Chapter 3 Results:
pages: 28
words: 2,784
Chapter 4 Results :
pages: 66
words: 11,310
Sent from Auckland, Auk, New Zealand
Monday, December 21, 2009
The meaning of open
Totally love this article from the Google Blog. (http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/2009/12/meaning-of-open.html)
The meaning of open
Monday, December 21, 2009 at 4:57 PM ET
Last week I sent an email to Googlers about the meaning of "open" as it relates to the Internet, Google, and our users. In the spirit of openness, I thought it would be appropriate to share these thoughts with those outside of Google as well.
At Google we believe that open systems win. They lead to more innovation, value, and freedom of choice for consumers, and a vibrant, profitable, and competitive ecosystem for businesses. Many companies will claim roughly the same thing since they know that declaring themselves to be open is both good for their brand and completely without risk. After all, in our industry there is no clear definition of what open really means. It is a Rashomon-like term: highly subjective and vitally important.
The topic of open seems to be coming up a lot lately at Google. I've been in meetings where we're discussing a product and someone says something to the effect that we should be more open. Then a debate ensues which reveals that even though most everyone in the room believes in open we don't necessarily agree on what it means in practice.
This is happening often enough for me to conclude that we need to lay out our definition of open in clear terms that we can all understand and support. What follows is that definition based on my experiences at Google and the input of several colleagues. We run the company and make our product decisions based on these principles, so I encourage you to carefully read, review, and debate them. Then own them and try to incorporate them into your work. This is a complex subject and if there is debate (and I'm sure there will be) it should be in the open! Please feel free to comment.
There are two components to our definition of open: open technology and open information. Open technology includes open source, meaning we release and actively support code that helps grow the Internet, and open standards, meaning we adhere to accepted standards and, if none exist, work to create standards that improve the entire Internet (and not just benefit Google). Open information means that when we have information about users we use it to provide something that is valuable to them, we are transparent about what information we have about them, and we give them ultimate control over their information. These are the things we should be doing. In many cases we aren't there, but I hope that with this note we can start working to close the gap between reality and aspiration.
If we can embody a consistent commitment to open — which I believe we can — then we have a big opportunity to lead by example and encourage other companies and industries to adopt the same commitment. If they do, the world will be a better place.
Open systems win
To understand our position in more detail, it helps to start with the assertion that open systems win. This is counter-intuitive to the traditionally trained MBA who is taught to generate a sustainable competitive advantage by creating a closed system, making it popular, then milking it through the product life cycle. The conventional wisdom goes that companies should lock in customers to lock out competitors. There are different tactical approaches — razor companies make the razor cheap and the blades expensive, while the old IBM made the mainframes expensive and the software ... expensive too. Either way, a well-managed closed system can deliver plenty of profits. They can also deliver well-designed products in the short run — the iPod and iPhone being the obvious examples — but eventually innovation in a closed system tends towards being incremental at best (is a four blade razor really that much better than a three blade one?) because the whole point is to preserve the status quo. Complacency is the hallmark of any closed system. If you don't have to work that hard to keep your customers, you won't.
Open systems are just the opposite. They are competitive and far more dynamic. In an open system, a competitive advantage doesn't derive from locking in customers, but rather from understanding the fast-moving system better than anyone else and using that knowledge to generate better, more innovative products. The successful company in an open system is both a fast innovator and a thought leader; the brand value of thought leadership attracts customers and then fast innovation keeps them. This isn't easy — far from it — but fast companies have nothing to fear, and when they are successful they can generate great shareholder value.
Open systems have the potential to spawn industries. They harness the intellect of the general population and spur businesses to compete, innovate, and win based on the merits of their products and not just the brilliance of their business tactics. The race to map the human genome is one example.
In the book Wikinomics, Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams explain how in the mid-1990s private firms were discovering and patenting large amounts of DNA sequence data and then assuming control over who could access that information and at what price. Having so much of the genome under private ownership raised costs and made drug discovery far less efficient. Then, in 1995, Merck Pharmaceuticals and the Gene Sequencing Center at Washington University changed the game by creating a new, open initiative called the Merck Gene Index. Within three years they had published over 800,000 gene sequences into the public domain, and soon other collaborative projects followed suit. This in an industry where early stage R&D was traditionally pursued individually in closed labs, so Merck's open approach not only changed the culture of the entire field but also accelerated the pace of biomedical research and drug development. It gave researchers everywhere unrestricted access to an open resource of genetic information.
Another way to look at the difference between open and closed systems is that open systems allow innovation at all levels — from the operating system to the application layer — not just at the top. This means that one company doesn't have to depend on another's benevolence to ship a product. If the GNU C compiler that I'm using has a bug, I can fix it since the compiler is open source. I don't have to file a bug report and hope for a timely response.
