I’ve moved seamonkeyrodeo to my MediaTemple hosting account (which is a very good web host, by the way), and have the following notes:

1. Dear WordPress — being able to export one’s entire blog and import it into a clean WP install is great. Including the 6MB of comments that I’ve flagged as spam over the last few years in the export? Less great. Possibly even dumb.
2. The URL for seamonkeyrodeo (karaoke mind control) is now http://smr.absono.us, rather than http://www.blackmailr.com/smr. One utterly arbitrary URL is as good as another, says I.
3. For you feedreading types, I’ll save you a click and tell you that the blog looks exactly the same.
4. Not that it matters to anyone but me, but links to old-style URLs will start redirecting to new-style URLs tonight or tomorrow night, depending on when I’m inspired to get my mod_redirect on.
5. Also happy to say that I’m finally changing over to $yyyy/$mm/$title formatted permalinks, rather than $yyyy/$mm/$dd/$title — again, it doesn’t matter to anyone else, but it’s bugged me for years.

That is all. If you see anything out of the ordinary either happening or not happening on the site, let me know.

As I was reading the items above, I was reminded of a conversation that I had a couple of months ago: a friend was making the case that Google’s unofficial motto of “don’t be evil” was a surprisingly effective tool for keeping the company on course. The thinking went something like this:

Looking at evolutionary biology you have your “phyletic gradualism” people and your “punctuated equilibrium” people; phyletic gradualism proposes that evolutionary changes take place steadily and gradually, where punctuated equilibrium instead proposes that such changes take place mostly in quick bursts, with long, relatively static periods in between. Basically, most evolutionary biologists are either “creeps” or “jerks” on this issue.

One can look at corporations in a similar way. Relatively few companies set out to be evil; while there are certainly examples of “fuck all of you, we’re looking out for number one and everybody else can go screw” organizations out there, in the overwhelming majority of cases companies—like the people who make them up—basically want to do good. So how do we end up with so many companies doing so many ethically questionable things? That’s where the creeping and jerking comes in…and it’s the creeping that we need to pay the most attention to.

There isn’t much you can do about the jerks. When the minutes from a board meeting read “John Doe presented to the Board a plan to secretly dump toxic waste in playgrounds around the city, for approval, whereupon motion duly made, seconded and unanimously adopted, the plan was approved as presented in Exhibit A,” you’ve got a clear jerk into evil territory, and the people involved are well aware of what they’re doing.

The creeping, however, is more insidious. Little decisions are made every day, and—precisely because they’re little decisions—it’s easy to cut a little slack when making them:

“I’m not sure this is a great idea, but it’s just a small change.”
“We’ll just see how it works…we can always change back.”
“It’s not really that different from what we do now.”

These little decisions pile up over time. A company can (metaphorically speaking) wake up one morning and find that it’s doing evil, without ever having made a single really evil decision. And the really big gotcha in the creeping evil scenario is that while it’s hard to stop doing evil in any situation (hence the existence of organized religion), it’s even harder to stop when you don’t know how you started doing evil in the first place.

What’s powerful about Google’s “don’t be evil” motto, in contrast to many statements of corporate principle, is that it’s simple (though not easy). While the debate over what is and isn’t evil with respect to Google’s actions will continue both inside the company and outside, the motto provides a touchstone that is easy to grasp. In the context of corporate ethics, “is it evil to do X?” while very subjective, is a much more productive initial question for an employee to be considering than “can anybody remember whether our corporate principles said anything about doing X?”

Zuckerberg’s Beacon post suggests that Facebook experienced the creeping evil: none of the component decisions or elements are evil in and of themselves, but the little bits of slack added up. And when the blowup happened, Facebook lost time in responding because they were trying to figure out where the evil creeped in, so that they could do something about it.

Just popped open the personal email client and found that there’s suspiciously little (like, nothing) there since…um, the Friday afternoon after Thanksgiving…somewhere after “hey, they were right, you can get a lot of excellent Argentinian wine really cheap,” and some “cleanup” on this and that related to personal online presence. It would appear possible that I’ve fucked up mail routing. Again. Please stay tuned. This is, however, a convenient opportunity to note that I’m finally doing my best to give twitter a fair shot, so @whitneymcn on twitter should get through to me.

