(photo: Evil Erin)

Matt Yglesias analyzes the failure of the progressive block strategy, and chalks it up to progressives not picking issues that centrists care about.

He doesn't note his own role in that failure, vilifying the leader of the progressive block Raul Grijalva as the world's greatest monster unless he backs down. (Our own whip effort started to back Grijalva's efforts, which were already underway in the House when we started in June of 2009.)

I've said many times that it's impossible to expect progressive members of Congress to hold together if they don't have the backing of their natural fiscal constituencies the liberal interest groups and the unions. Without that support, they're left to raise money from PACS and other corporate sources to sufficiently fund their campaigns. That's why they take turns championing progressive bills that ultimately fail so they can pretend they do something, and then vote for bad bills that ultimately pass so someone else can be the failed hero. When Tammy Baldwin votes for one PhRMA-friendly bill after another, progressives can say hey, but she's so good on LGBT issues! Which never actually pass either, but the kabuki keeps activists sufficiently docile and donating to large organizations who fundraise off amping up outrage.

But it's also worthy to note that it's hard for them to withstand the assault of liberal pundits who sneeringly derided their efforts as naive, futile and purist. They should be proudly taking credit for their role in delegitimizing progressive opposition to the bill in liberal intellectual circles, much the same role that the same people played during the Iraq war. After all, it's TNR's stock in trade.

I'll leave it to others to analyze how corporate cash was laundered through foundations to underwrite the efforts of various opinion leaders in the health care debate, but it definitely deserves more scrutiny. . .

Monday, June 1, 2009

Kaiser Family Foundation Launches New Non-Profit Health Policy News Service

Menlo Park, CA In the midst of a major federal health reform debate and the ongoing financial turmoil in the media industry, the Kaiser Family Foundation officially launched Kaiser Health News (KHN) today to provide a new source of in-depth reporting on major health issues. KHN is staffed by experienced health policy journalists and editors, and will feature contributions from a wide array of leading health policy commentators and independent journalists.

[]

At the heart of KHN will be in-depth, explanatory stories about complex health policy issues and major developments in Washington, D.C., and around the country in the health care marketplace and health care delivery system. The news service will cover policy stories like health care reform, developments in major public health coverage programs like Medicare and Medicaid, and complicated ongoing policy challenges like the financing of long-term care, and it will examine the nation's health care system from a consumer perspective. KHN will also provide a synthesis of health policy news coverage through a daily health policy report, original programming from Kaiser's broadcast studio, and regular columns from contributing writers and experts. Jonathan Cohn, senior editor of The New Republic, and Howard Gleckman, senior research associate at the Urban Institute and former senior correspondent at Business Week, will be writing bi-weekly columns. Among others who will contribute occasional columns are: Michael Cannon of the Cato Institute, Jim Capretta of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, Judy Feder of the Center for American Progress, and Mark Pauly of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.

The development of Jonathan Gruber's much-vaunted model, which formed the justification for econo-wonks and politicians alike to support the Senate bill's voodoo claims about the excise tax, was originally paid for by the Kaiser Family Foundation in 1999 according to Gruber. It was given a facelift this year courtesy of the Small Business Majority, whose money comes from foundations including the Blue Cross Blue Shield Foundation. (h/t spanishinquisition)

And recall that Kaiser Permanente was the original sponsor of the Washington Post pay-to-play salons.

You have to wonder if any of that Kaiser cash underwrote other efforts at the Post after the parties fell through.

HCAN's efforts were funded by Atlantic Philanthropies, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and George Soros foundations, among others.

So, come on, pundits. Don't let the lameness of progressives in Congress get all the credit for shooting down the public option, rolling back choice, and teeing up constitutional amendments to overturn the health care bill around the country.

Stand proud.

Tags: Blogosphere, Jonathan Gruber, Kaiser Family Foundation, Matt Yglesias, Media, new media, Raul Grijalva, Robert Wood Johnson, The New Republic, TNR, veal pen

Doctor's Associates, Inc. v. QIP Holders LLC, 2010 WL 669870 (D. Conn. Feb. 19, 2010). My prior post on this case.

As a long-time vegetarian (over a quarter-century), I find America's obsession with "more meat" competitions simultaneously amusing and repulsive. On my personal blog, I have routinely chronicled the "burger wars" between heartland restaurants trying to outdo each other by offering bigger and bigger burgers. As far as I know, the current high-water mark is the Beer Barrel Main Event Charity Burger, a 123 pound burger that includes 80 pounds of meat. See the photo. If you're one of those people who thinks a burger can never have too much meat, good luck working on that bad boy.

Today's post involves subway sandwiches instead of burgers, but it turns out that subway sandwich restaurants' competition over claims of having more meat is no less stiff. Quiznos kicked off the war in 2006 by launching a "double meat" line of sandwiches. Quiznos ran two TV ads comparing the meat in its sandwiches to Subway's and set up a website soliciting individuals to make and submit their own comparative digital video ads. Subway was not amused and ultimately filed a seventh amended complaint (!) over Quiznos' ad campaigns. (What a patient judge).

The parties hotly contested every aspect of the litigation, and Rebecca does a thorough recap of the lengthy ruling. I'm going to focus on the court's discussion of the crowdsourced video ads published on Quiznos' ad campaign website, which Quiznos defended on 47 USC 230 grounds.

Citing the MCW v. Badbusinessbureau case from 2004, the court says "the critical inquiry with respect to CDA immunity in this case is whether the Defendants merely published information provided by third parties or instead were actively responsible for the creation and development of disparaging representations about Subway contained in the contestant videos."

The MCW decision was questionable even at its time, but it's bizarre to see the court reach into history for this obscure, archaic, unpublished and geographically distant (it was a TX precedent being cited in a CT court) district court precedent. To do this, the court bypasses dozens of more recentand more thoughtfulcases, including the multiple Ripoff Report cases that have expressly and implicitly rejected the MCW case. A more natural citation would have been the Roommates.com case, which also referenced legal distinctions between active/passive websites similar to the legal standard quoted above. However, if the court had followed Roommates.com, it almost certainly would have ruled for the defense, as Quiznos didn't require illegality or even channel users towards illegality. (Rebecca makes the same point). Therefore, I'm baffled how the court got to this legal standard citing this legal precedent.

Using this odd legal standard, the court says it's up to the jury to decide if Quiznos just exercised traditional editorial control or impermissibly "actively participated in creating or developing the third-party content submitted to the Contest website."

Unquestionably, sending this case to a jury is a 230 loss, but how bad is unclear. We'll never find out what the jury would do with the case because the parties promptly settled the case after this ruling. However, a plaintiff's ability to hold a case open through trial, rather than having it disposed of earlier in the proceedings, would itself represent a significant win for plaintiffs--it would mean plaintiffs can get discovery to fish for embarrassing facts, force the defense to incur lots of litigation costs, and get a chance to tell their sob story before a jury. (FWIW, I am not aware of any 230 case that has ever reached a juryam I forgetting something?) Nevertheless, I think very few courts will follow this precedent given the plethora of more persuasive precedents and the fact that Quiznos' crowdsourced ads were just one part of Quiznos' larger allegedly false ad campaign. Therefore, I don't expect this 230 loss to spread to many other cases.

I also don't think this case shines much light on the legitimacy of crowdsourcing ads. There's no reason to believe that crowdsourced ads are per se problematic. At the same time, if the advertiser uses the ads offline, clearly the advertiser "adopts" the ad and takes full responsibility for its contents. If the advertiser only publishes the ad online, 230 might be available but the advertiser still might tread cautiously due to the FTC Endorsement and Testimonial Guidelines, which basically ignores 230 and holds advertisers liable for certain types of third party advertisements anyway. I think 230 may nullify this part of the FTC guidelines, but most advertisers would rather not tangle with the FTC to establish the deficiencies in the FTC's thinking. As a result, I expect most advertisers will vet most crowdsourced ads, even if they only publish them only, as if the advertiser is legally responsible for the ads and not protected by 230.

BTW, the Subway v. Quiznos lawsuit isn't the only litigation over subway restaurants' claims of double meat. In an apparently unrelated lawsuit, last month a class action suit was filed over Blimpie's "Super Stacked" sandwich for overclaiming that it had double meat.

I confess some schadenfreude when I see lawsuits against meat pushers for overhyping meat quantities. I would not shed a tear if the meat pushers lock up each other in litigation death struggles and sue each other to oblivion. Of course, consumers can facilitate that outcome by refusing to patronize vendors who "compete" with each other by encouraging us to overconsume the Earth's resources.

Although Open Home is an $3.99 app, I'd really call it a platform. With it, you can skin or customize your Android interface, add Live Folders, shortcuts and such. And there's tons of custom skins, fonts, icon packs for sale in the Android Market to enhance it. There's even an experimental 3D cube interface in the latest version as you swipe to other home screens, the screen rotates like a cube. I haven't dropped the $3.99 just yet, but I did install Open Home Lite, which is free. It wasn't until after installation that I realized the software adds two extra home screens to the Nexus One. I don't have enough apps and shortcuts to fill up seven screens just yet, but I'm heading in that direction, so the extra space will come in handy. Each of the screens can hold a custom descriptive title as well check this old but relevant video to see how one user categorized the screens on his HTC Magic.

Aside from the extra home screens, Open Home adds dedicated search on the left and an interesting little slideout drawer on the right side of the screen. Simply tap and swipe the star to pull out the drawer. I'm thinking of placing the most used apps in the little drawer so that they're available from any of the seven screens. And I don't even have to give up my Live Wallpapers since Open Home supports them on my handset. Perhaps one of the best features of all Open Home allows for home screen rotation to landscape mode, something I wish Android would support natively.

I'll be playing some more with the free, lite version of Open Home, but I'm already inclined to drop the $3.99 it's a small price to pay for two extra home screens and customization features.

Images courtesy of Better Android Apps

Related research on GigaOM Pro (sub req'd):

Google's Mobile Strategy: Understanding the Nexus One

What if it Just Ain't True?