So if you are trying to grow an entire industry as broadly as possible, open systems trump closed. And that is exactly what we are trying to do with the Internet. Our commitment to open systems is not altruistic. Rather it's good business, since an open Internet creates a steady stream of innovations that attracts users and usage and grows the entire industry. Hal Varian has an equation in his book Information Rules that applies here:
Reward = (Total value added to the industry) * (Our share of industry value)
All other things being equal, a 10 percent increase in share or a 10 percent increase in industry value should lead to the same outcome. But in our industry a 10 percent increase in industry value will yield a much bigger reward because it will stimulate economies of scale across the entire industry, increasing productivity and reducing costs for all competitors. As long as we contribute a steady stream of great products we will prosper along with the entire ecosystem. We may get a smaller piece, but it will come from a bigger pie.
In other words, Google's future depends on the Internet staying an open system, and our advocacy of open will grow the web for everyone - including Google.
Open Technology
The definition of open starts with the technologies upon which the Internet was founded: open standards and open source software.
Open Standards
Networks have always depended on standards to flourish. When railroad tracks were first being laid across the U.S. in the early 19th century, there were seven different standards for track width. The network didn't flourish and expand west until the different railway companies agreed upon a standard width of 4' 8.5". (In this case the standards war was an actual war: Southern railroads were forced to convert over 11,000 miles of track to the new standard after the Confederacy lost to the Union in the Civil War.)
So there was some precedent in 1974 when Vint Cerf and his colleagues proposed using an open standard (which became TCP/IP) to connect the several computer networks that had emerged around the U.S. They didn't know exactly how many networks were out there so the "Internet" — a term Vint coined — had to be open. Any network could connect using TCP/IP, and now, as a result of that decision, there are about 681 million hosts on the Internet.
Today, we base our developer products on open standards because interoperability is a critical element of user choice. What does this mean for Google Product Managers and Engineers? Simple: whenever possible, use existing open standards. If you are venturing into an area where open standards don't exist, create them. If existing standards aren't as good as they should be, work to improve them and make those improvements as simple and well documented as you can. Our top priorities should always be users and the industry at large and not just the good of Google, and you should work with standards committees to make our changes part of the accepted specification.
We have a good history of doing this. In the formative years of the Google Data Protocol (our standard API protocol, which is based on XML/Atom), we worked as part of the IETF Atom Protocol Working Group to shape the Atom specification. There's also our recent work with the W3C to create a standard geolocation API that will make it easy for developers to build browser-based, location-sensitive applications. This standard helps everyone, not just us, and will lead to users having access to many more compelling apps from thousands of developers.
Open Source
Most of those apps will be built on open source software, a phenomenon responsible for the web's explosive growth in the past 15 years. There is a historic precedent here: while the term "open source" was coined in the late 1990s, the concept of sharing valuable information to catalyze an industry existed long before the Internet. In the early 1900s, the U.S. automobile industry instituted a cross-licensing agreement whereby patents were shared openly and freely amongst manufacturers. Prior to this agreement, the owners of the patent for the two-cycle gasoline engine had effectively bottled up the industry.
Today's open source goes far beyond the "patent pooling" of the early auto manufacturers, and has led to the development of the sophisticated software components — Linux, Apache, SSH, and others — upon which Google is built. In fact, we use tens of millions of lines of open source code to run our products. We also give back: we are the largest open source contributor in the world, contributing over 800 projects that total over 20 million lines of code to open source, with four projects (Chrome, Android, Chrome OS, and Google Web Toolkit) of over a million lines of code each. We have teams that work to support Mozilla and Apache, and an open source project hosting service (code.google.com/hosting) that hosts over 250,000 projects. These activities not only ensure that others can help us build the best products, they also mean that others can use our software as a base for their own products if we fail to innovate adequately.
When we open source our code we use standard, open Apache 2.0 licensing, which means we don't control the code. Others can take our open source code, modify it, close it up and ship it as their own. Android is a classic example of this, as several OEMs have already taken the code and done great things with it. There are risks to this approach, however, as the software can fragment into different branches which don't work well together (remember how Unix for workstations devolved into various flavors — Apollo, Sun, HP, etc.). This is something we are working hard to avoid with Android.
While we are committed to opening the code for our developer tools, not all Google products are open source. Our goal is to keep the Internet open, which promotes choice and competition and keeps users and developers from getting locked in. In many cases, most notably our search and ads products, opening up the code would not contribute to these goals and would actually hurt users. The search and advertising markets are already highly competitive with very low switching costs, so users and advertisers already have plenty of choice and are not locked in. Not to mention the fact that opening up these systems would allow people to "game" our algorithms to manipulate search and ads quality rankings, reducing our quality for everyone.