Note to self: install breathalyzer on powerbook.

“Mistakes were made. Things caught fire. Let’s move on, shall we?”

Why Do We Suck? and Other Questions Political Journalists Asked Themselves at YearlyKos
Jay Rosen says: “I’ve been reviewing the press coverage, blogging and video from the Yearly Kos conference in Chicago and trying to make some sense of what happened between the press and the liberal blogosphere at this event. The main conclusion I have is….

…There is more respect expressed for the blogosphere, and a little less wariness between the two groups. (But let’s not overstate it.)”

The flavour of cool
The Economist asks: “Can e-mail newsletters recommending cultural events in the world’s big cities maintain their credibility as they grow?”

Slap in the Facebook: It’s Time for Social Networks to Open Up
Scott Gilbertson writes in Wired: “Damn the Facebooks and the MySpaces. The last time we checked, there was this thing called the internet that had 6 billion users. It’s time to take our personal data out of Mr. McGregor’s little gardens and put it back where it belongs — free and open on the open web.”

Tests for Customer Focused Companies
John Hegel on “customer-focused” companies: “I apply three questions to determine whether companies are truly customer focused. These three questions zero in on the most fundamental elements of a firm – decision-making power, performance metrics and brand promise. It is surprising how few companies meet these tests.”

Give ‘em Something to Talk About
FastCompany asks: “Your product may be good, but will it spark a conversation?”

It’s a small world, after all: the Online Press Gazette’s list of the “new establishment” of online journalism in Britain. Interesting read: note that the top ten can be summarized as “an Australian/naturalized American, another American, and pretty much anybody who works at the BBC or the Guardian. And oh yeah, the Daily Telegraph used to be pretty cool, too.”

It’s an interesting jumping off point for Friday musings: GigaOM’s Robert Young noting that Social Media is not Mass Media.

Identity, Privacy, and Taxonomy: Doc Searls continues to push “Vendor Relationship Management,” and suggests that all interested parties head to the December 4-6 Internet Identity Workshop. Unfortunately there’s no way I’m getting out to Mountain View two weeks from now — can somebody who goes drop me an overview?

Disillusionment of 10 O’clock: while Jason Calcanis’ departure from AOL is getting most of the blogtwitter, Global Nerdy also notes that Aaron Swartz apparently isn’t all that excited about being part of Wired.

Start swapping in words other than “search” and the real fun starts: Bill Burnham noting that Search + State + Metadata = A Search Application. Just sit and think about that equation for a while before you read the post, please. It’s worth the extra time out of your day.

Because that SCO thing worked out so well for everybody: Ballmer floats the idea that Linux uses [Microsoft's] intellectual property. [Slashdotted, only intermittently available.]

I don’t really care about Etsy but this was really funny: Charley O’Donnell imagines various sites’ user response to two days of scheduled downtime.

Flickr set of old BBC technology.
Incredibly cool retrotech goodness, but bear in mind that I also spent a vacation visiting the VLA, so your mileage may vary.

Rubel on RSS aggregators as ad networks.
Early experiments with ad-only RSS feeds pretty much flopped, though I’ll concede that none (as far as I know) included any intelligent targeting capability. As far as incorporating targeted advertising, I’d probably bet on NewsGator rather than Bloglines (top desktop apps + web, though NewsGator online is painfully sluggish for me these days).

Side note: it’s mind boggling that none of these online aggregator folks are even asking for any meaningful demo information. Behavioral targeting is great and all, but unless your advertisers can target women in the New York metro area your pricing probably stays at banner ad levels, and you’re just giving up the most fundamental targeting tool available.

Web Worker Daily.
Just because I’m not sure I’ve linked to it before. Good reading.

Venturebeat on xuqa.com.
I like: rather that trying to come up with ways to de-emphasize the popularity contest aspect of social networking sites, just build a social networking site that’s explicitly a popularity contest. Says Venturebeat:

The stated goal is become the richest most popular person. The users build currency acquiring “peanuts,” by engaging in any number of activities, such as playing poker or winning modeling contests. More intriguing, though, users can get peanuts by signing up for offers from advertisers.