A few years ago one of my friends accidentally discovered that his dad was in fact not his dad at all. Ouch. At twenty seven years of age, he discovered that something he absolutely knew (not thought, hoped, or wished) to be fact, was in reality, not true at all. Let's just say that his reaction wasn't a totally positive one. It never occurred to him that his truth', may in fact, be a big lie. A well-meaning lie (his mum had tried to protect him). A noble lie (is there such a thing?). But a major deception nonetheless.

What if you were to wake up tomorrow and discover that something you've believed (thought to be absolute fact) for years, simply wasn't true? Completely and utterly false. You weren't even close. How would you feel? Mad? Betrayed? Confused? Stupid? Maybe a little of each? Could it be that some of us hold on to certain beliefs in order to avoid the above feelings? After all, imagine having to unlearn something we've believed for decades? That would be quite the mental and emotional challenge, wouldn't it?

We've spoken about beliefs many times here at me-dot-com but today I want to give you a little something to chew on, think about and discuss; if you feel so inspired.

Some questions for you:

1. Is it possible that you've learned' certain things over the years that are, in fact, false? Is it maybe even likely?
2. Is it possible that some of your (self-limiting) beliefs are the very things which stop you from fulfilling (or at least, exploring) your potential, making certain decisions, taking chances and possibly finding happiness?
3. Did you consciously choose and develop your own beliefs, or did you simply adopt hand-me-downs from somebody else? (Many people do this). But Craig, why wouldn't I believe dad? He knows and I trust him, so his beliefs become mine - consciously or not. Intentionally or not. Besides, I wouldn't want to offend him would I?
4. Is it possible that you've believed certain things (seen the world in a particular way) for so long that the very thought of questioning some of your long-held beliefs makes you feel (1) uncomfortable, (2) anxious, (3) disloyal, (4) unfaithful, or perhaps even (5) overwhelmed?
5. Have you ever been coerced, pressured or expected to believe certain things, and because of those imposed beliefs you have been compelled to adhere to certain standards, rules and behaviours? Even though deep down you resented it?
6. Have you ever felt like questioning certain beliefs (to others) but held your tongue in order to keep the peace and avoid potential confrontation? (Why bother it will only create problems?).
7. For the most part, do your beliefs empower you or limit you?

Breaking Free

Sometimes beliefs are like handcuffs or leg irons. They restrict movement, potential, exploration and of course, freedom. Freedom to learn, grow and change. They keep us in the custody of something or someone. You know what I mean.

One of the most liberating, empowering and cathartic things we can do as authors of our own lives is to question our beliefs. Not for the sake of being different, difficult or rebellious, but for the sake of learning who we are, what we are and what we really believe beyond the social conditioning, the weight of expectation, the years of mental and emotional programming and beyond the pressure of group thinking.

After all, our beliefs determine our choices and behaviours (for the most part) and our choices and behaviours determine the kind of results we produce in our world. So why wouldn't we? Is it time for you to do a little unlearning?

Tell me about what you've unlearned lately.

Craig Harper (B.Ex.Sci.) is a qualified exercise scientist, author, columnist, radio presenter, television host, motivational speaker and university lecturer. For the past 25 years he has been a leading presenter, educator, motivator and commentator in the areas of personal and professional development. You can visit Craig's blog at Motivational Speaker.FREE eBook So You've Decided to Get in Shape (Again) Craig's FREE eBook takes 20 30 minutes to read, and addresses the REAL getting-in-shape issues based on his 25 years of experience. To get Craig's FREE eBook click here, weight loss books.

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With each new milestone in technological evolution we've seen a company emerge as the clear leader. In the current landscape, we observe this happening in several key parts of the marketplace including networking, search and operating systems.

Cloud computing is a new disruptive force that makes us ask the question whether we'll see the future of the cloud dominated by a single company. In this multi-part series, we'll take a look at a handful companies and envision what the world might look like, if, in fact, they win it all. We'll also analyze what it will take for a new company to rise up and claim the leadership role in this chapter of computing.

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Dominance Happens: A Bit of Recent History

There has been a love/hate relationship with companies that dominate markets. On one hand, it's us consumers that make it happen. But when they become giants we cheer as governement regulators and competitors knock them down.

Microsoft has faced this issue perhaps more than any company in the past few decades. When the browser battles were in full swing in the late 1990s, Microsoft was taken to court by the Department of Justice for antitrust violations.

In this note released in 2000 - Technology, Market Changes, and Antitrust Enforcement -Microsoft evaluated the idea of whether it was consistent with public welfare for a company to "win" a technology market, and what it means to have a network effect in technology.

Microsoft makes the point that no technology company will hold a dominant position for long if it doesn't innovate and expand the market definition. Additionally, if a company doesn't find the right balance of trust and pricing between its customers new technologies will find a way into the market and cause customers to defect.

Point: A Dominant Vendor Will Emerge in the Cloud

Taking these factors into consideration, we believe there are several points that can support the argument that a dominant player in cloud computing in the future. Due to the nature of market forces a single vendor will emerge as the clear leader in offering cloud solutions.

• First mover advantage: We're already seeing amazing things happen at first-movers like Amazon that are defining product and pricing. This gives them an advantage in fueling further growth and by learning and iterating the solutions in the market. Being first in an infrastructure-driven business will help them reach scale that others just can not reach easily - and potentially price it where others can't match.
• Vendor lock: Once you get started with an infrastructure provider it becomes interwoven into business operations. By the current nature of the cloud (e.g. little standards, a lot of innovation) being first with leading solutions adds more momentum to the first-mover that wins strategic customers.
• Strategic synergies: When we look at the combination of cloud computing and collaboration, we see a natural fit in services that meet more needs and take more market share. It may just work out that bundling works also in the cloud and creates the network effect that Microsoft is famous for. Cisco is also partnering across the landscape, with a focus on preparing the network for the cloud. By making it easier to manage your cloud with Cisco gear, it will provide IT leaders a reason to expand their relationships today, and stay tomorrow.
• Acquisitions and Partnerships: Companies that buy their way into the market will be a big factor in putting momentum behind their offerings. Companies to watch: VMware, Cisco, Oracle. These companies are already showing that the race is on to win the cloud through aggregation of capabilities. Cisco has a blog dedicated to Cloud Computing, Oracle is going on tour sharing its ambitions for the cloud

Counterpoint: A Dominant Company Will Not Emerge in the Cloud

Perhaps no single organization will have the ability to create a dominant foundation in cloud computing. Instead, we'll see many types of solutions as equal peers in the market.

In a way, this runs against the grain of existing technology landscape and our history with successful innovations. Maybe that is why we love the idea of the cloud itself?

• It's too big to own: One big reason to doubt a single dominant force in the cloud is that it feels like owning the Internet. Even Cisco with its strengths can't make such a claim. Perhaps the cloud is the perfect market, where the barriers of entry are low enough that continual evolution will occur.
• It's a movement, not a layer: Another argument against the cloud having a dominant player is its fuzzy definition. There are many parts and pieces to it, and it's not clear today what it would mean to "win" the cloud computing market.
• Portability will keep vendors in check: If customers demand solutions where they can move from vendor to vendor freely, it will impact the landscape. Companies with cloud solutions in the marketplace could be required by these customers to remove barriers to moving data and services between different entities. Additionally, standards and best practices may emerge that allow companies and individuals to move freely between providers. In this world, it will become a fluid market that prevents vendor lock and promotes pricing and trust as brand differentiators.

A Glimpse at Potential Futures

We've compiled a list of companies worth reviewing as candidates as possible dominant players in cloud computing. We'll be looking at their brand and the available assets that could be leveraged to achieve this position. Finally, we'll take a fresh look at what it might feel like if they succeed and shape the brave new world of cloud computing.

The list of candidates we're analyzing includes: Google, Microsoft, Apple, VMware, IBM, HP, Cisco, Amazon, Salesforce, Facebook, and our favorite, Insert new startup to our list by adding a comment below.

Please let us know what you hopes and fears are with the cloud computing marketplace. Any companies we should we add to our list (or remove)? What's your take: Is there one company today that is best positioned to win the cloud?

Photo credit: reddodo & savingfutures

(photo: plastic lemonade)

First, Sen. Richard Shelby put a blanket hold on all executive branch nominees to extort the executive branch into rigging procurement to guarantee that the company he favored won a bid on a defense contract. Oh, and he wanted the FBI to build a crime lab in his state, too.

And now Sen. Lindsey Graham is copycatting, placing a hold on the closing of Gitmo hostage to extort the Department of Justice into not having a civilian trial for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. And Graham's not being subtle about it. In a well-researched piece for The New Yorker, Jane Mayer breaks some amazing scoops:

Rahm had a good relationship with Graham, and believed Graham when he said that if you don't prosecute these people in military commissions I won't support the closing of Guantnamo. . . Rahm said, If we don't have Graham, we can't close Guantnamo, and it's on Eric!'

[snip]

Graham told [Mayer], It was a nonstarter for me. There's a place for the courts, but not for the mastermind of 9/11. He said, On balance, I think it would be better to close Guantnamo, but it would be better to keep it open than to give these guys civilian trials. Graham, who served as a judge advocate general in the military reserves, vowed that he would do all he could as a legislator to stop the trials.

Okay, Senators Graham and Shelby? This is the U.S. Senate, not middle school. This blackmail thing? Its not like, Oh, the cool kids are wearing Hello Kitty wristwatches and you need to follow the fad.

There is zero logical nexus between whether or not to close Gitmo and whether or not to have civilian trials, so the only reason for making the kind of statement quoted above, is quid pro quo. While I'm not suggesting that this is a Hobbs Act violation (read the link, trust me), it certainly smells just as bad.

Kate Martin, the Center for National Security Studies director, warns, We can't have a situation where political pressure forces the federal government to forgo criminal prosecution. That would mean the system is fundamentally broken.

Message for Rahm, from Marcy Wheeler:

Remind me. Didn't Rove and the Bush White House get in trouble for this kind of tampering with DOJ issues?

