IT Spot

A not so subtle reminder in the Working Press Room on Friday morning.

(Credit: Robert Vamosi / CNET Networks)

When Al Gore agreed to talk at the end of the RSA 2008 conference, the 2007 Nobel Laureate stipulated in his contract with RSA that no members of the press would be allowed inside the keynote. Many of my colleagues in the press were put out about this, and rightly so.

Fortunately, this year I was registered as a speaker at RSA 2008, so I didn’t have my usual press pass (although the nice guardians at the press room door certainly didn’t stop me from going inside).

Since individual attendees at RSA are allowed to blog and to take photographs at the conference, I feel I was within my rights to do so.

After hearing Gore’s speech (which is very similiar to the talk he gave at TED and can be viewed in its entirety online), I’m unclear why Gore would want to bar the very people who can best get his message out. Yes, I am sympathetic to Gore’s central message. And I understand there are those who do not agree with his point of view (as evidenced by the three protesters). But since nothing new was added here, why all the secrecy?

Or was it all a media stunt?

Earlier today I was speaking with a CIO when the conversation turned to the subject of Microsoft. There’s been no small amount of reaction to the publication of Gartner Group’s gloomy report on Windows. But this exec was not buying into the notion of a future tech landscape where Web browsers elbow aside client operating systems as the preferred software development platform.

“We’re still on XP. I’m not going to move to Vista for a while. We’ll let other people be the early adopters,” she said, asking to remain unidentified in case Microsoft happens to read her quotes. Still, she added, “I just don’t see a world in which Web apps make the OS obsolete any time soon.”

Any time soon is the operative phrase.

One quote doesn’t a trend make - except when person delivering the lines agrees entirely with me. (Just kidding.) In their quieter moments, I suspect that most of the participants in the bloviation-fest which attended dissemination of the Gartner report conclusions would agree. But the groupthink around this topic is leading to entirely off-the-wall prescriptions - especially when it comes to promoting online advertising as the magic answer to Microsoft’s troubles. I’m on record writing that Steve Ballmer would only be wasting billions of dollars to buy Yahoo but enough on that topic for now.

Microsoft has a big challenge figuring out how Windows will thrive in a world where more client apps are operating system-agnostic. But that’s not the same as proclaiming the demise of the client OS. I don’t know how many people attended their speech or read the report, so consider the following:

“There’s lots of discussion on how Web 2.0, Ajax and open-source products will make the client OS unimportant and unseat Microsoft as the dominant desktop software vendor. Some even insist that the client OS already doesn’t matter. The client OS may be less important today than it was 10 years ago, but that’s a more-accurate description for application developers trying to decide what OS they want their applications to run on. New applications are increasingly OS-agnostic, but legacy applications were very often developed for a specific OS, usually Windows. Legacy applications remain installed and important for years, meaning that for enterprises, the client OS is still a critical choice and will be for years to come.”

Gartner is more concerned with the changing definition of an operating system if a virtualization hypervisor takes care of the interface between hardware and application. (Hasn’t that been the traditional role of an OS?) The report then geeks out on what Microsoft needs to do to retrofit and rescue Windows from oblivion. Etc. etc. But nowhere does it make the silly leap of logic mentioned above.

Microsoft’s seemingly getting attacked from all sides these days but give the company some credit for not being completely clueless about the changes taking place around it. Apropos, Mary Jo Foley offers several good points to consider:

•&nbsp Windows currently contributes one-third of Microsoft’s revenues and two-thirds of its profits, I’ve heard company officials claim. Windows is installed on more than 90 percent of consumer and business desktops combined. That market share isn’t going to disappear overnight, no matter how much Web 2.0 pundits and online-services vendors want that to happen.

•&nbsp Windows 7, from all accounts, is going to be a minor upgrade to Vista. It is not going to be the start-from-scratch, slimmed-down operating system that many believe Microsoft is building in a back room as a “Plan B.” Singularity, the Microsoft Research microkernel OS, also is not that brand new Microsoft operating system. However, I do believe Singularity is the core of what ultimately will become a brand-new distributed OS platform from Microsoft. Unlike Gartner, I’m not going to pick a date out of a hat (by 2011!) and claim that’s when such a platform will be announced.

•&nbsp As has been reported previously, Windows 7 is likely to include a feature that, at least at one point, was called the “Component Delivery System” which is expected to allow users to install the pieces of Windows that they want and need in a more user-configurable way. This may not be identical to the modularized role structure offered in Windows Server 2008, but it is similar in its intention. This should help, to some extent, with Windows’ bloat — as should Microsoft’s expected move to use Windows Live to deliver non-core pieces of functionality to users.