So as you are building your product or adding new features, stop and ask yourself: Would open sourcing this code promote the open Internet? Would it spur greater user, advertiser, and partner choice? Would it lead to greater competition and innovation? If so, then you should make it open source. And when you do, do it right; don't just push it over the wall into the public realm and forget about it. Make sure you have the resources to pay attention to the code and foster developer engagement. Google Web Toolkit, where we have developed in the open and used a public bug tracker and source control system, is a good example of this.
Open Information
The foundation of open standards and open source has led to a web where massive amounts of personal information — photos, contacts, updates — are regularly uploaded. The scale of information being shared, and the fact that it can be saved forever, creates a question that was hardly a consideration a few years ago: How do we treat this information?
Historically, new information technologies have often enabled new forms of commerce. For example, when traders in the Mediterranean region circa 3000 BC invented seals (called bullae) to ensure that their shipments reached their destinations tamper-free, they transformed commerce from local to long distance. Similar transformations were spurred by the advent of the written word, and more recently, computers. At every step of the way, the transaction, a consensual agreement where each party gets something of value, was powered by a new type of information that allowed a contract to be enforced.
On the web, the new form of commerce is the exchange of personal information for something of value. This is a transaction that millions of us participate in every day, and it has potentially great benefits. An auto insurer could monitor a customer's driving habits in real-time and give a discount for good driving — or charge a premium for speeding — powered by information (GPS tracking) that wasn't available only a few years ago. This is a fairly simple transaction, but we will encounter far more sensitive scenarios.
Let's say your child has an allergy to certain medicines. Would you allow her medical data to be accessible by a smart wireless syringe which could prevent an EMT or nurse from accidentally giving her that medicine? I would, but you might decide the metal bracelet around her wrist is sufficient. And that's the point — people can and will reach different decisions, and when it comes to their personal information we need to treat all of those decisions with equal respect.
So while having more personal information online can be quite beneficial to everyone, its uses should be guided by principles that are responsible, scalable, and flexible enough to grow and change with our industry. And unlike open technology, where our objective is to grow the Internet ecosystem, our approach to open information is to build trust with the individuals who engage within that ecosystem (users, partners, and customers). Trust is the most important currency online, so to build it we adhere to three principles of open information: value, transparency, and control.
Value
First and foremost, we need to make products that are valuable to users. In many cases, we can make our products even better if we know more information about the user, but privacy concerns can arise if people don't understand what value they are getting in return for their information. Explain that value to them, however, and they will often agree to the transaction. For example, millions of people let credit card companies retain information on the purchases they make with their card in exchange for the convenience of not carrying around cash.
We did this well when we launched Interest-Based Advertising in March. IBA makes ads more relevant and more useful. That is the extra value we create based on the information we gather. It also includes a user preferences manager that clearly explains what users are getting in exchange for their information and lets them opt out or adjust their settings. The vast majority of people who visit the preferences manager choose to adjust their settings rather than opt out because they realize the value of receiving ads customized to their interests.
This should be our default approach: tell people, in obvious, plain language, what we know about them and why it's valuable to them that we know it. Think that your product's value is so obvious that it doesn't need explaining? There's a good chance you're wrong.
Transparency
Next, we need to make it easy for users to find out what information we gather and store about them across all of our products. We recently took a big step in this direction with the launch of the Google Dashboard, which is a single place where users can see what personal data is held by each Google product (covering more than 20 products including Gmail, YouTube, and Search) and control their personal settings. We are, to the best of our knowledge, the first Internet company to offer a service like this and we hope it will become the standard. Another good example is our Privacy Policy, which is written for humans and not just lawyers.
We can go even farther than this though. If you manage a consumer product where you collect information from your users, your product should be part of the Dashboard. If you're already there, you're not done. With every new feature or version, ask yourself if you have any additional information (maybe even information that is publicly available about users on other sites) that you can add to the Dashboard.
Think about how you can increase transparency within your product as well. When you download an Android app, for example, the device tells you what information the app will be able to access about you and your phone, and then you get to decide whether or not to proceed. You don't have to dig deep to figure out what information you are divulging - it tells you up front and lets you decide what to do. Is your product like that? How can you increase users' engagement with your product through increasing transparency?
Control
Finally, we must always give control to the user. If we have information about a user, as with IBA, it should be easy for the user to delete that information and opt-out. If they use our products and store content with us, it's their content, not ours. They should be able to export it or delete it at any time, at no cost, and as easily as possible. Gmail is a great example of this since we offer free forwarding to any address. The ability to switch is critical, so instead of building walls around your product, build bridges. Give users real options.