Really, the White House needs to BACK OFF and let the Department of Justice and the federal courts do their job. And a bunch of non-lawyers with ZERO expertise in this area should NOT be part of the decision making process, much less driving that process. Hasn't Rahm done enough damage to the President with his mishandling of the healthcare bill? Why do you want him to screw up something he knows even less about?

I stopped by the 4iThumbs booth to check out their product that would purportedly increase my (admittedly dismal) typing speed on the iPhone/iPod touch. It consists of a plastic overlay that puts small ridges between the letters of the standard iPhone keyboard, available in both portrait and landscape formats. The product comes with some tabs that you affix to the top and bottom of the device, and you can then slip the plastic overlay on and off. You can touch through the overlay and use the phone as usual while it's attached, although the bumps aren't terribly comfortable for swiping. There's a matching set of tabs for the back of the device which can hold the overlay when it's not in use.

I tested it out, and it works. I never texted much on any device other than the iPhone, so I can't make a direct comparison of typing speeds between an iPhone and, say, a Blackberry. I do type a lot on my iPhone, though, and I can readily say that my typing speed and accuracy increased dramatically while using the 4iThumbs overlay.

4iThumbs is $19.95US online for 1 set, which includes portrait and landscape versions and the tabs to attach them to your iPhone/iPod touch. At Macworld, you can pick up 2 for $15US, but you'll have to get there quick to take advantage of the show pricing.

TUAWMacworld 2010: Hands-on with the 4iThumbs keyboard for iPhone originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Sat, 13 Feb 2010 20:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Credit card usage is slowing. Revolving credit largely made up of credit card debt fell by nearly 20% in November, the largest drop on record, according to the Federal Reserve, reflecting less borrowing by consumers and banks' tighter lending standards. Through October, the number of new credit card accounts was down 46% from the same period in 2008, according to Equifax.

But abandoning credit cards is a much more radical step than using them less. Consumers who don't own a credit card often have a hard time renting a car. Some hotels won't book rooms to travelers who want to pay with a debit card or cash. Those that accept debit cards may place a hold on several hundred dollars in the customer's bank account, which could cause checks to bounce. And many consumer experts say that responsible use of credit cards is one of the most effective ways to build a good credit record.

It will be interesting to see what the long term implications of this will be, because I sense a lot of people now run with the baseline perception that banks and credit card companies exist only to screw their customers.

Giants of trip hop visit the lounge for the very first time this week, as do several friends old and new. Plus, we're giving away four free copies of Artemis' new EP Auralei. Check out my Twitter feed for more details.

Playlist for Dave's Lounge #182:

1. Massive Attack, "Girl I Love You (feat. Horace Andy)" Free download from: RCRD LBL
2. Jazzra, "The Only One" Buy from: iTunes | eMusic
3. SoulAvenue feat. LazyGrooves, "Walk With Me" Buy from: iTunes
4. Colette, "Like the Sun" Buy from: iTunes | eMusic
5. Artemis, "Ella" Buy from: Bandcamp
6. Adani & Wolf, "Lady in Black" Buy from: iTunes
7. Water (feat. Fay Lovsky), "Hold Me" Buy from: iTunes
8. Yubaba, "One" Buy from: iTunes | eMusic

Not an eMusic member? Click here to sign up for a free 15-day trial and receive 25 free MP3 downloads, plus 35 MP3s a month for only $15.89. It's a great value for indie music lovers and a great way to support both the artists and this podcast.

Own an iPhone or an iPod touch? Check out the Dave's Lounge iPhone app, which will givw you to access all the latest episodes of Dave's Lounge from anywhere for only $1.99. The Dave's Lounge iPhone app is now available from the iTunes app store.

Dave's Lounge has it's own Facebook page! Become a fan today and find out how to win a free digital copy of Artemis' new EP!

Enjoy the show!

• Aldiko: outstanding e-book reader (better than Kindle on the iPhone in terms of feature set; obviously the book store is not quite as good, but the integration with free eBook download sites is a plus). Currently reading Makers by Cory Doctorow.
• Amazon: search the full Amazon catalog (can use barcodes or photos in addition to typing or speaking your query), track orders in my account.
• APNDroid: useful if you want to disable your phone's cellular data connection (useful if you're often on WiFi and want to turn off your EDGE or 3G data connection)
• AppReferer: builds a QR code (a 2D barcode) that makes recommending an app to another Android user in person a one-click affair.
• Battery Graph: shows a nice chart (exportable, even) of battery usage, which is helpful if you're trying to isolate when the battery started to drain.
• Coin Flip: silly app that lets me flip a coin. Use it mostly to settle disputes between the kids. :)
• Congress: built by Sunlight Labs, a phenomenal "pocket Congressional directory" that includes contact info, committee memberships, news, and YouTube vids of every Senator and Representative.
• DroidLive Lite: Streaming radio (via Shoutcast) from 1300 radio stations around the world.
• Facebook: news feed, photos and profile info for friends
• Fandango: Order movie tickets from movie theaters so I can bypass lines at the ticket counter.
• Finance: Google Finance app
• Flashlight: turns screen bright white to use in dark rooms
• Foursquare: app for playing Foursquare, also has a nice widget for my home screen
• Gmote: turns my Nexus One into a touchpad remote (when paired with a computer running the Gmote server software). Handy for giving presentations, or just doing something nerdy and cool.
• Google Goggles: search Google by taking pictures.
• Google Sky Map: the one app that consistently blows people away. Load it up, turn your camera toward the night sky and you'll get a real-time view of which stars, constellations and planets are above you. An awesome accompaniment to a telescope.
• Jewels: Bejeweled-like game.
• Layar: Augmented reality app that displays info on screen in realtime through your phone's camera.
• Locale: very sophisticated app for scripting events to happen based on certain triggers. (When I'm at home, disable the data connection and connect to my home wifi access point. At 11pm, turn off the sound and put the phone to sleep; at 6am turn the sound back up; when I'm at work, put the phone in vibrate mode; etc.)
• Metal detector: actually works.
• Movies (aka Flixster): Lots of info/trailers/reviews about new and upcoming movies, also integrates with Netflix for DVDs
• My Tracks: built by some Googlers, great app for keeping track of runs/bikes/ski runs you've done; captures altitude, distance, etc., then uploads to Google Maps My Maps.
• OpenTable: make restaurant reservations from the phone.
• Owner: adds my contact info to the unlock screen ("If found, please contact Rick Klau...")
• Pandora: streaming music channels.
• PapiJump: great little game using the phone's accelerometer.
• Pintail: monitors your phone's SMS messages for a message that says "locate" (plus a PIN); once received, activates the GPS and replies with the phone's location. Helpful if you've got a lost phone.
• Robo Defense: addicitve game.
• Scoreboard: Tracks scores of your favorite teams, with realtime updates and notifications as score changes.
• Seesmic: Great Twitter app.
• Shop Savvy: grab a barcode, find out who sells it and for how much.
• TiVo Remote: works with any TiVo HD unit over WiFi.
• TripIt: phenomenal itinerary manager for all travel info.
• Voice Recorder: does exactly what it says it does.
• Yelp: Local reviews.

Let me say, first off, that I am a huge fan of the elegant WPTouch plugin for WordPress by Brave New Code. This is one of those plugins that I would gladly pay $99 for since it creates such an amazing version of a WordPress blog for iPhones, iPod Touch and for Android devices.

Word to my peeps perform this update only if you HAVE NOT modified the theme. If you have, you will lose your changes as all of the theme files will be overwritten.

I learned the hard way that any modifications to the code or layout will be removed. Of course, once I hit the update button I thought to myself about the nature of this plugin. Then, upon refresh of Tech Startups on an iPhone and with Agent Switcher . . . my handiwork was toast.

Before you spend seconds obliterating hours of work to make changes in your WPTouch theme make sure you back up your original files (I do have mine, fortunately) and don't do the automatic update in your WP admin. Download the upgrade, unzip it, add your hacks back in to the new theme and then upload it to your server.

I have to say, it is kind of cool to have a plugin for a theme. What is important is to realize that it is a totally different animal than any other plugin.

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King Pharmaceuticals, Inc., v ZymoGenetics, Inc., 2009 WL 4931238 (E.D. Tenn. Dec. 10, 2009). Seattle Trademark Lawyer has some background.

This case involves the cutthroat (sorry) world of blood clotting drugs. King Pharmaceuticals sells bovine (cow) thrombin, a clotting agent. ZymoGenetics sells thrombin made from hamster ovaries and snake venom. ZymoGenetics' version has been making inroads on the thrombin market, and King isn't too pleased about that. King claims that its dropping market share is due to several bad acts on ZymoGenetics's part, including ZymoGenetics' AdWords campaign that included the King trademark "Thrombin-JM" as a keyword.

Blaming illegitimate AdWords for King's dropping market share seemed particularly implausible for two reasons. First, the product is purely B2B and has no consumer-facing side. It's used for post-surgery recuperation, so doctors/hospitals are the target customers--and for professional and liability reasons, they are pretty careful about what they prescribe to patients. So if the AdWords ads have helped facilitate doctor switching, it's more likely due to doctors learning of a new drug that doesn't have some of cow thrombin's negative side effects than any marketplace mistake over brands or other "unfair" diversion.

Second, the AdWords ads produced a trivial number of clicks. ZymoGenetics reports that it got 84 clicks on "Thrombin-JM" (and only 803 on the generic term "thrombin"). The court doesn't expressly guffaw at King for fighting over 84 clicks, but I can hear a snicker or two in the opinion. Not surprisingly given the minuscule volume of clicks, ZymoGenetics voluntarily dropped the competitive keyword purchase when it learned of King's lawsuit (it wasn't giving up much), and it agreed not to buy the keyword again. King pressed for a preliminary injunction to forcibly hold ZymoGenetics to its word, which many courts will issue in these situations, but this court decides that ZymoGenetics' promise is good enough and denied the preliminary injunction.