•&nbsp Windows 7 also is likely to include some kind of virtualization layer that will help ease backward compatibility, I’ve heard from various sources. Microsoft isn’t likely to a port of Hyper-V to Windows client. But it could take the form of a virtualization service like SoftGrid (Microsoft’s application virtualization offering) and/or hosted desktop virtualization (the new name/positioning for Microsoft Terminal Server, I hear).

That’s the sort of granular analysis that won’t flag much attention on Techmeme. But you know as well as I that headlines often don’t tell the full story.

It wasn’t immediately clear from Thursday’s reports, but Google will indeed share information from its Orkut social-networking site with Brazilian authorities trying to deal with suspected pedophiles.

On Wednesday, the Brazilian Senate ordered Google to share information on 3,261 suspected pedophiles, information Google had refused to share earlier. No more.

“Google Brazil is legally obligated to comply with this order, and it is Google’s policy to comply with valid judicial process,” spokeswoman Sara Jew-lim said in a statement Friday.

Google already had tools in place to allow users to flag potentially illegal content, and it’s now adding a filter “with the goal of blocking pornographic pictures when someone tries to upload them, so that these pictures will not be posted,” she said.

The Associated Press, a news cooperative owned by its print-newspaper contributors, said Friday that it and Microsoft have built a back-end platform that lets Web publishers syndicate online video to other sites across the Web. The upside: the video creator, Microsoft, AP, and the Web site publisher share in the revenue from video advertisements linked to the content.

The AP service, called the Online Video Network (OVN), lets members upload video to their site’s player and then share it with anyone else on the network, which could include the U.S. Web sites of member newspapers, TV networks, or radio stations. With the service, publishers also have some measure of control over which sites can syndicate their video.

(Credit: Associated Press)

For example, a New York newspaper could upload video of a local fire, and set restrictions on the content that gives only publications outside the New York City metro area the rights to use the content. That way, it would have the exclusive for the New York City area (even though locals might be able to find the video on a national Web site that syndicated the material).

Robert Aitken, product manager of online video for AP, said that the service is the newest iteration of a 2-year-old project. The original platform offered a fairly basic video player that allowed local affiliates to upload either their own video (to play on their site) or content created by AP’s staff. If a local newsroom posted its own material, it would collect a 50 percent cut of the advertising revenue, with the remaining share following to Microsoft and AP. But if it posted the AP’s content, the publisher would get a 20 percent cut, with Microsoft and AP each receiving 40 percent. (Microsoft seems to come out well in all these equations.)

With the new system, content creators (inside and outside of a media outlet) that sign up for the network can create video to syndicate to all of AP’s 1,800 affiliates, which collectively reach as many as 61 million unique visitors monthly, according to Aitken. In that scenario, a content creator that syndicates its video to a publisher would get a 30 percent cut of ad sales; the publisher, a 20 percent cut; and the remaining 50 percent would be split between the AP and Microsoft.

Contents creators are protected from digital thieves, Aitken said, because the video is contained within a video player. Other Web sites could take the video player, but it’s consistently linked to an advertisement.

“In a lot of cases, something might be borrowed and the original copyright owner is not compensated,” Aitken said. “But if you upload your video (in this system) you’ll always be compensated.”

A map view of Google’s European data centers.

(Credit: Pingdom)

Ever wonder where Google’s data centers are? Now you can use Google Maps to get a good overview.

Pingdom put together a Google map via Wayfaring based on data center location information from Data Center Knowledge. The map shows general areas, so don’t expect to zoom in on a satellite photo.

The result is an artful scattering of 36 pushpins, one for each known data center. Yes, that’s a lot of data centers, and Data Center Knowledge has some details on Google renting further capacity, too.

And there are likely more tucked away here and there. “Since Google tends to be quite secretive about their data centers in general, the information we have presented here most likely isn’t 100 percent complete,” Pingdom said.

On Friday, former Vice President Al Gore closed RSA 2008 with a keynote speech on emerging green technologies. The talk, running 45 minutes in length, was an update of the presentation he used in the Academy Award-winning documentary “An Inconvenient Truth.” The 2007 Nobel Laureate says global warming is real, and it may be worse than we previously thought. Three times during the speech, Gore was interrupted by hecklers. Each protester was removed by security.

Friday’s talk was similar to a talk he gave in February at the annual TED conference, but without the slides. Gore says new evidence shows the problem of global warming is even worse than we thought. He said that like computer security problems, carbon dioxide is an invisible threat.

More shortly…

Although solar panels can cut electrical bills, there are drawbacks. They cost a lot to install and are incredibly ugly.

