I set out to write a quick correction on a bad article that was discussed on the NY-Tech mailing list earlier this week, but this ends up being half about why Technology journalists and bloggers should just stop - as they rarely know what they're talking about.

The article “How Much Are Twitter's Tweets Really Worth?” on BusinessWeek.com has been gaining a bit of buzz across the industry this week. It’s a pretty good summation about how advertising works on Twitter - not because it’s a concise overview, but because it’s about as mindless and poorly conceived an article as the concepts that it speaks about. The writer, Spencer E. Ante, is an associate editor for Business Week. He has an impressive resume and articles behind him, so perhaps this was a postmodern experiment, or maybe he was just hungover from New Years eve. Whatever the explanation is, I'd love to hear it - as its the worst written article I've read in ages. The article is no longer online, so I’ll have to use quotes from a cached version in my criticism below. Let's all take a moment and thank the "Fair Use" clause of US Copyright Law.

UPDATE

The article's disappearance was not because of a paywall issue, but because it was - indeed - a steaming pile of shit. Businessweek now states:

This story contained a factual error that rendered its premise incorrect. The story is no longer available. We regret the error.

I'm keeping this up, not to "rub it in", but to note that the "factual errors" and "incorrect premise" are something that are pandemic to technology journalism. Writers at BusinessWeek, TechCrunch, Mashable, etc rarely know what they're talking about - and giving them a podium to stand on is just... dangerous.

Bad journalism is worthless , Twitter is worth a lot

The first half of Ante’s story is a schizophrenic overview of the recent search deals Twitter signed with Google and Microsoft. Ante starts:

Google and Microsoft are paying Twitter $25 million to crawl the short posts, or tweets, that users send out on the micro-blogging service. It sounds like big money.

Sounds like big money? That is big money - Twitter is making $25 Million dollars to give two search engines a ToS license and access to index their data. In a world where Search Engine Optimization is a skillset or service, Twitter is getting paid by the major engines so they can optimize themselves. This is pretty much unheard of.

For whatever reason though, Ante then goes on to comment:

But do the math and the payments look less impressive. Last year, Twitter's 50 million users posted 8 billion tweets, according to research firm Synopsos, which means Google and Microsoft are paying roughly 3¢ for every 1,000 tweets. That's a pittance in the world of online advertising.

This is where Ante shows that he must be drunk, hungover, or a complete idiot: This deal has absolutely nothing to do with online advertising. Google and Microsoft aren't paying to advertise on Twitter, they're paying to be able to show tweets in their own search engines. In fact, given how the integration of this deal works - where Tweets appear in the search engine results with a link back to Twitter - it should be Twitter who is paying the search engines. This is a syndication deal, not an advertising one. And this is to syndicate user-generated-content, not editorial! Twitter now has a giant ad, at the top of most search engine pages as syndicated content , and they got paid for it! Getting paid to advertise your brand, instead of paying for it, isn't a pittance - it's brilliant, revolutionary, and (dare I say) mavericky.

One of my companies is a media site. We're not a "top media site" yet, but we're hoping to grow there. Handling technology and operations, I deal with advertising networks from the publisher side a lot. Another one of my companies is advertising oriented, with a focused on optimizing online media buying and selling. Suffice to say, I know the industry well - which is why I find Ante's next bit of information troubling:

Top media sites often get $10 or $20 per thousand page views; even remnant inventory, leftover Web pages that get sold through ad networks, goes for 50¢ to $1 per thousand.

Here's a quick primer. If you're a media site with a decent enough brand or demographic, regardless of being at the "top" , you're getting a fairly decent CPM. I don't think Ante's numbers are "right" for "top media sites" - in reality, top media destinations are a bit higher per inventory slot. Additionally, most web pages have multiple slots which together create a "Page CPM" that is the combination of the two. While each slot might get $10-20 , an average of 2 slots on a page would net $20-40. If you look at ad networks that publish their rates (like the premier blog network FederatedMedia.net) , or speak to a friend in the industry, you'll get instant confirmation on this.

In terms of the remnant inventory, I think these numbers are even more off. Remnant inventory for random, run-of-the-mill websites and social networks will absolutely run in the 10¢ to $1 range. "Top" media sites are of a different caliber, and will monetize their remnant inventory at a higher range, usually in the $2-8 range, or utilize a behavioral tracking system that will net CPMs in that similar $2-8 range.

My main issue with this passage has nothing to do with numbers. What I find even more inappropriate, and wholly irresponsible, is that Twitter is not a "Top Media Site". Twitter is undoubtedly a "Top Site", however it is a social network or service. Twitter is not about providing media or content, it is about transactional activity and user-generated content. This is a big different in terms of online advertising. For a variety of reasons ( which mostly tie in to consumer attention span and use cases ) Social Networks have a significantly lower CPM - with most monetizing at a sub $2CPM rate, and a few occasionally breaking into a $2-8 range.

Ante's comparisons just aren't relevant in the slightest bit. Across the entirety of his article. But hey, there's a quote to support this:

The deals put "almost no value" on Twitter's data, says Donnovan Andrews, vice-president of strategic development for the digital marketing agency Tribal Fusion.

Really? Really? A $25 Million Dollar deal to syndicate user-generated-content, puts "almost no value" on that data ? Either this quote must have been taken out-of-context, Donnovan Andrews has no idea what he's talking about, or I just haven't been given keys to the kool-aid fountain yet. Since Donnovan and I have a lot of friends in common (we've never met), and journalists tend to do this sort of thing... I'm going to guess that the quote is out of context.

Twitter advertising is not (worth a lot)

The second half of Ante's article is a bit more interesting, and shows the idiocy of Twitter advertisers:

A few entrepreneurs are showing ways to advertise via Twitter. Sean Rad, chief executive of Beverly Hills-based ad network Ad.ly, has signed up 20,000 Twitter users who get paid for placing ads in their tweets. To determine the size of the payments, the startup has developed algorithms that measure a person's influence. Reality TV star Kim Kardashian, with almost 3 million followers, gets $10,000 per tweet, while business blogger Guy Kawasaki fetches $900 per tweet to his 200,000 fans.

Using Twitter for influence marketing like "Paid Tweets" is a great idea - however these current incarnations are heavily favoring the advertising network, not the advertiser.

There is absolutely no way, whatsoever, to measure "reach" on Twitter - the technology, the service, and the usage patterns render this completely impossible. The number of Followers/Fans is a figure that merely represents "potential reach"; trying to discern the effective reach of each tweet is just a crapshoot.

When an advertiser purchases a CPM for an ad, they purchase 1000 impressions of the ad in a user's browser. Software calculates the delivery of each ad to a browser, and those programs are routinely audited by respected accounting firms to ensure stability. Most advertisers, and all premium rate (as above) advertisers have strict requirements as to how many ads can be on a page (standard: max 2-3) and the position (require ads to be "above the fold"). 1000 deliveries roughly equates to 1000 impressions.