Now, King was going to court to redress ZymoGenetics' perceived transgressions no matter what, so it would be a little unfair to beat up on them for litigating over 84 clicks. However, this case is yet another example of how competitive AdWord lawsuits often are ridiculous overkill given the economic value at issue. (Related examples are 1-800 JR Cigar, which involved $345 of revenue, and Storus, which involved 1,374 clicks over an 11 month period). It's a good reminder to trademark owners to be smart with their litigation dollars!

The week before Thanksgiving, I attended an unusual symposium sponsored by the University of Denver Law Review entitled Cyber Civil Rights: New Challenges for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties in our Networked Age. The symposium covered standard Cyberlaw topics, but the raison d'tre was University of Maryland law professor Danielle Citron's two recent articles on online harassment of women: "Law's Expressive Value in Combating Cyber Gender Harassment" (Michigan Law Review) and "Cyber Civil Rights" (Boston University Law Review). It is unusual for a law school to celebrate another school's professor and her research, especially when the professor is fairly junior. Nevertheless, Danielle's participation brought together academics from both the Cyberlaw and civil rights communities, which provided a rare and interesting mix of folks..

First Panel

Danielle Citron started off by recapping her two papers. Online participation, such as blogging, is essential to professional standing, and employers are reviewing online profiles of prospective employees as part of their hiring considerations. However, women are being targeted for abuse online. These attacks are harming women by changing their online and offline activities, reducing their job opportunities, and causing women to change their gender representations online. Further, folks are trivializing these problems. Women are underreporting the attacks, and law enforcement only intervenes when there are offline harms. New laws can serve an expressive function to communicate that online attacks against women are socially unacceptable. The new laws can validate women's feelings that they have been harmed and encourage law enforcement to pursue more cases.

Commenting on the papers, Robert Kaczorowski of Fordham Law (and Danielle's stepdad) made an extended analogy between the Ku Klux Klan and cybermobs.

Wendy Seltzer asked if we could deemphasize the effect of words rather than prohibit them. Danielle responded that we don't know how seriously to take any particular threat.

An audience member asked if is there a difference between mobs and individual actors who are just taking advantage of being anonymous. Danielle answered that groups can become more extreme online. I think this point deserves more exploration: a series of uncoordinated individual decisions to pile on to an attack can look like a coordinated attack to the victim. This is part of why I thought the KKK references were puzzlingKKK activities are clearly coordinated, while online attacks against women can succeed without any coordination or ongoing connection between the attackers.

Paul Ohm argued that that legal solutions are better for cyber civil rights problems than technological solutions. Paul discussed what he labeled Felten's Third Law. (He doesn't know of two earlier laws named for Ed Felten; he just assumes they exist given Ed's impressive and influential oeuvre). As articulated by Paul, Felten's Third Law is that in Cyberlaw conflicts, lawyers love technical solutions and technologists love legal solutions. In other words, we love the solution we don't know because we assume it has to be better than the one we do. As both a law professor and technologist, Paul picks law over technology for these problems.

Paul categorically rejects any technical solution that would create a fully identified Internet. For example, we should not mandate server log retention because we know the logs will be co-opted to regulate other forms of unwanted content, not just online harassment.

Wendy Seltzer discussed the unintended consequences of legal intervention. For example, mandatory Internet filtering in school libraries hasn't stopped kids from bypassing the filters, but it has facilitated a marketplace for improving filtering technologies that has benefited repressive regimes. Another example: anti-circumvention technology fails to restrict copying but has reduced innovation around DRMed content. Wendy also noted how norms can help curb abuses. For example, while there are online cesspools, she praised Wikipedia's evolving guidelines for living people's biographies.

In response, Danielle admitted that her solutions need to be more surgical. She said she might consider moving from a notice-and-takedown model to a notice-and-preserve model for intermediaries.

Second Panel

This panel was composed of three women academics from the civil rights community, so it was a noticeable shift from the typical Cyberlaw academic discussion.

Mary Anne Franks is a University of Chicago Bigelow Fellow and soon-to-be full-time law professor. She expresses our collective disappointment that cyberspace isn't a utopia that allows people to escape offline discrimination and harassment. She laments that women can lose control of their identities online, such as when someone creates a fake online profile in their names.

She then addressed how cyberspace is unique/special/different with respect to gender harassment. Many commentators try to duck cyberspace exceptionalism, so it was refreshing to see her tackle the issue squarely. Existing offline discrimination/harassment laws assume interactions between repeat players at work and school; online harassment can be divorced totally from any existing social networks. However, because the online activities still harm targeted individuals at work and school, we should treat the harms the same. Offline, there are switching costs to changing jobs or school; online, search engines' consolidation of results for search on a person's name creates a different type of switching cost. In terms of supervisory power, she thinks web operators have analogous control to employers or school administrators. Thus, when web operators receive notice of online harassment, they should have a duty to do something about it. Offline, employers can develop a variety of responses and policies to combat workplace harassment. Web operators should have similar latitude; for example, they can delete offending posts or suspend/ban accounts.

Helen Norton, a University of Colorado law professor, did not share Danielle's optimism (expressed in her first article) that existing discrimination laws can curb online harassment. Instead, Helen thinks a new civil rights statute is needed, but she might limit its remedies to exclude money damages. Helen is pessimistic that there will be regulation any time soon, noting that it can take years to enact civil rights legislation. Helen would also like to see more precise definitions of the exact harms that women are experiencing only online.

Nancy Ehrenreich, a Denver University law professor, began her talk by saying that we should not overstate the Internet's benefits. She then clarified that we should not assume that disadvantaged folks can overcome barriers online. For example, we impose cultural categories on people in every interaction, so even if people try to mask their identity online, they can't really escape. She wondered why we aren't talking about an anti-discrimination law for the web. Her concern is that discrimination denies individuals access to the Internet.

In Q&A, Paul Ohm observed that civil rights scholars often invoke free speech as the countervailing concern to their desired regulations, but Cyberlaw scholars are often more interested in other generative effects of the Internet, such as new business models, new labor models and new modes of production.

Panel 3

James Grimmelmann (see his slides) started with the Skanks in NYC case. In that case, the defendant criticized someone else in her social network on a blog, calling the plaintiff (among other unflattering things) a skank. The plaintiff sued to obtain the blogger's identity. After a successful unmasking, the plaintiff dropped the lawsuit, having successfully publicly shamed the blogger.

James hypothesized that this unmasking and shaming was an appropriate remedythe blogger got shamed (like an eye for an eye), and unmasking is a better outcome than other legal remedies like damage suits. James then posited a thought exercise that provided plaintiffs with an expedited unmasking procedure if they drop any damages claim. This would have a number of benefits. Unmasking curbs online harassment is especially effective at busting online mobs. Also, an unmasking remedy avoids messy debates over the First Amendment's scope, and it may be more desirable than trying to hold online providers liable.

Having advanced his own strawman, James then cut it down. In some cases, defamation remedies may be more desirable, and plaintiffs may not know that until they learn the putative wrongdoer's identity. In other cases, plaintiffs who just want unmasking would appreciate a lower legal hurdle. Also, we provide legal protection for anonymity for good reasons.

James' lessons from the thought exercise: we should consider ways to decouple an unmasking remedy from litigation. At the same time, we need to protect defendants from pretextual unmasking; in some cases, retaliation is a big concern, and we should incorporate this concern into the unmasking decision.

From Chris Wolf's talk (see his full remarks), the most interesting thing I learned is that 18 states have laws banning wearing masks in public, enacted to suppress KKK activities. This was the second speaker's KKK reference of the day, and it made me wonder if we were experiencing some variation of Godwin's Law.

Panel 4

Viva Moffat observed that secondary liability issues generate the most heat in online harassment discussions. She expressed concern that imposing legal duties on third parties may not help law's norm-shaping effect, and it's not appropriate to impose liability just because the provider has deeper pockets or the direct actor can't be found. She also suggested that imposing liability on third parties creates a greater risk of collateral damage than direct liability. [Note: I would like to know more about this last assertion. I suspect we cannot make a utilitarian calculation a priori]. As a result, she favors focusing more efforts on sharpening direct liability.

Ed Felten talked about identifying and anonymizing online activity. He explained the usual sequence of events in chasing bad online content:

log file => IP address => identity => justice

But the IP address => identity step breaks down when users use an anonymizing proxy or the user's network uses network address translation (used by home wireless routers or in coffee shops) and all connected devices' requests share a single IP address. He said that a majority of Internet connections use NAT.

Because IP address tracebacks can dead-end at the intermediary, an IP address can reveal too little information. However, even when users aren't investigatory targets, IP addresses can reveal too much information, such as geolocation. This paradoxIP addresses simultaneously reveal both too much and too little informationreflects that the IP address system was built for routing, not identification. So could we design a better authenticating technology?

He then conducted a semi-realistic thought experiment of a new technological tag that could be used instead of IP addresses. This tag could have the following attributes:

* can be placed by any intermediary
* conveys no information about the sender unless unwrapped by the intermediary (presumably for good legal cause)
* unwrapping the tag yields the best identity information the intermediary has
* the tag's use is voluntary as a technical matter
* the tag is removable as a technical matter

I then batted clean-up. A summary of my remarks:

Today's conversation has revisited long-standing Cyberlaw issues, such as:

* anonymity v. accountability, and who should be responsible for online content and actions
* cyberspace as a physical place. See, e.g., Noah v. AOL (an online discrimination case), National Federation of the Blind v. Target (also an online discrimination case) and Estavillo v. Sony
* cyberspace exceptionalism and cyberspace utopianism (on the latter point, see my article on search engine utopianism)
* when is the optimal time to regulate rapidly evolving technology? Early, when the technology is still in its infancy, or later, when market forces and new technological evolutions may have cured the early problems?

Danielle's articles convinced me that women are experiencing serious harms online that menincluding mecould easily trivialize. Danielle's articles also convinced me that online harassment has strong parallels to the 1970s legal evolution of workplace harassment doctrines, where a big part of the battle was to get people to take the harms seriously.