Akeena Solar is trying to get around both those problems with what it says it a better rack. The company has developed a completely integrated system, called Andalay, which includes a solar panel, the frame and the wiring that it says cuts down installation costs by around 50 percent. Integration also reduces the number of individual parts by 70 percent, says CEO Barry Cinnamon, who has been toiling in solar since the 70s.

Although the integrated system costs more than a conventional solar panel, overall costs are reduced by around ten percent, he said. Installation costs, after all, are about half the cost of a solar system.

“And the aesthetics are way better,” he asserted. “You get this nice rectangular look. It looks like a skylight.”

Suntech Power Holdings, the rapidly growing solar panel maker from China, and Kyocera have both licensed the technology. Akeena makes the rack and then ships it tothem. Both companies then wrap the rack around their solar panels and then ship the finished product back to Akeena. Akeena, however, is also letting Suntech sell the complete system to other solar installers outside of the U.S.

Waiting to hear how Yahoo’s board meeting went Friday?

You may want to cool your heels for a while. A CNBC report says Yahoo directors are not expected to do a conference call to discuss its merger options until sometime after the markets close.

Yahoo’s shares were largely comatose Friday, down a slight 0.87 percent, or 25 cents, to end the day at $28.34 a share.

The board will be debating whether to take Microsoft up on its unsolicited buyout offer, or team up with Time Warner’s AOL and Google.

Yahoo is looking to resolve the path it’s going to choose, given it faces a deadline within the next two weeks to do a deal with Microsoft, or face a potential proxy fight, exchange offer and, possibly, a lower bid from the Redmond giant.

This could be an all-nighter…

Earlier this week, The New York Times had a nostalgic little piece about the Princeton Record Exchange, a music store in the eponymous New Jersey college town.

It was, as one might expect, the sort of narrative that could be written about any beloved indie-music haven these days: it’s a quirky anachronism in a world that really doesn’t need it anymore, but it keeps on trucking.

It was a story that hit close to home for me. I lived in Princeton, which lies roughly halfway between New York and Philadelphia, for roughly 15 years, from pre-adolescence into my early 20s. For a sizeable chunk of that time, I was a Record Exchange regular. I’d pick through the shelves, hunting for something that looked kind of cool, or bugging the staff for recommendations. Plus, it was two blocks away from the ice cream store where I worked in high school. It was a nice place to blow a paycheck on the way home.

Would I do that now? No. Reading that New York Times article turned me on to the realization that music stores like the Record Exchange no longer have a place in my life. As a music fan who’s eagerly plunged into the digital age–I had an iPod back when they were chubby!–this is somewhat of a disconcerting revelation. But I realized something else: I’d gladly fork over that $4.99 for a second-hand Pavement album, but I wouldn’t take the CD with me. I’d really just like to keep the store in business.

I wonder if I was part one of the last generation of teenagers to consider browsing through record store racks to be an essential pastime. The iTunes store launched in 2003, when I was 18. Ten years from now, will the whole industry be digital, save for a few holdouts, retired hippies and former indie-pop boys who don’t look so cute now that they’re going bald?

I, for one, can’t remember the last time I bought a CD, since my entire music collection is now on a hard drive. I haven’t been to the Record Exchange in ages, nor do I poke my head into the scattered record shops that line the streets of the neighborhood where I now live in New York. Call me a terrible excuse for a music fan, but I don’t have any use for it; since I was never a vinyl collector (the story would be very different if I were a DJ), I welcomed the opportunity to free up bookshelf space by getting rid of all those darned CD cases.

But the real reason I don’t go back to record stores isn’t because I can buy music online, it’s because I can discover it there. In my days of frequenting the Princeton Record Exchange, it was the late ’90s and early ’00s, before I owned a laptop or even a cell phone, when my house still had dial-up AOL. It was also the age of Clear Channel radio domination, rife with pre-bizarro Britney, ‘N Sync, and embarrassing excuses for “rock” (who remembers when Fred Durst was cool?) I didn’t live in a city, so I wasn’t surrounded by concert venues; I found new music by listening to a few good radio stations (Princeton’s indomitable WPRB, and then a now-defunct indie-rock station from the Jersey Shore that I could only get by taping makeshift antenna wires to my bedroom wall) and poking around the Record Exchange.

Before Last.fm, Hype Machine, and Muxtape, this was how I defined “music discovery.” It was a lot more of a gamble. There were more than a few occasions when I picked something up at the Record Exchange just because the album art was cool. Bad idea. Now that I have the ability to preview something on Stereogum, read an appropriately convoluted review on Pitchfork, and stream it on Imeem before opting to plunk down $.99 for it on Amazon MP3, I’m saving money in addition to space.