When an advertiser purchases a CPM on an email, they purchase 1000 deliveries of the email, featuring their ad, to users' inboxes. When emails bounce or are undeliverable, they don't count against this number - only valid addresses do. The 1000 deliveries are , usually, successful email handoffs. A term called the "Open Rate" refers to the percentage of those 1000 emails that are actually opened by the user, and load the pixel tracking software (this method usually works, it is not absolute but good enough). Typical Open Rates vary by industry, but tend to hover around a global 25%; with content-based emails around 35% , and marketing messages at 15%. With these figures in mind, 1000 email deliveries roughly equates to 250 impressions.

When an advertiser purchases a CPM on a Twitter, they merely purchase a branded endorsement (which is very valuable in its own right) that has a potential reach of X-Followers. This number of followers does not equate to the number of people who will see the tweet "above the fold", nor does it equate to the number of people who will see the tweet on their page at all. Twitter has absolutely no offerings ( at the current time ) to count the number of people exposed to a tweet on their website - either at all, or in accordance with an optimal advertising situation. Twitter has itself stated that 80% of their traffic comes from their API - which makes those capabilities technically impossible for that traffic.

Gauging the number of Tweets sent out over the API won't work either -- Twitter applications built on the API tend to have "filtering" capabilities, designed to help users make sense of potentially hundreds of Tweets that come in every hour. When these client-side lists or filters are used, sponsored tweets may be delivered to the application- but they are never rendered on screen

Looking at common use-patterns of Twitter users, if someone is following a handful of active users, all Tweets that are at least an hour old will fall below the fold... and tweets that are older than two hours will fall onto additional pages. This means that twitter users would effectively need to be "constantly plugged in" to ensure a decent percentage of impressions on the sponsored tweets.

A lot of research has gone into understanding usage patterns in Twitter, as people try to derive what "real" users are: a significant number of Twitter accounts are believed to be "inactive" or "trials" - users who are following or followed-by less than 5-10 users; the projected numbers for "spam" accounts fluctuates daily. Even in the most conservative figures, these numbers are well into the double digits.

Social Marketing company Hubspot did a "State of the Twittersphere, June 2009" report. Some of their key findings make these "pay per tweet" concepts based on the number of followers even more questionable. Most notably, Hubspot determined that a "real" Twitter user tweets about once per day (the actual number is .97). Several different Twitter audits have pegged the average number of accounts followed by 'seemingly real' accounts ( based on number of followers, followings, and engagements with the platform, etc ) to be around 50 - so an average user should expect about 50 subscribed Tweets daily as well. The Twitter.com site shows 5 tweets "above the fold" ( which represents 20% of their traffic, and a quick poll twitter clients shows an average of 7 ). Assuming Tweets are spread out evenly during the day, an average user would need to visit Twitter about 9 times a day in order to ensure seeing sponsored Tweets. In the online publishing and social media world, expecting 9 visits per day, every day, by users is... ridiculously optimistic. Realistically, users likely experience a backlog of older, unseen, tweets on login - and sponsored tweets get lost in the mix.

As I stated before, the "celebrity advocacy" concept of a sponsored Tweet is very desirable concept for advertisers -- and one that would decidedly command a higher rate than other forms of advertising. However, the concept of "Actual Reach" on Twitter is nebulous at best. A better pricing metric for Twitter-based advertising would be CPC (cost per click ) or CPA ( cost per action ) , where tweeters would be paid based on how many end-users clicked a link or fully completed a conversion process.

A bunch of Social Media Blogs and Journalists are reporting that there is a viral Social Media Breast Cancer Awareness Campaign, in which women post the colors of the bras as a Facebook status.

It's a neat idea for a story, but its not true.

Aside from the fact that this viral campaign isn't organized by any Breast Cancer Awareness non-profit or an advertising agency, and its a really bad idea for a Breast Cancer awareness campaign [ a) it's more appropriate for lingerie designers, b) it dilutes the association with pink that the Susan G. Komen foundation has been fighting for ] one only needs to do a quick web-search to discover that this is really a weeks-old chain-letter meme that is constantly morphing and getting hijacked.

A week ago, someone posted a question on Answers.Yahoo.com , and a respondent copy-pasted the text as it appeared then:

right girls let's have some fun. write the color of the bra you're wearing right now as your status on fb and dont tell the boys. they will be wondering what all the girls are doing with colors as their status. forward this to all the girls online

Several other respondents confirmed this was the letter in that posting, and this is only one of dozens of similar explanations of this across the internet dated last week.

At some point over the last few days, someone decided to hijack the meme and make it a little more socially responsible - and they added the Breast Cancer bit to it. It's nice, and its sweet, and its a great way to turn around a stupid internet joke into something serious. If someone looks at a one of these Facebook status postings today, no matter the author's intent, they'll associate with a tie-in to Breast cancer, since that's what current media coverage states.

Nevertheless, the meme is not necessarily about Breast Cancer awareness. It's currently getting interpreted as such, but only some participants share that intent.

Whenever a new project starts, we do a few standard things:

• Identify the general product / idea
• Identify several classes of users it appeals to
• Draft Use Case Scenarios for each user class

If, for example, your project is a "game":

• you might identify the general idea as a game played on a court where two teams each try to sink a ball into a basket;
• the user classes would be children, competitive sports - high school, college, professional , casual adults;
• a use case scenario might be an adult goes to a gym to work out and sees 5 other friends who want to play a game together.

Use cases can really help help you focus on specific product features -- figuring out what have the greatest utility, broadest appeal, or largest differentiators against competitive goods and services. They're often created both during team brainstorming sessions and as homework for the various client 'stakeholders' in a project. These stakeholders who best represent the end-consumers should create at least 1/3 of the Use Cases, and should sign-off on all of them. In a startup/corporate environment, that would mean the Product Manager and perhaps some C-Level executives; in an agency environment that would mean the Client and their team, not the internal strategist or team. Why? Because when the stakeholders drive the Use Case creation, you have better insight into the core business goals, market opportunity, and targeted user demographics.

Like everything else in your project, your Use Cases will shift with time as your product matures and you get a better idea of who your actual audience is -- so you'll always have to revisit them to update and add new scenarios. Despite this changing nature, it is unbelievably important to really think things through and create detailed use cases. In the past year alone, I've been part of three projects that all became seriously derailed and stressed because of bad Use Case Scenarios on the same exact product feature -- the "Search" function -- so I'll use that as a paradigm.

In every situation, the original use cases described something very simple, like:

• I type in /chocolate/ and it shows me a list of recipes that match chocolate. like in the title."

But then they progressed as the stakeholders used the first version:

• When I type in /chocolate/ it should show me a list of recipes that have chocolate in the title, or as an ingredient."

And then they progress a little more:

• There is chocolate in the description of this item , and it's not showing up in search. I meant for the description to be part of it too."

And then...:

• "Someone commented and said this recipe could be good with chocolate, that should be in the search results. But it should go later in the results."

Oh no:

• "Wait a second... why am I not seeing chefs/authors who write about chocolate. they're most certainly relevant."

