Alec Saunders SquawkBox

We started out with a great set of topics for the Squawk Box this morning and then… disaster struck. The recording stopped. Currently we at iotum are working with our hardware partner ThinkEngine to find a resolution to this problem, but occasionally it strikes. Anyway, the result? Although we had a great conversation about four topics, you get to listen to the first two only.

Enjoy the call. We discussed the use of Twitter as a communications bus on the internet, and also Microsoft’s decision to adopt ODF, PDF, and the XML paper document formats.

 

 Squawk Box May 22 [12:48m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

One of the best sessions at Mesh ‘08, Mathew Ingram sat down and interviewed Ethan Kaplan, Time Warner’s VP of Technology. Ingram began with a softball question on whether it was a good time to be an artist, which Kaplan answered with assertion that there wasn’t a better time to be an artist — that artists were no longer defined by their medium, but rather were practictioners in many media.

I jumped up with Nokia N95, and captured 25 minutes or so of the talk. Enjoy!

 

 Ethan Kaplan and Mathew Ingram Mesh 08: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

I sat through a late day session at Mesh ‘08 yesterday titled Private vs. Public. Chaired by Rachel Sklar, it featured Nancy Baym, Mark Kingwell, and Ken Anderson. The promise?

Are society’s notions about privacy changing? Does anyone even care about privacy any more? Once you provide your information, does it belong to you or to Them? Younger Web users seem perfectly comfortable disclosing even intimate personal details to people they meet online. But some are concerned about what seems like excessive disclosure, and also wonder what happens to your data once social media sites get hold of it. Come and discuss these issues and more with Internet researcher Nancy Baym of the University of Kansas, philosophy professor and author Mark Kingwell and Ken Anderson, assistant privacy commissioner for Ontario, in a panel moderated by Rachel Sklar.

It was a fabulous premise, but a huge noop in terms of delivery. Rather than focus on the real issues, moderator Rachel Sklar guided the conversation through a series of the typical hype riddled hand wringing crap that ignorant media people who don’t understand privacy issues typically bring up.

A much more valuable conversation at Canada’s Web Conference would have been around what rights we as Canadians should expect. We have privacy rights in Canada, whereas Americans don’t. Convening a panel with an American philosophy professor, and an American internet researcher, chaired by an American journalist, all of whom were unprepared to discuss the privacy rights guaranteed Canadians, was a waste of time.

I would have liked to have seen an in-depth discussion of:

1. your privacy rights and what you should do to protect them. What does the act, PIPEDA, guarantee you?
2. the proliferation of video surveillance throughout Canada, and what is legislatively being done to protect citizens from undue and unwanted surveillance. Ken Anderson at least addressed this from the point of view of surveillance cameras in Toronto.
3. the changing privacy landscape in the US. Many of the US web sites Canadians currently use are adapting their privacy policies to match Canadian style privacy policies. Facebook, for example, is one such site.
4. what rights do you have in law with respect to privacy policies on web sites? Is a privacy policy a contract, or something else?
5. if you’re starting a business, what should you focus on with respect to privacy? What is the users expectation? What are your legal obligations?
6. as a business owner, what are the implications of storing your data or locating your servers offshore or in the US?

There were so many more interesting privacy questions that could have been explored in that session. Instead the central question seemed to be who has a right to your drunken college pictures on Facebook.

Meh!

I’ve been giving the mDialog application a whirl here at Mesh 08.  The promise of mDialog is that you will be able to easily share video, via the mDialog site, with your friends on iPod and via QuickTime.  So I uploaded the video of Ethan Kaplan and Mathew Ingram to the site to check it out.

There are lots of things to like about mDialog. For instance, there doesn’t seem to be a limit on the size of the files you can upload.  Video quality is excellent, as well.

However, it’s something that I can’t really recommend.

• Getting started requires a subscription to QuickTime Pro. Cost $39.95
• The service has limited capabilities in free mode.  To be able to really take advantage of it, your going to pay an additional subscription cost.
• The video is rendered locally using QuickTime Pro.  That’s a high high nuisance factor, as rendering large videos takes hours, and ties up your PC during that time.
• The video is rendered as an m4v – a proprietary Apple format.  That means anyone who wants to play it has to have QuickTime installed also.  Flash Video is much more ubiquitous and would have been much more preferable.
• Once uploaded it takes a very long time for the video to be available online.  In fact, the video I shot yesterday, and rendered and uploaded starting at midnight last night, is still not online.  If it isn’t online by the time I get home tonight, I will re-render it, and upload directly to the blog.

I’m not sure the world needs another video sharing site.  Even if it does, I’m quite sure that, for me anyway, the current incarnation of mDialog isn’t it.

Apologies for not getting this posted until today.  At the Mesh conference, while WiFi is free, most ports are blocked.  Uploading audio with FTP is problematic as a result.

On the call, we talked about Microsoft’s new “pay the user” search model.  Consensus? A desparate bid.  None of us felt that we would change our behaviour as a result of micro-payments.

And what about the rash of lawsuits being launched in the US by consumers against wireless providers? Finally fed up with byzantine contracts, billing plans, and high handed behaviour by the carriers, consumers are fighting back.  No surprise to any of us.  We’ve all experienced a carrier “sting” after tripping some unknown carve-out in the terms of service.

And finally we talked about Warner Records VP Technology Ethan Kaplan’s comments at Mesh.  Unfortunately, a glitch in the conference recording meant that I lost most of the tail end of that conversation.

On the call: Dan York, Brad Jones, Jim Courtney, Jeanette Fisher, Dave Brown, Adam Somer, Jeb Brilliant, Ian Hood, and Neal Saferstein

 

 Squawk Box May 21 [25:05m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download