While I find a lot of descriptive value in Danielle's work, the normative implications are not as clear. As usual with attempts to regulate rapidly evolving technology, there are many important but overwhelmingly hard definitional challenges, such as who is an intermediary, what are online mobs and what constitutes online harassment. For example, I do not think the Skanks in NYC incident is an online harassment case or an attack, but James Grimmelmann's talk assumed those characterizations.

While we can debate what should be the right level of regulatory intervention, we should not overlook that Congress already enacted a law squarely governing intermediary liability for online harassment: 47 USC 230. The angst that prompted this conferencebad behavior onlineis the logical consequences of 230's broad immunity. The statute enables websites to adopt policies that they will not police user content or retain server logs of user activity. These choices aren't a surprise or a per se abuse of the immunity; instead, they are the unavoidable implications of Congress' action.

We might question Congress' wisdom in adopting 230, but we should not diminish its potential importance to the Internet as we know it. [In Q&A, Chris Wolf asked about the comparative experience in countries that don't have such broad immunity. In those countries, we know that websites take down user content much more freely, and I believe that the most interesting UGC innovations are all taking place here in the US, not countries with more restrictive UGC liability.] I can, at most, only prove correlation and not causation, but I believe 230 is one of the main causal reasons why the Internet has succeeded so well.

When I speak around the country about 230, I often encounter folks who generally accept 230's immunity scope but want just one new exception, i.e., their pet topic. If everyone got their just one exception, the law would be eviscerated. (I said it would be Swiss-cheesed to death; maybe I should have said it would be overcome by a thousand duck bites). I'm not rejecting new exceptions categorically (they should be each considered on their own merits), but in aggregate 230's immunization benefits are actually quite precarious. I believe 230 works precisely because of its strength and simplicity, so adding more exceptions could significantly reduce its efficacy.

I concluded my remarks by observing that online harassment is a subspecies of bullying and incivil behavior in our society. While we can and should work to curb online harassment, I am more interested in addressing bullying and incivility in all its forms, wherever it takes place.

In this regard, I have been impressed by how my son's school is proactively addressing bullying. See more about this effort, called Project Cornerstone. The school is teaching kids not to bully or to tolerate being bullied, and the project gives bullied kids tools to go on the offensive against bullies. There's no guarantee that anti-bullying programs will work in the short or long run, but I remain hopeful that online harassment today partially reflects that many current Internet users never got any anti-bullying education. Perhaps, then, online harassment issues will naturally abate (without any regulatory intervention) as new generation of Internet users, better educated about bullying, come onto the Internet.

Following my remarks, we had more Q&A.

Paul Ohm Q: Some cyber folks argue against secondary liability because they believe that a victim can pursue a direct action, but Ed's talk suggests that user anonymity will continue to be possible.

Mary Anne Franks: civil rights isn't about individual claims because victims have to bear too high a burden to pursue claims. Instead, civil rights are about changing large-scale social norms. The goal is to achieve anti-discrimination by any means necessary. Thus, civil rights scholars have already discussed and concluded that it's appropriate to impose liability on intermediaries like employers and schools.

Danielle: intermediaries are the lowest cost avoiders.

James Grimmelmann: no, the harassers are the lowest cost avoiders. Civil rights folks would get more support from the Cyberlaw crowd if they focused their regulatory desires towards intermediaries who are in active concert with the bad actors.

Danielle's Wrap-Up

We all agree that:

* education can make a big difference
* online communities need to self-police
* there are numerous limits to using the law as a solution, including that lawsuits don't make sense and 230's immunity.

We don't agree on what to do next. There are First Amendment limits, and technology doesn't offer any panaceas.

The web browser is the the only place that most computer users come into contact with a command line these days. Well, lest I forget the search box that wraps those magic keywords and phrases in some crazy ass query that pings about 8 billion servers on the dark side of the moon that Google owns.

The address bar in a browser is not different except that it requires the user to know the path to a set of files store someplace. The browsers job is to take this command and wrap it up in a request with more information (headers) to identify itself to the host of the requested files.

Most users don't know that this happens, they don't care and even if they did would it matter to them as long as they found what they wanted.

Search is used when people don't know the URL to type and you need assistance. URL's get typed into the browser when a user knows where to find what they what. URL's are like phone numbers to users (I know about IP addresses so hold your horses).

If asked how a phone is able to make a connection to the right individual on the other end. All you would say is, Dail the number. You wouldn't get into exchanges, towers, cables, routers, etc. A phone number is a code. It is a file pointer to get the information you desire.

This mind numbing nonsense regarding the death of URL's is shattering my faith in humanity. With that said, I don't think it was the point of the post. I think this was:

We all know that the internet has won as the transport medium for all data but the universal interface for interacting with the web? well, that battle is just now getting underway. Chris Messina

Let me stand right up and say there is no battle for the universal interface for interacting. There are trends, tools and options. Each person will choose their own, have it chosen for them or develop their own. It's that simple. Do what you like, use what you like and move on.

Attempting to prescribe what a universal interface is a fools errand and a businessperson's opportunity. It's not grounds to loosen one's grip on the reality that the internet will keep moving along with or without you. Just do your best for the groups that you represent and meet their needs.

URL's, phone numbers and file pointers will always exist. Without them nothing works. I don't even know how I came to write this piece or why I found it important. I should have just left these hyperthinking geeks to fight about nothing.

Saying that the trend of embedded graphical navigation systems to find what you are looking for is going to destroy the internet is like saying that because of contacts as graphical representations of of phone numbers that they will disappear.

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/0

No One Is Taking Your URL Away is a post from: TechStartups.com

On my way to the Audience Conference this morning I was fortunate enough to have the bus drop me right in front a Verizon store. The balloons were out and I knew that is meant one thing . . . Droid.

At 7:30 a.m. there was no line and I was able to go straight in the store where the associates outnumbered the patrons. That is saying a lot because in New York mobile stores are always busy.

It was obvious though that the people in the store were nerds of the first order, though. One glance at the khaki pants, bad leggings and dishevled fauxhawks let me know the IT department had arrived. My people.

I was able to avoid ending up on a list to buy the heralded Droid and step right up and start fondling it with my geek gloves. Geek gloves, btw, are similar to kid gloves but they hold a special reverence and care for gadgetry.

After a hands on I can tell you that the device is gorgeous, lighter than you would expect and blazing fast on Verizon's network.

Here's how it went down: I immediately flipped it open to expose the QWERTY keyboard to get my hot thumbs typing in URLs to load up some internet goodness. For sites with Android style sheets it loaded them right up without more than a 2 second delay. For full sites it took a bit longer but seemingly quicker than the iPhone. I know, I should have done some AB testing but the overly chatty associates might have asked me to move it along.

The screen is clear, bright and has a large surface area that is welcome to fat fingers like mine. I was able to press icons with the phone with ease and get them open quickly. Which was a surprise to see them load so quickly.

Since this is a cursory overview of the phone I can say that I have only one gripe the keyboard is shifted left. Which forces the use to type mostly with the left hand. I want two hand glory on this sucker to rip out blog posts.

All in all, I was happy testing it out and probably will pick one up in the next few weeks.

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/0

The Droid Doth Be Here Initial Review is a post from: TechStartups.com

Like you, I've been a member and user of PayPal's service for years. They were early to the game and grew accordingly with a product that made buying online drop dead easy. With an exit to eBay they were integrated into a powerful money minting machine.

They also joined a culture of apathy and disdain for those that help them line their pockets developers.

Like their acquirer, PayPal continued to build a mediocre developer community, foster it with partial code samples, limited information and limited support. Now in kindness to PayPal they did begin providing better support a few years ago and are pretty good when it comes to engaging developers on the message boards offering solutions a problem that has plagued eBay for years.

Visit any eBay developer board and you'll find replies that focus on posting in the wrong thread topic instead of offering a solution. It shows the developers that they aren't a priority.

I was looking forward to the release of the brand spanking new PayPal X Developer Network. Hoping that my previous experience wouldn't hold true and that there would be a renewed focus on the developers that are integrating the PayPal gateways and API's into their platforms. But they let me down.

The new developer community site is plagued with broken links, the same old code samples and forums that stopped loading threads on October 28. The intention is there but the execution is hit and miss.

I can forgive them this time, though. Because it appears that their intention is to focus fully on their API implementations and integrate the legacy products like IPN and PDT into a more standardized solution.

Which will help PayPal as it moves toward working with developers to create a wider range of solutions like mobile and in application micro-payments.

Something else of note with the new PayPal X Developer Network is the improved site IA. Thank you to the person(s) that restructured the information and worked with the UI person(s) to highlight what developers want most . . . documentation.

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/0

PayPal X Developer Network Same as it Always Was is a post from: TechStartups.com

This is my attempt to give a small bit of advice when tracking dynamic files with MySQL. Most CMS's and blogging platforms have built in tracking that is not dependent on reading server logs.

Which means they either need to write to a flat file or to a database. And if it is the latter there are some things to keep in mind.

Amount of Data to Be Stored

This is the single most important question to answer. It is the one that leads you to the magic buzzword, 'scale'. Most databases are designed to hold millions of records but the problem comes when writing thousands of records at the same time statistics are being run, etc. The answer to this question should reflect site traffic and anticipated usage.

Remember, if this is an open system and you allowing bots to traverse your content, especially with feeds, that you should take your number and multiply it by 10. You will be amazed at the amount of bot traffic on your feeds.

File Monitoring

Next, setup a portion of the script itself or another script on a cron that monitors the files that you need tracked. You're probably most familiar with this concept from IP or application monitoring. Think of this as the same, simply micro, down to the file.

Obviously, the most vital files should be monitored more often. Vital meaning the most trafficked files, syndicated data or files that power content for partners or your own onsite widgets. Set this monitor up to email yourself or bust out your cURL skills and send yourself a DM with the Twitter API.

Placement of Tracking Code In File

This doesn't need much of an explanation. Put your tracking code before you execute the core function of the file. That way if your tracking code is failing, it will do so before creating output to your users.