If there are existing standards for handling user data, then we should adhere to them. If a standard doesn't exist, we should work to create an open one that benefits the entire web, even if a closed standard appears to be better for us (remember — it's not!). In the meantime we need to do whatever we can to make leaving Google as easy as possible. Google is not the Hotel California — you can check out any time you like and you CAN, in fact, leave!
As Eric said in his 2009 strategy memo, "we don't trap users, we make it easy for them to move to our competitors." This policy is sort of like the emergency exits on an airplane — an analogy that our pilot CEO would appreciate. You hope to never use them, but you're glad they're there and would be furious if they weren't.
That's why we have a team — the Data Liberation Front (dataliberation.org) — whose job it is to make "checking out" easy. Recent examples of their work include Blogger (people who choose to leave Blogger for another service can easily take their content with them) and Docs (users can now collect all their documents, presos, and spreadsheets in a zip file and download it). Build your products so that the Data Liberation team can work their magic. One way you can do this is by having a good public API that exposes all your users' data. Don't wait for v2 or v3, discuss this early in your product planning meetings and make it a feature of your product from the start.
When reporters at the Guardian, a leading UK newspaper, reviewed the work of the Data Liberation team they proclaimed it to be "counter-intuitive" for those "accustomed to the lock-in mentality of previous commercial battles." They are right, it is counterintuitive to people who are stuck in the old MBA way of thinking, but if we do our jobs then soon it won't be. Our goal is to make open the default. People will gravitate towards it, then they will expect and demand it and be furious when they don't get it. When open is intuitive, then we have succeeded.
When bigger is better
Closed systems are well-defined and profitable, but only for those who control them. Open systems are chaotic and profitable, but only for those who understand them well and move faster than everyone else. Closed systems grow quickly while open systems evolve more slowly, so placing your bets on open requires the optimism, will, and means to think long term. Fortunately, at Google we have all three of these.
Because of our reach, technical know-how, and lust for big projects, we can take on big challenges that require large investments and lack an obvious, near-term pay-off. We can photograph the world's streets so that you can explore the neighborhood around an apartment you are considering renting from a thousand miles away. We can scan millions of books and make them widely accessible (while respecting the rights of publishers and authors). We can create an email system that gives away a gigabyte of storage (now over 7 gigs) at a time when all other services allow only a small fraction of that amount. We can instantly translate web pages from any of 51 languages. We can process search data to help public health agencies detect flu outbreaks much earlier. We can build a faster browser (Chrome), a better mobile operating system (Android), and an entirely new communications platform (Wave), and then open them up for the world to build upon, customize, and improve.
We can do these things because they are information problems and we have the computer scientists, technology, and computational power to solve them. When we do, we make numerous platforms - video, maps, mobile, PCs, voice, enterprise - better, more competitive, and more innovative. We are often attacked for being too big, but sometimes being bigger allows us to take on the impossible.
All of this is useless, however, if we fail when it comes to being open. So we need to constantly push ourselves. Are we contributing to open standards that better the industry? What's stopping us from open sourcing our code? Are we giving our users value, transparency, and control? Open up as much as you can as often as you can, and if anyone questions whether this is a good approach, explain to them why it's not just a good approach, but the best approach. It is an approach that will transform business and commerce in this still young century, and when we are successful we will effectively re-write the MBA curriculum for the next several decades!
An open Internet transforms lives globally. It has the potential to deliver the world's information to the palm of every person and to give everyone the power of freedom of expression. These predictions were in an email I sent you earlier this year (later posted as ablog post) that described my vision for the future of the Internet. But now I'm talking about action, not vision. There are forces aligned against the open Internet — governments who control access, companies who fight in their own self-interests to preserve the status quo. They are powerful, and if they succeed we will find ourselves inhabiting an Internet of fragmentation, stagnation, higher prices, and less competition.
Our skills and our culture give us the opportunity and responsibility to prevent this from happening. We believe in the power of technology to deliver information. We believe in the power of information to do good. We believe that open is the only way for this to have the broadest impact for the most people. We are technology optimists who trust that the chaos of open benefits everyone. We will fight to promote it every chance we get.
Open will win. It will win on the Internet and will then cascade across many walks of life: The future of government is transparency. The future of commerce is information symmetry. The future of culture is freedom. The future of science and medicine is collaboration. The future of entertainment is participation. Each of these futures depends on an open Internet.
As Google product managers, you are building something that will outlast all of us, and none of us can imagine all the ways Google will grow and touch people's lives. In that way, we are like our colleague Vint Cerf , who didn't know exactly how many networks would want to be part of this "Internet" so he set the default to open. Vint certainly got it right. I believe we will too.