And then, overload...:

• "This kinda works. But I should be able to narrow these results down, like in Yahoo or Google. And we should show more info from the recipe in here. What about a picture ? And misspellings / near spellings ? It should detect those. People spell certain ingredients differently. We have a lot of Europeans searching, how will é ç and other characters match in search or recipes ? This seems to be broken. It is broken. This sucks, you're wasting my time and money."

To the stakeholder , there is no difference between these requests -- they specified a search function, and they expected it to work a certain way; the product team failed at each interval to deliver on their expectations. To the stakeholder, the search function is a "black box" -- they don't know and don't care if the mechanics behind each iteration are different... it's a search box!

To the product team though, each iteration was a completely different product and each one required vastly different amounts of resources.

The first iteration -- searching on the title -- was a simple and straightforward search on a single field... and described as such, a team would just search directly on the database. The resources allocated to this would be minimal - it's literally a few lines of code to implement.

As the search use case gets refined, the product design moves from searching on a single field to searching on multiple fields -- probably using joins and views -- and calculating search results. By the end of the product refinement, its quite clear that a simple in-house search solution can't deliver the experience or results the stakeholder actually wants, so we need to look into other solutions like Solr/Lucene , Sphinx or Xapian. These advanced options aren't terribly difficult to implement -- but they go beyond a single search function into running and maintaining separate search servers , configuring the engines, creating services to index documents, creating resultset rules for sorting, creating error-handlers for when the search system is down, etc etc etc. The simple "Search" button grew from a few lines of code into a considerable undertaking that requires dedicated people, days of work, and a constant tailoring of the resultset rules.

Eventually the product teams will scream "Feature Creep!" and a manager will flatly say "Out of Scope." Items like this are unfortunately both -- but they shouldn't be. The intent and expectations of the stakeholder have rarely changed in this process, they just failed to articulate their wants and expectations. The blame, however, is shared: the client should have better described their needs; the product manager should have asked better questions and better managed the stakeholders "Use Case homework".

With a properly written out Use Case Scenario -- in which the stakeholder actually illustrates the experience they expect -- the product team is likely recommended the latter scenario, and offer tiered suggestions leading up to the desired expectations with the resources/costs at each point.

Unfortunately the status quo is for stakeholders to half-ass the Use Case. Few product or project managers will pick up on the shortcoming , and the tech team will never pick up on it. So "Search" -- and any other feature -- gets reduced to a line item with little description or functional specification, and when development beings it becomes built in the easiest / simplest way to satisfy that request. This predictably and unilaterally results in expectations being failed and the project getting derailed. Not only are the simplest and most robust solutions to "search" built, but every single step in between -- costing dollars and immeasurable team spirit and energy.

The old adage about medication -- An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure -- holds extremely well as a truth about product development. Articulating exactly what you want and need to accomplish before development begins will save dollars and countess hours of stress.

Over the past 12 years, I learned these 10 things the hard way.

10 You and your team are not your core audience.

You're a super user, which probably corresponds to a 5-10% demographic of product traffic, and where you want your users to one-day be. You've got great insights and direction, but you can't make a product that is only "for you". Remember about that other 90%. Unless your business model suggests you can ignore them all! Generally speaking, 20% of your users will account for 80% of your traffic - so try to remember that other 10-15%. You should also track metrics every few weeks -- see how your users break down into usage patterns, and see where your team falls in there.

9 If your team isn't using your product on a daily basis - you need a new team, a new product, or both.

You've got a huge issue if your team isn't using your product on a daily basis. They're going to have different usage patterns than your core demographic, but if you're not building something that they want-to or can use on a daily basis... you've either got the wrong team, the wrong product, or both. Don't accept excuses, don't try to rationalize behavior. The bottom line is that if your team isn't full of passionate and dedicated users of your product, and you can't sell them on it... how can you expect your team to convince consumers and investors ? You can't.

8 "If you build it they will come" == bullsh*t

You need a solid marketing plan, for your site or your new features. Just putting something out there won't suffice -- people need to learn that your product is awesome. If you don't have the resources to drive people to your product, rethink your resource allocations immediately -- maybe you can scale back your vision to save some resources for marketing. People need to know that your product exists, and they'll learn how to use it by good example -- those are two tasks that your team needs to lead on. Also remember that despite what you think and how hard you work, whatever you build won't be the most amazing thing in the world -- so make sure you have resources budgeted to be nimble and respond to users...

7 Jack be Nimble, Jack be Quick...

If you're a consumer oriented product, you'll often need to change direction , add features, etc many many times after launching. You need a technology platform and internal process that lets you do that. People love to talk about getting their startup going by outsourcing and offshoring the development. This is such an incredibly bad idea. To illustrate, try to count the number of startups you know of that outsourced their product development and had a successful exit. I can count them all on a single hand -- and still have fingers left.
Why? If you go the outsource route, it means you've decided "This is what our product MUST be" -- but when your users help you realize what your product SHOULD be... you're facing change orders, new contracts, and even trying to reserve some other company's time. Then you have to deal with the transfer of knowledge and technology when you eventually need to move in-house -- figuring out how you can have your internal team support and extend a product that someone else built. If you're going to contract something out, do a prototype or a microsite or a feature -- but don't have someone else build your core product you, it's a proven recipe for failure.
In simpler terms, you can't outsource your core business competency.

6 Listen to your lawyers, don't obey them.

It's easy to forget that lawyers give legal advice, not legal rules -- and that at their very cores, lawyers mitigate risk while entrepreneurs take risks. I don't mean to suggest that you should be doing anything specifically "risky" or illegal, but that you remember your lawyers will always push you towards solutions approaching 0% risk - which means you may miss many marketing, product, and business opportunities. Good marketing and successful products often push the limits of what is allowed; opening up your company to some amount of liability may be a risk that offers a far greater reward than any penalty you can incur.

5 Product Management is not Project Management

This confusion seems to inflict folks in the East Coast and Advertising / Interactive fields. ( if you're from a West Coast software background, you're probably immune ). A Project Manager handles resource allocation and making sure that deliverables and commitments keep to a schedule. A Product Manager makes sure that the deliverables actually make sense, and represent/understand the Business Goals, Market Opportunity, Competitive Advantage, and End Users. Product Management is a role -- Project Management is a task. Whether you're working on a startup, online product, or interactive campaign : you need to have a capable Product Manager who is part of the day-to-day checkin process. You also need to make sure to make sure that the people who handle resource allocation understand the roles, responsibilities, and workflow of each person they're managing -- otherwise you have some departments slacking off while others are completely overloaded trying to meet deadlines that were either unreasonably imposed on them, or that they agreed to without understanding the full scope.

4 If you have a good idea, it'll probably get stolen.

This is just how things work - people are often inspired by someone else, or they're ruthless and copy it verbatim. The exception is when someone else had the same good idea on their own -- but then you'll probably have people trying to steal that idea too, effectively doubling the rampant thievery going on. Arrgh! If you've been out in the market for a while and no one is competing with you, you may want to ask yourself why ? Competition doesn't just validate your idea, it also gives you the chance to better measure the market opportunity and how the audience responds by looking at your competitors. If you stole your idea from someone else you know all this already, so there's no need to address you too.