Corrupt Data

Once monitoring has been setup you can nip corrupt data in the bud. The key is to act quickly after you receive a monitoring alert that one of your scripts is having an issue with a DB query, insert or update. Most likely the issue will be an insert with some sort of corrupt data or duplicate auto increment id if their are thousands of inserts coming in and the table has failed.

Write that optimization command or fire up your GUI and make that table normal.

MySQL is pretty forgiving when it comes to inserting thousands of records a day into one table. Keep in mind that first question of scale though and when designing your file tracking DB think about efficiency.

This should lead you to optimize queries, write some code to perform statistic functions in your file language away from the database, spread the tracking data across a few tables and an efficient replication method. Because you never know when that next traffic burst will happen.

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/0

Tracking Dynamic Files With MySQL is a post from: TechStartups.com

We're getting into the nitty gritty of startups today! I wanted to take a moment to explore startup business partnerships.

When you take a look at the personalities needed to grow a business from the ground up, often they are very similar and don't make for easiest relationships. Disagreements and gray areas first tear them apart . . . and with them goes the business.

Let's look a little closer.

Choosing a partner

Finding the right partner to begin a startup with is like magic. It's more special than finding the right person to spend the rest of your life with. Don't tell my wife that I said that. OK?

I could sing new media country songs about the woes of handwritten contracts, missed opportunities, legal bills and partners that just can't hold up their end of the bargain. Love is easier than a startup business partnership.

However, when you have a partner that is pulling their weight it's as easy as hanging out with your best friend. And working together on the same vision. I put a lot of stock in this best friend analogy.
You can do and say things with your best friend that you can't with anyone else. You can fight with your best friend, makeup and have a stronger relationship than before.

How to get it right

Put a written operating agreement in place. One that both of you are happy with. Happy doesn't mean you get everything that you want, but one without any gray areas that can make you question the duties of your partner or yourself. There shouldn't be any surprises.

Next, take it to your attorney. Not A' attorney but yours. Your partner should take the agreement to their attorney as well. Hash out any issues with your attorney. Believe me, they will ask you questions that you didn't ask yourself when you wrote it up.

Get back together with your partner and if you can work out the differences you can go forth and work late nights together in harmony and bliss.

How not to do it

There are too many ways not to do it to list here. But some of the big ones are not getting operating agreements in place, not having them attorney reviewed, not checking out your partners background and past business partners, not agreeing on a business plan or revenue model.

The most important is something I mentioned above. Never, ever, never under any circumstances sign an agreement or consult with the same attorney that your partner is using or that is going to be the counsel for your startup. You need to have an impartial arbiter and it should be your startup attorney. Let your personal attorneys do the dirty work and the startup attorney keep the best interest of the business in mind. If this isn't the case, you could lose more than your partner, but your business, equity or cash. Limit your liabilities.

Talk to anyone that has worked at a startup and they can tell you the story of the that companies founders or a few of their own. Anyway that you find your way into a startup business partnership, always make sure that you have your attorney's attention when you need it most. Hopefully, they'll just be busy due diligence requests for a healthy exit.

Post from: TechStartups.com

Does having too many friends in online social networks make radical, innovative thinking harder to develop and foster group-think instead? That's the conclusion of one scientist contributing to a recent issue of Science magazine, but we're not so sure.

Viktor Mayer-Schnberger, director of the Information + Innovation Policy Research Center at the National University of Singapore, argues that "the over-abundance of connections through which information travels reduces diversity and keeps radical ideas from taking hold."

Sponsor

Mayer-Schnberger is specifically interested in what it will take to see the next major stage of the internet come into being and believes that extensive social networking could favor slower iterative development instead of radical paradigm shifts. Smaller networks of developers are more likely to allow unusual ideas the time they need to grow and mature, before other thinkers shoot them down or rip them off. Big networks can also be very distracting.

Other factors to consider though, we would contend, include the positive impact of collaboration, serendipitous social discovery, rapid news dispersal, interdisciplinary cross-pollination and the increased scalability of support for ideas that living large on social networks enables.

A "good or bad" analysis may be too crude for evaluating the effect of extensive social connections online on innovation: it seems true that both extended periods of uninterrupted work time are essential to innovation and that online noise is good for you. Is participation in large social networks a net positive or a net negative? That probably depends on the person, but smaller networks are probably an important option as well.

We would post a poll asking for your opinion on the matter, but in writing about group-think online that would seem too ironic.

Science magazine subscribers can read Mayer-Schnberger's article here. MSNBC's science blog and New Scientist have additional coverage.

If you're out to create something truly great, you'll likely need to challenge some widely held but incorrect beliefs. Challenging conventional wisdom is much harder than most people realize, and those that do make us uncomfortable. Which is why it's so important to learn how to identify and embrace people who see the world differently than you do.

Evolutionary Biology and Conformity

Imagine our ancient ancestors out on the savanna in search of food. Chasing a large group of hunters who were running after something out of view was probably a better survival strategy than pursuing animal tracks that may or may not have led to food. Gregory Berns argues that mankind's propensity to follow the crowd is at least partially a result of evolutionary biology.

Such a propensity is so ingrained in human nature that we will go to ridiculous lengths in order to adjust our beliefs to those of a group, as proven in the series of conformity experiments run by Solomon Asch in the 1950s. According to Wikipedia:

In the basic Asch paradigm, the participants the real subject and the confederates were all seated in a classroom. They were asked a variety of questions about the lines (which line was longer than the other, which lines were the same length, etc.) The group was told to announce their answers to each question out loud and the confederates always provided their answers before the study participant. The confederates always gave the same answer as each other. They answered a few questions correctly but eventually began providing incorrect responses. In a control group, with no pressure to conform to an erroneous view, only one subject out of 35 ever gave an incorrect answer. However, when surrounded by individuals all voicing an incorrect answer, participants provided incorrect responses on a high proportion of the questions (36.8%). 75% of the participants gave an incorrect answer to at least one question.

It's very challenging to make decisions based on your own information and logic when everyone disagrees with your point of view. We have an urge to conform, as we learn again with each economic boom and bust. Unfortunately, as David Hirshleifer describes in The Blind Leading the Blind: Social Influence, Fads, and Informational Cascades, If there are many individuals, thenwith virtual certainty a point in the chain of decisions will be reached where an individual ignores his private information and bases his decision solely upon what he sees his predecessors do.

Weird Ideas That Work

The inspiration for the title of this post came from the book Weird Ideas That Work, in which Robert Sutton suggests hiring people who make you uncomfortable. He argues that employers typically hire people like themselves and that most interviews are more about the social fit between the candidate and interviewer rather than the candidate and the job.

So what can you do to embrace those who make you uncomfortable?

1. Identify your heroes.

Chances are that the historical figures you hold in high esteem made those around them uncomfortable in their day. Einstein did. Gandhi did. Jefferson did. Apple's Think Different campaign was as much about communicating what the company stood for to its employees as it was about selling Apple products to its customers. An organization that embraces unconventional thinkers has an unfair competitive advantage in a world governed by conformity.

2. Adjust your hiring process to focus on what really matters.

Jeff Cordova, a former Yahoo colleague of mine, puts all engineering candidates through a code test before he determines cultural fit or the like. He literally sits down in a room with a candidate and spends a few hours coding up an application with them. At the end of the test, he has a very good idea of their software engineering skills and often asks other members of his team to drill down in a particular area of expertise. It's only after qualifying their skills as an engineer that he allows his team to determine their fit within the organization.

While software engineering is relatively easy to test, you can apply a similar type of testing process for just about any role to reduce the impact of social bias in hiring. Microsoft notoriously put candidates through case study interviews (I don't know if they still do), as documented by William Poundstone in How Would You Move Mount Fuji?

Spend more time thinking about interview-based experiments that you can run on candidates to test what really matters for the role and you might find yourself hiring a different type of person.

3. If you have a negative reaction to an idea, use the 5 Whys.

The 5 Whys is a method to get at the root cause of a problem. When you hear an idea, before you immediately respond, try to understand the underlying reason for your knee-jerk reaction. You may find that your reaction is more about protecting existing orthodoxy or the source of the idea than it is about the merits of the particular approach at hand.

4. Consider increasing organizational diversity.

The true benefit of diversity is that it has the potential to produce better results. Diversity along the lines of age, gender, race, religion and sexual orientation has the potential to make an organization more resilient to conformity. Different people from different backgrounds bring in different biases. And groups that have experienced greater prejudice may have a membership inoculated from group think as a matter of self-preservation that is, when everyone hates your group, you tend to hold a differing opinion.

It's not easy working with one of the rare people who is deeply nonconformist. But if your goal is to be innovative, to create something great and to make a difference in the world, you should be prepared to make those around you uncomfortable and recruit others who do the same to you.

Mike Speiser is a Managing Director at Sutter Hill Ventures. His thoughts on technology, economics and entrepreneurship will appear at this time every week.

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The future of mobile: GigaOM Pro provides insider perspectives and analysis on the trends defining tomorrow's mobile market. Learn more

Its taken a bit longer than we all might have hoped, but it seems that Android is really starting to pick up the steam it deserves. Be it Samsung, LG, Sony Ericsson.. if they're a big gun in the mobile manufacturing world (Well, outside of certain obvious exclusions), they're probably working on an Android handset or two. The first off the bat and the most dedicated so far has been HTC - and if the latest rumors hold true, they might be looking to throw even more weight behind it.

According to the Digitimes, HTC may be looking to put the Droid onto as much as fifty percent of their handsets. Now, HTC doesn't push'em out as fast as some other manufacturers (by the way, Samsung, we're totally talking about you), but they still pump out a good number of'em each year. And of their lineup, almost the entirety is Windows Mobile. Digitimes also adds that HTC is aiming for around 30% of their handsets this year to be Android-based. We can think of about 5 or 6 we're expecting to see by years end (including those that have launched already) -f it that's 30% and HTC continues to make around as many total devices next year, we can probably expect at least 9 or 10 Droidphones from them next year. Fuzzy math? Absolutely. But we can hope, can't we?

