account, sometimes resulting in as many as 3 bills in one billing period), that a lot of people like me continued to hold out and stay on Blue despite the deterioration in service. When I knew I was heading to Europe, I realized I would have to switch to Orange in order to get the international roaming package. I consulted Lisa, the very nice Yahoo! account rep at Vision Cellular, who helped me navigate some of the maze and then informed me that I would have to go through Cingular directly to finish the process. Lisa also explicitly advised me to double-check that my international roaming package got on my new plan, because Cingular was notorious for losing feature requests like that in the migration shuffle.

It was a long and painful call. I was rerouted several times to several different people, who were all very nice, but none were too sure exactly what needed to happen. I was finally connected to someone who could figure out how to do the complex things that needed to be done. I stated and restated the features that I wanted on my plan. She stated them back to me. I hung-up. A week passed. I called to check that my international roaming plan got put on. It did. Hooray! I don’t know what Lisa was so concerned about.

One-thousand seven-hundred ninety dollars and eighty-four cents. One-thousand one-hundred fifty-four dollars and ninety-nine cents in data usage. No $19.99/month unlimited MediaNet charge. Lisa’s words ringing in my head. They got the international roaming right, but they forgot the data plan. Doh! Well, at least it’s not my fault. Wait, what if it’s not in their records? Well, at least this gives the preferred corporate customer speech a little more weight…

…”Hello, this is Jason. How may I assist you this evening?……Hello?”

Oh, it’s a real person – not just a recording of a real person telling me how valuable I am to her. I always put the phone on speaker when I’m on hold and it always takes the person saying “Hello?” a few times to get me to realize they’re finally there.

“Hi Jason, I’m calling about a bill I just got that seems a bit high…it’s around $1,800.”

That got his attention.

I explain that I think my unlimited data plan got lost in the migration shuffle. Jason is very solicitous (I must say that in general, Cingular operators are some of the nicest call-center operators I have encountered, right up there with Southwest), and we quickly run through the bill. We talk about the $527.25 in roaming, and I admit that it is high but not unreasonable. We both agree that the $1,154.99 in data is the crux of the issue. Jason puts me on hold while he tries to confirm my story about my unlimited data plan on Blue. I wasn’t lying, he puts me back on hold while he tries to dig up my migration request. He comes back to tell me they are still looking. I tell him to take his time. In the meantime, I see that they did this to me as well on my last bill. But, it was only a 6 day billing period (this is the whole painful 3 bills at once thing I mentioned above), so the total error came to $34 and I didn’t notice it. Jason comes back to tell me they can’t find it.

OK Jonathan, get that preferred corporate customer speech dusted off.

But alas, Jason’s ‘team leader’ isn’t working this shift. Jason is going to file a credit request form and annotate my account, and his ‘team leader’ will� take a look at it when she is in tomorrow. Is there anything else I should do? I can call back tomorrow and talk to Jason’s ‘team leader.’

“Have I resolved all of your issues this evening sir?”

What!? No! Oh, he’s back on the call-center script. He tried to be helpful, I’ll play along – after all, this call may be recorded for quality-assurance purposes.

“I guess as much as you could.” [As long as I get my f*cking money refunded!]

“Thank you for choosing Cingular sir, and have a nice evening.”

“Thanks, you too Jason.” [Good karma will help ensure the safe return of my money.]

I look at my phone, that call took 33 minutes and 56 seconds. I still owe Cingular $1,790.84.� I need a drink.

For those of you who read this far, I will post an update after I speak to ‘team leader’ tomorrow. In the meantime, I did find an email from Lisa confirming that the migration order was filed with the unlimited data request. So, I am feeling pretty confident that I will get the money back one way or another.

Oh and btw, you can thank Russ for telling me I had to blog about this (and my procrastination instincts for actually listening to him…and probably taking it a little farther than he had in mind).

I posted a little update here. Bottom-line is that the bill is now down to $1,056.22 on the website, but I haven’t called them back yet.