3 Nothing is confidential. Trust is an arbitrary term. Respect is earned.

The only people that you can trust to keep a secret are your lawyers, because they'll be disbarred and lose their career. Proving that someone leaked a secret, shared a "confidential" presentation, violated an NDA, etc is not only hard to do, but very costly -- which is why people do that all time. If you're honest and forthcoming in all your dealings, word will spread and you'll increasingly meet more people who are similar. You shouldn't expect that anyone will keep a secret just because you asked them to -- and you should always be prepared for the worst and expect the opposite.
This isn't to say that you shouldn't bother with privacy contracts, but that you should be smart about what you share. The vast majority of potential partners and investors will scoff at an NDA in preliminary meetings, but as your relationship progresses and they need access to more proprietary information -- your internal numbers, market research, bookkeeping, etc -- negotiating for an NDA is commonplace. You should always ask yourself if you really think this group is serious about working with you, or trying to do market research of their own for another project or investment with a competitor.

2 When it comes to a market opportunity, you can trust your gut - the experts aren't always right.

Two charming examples about how "I was right" and "they were wrong" involved music and net experts telling me that "there will only be MySpace, and no other sites will ever be relevant for music", and internet experts mandating that social network walls will never come down so portable identity / users will never happen. I'm not trying to flatter myself with this -- neither of those companies had a successful exits, just a series of patent applications and legal headaches on one of them trying to keep the products afloat. I do mean to suggest that this is a very common situation -- and Bessemer Venture Partners has a quirky take on this, they maintain an "anti-portfolio" of successful projects they turned down. As a word of caution - while the experts may be wrong about your market opportunity... they may be right about the monetization / business viability. Any time someone shoots down your ideas, you should use their arguments to both try and build a better/stronger product, and also to disprove the viability -- because they could be right and may have just saved you from a lot of headaches, grief and capital losses.

1 Listen to your users -- but be smart about how you proceed.

These days everyone says "Listen to your users" -- and you should, its a good mantra. However, please remember that you need to analyze what your users say , not just take it at face value. One of my companies makes a lot of product decisions based on user feedback, and we do extensive "User Acceptance Testing" and Focus Groups whenever we want to test out an idea, or launch something new. We always profile / qualify the users who give us feedback to determine what kind of user they are ( ie: super user, industry insider, mass market, etc ) , and make note of both what they say and what they do. It never ceases to amaze me how many people think that they're a super-user -- when they're barely a casual/incidental user; or how many users say that they really love a particular feature, that it is the most important, and they want more things like it -- while their usage patterns and other interview questions show a strong preference and reliance on another feature. Listening to your users isn't just keeping track of what they say -- it encompasses understanding what they mean, discovering what they forgot to say, and working with them to enrich their experience.

Note

I didn't learn these all at once, and I didn't make all the mistakes myself. I did make some myself; others were imposed on my by management or partners. In every situation my life was complicated by these issues - and I can only hope others don't repeat these mistakes.

I see a week playing out like this:

Monday NewsCorp Publisher sites block search engines. Their traffic plummets.

Tuesday Search Engines drop MySpace, IGN, Beliefnet... because they can and need to humble NewsCorp. Their traffic plummets too.

Wednesday Analysts give bleak outlook for NewsCorp strategy, scream outrage, lower rating of stock.

Thursday Rumors circulate that Rupert Murdoch is begging to get re-indexed. His peons start making phone calls.

Friday No one can be bothered to answer the phone or email. Seeing as its Friday, everyone decides to just make NewsCorp sweat it out. The web properties are officially operating at a loss, Advertisers are not happy, and the traffic is jeopardizing Advertiser and Ad network relations.

Saturday People are damn glad its not a trading day.

Saturday On the 7th day, he rested. He was not an employee of NewsCorp, who are going batshit crazy trying to up their traffic.

Monday News Corp gets reindexed. But not until a few hours /after/ the start of trading... because that's what people like to do.

Tuesday It turns out that Murdoch bought most of the devalued NewsCorp stock the previous day, upping his ownership to 50+%. Analysts raise the rating back to previous levels, and the value rises.

And perhaps... Police find the mangled carcass of a newborn baby in a dumpster close to the NewsCorp offices. It's heart has been clawed and chewed out, and it looks as if someone had been drinking tears straight from its eyes.

OpenID is a really useful protocol that allows users to login and authenticate -- and I'm all for providing users with services based on it -- but I've ultimately decided that it's a bad idea when Registration is involved.

The reason is simple: in 99% of implementations, OpenID merely creates a consumer of your services; it does not create a true user of your system -- it does not create a customer.

Allowing for OpenID registrations only gives you a user that is authenticated to another service. That's it. You don't have an authenticated contact method - like an email address, phone number, screen name, inbox, etc; you don't have a channel to contact that customer for business goals like customer retention / marketing, or legal issues like security alerts or DMCA notices.

The other 1% of implementations are a tricky issue. OpenID 1.0 has something called "Simple Registration Extensions", some of this has been bundled into 2.0 along with "Attribute Exchange". These protocols allow for the transfer of profile data, such as an Email Address, from one party to another -- so the fundamental technology is there.

What does not exist is a concept of verifiability or trust. There is no way to ensure that the email address or other contact method provided to you is valid -- the only thing that OpenID proves, is that the user is authoritatively bound to their identity URL.

The only solution to this problem is for websites to limit what systems can act as trusted OpenID providers -- meaning that my website may trust an OpenID registration or data from a large provider like MySpace or Facebook, but not from a self-hosted blog install.

While this seems neat on some levels, it quickly reduces OpenID to merely be a mechanism for interacting with established social sites -- or, perhaps better stated, a more Open Standards way of implementing "Facebook Connect" across multiple providers. A quick audit of sites providing users with OpenID logins limited to trusted partners showed them overwhelmingly offering logins only though OpenID board members. In itself, this isn't necessarily bad. My company FindMeOn has been offering similar registration bootstrapping services based on a proprietary stack mixed with OpenId for several years; this criticism is partially just a retelling of how others had criticized our products -- that it builds as much user-loyalty into the Identity Providing Party as it does into the Identity Requesting Party. In layman's terms - that means that offering these services strengthens the loyalty of the consumer to company you authenticate to as much as it offers you a chance to convert that user. In some situations this is okay - but as these larger companies continue to grow and compete with the startups and publishers that build off their platforms, questions are spawned as to whether this is really a good idea.

This also means that if you're looking at OpenID as a registration method with some sort of customer contact method ensured, you're inherently limited to a subset of major trusted providers OR going out and signing contracts with additional companies to ensure that they can provide you with verified information. In either situation, OpenID becomes more about being a Standards Based way of doing authentication than it is about being a Distributed Architecture.