Last year, a popular independent bookstore in Princeton (another frequent drain on my ice cream store paychecks back in the day) succumbed to the Amazon juggernaut and shut its doors. Now, I still go to bookstores, namely the droolworthy Strand near Union Square in Manhattan. Most of the time, though, I don’t know what I’m looking for–I’m there for the search, not the retail. If I have a specific target, say, if my editor wants me to pick up The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Punctuation, I load up Amazon and order away.

“Book discovery” online is eons behind music discovery, perhaps because you can’t toss Hemingway and Hardy into an algorithm quite as easily as Hot Chip. But still, my offline reading experience is migrating increasingly online; I’ve recently become a fan of Goodreads, and I subscribe to Flavorpill’s Boldtype newsletter. Then there’s the fact that my addiction to the contents of my Google Reader means I’m already reading fewer books and magazines (sad, I know). It’s made me start to wonder, in light of my Record Exchange realization, if one day I’d also feel like supporting a small bookstore just to keep it alive.

The notion of paying to keep something obsolete in business effectively makes it a museum. And the Times profile of the Princeton Record Exchange, with its quips about comically pretentious staffers and eccentric clientele who drive for hours just to get there, not to mention the decor (”early-dorm room with dorky posters, wood-plank ceiling, gray linoleum and an emaciated gray carpet”), reeks of a This American Life-worthy cultural vignette. The digital media revolution is all about efficiency, convenience, and accessibility, none of which apply to small-time music stores where you have to flip through racks of CDs to find the one you want only to learn that it’s sold out. But is that all bad? Perhaps one day we’ll put that kind of musty inefficiency on a pedestal as a charming relic of the old days, an alternative to the everything-at-your-fingertips world that Larry and Sergey brought us.

And indeed, if I had the cash on hand, I’d support an independent record store for the same reason that some well-heeled philanthropists funnel money into historic-preservation funds for landmarks they’ll never see. We don’t necessarily need them for ourselves; for one reason or another, we just need to know that they exist.

Microsoft on Thursday issued its response to proposed Federal Trade Commission guidelines for online ad industry self-regulation, but the company wouldn’t necessarily oppose regulation, a Microsoft representative said.

“Two years ago we were one of a handful of companies calling for a comprehensive federal privacy bill,” Frank Torres, director of consumer affairs for Microsoft, said in an interview.

Microsoft also has been talking to the sponsors of bills in New York and Connecticut that deal with online advertising, he said. “We’re definitely not opposed to them.”

In the meantime, Microsoft’s proposal recommends that consumers be able to opt out of behavioral targeting and that targeting based on sensitive data, such as health conditions, sexual orientation or religious beliefs, should be opt in.

The Network Advertising Initiative trade group for online ad networks also released guidelines this week that would exclude sensitive information and children under 13 from ad targeting. The Center for Digital Democracy and the U.S. Public Interest Research Group support a separate FTC rulemaking for each of the following sensitive data
issue areas: children, teens, health and medical, and financial. And the Institute for Public Representation at
Georgetown University Law Center says data from anyone aged 17 and under should be considered sensitive data.

Microsoft also says the companies that keep records of page views or collect other information about consumers for the purpose of delivering ads–including Web search data–should post a privacy policy on the home page, keep the data secure, and retain the data for only as long as needed or as required by law.

That would apply to search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft, and not just companies that do behavioral targeting. In the FTC proposals, search data is not covered.

“Our view is that the FTC should broaden the scope of the principles to include” contextual advertising, Torres said.

Meanwhile, the Online Publishers Association (OPA) said on Thursday that the FTC should exclude anonymous behavioral information in its guidelines on targeted advertising and focus on personally identifiable information only.

“Behavioral information derived from the use of anonymous tracking technology is necessary to facilitate many services unrelated to advertising, to create desirable (and, in many cases, free) content, and to design and refine products and services that provide consumers with the best possible online experience,” OPA said in a statement. “None of these beneficial uses of anonymous behavioral data raises privacy concerns.”

The FTC principles, unveiled in December, say sites should give consumers the ability to choose whether to have their information collected for behaviorally targeted advertising, and if ads are based on sensitive information, consumers should be asked for permission to be targeted.

The Interactive Advertising Bureau weighed in with its proposed guidelines
earlier this year which support an opt-out system for consumers who don’t want their information collected for advertising purposes.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) says self-regulation won’t protect consumers the way that legislation would.

“It’s time to move beyond the self-regulatory approach, particularly in light of the growing problems of identity theft and security breaches in the United States,” says Marc Rotenberg, executive director of EPIC. “The FTC should push for laws and techniques that minimize or eliminate the collection of personally identifiable information.”