Tim Oren's Due Diligence

Roaming Eye: 04/13/06

SOX it to me? Alan Greenspan thinks SarbOx went too far, and specifically that it is driving public companies away from the US equity markets. What we don't know yet is whether investors' capital will follow them, which is the ultimate test. Some form of oversight on Enron-style fraud was inevitable, the question is whether in the event the ongoing compliance burdens swamp the overall benefits of a more trustworthy market. Since there is a market-in-markets, we'll find out.

I'm glad to see Greenspan is still out there working, too. It would be a screaming shame for that much accumulated experience to just end up on a beach, though he's certainly earned that if he wants it. I'll miss his dry as dust erudite delivery in hearings; one of the best at making huffing-and-puffing Congresscritters look just as idiotic as they were acting.

SOX is rippling through the consulting, investment and IT worlds, sort of a slow-mo Y2K event, displacing other investments in technology deployments, audit and consulting outlays, and startup formation. Good or bad, it's hard to tell yet. Need for more oversight on business units and finances pushes more data towards centralization and/or integration. In turn piling up more risks of compromise, a potentially business threatening event itself. Some of the IT architect types are kicking around compliance oriented architecture as a description for what needs to happen, essentially building in identity, security and auditability at the same time as reconstructing systems to a message-based services oriented architecture. Without commenting on the merits of any particular proposal, there are some interesting implications. On the upside, over time this could result in more intrinsic security in systems, rather than having it scabbed on (often ineffectively) afterwards. On the downside, architectures that had taken security (or other exogenous requirements) as their primary focus, as opposed to usability or business benefits, have a nasty way of cratering in expensive ways.

Lots of good citizens' journalism stuff out there this week. Michael Yon heads to Afghanistan. Michael Totten takes a gonzo roadtrip across Turkey into the Kurdish north of Iraq. (Anyone who thought we were really going to launch all of 4ID into northern Iraq should contemplate the logistics implications of that drive.) The Marine Corps' artist-in-residence (who knew?) has some reflections on his service and choice words on 'backing the troops', leading to an interesting debate.

The Big Pharaoh is moving up to a bigger pyramid. One of the most interesting (and funny) ME bloggers now has his own domain safely off of splog-ridden blogspot. (Can we give Google a prize for worst-follow-though-on-a-smart-acquisition yet?)

Chewy tech link: CoFE - an open source collaborative filtering engine in Java. HT: Marc Danziger.

Roaming Eye: 04/11/06

Rain, rain, and more rain. Oregonians can call us CA wusses, but ENOUGH ALREADY! Turn off the bubble machine.

You think you had a bad day? It could have been worse.

Long for the simpler days of yore? B/W screens, 3.5" floppies? You CAN revisit your youth. HT: Chap.

Laphroaig, straight up. Some time ago B5 and I discovered a shared taste. Islay, if you please. One of the very few times you will see him quote the NYT approvingly.

You were looking for something more technical? A Spectral Clustering Approach To Finding Communities in Graphs. Enjoy.

Roaming Eye: 04/06/06

Planning vs. Emergence in Music Recommendation. Not quite how Steve Krause put it. The best line is an aside: "...better algorithms are nice but better data is nicer...". Which gets you better data, Pandora's hand-coded 'music genetics' or last.fm's wisdom of crowds? Older post, but discussion still alive. I drag it in because Tom Conrad, Pandora CTO and good guy, will be on a panel at BayCHI at PARC next Tuesday (4/11). (Link will rot.)

Somewhat up the same line, Phil Jones is on a riff about SemWeb vs. SynWeb. That would be the ballyhoo'ed Semantic Web vs. a Syntactic Web approach of carrying along the structure and letting the humans figure it out. Great quotes:

...The web is a wonderful example of doing the right thing. It's a "worse is better", funky little hack which combines an easy to use tool (the browser) with the simplest protocol which could possibly work, and a slightly fuzzy, problematic mark-up language, to solve a real-world problem : how to share documents over the internet. It disregarded mainstream academic Hypertext theory (how do you avoid broken links? answer : we don't) and the complexities of client-server architectures of the time. Consequently, it spread like wild-fire, adding many incremental improvements.....