But consider this -- if you're creating some sort of system that is leveraging into the large-scale social network to provide identity information, OpenID may be too limiting. You may get to work with more networks by using the OpenID standard, but your interaction will be minimal; If you were to use the network integration APIs , you could support fewer networks, however you'd be able to have a richer -- and more viral -- experience.

Ultimately, using OpenID for registration is a business decision that everyone needs to make for their own company -- and that decision will vary dependent upon a variety of factors.

My advice is to remember these key points:

• If the user interaction you need is simply commenting or 'responding' to something, binding to an authoritative URL may suffice

• If the user interaction you need requires creating a customer, you absolutely need a contact method : whether it's an email, a verified phone number, an ability to send a message to the user on a network, etc

• If you need a contact method, OpenID is no longer a Distributed or Decentralized framework -- it is just a standards based way of exchanging data, and you need to rely on B2B contracts or published public policies of large-scale providers to determine trust.

• Because of limited trust, Network Specific APIs may be a better option for registration and account linking than OpenID -- they can provide for a richer and more viral experience.

While my MacBook is getting repaired, I'm back to using an old iBook G4 as my portable device.

These are some tips I've found to make it run a little bit faster.

If you've got any others, let me know.

Disable Spotlight

For many people, Spotlight is a great utility. For everyone I know, it's a feature they never use powered by a background task that runs needlessly.

If you don't use Spotlight, you can shut it off really easy: in System Preferences, just select Spotlight and add your actual harddrive, not a folder, to the list of 'private' items that won't be indexed.

Disable Dashboard

Dashboard is neat, but its always running... taking up memory and cpus.

To kill it off, enter this in terminal

defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean YES
killall Dock

Should you ever want to re-enable it (why? for weather or calculator?!? )

defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean NO
killall Dock

Disable Junk Mail Filtering

Most folks I know have a really good server-side junk mail sorter. That means once mail comes in, it's been sorted... so your mac is just analyzing it again... and its not very fast at it. In your Mail.app preferences, you can enable / disable junk mail sorting. Turning it off makes my computers significantly happier when messages come in.

Kill Your Shadows

If you're on 10.4 , you can run (http://unsanity.com/haxies/shadowkiller)[ShadowKiller] , a neat app that just enables/disables shadows. The shadows on OSX are a great feature on telling one window from another -- but if you can do without them, your machine will be noticeably faster.

Disable Transparency in Toolbar Widgets

I use the awesome iStat package from iSlayer.com to show the current CPU / Memory loads and network traffic on my machines. This toolbar application, along with many others, offer the chance to make their widget opaque. Running opaque stuff is just about always faster than running tranparancy/shading things. If you've got any apps that offer this option, take it.

The Yahoo Maps API is powerful, but largely undocumented.

I'm guessing all the docs / marketing materials were written by developers and project managers, with little product management considered -- because its damn near impossible to do the simplest things.

My needs weren't intense , I merely wanted to do this:

• Include a map on a web page that plots an address

One would be amazed at how assbackwards the Yahoo and Google APIs are. Doing something simple like that is a complete PITA. Neither offer the ability to do that "out-of-the-box".

At the end of this posting is a sample of code that will do this.

Before I get into that, I'll talk about my learnings from fighting with APIs and a lack of documentation for over 3 hours.

The main issue I had was with the difference between an address and a geopoint. Yahoo will let you instantiate a map from an address, however placing markers must be done with a geopoint. The yahoo library is asynchronous -- so when you render the map, it has no idea what the geopoint is... so you'll need to leverage into their callback chain hooks to later derive the geopoint for the address , or mapcenter. Of course, none of this behavior is documented. Nor are any of the class methods documented in full.

I eventually came up with two possibilities:

• generate a map from an address, in a callback query the center geopoint & label it
• generate a geopoint from an address, in a callback draw the map and label it

I ended up going with the latter. here is the code

<div id="ymap"></div>
<script type='text/javascript' src='http://api.maps.yahoo.com/ajaxymap?v=3.8&appid=#####API_KEY######'></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
    var map= undefined;
    var mapAddress= "#####ADDRESS#####";
    function ymapStart(){
        map = new YMap(document.getElementById('ymap'));  
        map.addTypeControl();  
        map.addZoomLong();  
        map.addZoomShort();
        map.addZoomScale();
        map.addPanControl();  
        map.setMapType(YAHOO_MAP_HYB);  


        // you need to capture the EventsList.onEndGeoCode callback that will be triggered by the map.geoCodeAddress function
        // it would be nice if someone documented that
        // the 3rd paramter, a function, will be called with a YEvent object.
        // that is also undocumented
        YEvent.Capture( 
            map , 
            EventsList.onEndGeoCode ,
            ymapDraw
        );
        go= map.geoCodeAddress(mapAddress);
    }   
    function ymapDraw( eventObject ) {

        // 
        // eventObject is a YEvent object
        // on a onEndGeoCode it returns:
        //  ThisMap - YMap
        //  Address - string
        //  GeoPoint - YGeoPoint
        //  success - bool
        // I have no clue what it returns on other calls
        // all of this was entirely undocumented 

        if ( eventObject.success ) {
            var mymap= eventObject.ThisMap ;
            mymap.drawZoomAndCenter( eventObject.GeoPoint, 3);  
            var marker= new YMarker( eventObject.GeoPoint );
                marker.addLabel(mapAddress);
                marker.addAutoExpand(mapAddress);
            mymap.addOverlay(marker);
        } else {
            // failsafe
            mymap.drawZoomAndCenter( mapAddress , 3);  
        }
    }
    ymapStart();
</script>

Over the past few days I've gotten into far too many arguments over the arrest of Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates by Cambridge Police Officer Sgt. James Crowley. Some have said that I can't possibly be liberal, as I haven't automatically sided with Gates over the police report. On BoingBoing.net, someone suggested that I was "white, clueless and uncomfortable with the subject [of racism]".

I beg to differ.

I'm liberal and I'm white, but I'm neither clueless nor uncomfortable with the subject of racism in America.

I'm just willing to look at this situation with an open mind , and not use my predispositions to jump to the conclusions that Gates must be correct, that race must be at issue, and that the police must be wrong as so many commentators and friends have.

While racism and racial profiling are problems that our culture must address, this situation doesn't seem like one caused by these issues in the least bit. I'll reiterate that I do not mean to say that these issues are not important, nor that they must be addressed -- just that they do not seem to be involved in this particular sitation.

Examining reports from both parties, this entire situation seems like a routine incident that went ridiculously out of control -- not because of race, and not because of a police state, but because an angsty professor kept antagonizing a stupid police officer. Both parties are likely to blame, and their own stupidity is at cause. I contend that racism was not the mitigating factor in this arrest, and I'd go as far to suggest that if any sort of racism is involved, it was perpetrated by Gates himself.

The situation and the particulars of Gates' alleged "crime" are not at issue, and never have been. What has been at issue is the motivation for arrest -- the motivation alleged by Gates, his supporters and some journalists -- as a motivation being born of racist intent.