[Via EngadgetMobile]

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it's time for you to find a new Job2.0

By Jim Hietala

Spending the early part of this week in The Open Group Security Forum meetings, I have been struck by the commonality of governance, risk, compliance, and audit issues between physical IT infrastructure today, and virtual and cloud environments in the (very) near future. Issues such as:

• Moving away from manual compliance processes, toward automated test, measurement, and reporting on compliance status for large IT infrastructure. When you are talking about physical infrastructure, manual compliance is difficult, expensive in labor cost, and sub-optimal given that many organizations choose to sample just a few representative systems for compliance, rather than actually testing the entire environment. When you are talking about virtual environments and cloud services, manual compliance processes just won't work, automation will be key.
• Incompatible log formats output by physical devices continues to be a problem for the industry that manifests itself in problems for security information and event management systems, log management systems, and auditors. Ditto for virtual and cloud environments, at much larger scale.
• Managing security configurations across physical versus virtual and cloud environments provides similar challenges. [Disclosure: The Open Group is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Emerging-standards work from the Security Forum, which was originally conceived as solutions for some of these issues in traditional IT environments (in house, physical servers), will have important applications in cloud and virtualization scenarios. In fact, with the scale and agility provided by these environments, it is hard to think about adequately addressing audit and compliance concerns without standards that provide for scalable automation.

The Automated Compliance Expert Markup Language standards initiative will address issues of security configuration and compliance alerting and reporting across physical, virtual, and cloud environments. The revised XDAS standard from The Open Group will address audit incompatibility issues. Both of these standards efforts are work-in-progress at the present time, and our standards process is truly and open one. If your organization is a customer organization grappling with these issues, or a vendor whose product might benefit from implementing these standards, we invite you to learn more.

This BriefingsDirect guest post comes courtesy of Jim Hietala, vice president of security, The Open Group. You can reach him here.

Fever and the Future of Feed Readers

Time was, every self-respecting geek lived and died by his feed reader (or aggregator, if you prefer). Just several years ago, the number of subscriptions in your RSS-chomping tool of choice made for bragging rights. 200? Oh, I can get through 500 feeds a day. More subscriptions meant you were more in the know. Really good lists of subscriptions were traded amongst friends, but cautiously, just as one might hold back a recommendation to a superb but little-known restaurant.

At the time, the only real debate was around the best way to present all this information. Some preferred a river of news, others preferred their content categorized and neatly filed, like sections in a newspaper. But everyone was in agreement: having all this fresh content collected for you in one place was a boon. It was a change in mindset, and it seeded the demand for what is now being called the Real-Time Web. (Incidentally, the Real-Time Web is next year's Web 2.0. If you'd like to appear cool and aloof, start disdaining the expression now).

Today, at least in the web-tech echo chamber, feed reading is quickly falling out of fashion. Too many sites producing too many feeds of dubious quality means information overload, and a creeping sense of obligation to keep up with a torrent of questionably relevant content. Some have gone back to checking a handful of bookmarked sites, as we did in the early days of the web. Others rely on social aggregation sites like Reddit, Digg, and Hacker News to show them what's worth reading. Both strategies are highly manual and, to me, distressingly unoptimized.

Abdicating Aggregation

Another camp all but eschews the idea of trying to keep up with feeds. Chris Wanstrath, co-founder of the superb social coding site GitHub, is one of the more visible advocates of this approach, saying in a tech conference keynote last year:

Stop using Google Reader or NetNewsWire or whatever the kids are using these days. It's not worth your time. [L]et other people do the filtering for you. Use your time for other things.

This statement initially rings true. We're in the age of social networking, after all. I've told social sites about my friends, and my friends are always talking about things, so just show me what my friends are talking about and I'll always be in the loop, right? Then I can focus on my own interests and projects. Sounds great.

The problem with abdicating your content consumption to other people, though, is other people. Perhaps it's overestimating my ability to find interesting things to read, but I don't trust my friends and the Internet at large to educate and entertain me. In the venn diagram of my interests and my friends', there may be 80% overlap, but most of the content that I'm going to find deeply engaging is probably in the leftover 20% at the margins.

There's also a sort of collective danger to the strategy of exclusively consuming information through social osmosis: if everyone does it, who's going to find the interesting stuff? Who takes the reigns as the editors, the arbiters of taste? Going back to a post I wrote in 2003, who will be our cool shit aggregators?

If everyone took Wanstrath's advice, nobody would do any filtering and nobody would consume anything. Realistically, we're in no danger of that, but we're also not seeing a radical improvement in the way we consume information on the web. Surely someone's investigating another strategy?

Blending Subscriptions with Social Data

Google Reader is, as evidence of the slowly dying field of feed reading, pretty much the only regularly-updated, widely-used aggregator left on the web. Bloglines has been gasping for air for over a year, and NewsGator is positioning itself towards the enterprise, presumably trying to scrape some money out of the generally unprofitable business of aggregation.

Reader has been something of a playground for Google, and one of the products for which the behemoth has been most responsive to public feedback. When Reader launched, its interface was nigh-unusable. It was updated, improved, and gradually became the only feed reader worth using and not just on the web, something it pains me to say as the owner of licenses for multiple desktop aggregators that eventually had their price driven down to free, and have since seen little attention from their developers.

Today, Google seems hellbent on cramming its otherwise clean and speedy products with cumbersome, poorly conceived social features. Presumably they see social networks as a threat to their valuable side business of, uh, completely free products, and this is their ham-fisted response. In Reader's case, the user response has been one of confusion and derision.

Seeing content filtered through my social lens seems like the marriage of traditional feed reading to Wanstrath's more osmotic approach. Reader's implementation doesn't prove this to be a happy union. The tool is now cluttered with smilie faces indicating content that my friends liked, only Google has fairly incomplete view of who my friends are because they've yet to create a social experience that encourages me to share that information. Reader's myriad competing ways to share, vote on, annotate, and remember items further detract from its former appeal.

I've given up on Reader, but I'm not ready to give up on feed reading just yet. I wanted to try one more experiment.

Enter Fever

Fever is a feed reader designed and built by Shaun Inman, the developer behind the popular Mint web traffic analytics product. Like Mint, Fever is $30 (USD) and runs on your server a ballsy proposition in an age of free software running in the proverbial cloud. It is unapologetically for power users.

Fever's proposition is straightforward: supply it with the feeds you always want to read, and supplement those with feeds that you only want to read the juicy bits of. Fever will then show you a sort of personal Techmeme or Google News, pulling together stories that reference common URLs. Fever's precise formula for this isn't discussed on the product's relatively curt homepage. Take it or leave it.

I forked over my money, spun up a virtual server, and have been using Fever for several days now. Installation was as straightforward and slick as you could hope for given that Fever is a self-hosted web application. Special features aside, it handles the basics well imagine Google Reader before all the social bloat and with a far more attractive design. Fever's design is not perfect, but it's easy on the eyes and pleasant to use. Put another way, Fever doesn't make it harder to read feeds much as you always have.

The $30 question, though: does Fever really float the best, most relevant content to the top in a personalized way? Can it dig through all the noise on the web and show you what you need/want to know at a glance? The free answer: sort of.

For starters, it's easy to pollute your corpus of signal feeds, which Fever calls sparks. Fever needs sparks that contain a lot of links. If you put top feeds from Digg, Reddit, and the like into Fever, you'll basically just end up with your own dim, mostly irrelevant slice of the web. Fever really needs folks like Waxy, Laughing Squid, and Trivium to keep churning out link blogs full of references to good content. Without those sort of quality, URL-rich feeds, your Fever's view of what's hot is going to be lukewarm.

For this reason, Fever is just fine for floating good techie content to the top, but poor for most any other subject. I'd love it if Fever could find me good posts from the set of minimal techno or cocktail blogs I subscribe to, but link blogs and, indeed, linking outside one's own site just aren't as prevalent in those communities. Fever did similarly poorly given a number of sparks for top world news; a paucity of URLs means Fever can't replace Google News for figuring out what's on the front pages of the world's newspapers.

It's disappointing that I can't depend on Fever to be a one-stop shop for my daily information intake. With my current heavily-curated collection of subscriptions, I can rely on Fever to be a sort of no-bullshit Techmeme, but little more. For the topics of world news, music, art, culture, humor, food, and drink, I still need to read a number of feeds entry-by-entry.

Given Fever's initial cost, plus the ongoing cost of hosting a server on which to run it, I can't imagine that it's a tool that will last long in my tool belt. I already regret the time I spent setting it up and tuning my feeds, and I can't really justify keeping it around for the sole purpose of being a less-encumbered Google Reader.

The Future of Feed Readers

I'm not sure what the solution is here. Feed readers as we've known them are dying, but it's as yet unclear what will take their place. Filtering feeds for relevance algorithmically seems all but fruitless; filtering through the social graph is only a slight improvement, but misses the rare content that may only strike a chord with a small audience.

If there's one thing I'm convinced of at the end of this exploration, it's that there's more work to be done, and more businesses to emerge in this field. Social networks alone aren't focused enough tools to bubble up and share quality content. My hope is that a surplus open data of the sort we're trying hard to share at Twitter will help spawn a new generation of tools to manage the flood of content. I don't think it's a problem that Twitter, or any other pipeline for information, can solve on its own.

With all that said, perhaps the right approach really is to abdicate one's consumption of content to whatever you're passively exposed to, and to occupy your mind with other things. The act of creation is almost always self-affirming, and the act of consumption so rarely is.

Despite their much-admired situational awareness, even NYC subway veterans sometimes get confused about where to find the nearest station -- and if you're a first time visitor, fuggedaboudit. For iPhone 3GS-enabled residents and tourists, it's about to get a lot easier: acrossair is offering an NYC version of the Nearest Tube augmented reality app, New York Nearest Subway.

Hold your iPhone flat and see a 2D map of the entire system... then lift it perpendicular to the ground, and the heads-up display mode shows you floating icons representing nearby stations, complete with line legends and walking distances. For anyone who's ever walked to a faraway subway stop only to realize that there was a much closer option, this is incredibly compelling. No word on price yet, and the app is awaiting approval; as noted, this app will only work on the 3GS, as the magnetometer is used to determine the direction the phone is facing.