Sunday, December 20, 2009
Saturday, December 19, 2009
What is the world coming to?
Gosh!
So, i thought that the economy of attention was something that people want. Apparently Rosetta Thurman doesn't!
The reason i re-blogged (thats Tumblr's idea actually) her piece was because i thought it was a good one! Its something that i am interested in. Just like when i post something to FB that i read on Mashable. Why? because not many of my followers and friends will read Mashable, and they definitely wont read Rosetta's blog either!
Information wants to be free, and i believe that sharing is caring.
So, i thought that the economy of attention was something that people want. Apparently Rosetta Thurman doesn't!
The reason i re-blogged (thats Tumblr's idea actually) her piece was because i thought it was a good one! Its something that i am interested in. Just like when i post something to FB that i read on Mashable. Why? because not many of my followers and friends will read Mashable, and they definitely wont read Rosetta's blog either!
Information wants to be free, and i believe that sharing is caring.
How the iPhone could reboot education
How the iPhone Could Reboot Education
- By Brian X. Chen
- December 8, 2009 |
- 11:54 am |
- Categories: Phones
How do you educate a generation of students eternally distracted by the internet, cellphones and video games? Easy. You enable them by handing out free iPhones — and then integrating the gadget into your curriculum.
That's the idea Abilene Christian University has to refresh classroom learning. Located in Texas, the private university just finished its first year of a pilot program, in which 1,000 freshman students had the choice between a free iPhone or an iPod Touch.
The initiative's goal was to explore how the always-connected iPhone might revolutionize the classroom experience with a dash of digital interactivity. Think web apps to turn in homework, look up campus maps, watch lecture podcasts and check class schedules and grades. For classroom participation, there's even polling software for Abilene students to digitally raise their hand.
The verdict? It's working quite well. 2,100 Abilene students, or 48 percent of the population, are now equipped with a free iPhone. Fully 97 percent of the faculty population has iPhones, too. The iPhone is aiding Abilene in giving students the information they need — when they want it, wherever they want it, said Bill Rankin, a professor of medieval studies who helped plan the initiative.
"It's kind of the TiVoing of education," Rankin said in a phone interview. "I watch it when I need it and in ways that I need it. And that makes a huge difference."
The traditional classroom, where an instructor assigns a textbook, is heading toward obsolescence. Why listen to a single source talk about a printed textbook that will inevitably be outdated in a few years? That setting seems stale and hopelessly limited when pitted against the internet, which opens a portal to a live stream of information provided by billions of minds.
"About five years ago my students stopped taking notes," Rankin said. "I asked, 'Why are you not taking notes?' And they said, 'Why would we take notes on that?…. I can go to Wikipedia or go to Google, and I can get all the information I need."
Conversely, the problem with the internet is there's too much information, and it's difficult to determine which data is valuable.
These are the specific educational problems Abilene is targeting with the iPhone. Instead of standing in front of a classroom and talking for an hour, Rankin instructs his students to use their iPhones to look up relevant information on the fly. Then, the students can discuss the information they've found, and Rankin leads the dialogue by helping assess which sources are accurate and useful.
It's like a mashup of a 1960s teach-in with smartphone technology from the 2000s.
Each participating Abilene instructor is incorporating the iPhone differently into their curriculum. In some classrooms, professors project discussion questions onscreen in a PowerPoint presentation. Then, using polling software that Abilene coded for the iPhone, students can answer the questions anonymously by sending responses electronically with their iPhones. The software can also quickly quiz students to gauge whether they're understanding the lesson.
Most importantly, by allowing the students to participate in polls anonymously with the iPhone, it relieves them of any social pressure to appear intelligent in front of their peers. If they answer wrong, nobody will know who it was, ridding students of humiliation. And if students don't understand a lesson, they can ask the teacher to repeat it by simply tapping a button on the iPhone.
"Polling opens up new realms for people for discussion," said Tyler Sutphen, an ACU sophomore who has participated in the iPhone initiative for a year. "It's a lot more interactive for those who aren't as willing to jump up and throw out their answer in class. Instead, you push a button on the iPhone."
Kasey Stratton, a first-year ACU business student, said her favorite aspect of the iPhone program was how apps are changing the way students interact socially. Many Abilene students use Bump, a free appdownloadable through the App Store [iTunes], which enables them to swap e-mails and phone numbers by bumping their iPhones together. Also, the campus' map app helped her become familiar with the campus quickly when she arrived.
"At ACU it's like they see [the iPhone] is the way of the future and they might as well take advantage of it," Stratton said in a phone interview. "They're preparing us for the real world — not a place where you're not allowed to use anything."
