Today I’m going to try a slightly different style of blog post. The reason is that today’s post is a “catch up” post, meaning that I’ve allowed a number of days to pass without posting anything here but since those days haven’t been empty, I want to document some of the things I found interesting but didn’t post. Doc Searls and Dave Winer both seem to use a style like this (though they post contemporaneously), in that they post short posts with links to the items and less commentary about those links than I do. So I’ll try that with this one and see how it goes. So here goes.

In a Wired News article titled “Why Data Mining Won’t Stop Terror,” Bruce Schneier says …

We’re not trading privacy for security; we’re giving up privacy and getting no security in return.

Wired News:

Let’s look at some numbers. We’ll be optimistic — we’ll assume the system has a one in 100 false-positive rate (99 percent accurate), and a one in 1,000 false-negative rate (99.9 percent accurate). Assume 1 trillion possible indicators to sift through: that’s about 10 events — e-mails, phone calls, purchases, web destinations, whatever — per person in the United States per day. Also assume that 10 of them are actually terrorists plotting.

This unrealistically accurate system will generate 1 billion false alarms for every real terrorist plot it uncovers. Every day of every year, the police will have to investigate 27 million potential plots in order to find the one real terrorist plot per month. Raise that false-positive accuracy to an absurd 99.9999 percent and you’re still chasing 2,750 false alarms per day — but that will inevitably raise your false negatives, and you’re going to miss some of those 10 real plots.

Wired News:

Daryl Houston, one of the Flock developers, wrote an interesting and, I think, useful post on Monday called “How I am using Flock.” Such posts from the developers help to enrich our understanding of what might be done with the program. For instance, I’ve already incorporated his idea about using the Shelf as a place for notes. Though this tool (the Shelf) isn’t yet as richly useful as it has the potential to be, I find it incredibly useful in blogging.

On a somewhat lighter note, Mike Neel recently blogged about an online version of the Johari Window, a metaphoric way to depict the divergence between our public and private personas. As a result, I was moved to create one for myself. If you are interested in filling out this little exercise about your view of me, visit this link and pick 5 or 6 words from the list to describe me. Once you’ve added your entries, you can see the results by visiting here. If you’d like to create your own Johari Window, go here.

In this entry on March 7, Ray Ozzie talks about an innovation he calls the Clipbook. Some fascinating screen casts of how it operates can be found here.

Michael Arrington at TechCrunch has posted some screen shots of a Google Calendar that is is said to be in the offing.

Well, I’m sure there are more things I’ve examined and found interesting in the last few days, but that will give you some idea of what has caught my attention for now.

technorati tags: security, Flock, Johari Window, Google calendar, clipbook

For the last few days I’ve been involved in reviewing and editing the documentation for Flock.  After Lloyd seduced me into joining in the effort to produce/improve the documentation for Flock the other night, I read through the documentation that has been created thus far for the purpose of proofreading it.  While do so, I learned a few things I didn’t know.  For instance, I found out …

1. The search bar is a powerful little tool to use when looking through your favorites.  It searches not only by name and description, but also by the tags you set up when marking a web page as a favorite.
2. Click the feed button next to your News Sites collection in the Favorites Manager’s sidebar.  You’ll see an aggregated page.
3. When you’re done with something like Photo browser, Photo Uploader or Maps, you can make your favorites re-appear in the topbar by clicking the tiny arrow icon on the right end of the topbar.  (The arrow is so tiny, I didn’t know it was an arrow.  I had assumed it was an X to close the window.)
4. To see a list of your blog posts and drafts, open the Topbar menu and choose My Blogs.  (I knew you could create a new blog post using the Blog editor, but I had never explored the My Blogs tool.)

This morning I made my first significant contribution to the documentation when I created the Quick maps page for it.  This was my first extensive foray into Wiki editing, and while I was a bit nervous about doing it, I found it to be not all that difficult.  The great thing about wikis is that it’s easy for someone to come along behind you and clean up any messes you make or to correct any misunderstandings you may have introduced by your edits.  Since I’m not a developer/coder, I’m pleased that editing the documentation gives me a way to contribute to a project I believe in.

technorati tags: Flock, documentation