Real Networks creates RSS-focused toolbar/site.
Real Networks might want to talk to the ToolButton folks about their download and usage projections.

Techdirt Mike on Newspapers and New Media
Man, I love Techdirt. Mike points to Vin Crosbie’s opinion piece, as well as a web of related TD posts. On the question(s) of newspapers’ relationship to new media, Mike says:

So what is the answer? Well, Crosbie believes its in really personalizing content. That is, finally recognizing that not only is the internet different than paper, it lets you do new and useful things that simply couldn’t be done on paper. Instead of just copying the offline experience, make it much, much better.

Amen, brother. See also my post from yesterday, linked below.

BT has a futurologist?
Yesterday I pointed to an interview with the NY Times’ futurist. Fair’s fair, so BT’s…um, futurologist…gets the nod today.

The past two days I’ve been trying to catch up on work and possibly even get ahead a little…which leads into the final part of the title: heading out Friday night for five days on the Maryland shore, hanging out with family, kayaks, food, and drink. Largely offline until next Thursday.

Just so you all don’t miss me too much, I’ll dump out some of the recent blogfodder highlights…

While disagreeing with Bruce Schneier on security topics is generally a good way to be wrong, I can’t share his (kinda) positive take on the recent, successful “MD5 is broken” defense. As Schneier says (and Ed, our head of development reminds me at every opportunity), MD5 is broken, but it’s not broken in any way that appears to be relevant to the case. Where Schneier takes the positive message of “[i]f there’s any lesson here, it’s that theoretical security is important in legal proceedings,” it seems to me like more of an effort to muddy the waters surrounding security issues for personal gain. I don’t believe that this case is actually a model for any productive thinking on the importance of security — theoretical or otherwise.

Many others have pointed to the Copyright Office’s possible Internet Exporer only issue. Come on, now — when Microsoft makes a point of being cross-browser compatible, “but testing is hard“ seems a pretty lame argument.

Nelson’s blog is well worth reading in general. In particular, I loved his post on the One True Email Quoting Style. While it’s true that the OTEQS is also the basis for usenet-clogging “death by a thousand line-by-line rebuttals” debates, I still love it. Oh, and by the way — Nelson is the inventor on Google’s recent RSS advertising patent filing. Still think it should be rejected, but really excellent for Nelson.

AOL acquires XDrive. Yeah, whatever. This is really just an excuse for me to complain again about the fact that no one offers a decent, cheap home storage appliance. All I want is no stupid OS limitations on client machines, minimum of three hot-swappable drives, RAID5, and a nice small form factor. In a world of Nano-ITX motherboards and sub-$1/MB hard drives, is this really so much to ask?

Jon Udell on desktop search. “Google’s PageRank showed us that relevance is a collective judgment. Services such as del.icio.us, Flickr, and Furl are likewise showing us that metadata tagging wants to be a group effort. One of the ironies of desktop search may prove to be that, by the time it went mainstream, the personal hard drive was about to become an endangered species.” Not yet convinced…reference my various search posts.

Along similar lines, some thoughts from Collision Detection on desktop search, referencing Steven Johnson’s NY Times Book Review piece.

One of many posts in the last couple of days, noting that A9.com got an (apparently) unpaid plug via television’s the O.C.

Despite the apparent search preferences of Pretty White Kids With Problems, Google is one of the world’s most influential brands.

As noted by Fred Wilson, the search gap appears to be narrowing. Again, reference my many — and probably boring — search posts.

Tivo releases an SDK, but many feel it’s too little too late. Really interesting, as I’ve been close to two other “are we a product or a platform” decision processes, where fear of losing control of the product ended up killing it.

Scoble on editing. (Also in an older series of posts somewhere around here, which tells you something about how long this topic been in blogfodder purgatory.) Agree with the idea that the immediacy of blogs has its own value, not convinced that everything about every process needs to be public. Sometimes the world just wants the finished product.

And finally a little something on the schizoid nature of the hive mind: the blogosphere is both enthusiastically for and violently against centralized tools, due to their incredible potential and/or instability and limitations.