Implementing the iPhone program wasn't easy. In addition to writing custom web apps for the iPhone, the university optimized its campuswide Wi-Fi to support the 2,100 iPhones. Rankin declined to disclose exact figures for money invested in the iPhone program, but he said the initiative only takes up about 1 percent of the university's annual budget. To offset costs, the university discontinued in-dorm computer labs, since the vast majority of students already own notebooks. Students who opted for iPhones are responsible for paying their own monthly plans with AT&T.
After a successful run, the university plans to continue the iPhone program, with plans to upgrade to new iPhones every two years. Rankin said some UK universities plan to launch similar initiatives as well. In the United States, Stanford doesn't hand out free iPhones to its students (yet), but it offers an iPhone app called iStanford for students to look up class schedules, the Stanford directory, the campus map and sports news. Stanford also offers a computer science course on iPhone app programming, whose lectures are streamed for free via iTunes.
"For us, it isn't primarily about the device," Rankin said. "This is a question of, how do we live and learn in the 21st century now that we have these sorts of connections?…. I think this is the next platform for education."
See Also:
Friday, December 18, 2009
So,
Just got my blog up and running after a long hiatus. Still really trying to work out exactly how i am going to use this part of my online presence. I am slowly feeling more and more compelled to start actually blogging, rather than just sharing as I do on facebook. As you will notice below, thats a little bit of what i have started here. I hope to find a happy medium. I enjoy writing, and so I hope that blogging will help me get better!
Expect to see more!
Just got my blog up and running after a long hiatus. Still really trying to work out exactly how i am going to use this part of my online presence. I am slowly feeling more and more compelled to start actually blogging, rather than just sharing as I do on facebook. As you will notice below, thats a little bit of what i have started here. I hope to find a happy medium. I enjoy writing, and so I hope that blogging will help me get better!
Expect to see more!
How to lead a scammer / phisher on!
Phishing — where scammers attempt to steal sensitive information like account passwords and credit card numbers by posing as trusted sources or web sites — is all too common. Fraudulent e-mails and sites are best avoided altogether, but if you're feeling particularly "vigilante," there are a number of ways you can ruin a phisher's operation, and perhaps help protect your fellow web users in the process. Here's how.
1. Bait the Waters
Lure would-be scammers by registering dozens of e-mail addresses, using fake names and identifying information. The more e-mail identities you have, the more spam e-mail you will receive.
2. Respond Credulously
When you get a come-on from an e-mail scammer, write back enthusiastically and ask for more details. "I am sorry to hear that your brother is being held prisoner! Where exactly is the prison he is being held at? Were you hurt when you were deposed in the coup?"
3. Create the Impression of Great Wealth
Mention in your reply e-mail that it is currently a very busy time for your business, or that you are in mourning for your wealthy uncle who has just died and left you his estate.
4. Invent a Persona
Make up a name, and include small details in your e-mail, including the name of a spouse or a pet. Do not select a real name for your persona, in order to avoid implicating other people in your anti-scam scam. Name yourself something that is clearly ridiculous to you, but that a foreign scammer might not recognize, such as "Alfred E. Newman." Find stock photographs to complement your new persona.
5. Ask for Proof
When the scammer expresses his desire for you to wire money, act as though you are wary. Ask him to send proof of the legitimacy of his business. Ask for photographs of his office, his co-workers, and his car. Remember, the more time he spends satisfying your requests, the less time he has to devote to scamming other people.
6. Ask for Patience
Keep the scammer excited about how much they are going to fleece you for. "After reviewing my accounts, I think I will soon be able to comply with your request, and in fact can double it." First, though, say you must arrange to have the money released, which will take time. Apologize.
7. Ask for Money
Turn the tables on the scammer by explaining that, before you can wire the money, you need to pay a fee to your own bank to have the funds released. Ask him to wire you money. If he sends a check, do not cash it, but record the account information, as it is likely a stolen or made-up account.
8. Poison Future Scams
Over the course of your correspondence, relay incorrect information that will make the scammer's future scams less effective. For example, mention that American women love to be called dirty, offensive, names, or that most American banks are only open on Sundays.
9. Delay
Invent more and more delays to the promised pay-off. The scammer just has to do one more thing for you, send one more photograph, etc., before you can go ahead and send the money. The more hoops you make the scammer jump through, the more willing he will be to do more, since he has already invested so much time and energy.
10. Enjoy
Increase the difficulty level of the requests. Ask the scammer to travel to another country "to meet your representative" there. Then e-mail again, apologizing for the mix-up and reschedule the meeting. If you start to feel badly, remind yourself that this is the same technique scammers use on their victims. They get them to sink more and more money in, in the form of fees and upfront costs, making it harder and harder for the victim to admit to him or herself that it's a scam.