The legality of Gates' alleged "crime" is not at issue either. It is common, and sad, for police officers to abuse their power and arrest people for trumped-up charges that have no basis in fact; charges that are made-up for the sole intent of arresting an individual; charges that are dropped at the prosecution phase. The fact that charges such as these are invalid, illegal, abusive and indecent is irrelevant. Simply put, the validity of charges does not speak to motive -- and when the "Racism" card is played , motive is the core of the issue.

There are two entirely different concepts related to the arrest of Henry gates. One concept is the motive for his arrest -- was this racially based? The other concept is the validity of the arrest -- was it legal or just or ethical ? These two concepts are independent of one another, and should be treated as such. Conflating the two concepts does not address the issue, it merely weakens an argument. While a racially based arrest would determine an arrest illegal, an illegal arrest does not necessitate a racial motive.

Moving onwards...

My undergraduate degree is from Pomona College; a school that, very much like Gates' Harvard is elite, fancy, overpriced and liberal across all key metrics. While there I doubled majored in Media Studies and Political Science, and studied abroad for a semester in East Africa. That is to say that I'm not only familiar with Gates' fields of expertise ( Cultural Studies, African Studies, African-American Studies, Critical Theory, Media Theory, Postmodernism, Post-Structuralism, Semiotics, etc ) but also familiar with his own work -- and with the temperament of his colleagues.

Henry Gates is a brilliant , accomplished and important academic -- a characterization that I believe is the root of his arrest, not his race.

Much of Gates' work is rooted in Cultural Theory -- in looking at social , historical and economic topics , then re-examining under the lens of racial and cultural sensitivities to elicit new and further understandings. His work -- while brilliant and original in substance -- is largely typical in its academia oriented underpinnings and approaches. This isn't a bad thing, it just means that Gates is typical of many academics in the social sciences -- and particularly those that deal with critical theory: his expertise, passion, and daily routine is to look at situations and examine the role that his chosen subject plays in them. For Henry Gates, his specific routine is to examine how race and race-relations affect historical and current situations. To phrase this differently: day in and day out, Henry Gates looks to see how race may play a role in a given situation.

So many academics are mired in their own research and beliefs, that they try to apply it to every aspect of their field, the world, and their daily lives -- and often in ways that are grossly incorrect. Many students have a "reality-check moment" during a Literature, Film or Art course where they begin to question their professor's interpretations of an author's intent, or why they were tasked to arbitrarily apply concepts like "Light vs Dark" onto a body of work. When people in academic circles keep applying and examining theories into situations like this, things can begin to get out of hand.

When departments get out of hand, self-sustaining fringe branches of Academia start to form. These are subcultures of academic discourse where it is celebrated when a person over-analyzes and over-applies their concepts. A good example of this phenomena is illustrated by certain branches of Cultural Studies in which unrelated and inapplicable fields are brought together. In 1996 Alan Sokal, a physicist at NYU, perpetrated a hoax on an academic journal published by Duke University Press; Sokal's hoax was to get published a nonsense paper that strung together elements of mathematics, physics and political theory. Sokal's attempt was a success, and was then followed by a book he authored called "Fashionable Nonsense", which sought to debunk a considerable number of texts in Cultural Studies. Sokal illustrated how academics would not only stray from their areas of expertise , but also create interpretations where they do not exist simply to further their point.

Individual academics can get out of hand too, seeking to create issues to support their cause. I'll reference a woman named Kerri Dunn, who taught at a school next to my undergrad shortly after I graduated. In the midst of serious race-related issues on campus, Ms. Dunn found herself the victim of a hate crime -- her car partly destroyed and wholly vandalized with racial epithets. The campus was terrorized , yet rallied to support Ms. Dunn in both getting through her ordeal -- and addressing the race issues on campus. Months later, it would unfortunately be discovered that Ms. Dunn had staged the entire incident. Kerri Dunn was sentenced to several years in prison for filing a false police report and insurance fraud.

I don't mean to suggest that Mr. Gates would dare do something as atrocious as Kerri Dunn. However, I do want to illustrate that Academics - when dealing with subjects close to their own field, tend to over-analyze and project.

That is to say that while it is entirely possible a While Police Officer antagonized and arrested a Black Professor solely because of his skin color and then fabricated a report of the situation to support it, it is equally possible that a Black Professor antagonized a White Police Officer because he projected the beliefs and expectations that the encounter was racially motivated. In both scenarios a form of racism is encountered. The first scenario is a typical sort of racism against minorities; the second scenario involves an inverted form of racism, where a minority addresses a situation with the expectation of racist intent (where it does not exist) and analyzes all actions through the lens of racially charged motivation.

As I read more and more reports of the situation, from the perspectives of both Gates and the arresting police officer, I find the scenario in which Gates assumed and reacted as if there was racist intent to be the most plausible.

To recap the controvery, Gates and others suggested that the arrival of the police officer on the scene was racially motivated. I find this questionable. The arresting officer didn't appear at Gates' home because he was black -- he appeared because Gates' own neighbors saw two men try to break into the building and called the police. An attempted break-in did indeed happen -- one that Gates was involved in, as he and and his driver attempted to push down the door (it was broken). Some people have suggested that the police were called only because Gates and his driver were not white. I find that suggestion ridiculous -- Gates' neighbor called the police because she did not recognize either of the men as her neighbor -- a colorblind situation. Considering the fact that the 2 men were not 'milling around' the front porch, but actively trying to bust the door in, I think it is very safe to assume that the police would have been called whether they were white, black, orange or red -- if you see someone that doesn't look like your neighbor trying to break a door down, you call the police.

When the officer arrived on the scene, the accounts of the incident between Gates and the officer begin to differ: The officer claims that Gates was hostile, Gates claims the opposite.

According to his filed report, the officer repeatedly asked Gates for ID until Gates finally relented. Gates' lawyer has not made any comment on how many times he was asked his ID, but he does corroborate the officer's accounts that Gates had to go into the kitchen to get his wallet, and that he was arrested after exiting the building.

Gates' lawyer and colleague , Professor Charles Ogletree , released a statement ( viewable at http://www.wickedlocal.com/cambridge/news/x737378901/Harvard-professor-Charles-Ogletree-releases-statement-on-behalf-of-Henry-Louis-Gates ), which stated in part:

As he was talking to the Harvard Real Estate office on his portable phone in his house, he observed a uniformed officer on his front porch. When Professor Gates opened the door, the officer immediately asked him to step outside. Professor Gates remained inside his home and asked the officer why he was there. The officer indicated that he was responding to a 911 call about a breaking and entering in progress at this address. Professor Gates informed the officer that he lived there and was a faculty member at Harvard University. The officer then asked Professor Gates whether he could prove that he lived there and taught at Harvard. Professor Gates said that he could, and turned to walk into his kitchen, where he had left his wallet. The officer followed him. Professor Gates handed both his Harvard University identification and his valid Massachusetts driver’s license to the officer. Both include Professor Gates’s photograph, and the license includes his address.  Professor Gates then asked the police officer if he would give him his name and his badge number. He made this request several times. The officer did not produce any identification nor did he respond to Professor Gates’s request for this information.