He's sure right about that. I was there in that academic hypertext crowd. The only thing more butt-ugly than HyperCard (in theoretic terms) was the Web. Guess what?

The Semantic Web isn't an extension of this at all. It's basically a naive assumption about how meaning works ("hey! if we all use the same code-numbers for things then we'll know when we're talking about the same stuff") and a crowd of enthusiasts engaged in the Sisyphan task of trying to make anything useful from this assumption; while, all the while, casting covetous glances at the meta-data which is being generated by people who aren't burdened with the responsibility of inventing common code-numbers and ontologies.

Needless to say, there's a bit of a debate on this. You'll have to chase one-way links to follow it. Count me on Phil's side. Late binding and minimal policy are Good Things in both programming languages and human (in the loop) languages.

In another somewhat old one, Greg Yardley dishes Yahoo exec Brad Horowitz' hierarchy of consumers, synthesizers, and creators, saying such an elitist view indicates that Yahoo is likely to neglect and ruin acquisitions such as flickr and del.icio.us. Horowitz rejoins in comments, pointing out that he was being descriptive, not prescriptive. My experience with CompuServe Forums, and anecdotally from the Well and early BBS', supports a 10:1 'lurk to post' ratio similar to his, in traditional conferencing systems. YMMV on the creator vs. synthesizer thing. That's analogous to the 'linker vs. thinker' distinction in blogland; there are a lot of styles in playing the game.

Horowitz' point is the real goal should be knocking that ratio down by making the threshold to a creative act as low as possible. His phrase is 'implicit creation'. A relevant post elsewhere is Rashmi Sinha on the cognitive virtues of tagging vs. categorization, which could have something to do with folksonomies filling some of the gap, and dovetails nicely with the Syn/Sem discussion.

The German students who did the 'other clusty' have GROOP, clustering tags both for its own sake and to infer social groupings and context. Sometimes working example here. Be nice if this were opened up, but it may be a bit fragile. Built around a GPL'ed analytics framework from Slovenia.

Finally, for the Compleat Angler: a human factors study on phishing (PDF). Read it and weep. HT: Arturo Bejar.

Roaming Eye: 04/05/06

Web 2.0: Is it the software, or the network that's really the difference? Interesting discussion and analysis from Mike @ Techdirt.

Google Real Estate: Who's on ground zero? Like a lot of Google Base, this is still 'empty world', but the shape of the attack is developing.

Darwin Fish: They found one. Not nearly as cute as those little bumper thingies.

Michael Yon reports on his road back to Iraq.

The Warm Mud Of ME: Brilliant essay by Gerard van der Leun.

The MSM: Death by Smiley Face?

The Instaprof points out a NY Times screed by Richard Siklos, describing the difficulties caused the legacy media (link may rot) by 'competitors' who don't have profit in mind:

There is another breed of rival lurking online for traditional media, and it is perhaps the most vexing yet: call it purpose-driven media, with a shout-out to Rick Warren, the author of "A Purpose-Driven Life," for borrowing his catchphrase.

These are new-media ventures that leave the competition scratching their heads because they don't really aim to compete in the first place; their creators are merely taking advantage of the economics of the online medium to do something that they feel good about. They would certainly like to cover their costs and maybe make a buck or two, but really, they're not in it for the money. By purely commercial measures, they are illogical. If your name were, say, Rupert or Sumner, they would represent the kind of terror that might keep you up at night: death by smiley face.

One presumes courtesy to Siklos' current employer kept 'Arthur' off the list of night-time worriers. Since the highest profile example he describes, craigslist, has had a notable impact on the print media's erstwhile cash cow, classified ads, that's a significant omission.

Since Jeff Jarvis has already ably dissected the media and political cluelessness shown by this article and others, I will proceed to two other ground of analysis. Business, of course. And smiley faces.

Seth Godin: Don't Take the Money

Seth Godin offers a concise and well reasoned argument on when not to go looking for venture capital to fund a new business. Particularly useful is his distinction between freelance and entrepreneurial ventures. The latter aims to create an opportunity where "...you scale and suddenly you own real estate or media properties or technology or a system or a brand that people pay for without you actually doing any incremental work yourself." That 'no incremental work' qualifier is the entrepreneur's equivalent of the VC's exit. It's only feasible if a self-sustaining institution has been created.