11. Abruptly Cease Corresponding
Cancel the phony e-mail you had set up. Post the scammer's name and any other identifying information you have received on anti-scam web sites.
Be Aware, and Be Safe
- The most infamous pool of e-mail scammers is in Lagos, Nigeria, but they come from all over the world, including from within the United States.
- Never use your real name, or any real-world details about yourself or your family, when interacting with a scammer. If you correspond via letter or package, use a safety deposit box and a fake address. Though there may be a comic element to their communication, scammers are professional criminals.
Editor's note: The preceding post is a work of satire.
Six Ways to Use Twitter to Enhance Your Nonprofit Career
So this is a post from another blog that i thought was worth a re-blog (the links at the bottom)
Last week, during my personal branding series for young nonprofit leaders, I asked you dear readers, how has Twitter helped you in your nonprofit career? I received six awesome success stories I want to highlight for you here. If you aren't convinced by now about the value of Twitter as low-cost professional development, I just.don't.get.you. If you're ready to jump on Twitter after reading this post, check out my easy, breezy guide to getting started!
1. Elisa: Get Noticed
Twitter has definitely helped my career! It has helped me build my knowledge base on nonprofit best practices, resources and technology which has allowed me to contribute intelligently to conversations within the office and provide evidence to back up my statements. In the last couple of places I've worked, I've also been one of the first people to find out about late breaking news or important new resources that have just come out relevant to our work. Both of these things have helped me build my 'clout' within the office and made me a more indispensable employee.
During my latest job search Twitter definitely helped me get noticed. I was asked about my Twitter feed during a job interview and asked to provide some opinions on the use of social media within nonprofits. Being able to demonstrate a level of experience and knowledge helped me land that job.
Finally, on a slightly more personal level that has professional implications, I've developed some good relationships with nonprofit movers and shakers (including many of the people you included in your top 30 list Rosetta) and all around cool people on Twitter. Those relationships have come in handy when I needed some support and I know they will again in the future; and I hope that I've been able to provide some of that support back to people.
2. Mary Jane: Become an Expert
Twitter has helped me discover reasearch papers, management articles, and news pertaining to my field across the country, all of which have impressed the hell out of my boss, who can't figure out how I'm so "on top" of things ;) Now I'm the "twitter tracker" for my agency, producing a summary of the best content found throughout the day in a "Today on Twitter" email. Using Twitter has also given my boss insight on what my interests are (nonprofit management, nonprofit boards), which gets me taken seriously when we talk about my career path.
3. Joe: Tell Your Story
I work as a counselor for the Grande Prairie Youth Emergency Shelter Society (GPYESS) which operates an emergency shelter (www.sunrisehouse.ca) in Grande Prairie, Alberta Canada. We help youth who are at-risk and homeless by providing emergency housing and emergency services.
Since I have started using twitter, I have developed relationships with people in the local community and all over Canada and the world. Twitter has allowed me to spread the word about how amazing our youth are.. It has also allowed me to educate about youth issues, and youth homelessness. Twitter provides a way for business, individuals, and donors to donate to help our youth. People have donated from all over the province! Twitter is a great tool for our organization.
We have had people donate cookies, clothes, and money because of twitter. As we fundraise almost 80% of our entire budget, every bit helps.
Twitter is awesome, and will continue to help and make great realtionships for our non profit
4. Michael: Connect With People in Your Field
Twitter allows me to have a volunteer consultancy of hundreds of people! If I have a problem that I need input on, I can ask the twitterverse, and get an answer that I may have never thought of on my own. The best part is the broad range of ideas I get from people in similar, and not-so-similar, situations!
Through contacts I've made on twitter, I've been able to plan a nonprofit conference in the city I live in that will get nonprofit leaders in the same room and talking to each other so they can effectively share resources instead of continuously reinventing the wheel. All of the speakers at the conference are connections that I've made on twitter, and they've donated their time because they love the idea and the city that they live in.
Twitter has allowed me to do things that I wouldn't have been able to without the connections that I've made through it.
5. Krista: Increase Productivity
Twitter has helped my professional development immeasurably since I joined about a year ago. Twitter puts me in daily contact with the best and brightest thought leaders in the nonprofit world as well as in human resources. Here are some ways I have learned, grown or found value as a result of my Twitter activity and contacts:
I was invited to join a human resources group I never would have heard of otherwise. This group's listserv offers indispensable and almost immediate help when needed.
I attended an HR Blogging unconference I learned about on twitter. There, I met lots of big names in HR blogging, some of whom work at nonprofits and all of whom are useful contacts and great people.