Gate's himself also had some interesting quotes and descriptions on the matter in the Washington Post (the lines below are non-contiguous):

- Before he could finish the conversation, a police officer was standing on his porch and asking him to come out of the house. "Instinctively, I knew I was not to step outside," said Gates, describing the officer's tone as threatening. Gates said the policeman, who was in his 30s and several inches taller than him, followed him into his kitchen where Gates retrieved his identification

- "I was thinking, this is ridiculous, but I'm going to show him my ID, and this guy is going to get out of my house," Gates said. "This guy had this whole narrative in his head. Black guy breaking and entering."

- After handing the officer both his Harvard and Massachusetts state identification, which included his address, Gates said he began to ask the officer this question, repeatedly. "I said 'Who are you? I want your name and badge number.' I got angry."

- The officer left and Gates followed him outside. There were about a half-dozen police officers standing in his front yard.  "I stepped out on the porch to ask them his name," said Gates.

While I'm willing to believe that the Police Officer's report is not completely true and slightly biased in his favor, I'm fairly certain that Gate's account -- one that is largely authored by a Harvard Law professor and one of the world's top legal experts -- is equally as stretched, redacted, and tweaked to seem the most appealing and least-damaging as possible.

I'd also note that Gates' official position seems to gloss over what could be significant amounts of time , as it does not address events that are not only claimed in the Arresting Officer's report, but can be substantiated by others:

• The officer radioed in a call in the time between his allegation that Gates refused to identify himself, and Gates ultimately identifying himself

• The officer radioed in a call at some point after getting Gates' ID or claim, for Harvard Police to handle the matter

The omission of items like this from Gates' account do not mean that the officer's account is more true or absolute -- but they do illustrate that Gates' claim to the timeline is indeed incomplete and has been edited, redacted, and prepared.

The two reports from Gates on the situation make me ponder a few questions :

• If a Police officer were to come to my door and say "I'm investigating a break-in" , and I had just broken in , I'd probably respond with something like "Yeah, it was me. I live here. The door was busted". I would not be thinking in terms of instincts to not step outside. Perhaps I feel that way because I'm white -- or perhaps I feel that way because I would fully expect a police officer to believe that I could have illegally broken in as that is exactly as how the situation would have seemed.

• Gates' remark in the Washington Post "This guy had this whole narrative in his head. Black guy breaking and entering," is a clear admission of preconceived notions and the expectation of racial motivation. Why was Gates projecting onto the cop?

• Was Gates angry before or after asking for the name and badge number? The cop was uniformed, and Boston uniforms clearly show the name above the pocket and the number on the badge. Unless they're wearing a jacket -- and its' been pretty warm in the North East the past few weeks -- these items are pretty hard to miss if you have a clear mindset. I should also note that all the police officers in photos of the incident are wearing short-sleeve shirts with visible name badges. Personally, I've transcribed Police Officer information like this before, and I've never seen anyone ask for a name & badge number that wasn't already under some form of mental/emotional distress. I don't mean to challenge the claim that Gates did not ask for the officer's information and was denied -- which may very well be true -- I simply question why Gates would have needed to ask for the officer's info.

• Why did Gates go outside to confront the officer, after earlier having an instinct and apprehension to specifically not go outside ?

These questions simply make me question his state of mind and his official account of the events. This apprehension to believe Gates' account is strengthened by two more points:

• Gates has a professional and personal temperament to analyze situations through a lens of race relations

• Gates just got off a plane from China -- which is reported to be about 20 hours of total travel time

Based on the accounts of both Gates and the officer, I believe the most plausible version of events is this:

• Gates breaks into his own own because his door is damaged
• Gates is tired and ornery from nearly a full day of travel. A cop arrives at his door, and his mind starts spinning on race relations and the audacity of a cop questioning him -- an elite Harvard Professor and an African American
• The police officer is an idiot and lets the antagonism between them escalate. This is supported by the fact that the antagonism between the two verifiably escalated, and only an idiot would have let that happen.
• Gates becomes increasingly irate at the situation, and convinces himself that the situation is racially motivated
• The cop becomes increasingly pissed off
• Gates leaves the building yelling
• The cop , who is an idiot , snaps and arrests him on a trumped-up disorderly conduct charge to humble Gates

Under this scenario, it becomes very clear that the police officer didn't arrest Gates or give him attitude because of his skin color; the officer was responding -- quite poorly -- to Gates' own antagonism and attitude.

Yes, the arrest was likely unnecessary, uncalled for, illegal, unfounded, and all sorts of other bad things -- but not one of them was likely related to racial motivation. Gates' arrest was related to pissing off an idiot cop.

I'd like to remind people that free speech , a police state, nor the right to piss off a cop are not at issue here -- racism is.

If Gates were white and behaved towards the cop like I believe he did, he would have been arrested. And if Gates were a neuroscience or math professor -- or less sleepy with a bit more tact -- he probably would have been a lot nicer to the cop when he knocked on the door. He may have even thanked the cop and said something like "Thanks for reporting so fast. I did have to break in, because it seems like the door was broken during an attempted robbery." Gates may have even expected the cop to ask for ID and been glad to provide it -- because that's what most people would expect a Police Officer to ask for when they're investigating a potential robbery... and that's how most people would react when they know a Police Officer would have good cause to think a robbery took place if they had just tried to break down the door themselves.

Few people have been willing to address this situation and its exact particulars. Far too many people assume that racism must be the motive, because there was a white Police Officer and a black Professor - or that only racism could ever explain why the esteemed Henry Gates could ever be arrested.

And this suggests another form of racism that seems to be at play. Not only is there the element of racism that I believe Gates exhibited - where he assumed that the Police Officer was racist - but another kind where bystanders and readers assume that race must be at issue when there are power dynamics involved between people of two different skin colors , especially when the minority is a powerful icon.

So I ask this question - could Henry Gates commit any crime and not have his arrest bring up the issues of race in our society? I don't think so.

Whenever I've tried to make the point that racism was not involved, the people that I've discussed this matter with have tried to reframe the situation so that it must be the core issue. Over the past few days I've wondered why people are so eager to prove Gates right and the Police Officer wrong, why racism must be the issue, why the Police must be wrong, and why Gates must be infallible.

The only explanations I've found are in the motives of people who are predisposed to :

• want Gates to be right , so that he can shed-light-on and make-issue-of race relations in America
• hate all Police

I've been so surprised at how polarizing this is. So many people look to this as an iconic example - a situation that finally can bring their personal beliefs into the national spotlight, and spark the same outrage they have realized for years in others. So many people exhibit such outright bias, necessitating that conclusions and facts match their beliefs.

Racism is indeed an issue our country battles with -- but so is blind idealism. Someone is not insensitive or uneducated because they don't believe a situation is based in racism.