If you've got preferred apps for navigating public transit in your city, pipe up in the comments.

[via Gadget Lab]

Continue reading Reality doesn't get more real: 2 iPhone views of the NYC subway

TUAWReality doesn't get more real: 2 iPhone views of the NYC subway originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 16 Jul 2009 14:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Google makes its money mostly from targeted advertising on product searches and other narrow, directed searches. The advertising on news-related searches is not nearly as valuable. Google could remove all newspapers and journalism content from its Web search catalog tomorrow and lose very little of its revenue. The links to news it provides are valuable to its users but not terribly valuable to its advertisers.

Most galling was that The Huffington Post's use of an Associated Press version of SI's report was initially tops on Google, which meant that it, and not SI.com, tended to be the place readers clicking through to get the gist of the breaking scandal would land.... Why did The Huffington Post come up ahead of SI.com? Because, even Google insiders concede, Huffington is effective at implementing search optimization techniques, which means that its manipulation of keywords, search terms, and the dynamics of Web protocol give it an advantage over others scrambling to be the place readers are sent by search engines. What angered the people at Sports Illustrated and Time Inc. is that Google, acting as traffic conductor, seemed unmoved by their grievance over what had happened to their ownership of the story. An SI editor quoted to me Time Inc's editor-in-chief, John Huey, noting crisply that, "talking to Google is like trying to talk to a television."

Should you care? Which database technology should you be using?

Of course the answer is it depends, but that's not very helpful. Let me ask you a few questions to help you figure out which technology is appropriate to your particular application. Then I can give a few pointers so that you can find out more.

First of all, calm down. Chances are that your current database is perfectly fine for now. But you might want to keep an eye open in case you notice some symptoms which show that you are pushing the relational model to its limits. Some symptoms relate to the structure of your data:

• Do you have tables with lots of columns, only a few of which are actually used by any particular row?
• Do you have attribute tables where each row is a triple of (foreign key to row in another table, attribute name, attribute value) and you need ugly joins in your queries to deal with those tables?
• Have you given up on using columns for structured data, instead just serialising it (to JSON, YAML, XML or whatever) and dumping the string into your database?
• Does your schema have a large number of many-to-many join tables or tree-like structures (a foreign key that refers to a different row in the same table)?
• Do you find yourself frequently needing to make schema changes so that you can properly represent incoming data?

Other symptoms relate to the scalability of your system:

• Are you reaching the limit of the write capacity of a single database server? (If read capacity is your problem, you should set up master-slave replication. Also make sure that you have first given your database the fattest hardware you can afford, you have optimised your queries, and your schema cannot easily be split into shards.)
• Is your amount of data greater than a single server can sensibly hold?
• Are your page loads being slowed down unacceptably by background batch processes overwhelming the database?

In my opinion, too much emphasis is often placed on scalability, despite being a very remote problem on most projects. It's understandable large-scale computing systems are sexy, and everybody likes to think they are building a service which is going to be massively popular but more often than not, developers would be better off focussing on their customers' needs, and solving the scaling problem only if it actually arises.

That said, there is one more reason to consider non-relational databases: they are fashionable. It sounds like a silly idea to base a technical decision on fashion, but remember the human aspects of managing software projects. Great developers generally want to work with cool people in a cool environment using cool technology. That means if you want to hire great developers, providing all this coolness gives you a better chance of getting the best people to work with you. If you want to get on Hacker News, cool technology is also the way to go. Fashion shouldn't be your primary reason, but all else being equal, you can probably err on the side of coolness. Don't forget the cool people and the cool environment though. And now I'll stop saying cool it's not very cool.

Document databases and BigTable

The BigTable paper describes how Google developed their own massively scalable database for internal use, as basis for several of their services. The data model is quite different from relational databases: columns don't need to be pre-defined, and rows can be added with any set of columns. Empty columns are not stored at all.

BigTable inspired many developers to write their own implementations of this data model; amongst the most popular are HBase, Hypertable and Cassandra. The lack of a pre-defined schema can make these databases attractive in applications where the attributes of objects are not known in advance, or change frequently.

Document databases have a related data model (although the way they handle concurrency and distributed servers can be quite different): a BigTable row with its arbitrary number of columns/attributes corresponds to a document in a document database, which is typically a tree of objects containing attribute values and lists, often with a mapping to JSON or XML. Open source document databases include Project Voldemort, CouchDB, MongoDB, ThruDB and Jackrabbit.

How is this different from just dumping JSON strings into MySQL? Document databases can actually work with the structure of the documents, for example extracting, indexing, aggregating and filtering based on attribute values within the documents. Alternatively you could of course build the attribute indexing yourself, but I wouldn't recommend that unless it makes working with your legacy code easier.

The big limitation of BigTables and document databases is that most implementations cannot perform joins or transactions spanning several rows or documents. This restriction is deliberate, because it allows the database to do automatic partitioning, which can be important for scaling see the section on distributed key-value stores below. If the structure of your data is lots of independent documents, this is not a problem but if your data fits nicely into a relational model and you need joins, please don't try to force it into a document model.

Graph databases

Graph databases live at the opposite end of the spectrum. While document databases are good for storing data which is structured in the form of lots of independent documents, graph databases focus on the relationships between items a better fit for highly interconnected data models.

Standard SQL cannot query transitive relationships, i.e. variable-length chains of joins which continue until some condition is reached. Graph databases, on the other hand, are optimised precisely for this kind of data. Look out for these symptoms indicating that your data would better fit into a graph model:

• you find yourself writing long chains of joins (join table A to B, B to C, C to D) in your queries;
• you are writing loops of queries in your application in order to follow a chain of relationships (particularly when you don't know in advance how long that chain is going to be);
• you have lots of many-to-many joins or tree-like data structures;
• your data is already in a graph form (e.g. information about who is friends with whom in a social network).

There is less choice in graph databases than there is in document databases: Neo4j, AllegroGraph and Sesame (which typically uses MySQL or PostgreSQL as storage back-end) are ones to look at. FreeBase and DirectedEdge have developed graph databases for their internal use.

Graph databases are often associated with the semantic web and RDF datastores, which is one of the applications they are used for. I actually believe that many other applications' data would also be well represented in graphs. However, as before, don't try to force data into a graph if it fits better into tables or documents.

MapReduce

Going on a slight tangent: if background batch processing is your problem and you are not aware of the MapReduce model, you should be. Popularised by another Google paper, MapReduce is a way of writing batch processing jobs without having to worry about infrastructure. Different databases lend themselves more or less well to MapReduce something to keep in mind when choosing a database to fit your needs.

Hadoop is the big one amongst the open MapReduce implementations, and Skynet and Disco are also worth looking at. CouchDB also includes some MapReduce ideas on a smaller scale.

Distributed key-value stores

A key-value store is a very simple concept, much like a hash table: you can retrieve an item based on its key, you can insert a key/value pair, and you can delete a key/value pair. The value can just be an opaque list of bytes, or might be a structured document (most of the document databases and BigTable implementations above can also be considered to be key-value stores).

Document databases, graph databases and MapReduce introduce new data models and new ways of thinking which can be useful even in a small-scale application; you don't need to be Google or Facebook to benefit from them. Distributed key-value stores, on the other hand, are really just about scalability. They can scale to truly vast amounts of data much more than a single server could hold.

Distributed databases can transparently partition and replicate your data across many machines in a cluster. You don't need to figure out a sharding scheme to decide on which server you can find a particular piece of data; the database can locate it for you. If one server dies, no problem others can immediately take over. If you need more resources, just add servers to the cluster, and the database will automatically give them a share of the load and the data.

When choosing a key-value store you need to decide whether it should be opimised for low latency (for lightning-fast data access during your request-response cycle) or for high throughput (which is what you need for batch processing jobs).

Other than the BigTables and document databases above, Scalaris, Dynomite and Ringo provide certain data consistency guarantees while taking care of partitioning and distributing the dataset. MemcacheDB and Tokyo Cabinet (with Tokyo Tyrant for network service and LightCloud to make it distributed) focus on latency.

The caveat about limited transactions and joins applies even more strongly for distributed databases. Different implementations take different approaches, but in general, if you need to read several items, manipulate them in some way and then write them back, there is no guarantee that you will end up in a consistent state immediately (although many implementations try to become eventually consistent by resolving write conflicts or using distributed transaction protocols; see the algorithm of Amazon's Dynamo for an example). You should therefore only use these databases if your data items are independent, and if availability and performance are more important than ACID properties. For more information, read about Brewer's CAP Theorem, which states that amongst Consistency, Availability and Partition tolerance, you can only choose two, and no database will ever be able to get around that fact.

Richard Jones, co-founder of Last.fm, has written up an excellent overview of distributed key-value stores. Also Tony Bain gives an introduction to the conceptual differences between relational databases and key-value stores, and recently there was a NOSQL event in San Francisco at which a number of different non-relational databases were presented.

Distributed systems are hard really hard. I suggest that you use them only if you really need the scaling aspects they offer (or just for fun outside of a production environment).

Closing remarks

In this article I have concentrated on open source projects. If you are willing to bind yourself to a particular vendor/hosting provider, Google's Datastore, Amazon SimpleDB, Windows Azure Storage Services or Force.com might be worth considering. They are good technologies, but keep in mind the business risk of potential lock-in.

I can't make judgement about particular projects' suitability for particular purposes. There is some very clever software out there, but also some very new and unstable software. If you want to consider using them, you should do your own research:

• look around their websites for a list of sites using the database in production (and for which aspect of their service they use it);
• check if they have a lively open source community, in case the original developer loses interest and stops maintaining the software;
• try to find some benchmarks (though beware that many benchmarks published on the web are methodologically flawed and/or outdated, so if you are serious about it you should run your own tests, using data which matches your application's characteristics).

As with any fashionable topic, there are many people with strong opinions, both positive and negative; don't let yourself be put off by them. I hope I've given you an overview of the kind of things you can do with different types of databases so that you can choose the right one for your application.

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