My own blogging activity has increased, and I have a list of people I can tweet if I need technical advice. Being involved in twitter allowed me to write posts like this one: ny.cc/GAPdG
On Twitter, I asked for recommendations for free systems to track resumes. Responses led me to two different online systems I put into place at my nonprofit, eliminating tons of paper and increasing efficiencies.
I have been named on other people's blogs as being knowledgeable about workplace issues, which is good for me personally but also good exposure for my nonprofit.
I became acquainted with the Rosetta Thurman blog, which is an awesome resource. :)
I've been able to stay up on trends, news, happenings in a way I couldn't before.
Most of the above would have taken much longer or wouldn't have happened at all without Twitter. Without question, it has been the single best tool for personal and professional growth that I've come across in my decades in the workplace.
6. Charise: Participate in the Community
I believe many nonprofit professionals question the value of Twitter and have yet to see explanation of how and why it's a powerful professional development resource.
Ten months ago I was a huge "Twitter skeptic". After only a month, I began to see that Twitter is a great tool for the over tasked, under resourced nonprofit professional.
My takeaways from Twitter are almost too numerous to list & include many already named by others, but here are a few more:
Like many nonprofit professionals, I live and breathe for my cause, but also have a vision of a nonprofit sector that breaks the existing silos dampening innovation and networking efforts. Participating in Twitter is a convenient, free way to strengthen our "community benefit" sector.
Working at a smaller nonprofit can be lonely & frustrating due to the lack of a leadership team. Knowing that other professionals share similar challenges is consoling. Even more important, sharing solutions builds morale & hope. Twitter allows nonprofit professionals be a part of a larger, non-exclusive community on a daily basis.
As a community of voices, Twitter allows for quick identification of trends in the nonprofit workplace. This has helped me become more focused in my career goals as I was able to identify needs in the sector that weren't being effectively addressed and translate this information into applications for competitive fellowships.
Twitter is one of the few places where nonprofit professionals are judged primarily on the quality and value of information they share, instead of age, race, gender, or location. Connections and dialogue are formed on Twitter that one might never see in the real workplace.
Although nothing replaces the value of a mentor, nonprofit professionals in search of guidance or mentoring will often find in Twitter a warm community of professionals ready & willing to offer advice & tips at anytime of the day or night. I know I have!
Twitter rocks.
What's your take? If you're not on Twitter yet, why not? If you are using Twitter, do you think you're using it effectively? Have some success stories of your own to share? Post them in the comments!
http://rosettathurman.com/blog/2009/12/six-ways-to-use-twitter-to-enhance-your-nonprofit-career/
Thursday, December 17, 2009
Control your mac remotely from Twitter
Controlling Your Mac from Twitter
A new app called TweetMyMac has come out giving us the option to control our Macs from a twitter account. TweetMyMac lets you get screenshots, iSight snapshots, and your IP address from your Mac just by sending a direct message to your specially setup Mac controlling account. You can start torrents remotely, shutdown your Mac and more.
Setting Up TweetMyMac
- Sign up for a new Twitter account just for your Mac (I called mine TweetAlexsMac) – feel free to protect the updates if you like. IMPORTANT: You MUST sign up for a new account, not just use your normal Twitter account or everyone you follow will be able to control your Mac!
- Set the new account to follow your main twitter account.
- Download and run TweetMyMac.
- Enter the account details for the new account you signed up for (that's your Mac's Twitter account)
- To control your Mac send it a direct message with a command (either using the direct message option on twitter or by writing a tweet of the form "d MacAccountName command")
- Your Mac will reply to some commands (like retrieving IP address or screenshots) using it's account so you will probably want to set your main twitter account to follow your Mac.
Commands:
shutdown – Shutdown your Mac. Will NOT save any open files.
restart – Restart your Mac. Will NOT save any open files.
logout – Logout of your Mac. Will NOT save any open files.
sleep – Sleep your Mac.
ip – Get your Mac's external IP address. Your Mac will reply with it's current IP.
isight – Snap an image from your Mac's iSight camera. Your Mac will reply with the picture posted on TwitPic.
screenshot – Get a screenshot of your Mac. Your Mac will reply with the picture posted on TwitPic.
say [phrase] – Your Mac will speak the phrase in the default voice.
torrent [torrent URL] – Your Mac will download the torrent and open it in the default torrent client.
[URL] – Your Mac will open any URL it is sent.
%[command] – Your Mac will execute the custom shell command. Note: this is disabled by default for security and must be enabled in the options to use.
Do take into account the note on TweetMyMac's website which states:
TweetMyMac is currently still considered beta software so please don't blame us if your Mac spontaneously catches fire.
So there you have it! Would you use this often? What do you think this could turn into in the future?
Sent from Auckland, Auk, New Zealand
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