I've also been so increasingly alarmed at how so many people simply want Gates to be right - and keep trying to make excuses. I read the forums on DemocraticUnderground.com pretty regularly ( often to judge if I'm still liberal or not ) - and the comments that some people make there have simply defied all aspects of common sense in trying to re-cast events as sympathetic. Several people tried to justify any hostility that Gates may have had towards police -- if those allegations were true -- as coming from the his experience growing up in a racist society. In other words: as facts come out to suggest that Gates was an ornery college professor who did not sleep much, there must be some way to excuse and rationalize his situation and keep the role of racism in America as central to this case. Another person was outraged that the Police Officer arrested Gates knowing that he lived in the neighborhood citing that the Police Report stated that - the report suggested no such thing. Another was outraged that someone could be arrested in their own home - however being in your own home is not an automatic "get out of jail free card", and many people are arrested in their own homes for a variety of reasons. We should also remember that Gates was not arrested for being in his home, he was arrested at his home and for a charge of Disorderly Conduct. Several people even questioned the legality of the police officer entering the home -- glossing over the fact that a neighbor called in a report of a possible robbery in progress, and as far as the Police were concerned... that robbery could still be in effect.
People also question why so many Police officers responded -- conveniently forgetting that a "burglary in progress" was the original call to police.

Finally , some people have suggested that Gates' neighbor was racially profiling the situation. A claim that perhaps could be true... but equally not be true. The neighbor , first and foremost, did not recognize Gates and his chauffeur who were busy trying to break the door in -- which can negate any sort of racial undertone as there were indeed two unrecognized people trying to break into a home. Yes, they had a valid reason (Gates lived there), but they were definitively breaking in and not recognized. It might also be worth nothing that the neighbor stated that the two men were wearing backpacks -- and that those two men may not have been Gates and his Chauffeur. It is entirely possible that Gates' arrival had scared off a burglary attempt -- and it is believed that there was a burglary attempt, because damage to the door is what caused Gates to try and force it open.

And before I forget, I should also bring up the fact that in the photos of the incident we see three police officers, one of which is African-American; and that one of the two police officers in the report has a Mexican-American last name.

Of course despite all these possibilities as to the numerous things that could have happened , people still mandate that racism was involved... and that only a racist would think otherwise. This is beyond ridiculous.

To make this situation even more ridiculous, NPR has reported today that Crowley was hand-picked to teach the Cultural Diversity class "Racial Profiling" at Lowell Police Academy [ http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=106936583 ] . Instead of re-examining the situation with an open mind , it has become common to hear remarks suggesting that it only illustrates how racially insensitive the Cambridge Police Department is, when their racial profiling expert makes an arrest like this. When people start making lines of comments like that, its clear to see that they're not open to looking at the facts or the situation -- they just want Gates to be right.

I think Crowley's position in the Police Department resonates very well with my interpretation of the likely events: Gates is tired and increasingly arrogant, and starts alleging racism at the officer; the officer, an expert in the field, is made even more increasingly upset by these allegations, and eventually explodes with an arrest.

I hope audio tapes surface of this event - someone must have been taping the radio chatter.

Incidentally... news reports on this situation brought to light another situation from 2004 where a neuroscience professor at Harvard Medical School , S. Allen Counter, was subject to racial profiling and the threat of arrest by Harvard police when he couldn't produce ID. If you want to talk about race issues in America , that is a much much much better example.

There's also a pretty good user-generated-content video on CNN where an African Amercian woman suggests that Gates is "racially pimping" this situation into a promotional opportunity for himself -- and there are several important racially motivated abuses of Police authority that should be addressed instead. The video is located here: http://www.ireport.com/docs/DOC-303137 ; and one of the cases is the harrowing video of Oscar Grant being shot to death in his back while in handcuffs by Police Officers in an Oakland train station.

And if you still don't agree with me, let me pose this one question: Why in the world would a cop want to arrest a Harvard Professor at his home ? The professor "Being black" just does not make sense. But a stupid cop being increasingly pissed off at a professor who was antagonizing ass ? That sounds just about right.

Update: I just learned that Apple dropped all DRM - and the two-tiered system... which completely invalidates my arguments below. So... nevermind!

Apple just blocked the Palm Pre's ability to interface with iTunes, as reported in Information Week .

Granted - Palm's interfacing with iTunes was questionable and a hack -- it basically emulated being an iPod to trick the software into compatibility. Apple's reasoning for the update is that it "addresses an issue with verification of Apple devices", which would often be fair for most companies and software makers...

However one needs to think about Apple's market share and new positioning as a vertical mobile provider. Not only is Apple the dominant player in the marketplace, but they've fixtured themselves into the entire chain and locking out competition at every step -- they've become the a primary force that is controlling the Hardware and Retail of music devices, the Software to install on them, and even the music distribution.

Sound familiar? Just a few years ago, the US and the EU took Microsoft to task for something similar -- bundling and tying the Windows & IE browser together, and then into PC's at reduced rates to block out competitive operating systems and browsers.

Palm's approach was largely unethical in many ways and definitely a dirty hack. It's also something that can -- and will -- probably be re-introduced as developers play cat&mouse with Apple to work-around device ID hacks , just as others have been re-enabling jailbreaks to the iPhone on every OS update.

But Palm's recent situation brings into light some larger questions -- through iTunes, Apple bundles the following things together: iPhone / IPod support and management, music purchasing, music management.

By integrating all those things together, Apple has created what is essentially not only a distinct market advantage, but an anti-competitive practice :

• users can not put the songs purchased through Apple on a non-Apple device , unless they pay for a premium for DRM free content
• users need to run additional software in order to install non-Apple procured music from their library onto a non-Apple device
• owners of non-Apple devices are obviously penalized for owning their device -- through needing to handle countless workarounds , paying more for content -- and are given incentives to abandon their current setups for a complete Apple solution

While Palm's approach to the situation is largely questionable, Apple's handling of it is illustrating a lot of the same parallels to what forced Microsoft to unbundle its software... and I'd wager that Apple may very well have 'shot themselves in the foot' with this, since few people knew/thought/cared about it before today.

Within the context of US and EU anti-trust laws -- and not thinking about 'fairness' to Apple... it seems to me like Palm could push the Justice Department for Anti-Trust measures against Apple -- and that could affect not just the iTunes support of devices, but the entirety of Apple's music retail business.

I'm not a lawyer - nor do I pretend to be one. But this seems to have little to do with interpretations of US statutes and laws than it does referencing history and case law. A good lawyer may very well be able to give Apple a free pass on this -- but you don't need to be a lawyer to see that there is more than enough correlations between this situation and successfully prosecuted anti-competitive practices for this to make it to the courts.

For more info on US anti-trust practices, check out this interesting article on the tying/bundling distinctions and applicabilities -- with some great case studies on what is considered illegally Anti-Competitive and what is not Antitrust In Distribution - Tying, Bundling and Loyalty Discounts, Resale Pricing Restraints, Price Discrimination - Part I