I've been thinking a lot about filter bubbles lately -- and not just the internet kind. The people around me every day are a filter bubble of their own -- chances are they drive similar cars, wear similar clothing and have similar hobbies. Since people tend to cluster around people that are like them, and then subsequently attempt to fit into that group, our lives tend to keep us pretty firmly within our comfort zones. We don't get a lot of randomness.

This post was originally about curation on the web, which is a solution specific to the filter bubble problem online. Curation, while not a new concept in real life or online (we've long had DJs and social bookmarking services), is picking up steam as people realize that there is value in assembling interesting and unique collections. Sites like Gilt, Pinterest and Restaurant Bucket List all deal in curation (Gilt employs people to do it, the others crowd source it) and let visitors stray outside of their algorithmic recommendation circles to find new and unique areas or things to try out. 

But there's more to breaking out of filter bubbles than just changing what sites you go to online -- there's a big bubble in the real world too, and breaking out of this one is even more difficult. The solution is not to set out on a quest to find new interests -- you don't know what you don't know, so you probably won't find it. The trick is to increase randomness. When I think of a typical week, I don't get that many opportunities for serendipity -- the people I know and the places I go are generally pretty predictable. 

I don't have a perfect solution -- there probably isn't one. However, there are some interesting prospects that I'll be watching and thinking about. A few standouts on the web to help increase real-life randomness are Meetup and GrubWithUs. Meetup is focused on informal meetings for any groups of people that want to assemble, and GrubWithUs bills itself as a way to "Eat with Awesome People". Another interesting avenue is volunteering -- in the past, I've found that the perspectives gained from volunteering are as outside-the-box as any I've found elsewhere.  

Serendipity is an important ingredient to success -- not just financial, but in life. We can all think back to chance encounters that ended up making a big impact on how we think, act or relate -- and often they happen because of a new person or experience outside of our normal comfort zone. The more steps we can take to actively expose ourselves to new ideas and people, the more interesting people we will become, and the more success we will have.

 

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The law profession and the medical profession are two extremely high cost fields. Students of either discipline must spend hundreds of thousands of dollars and untold apprentice hours learning the intricate details of their trade. When they finally are deemed fit to practice, they are licensed by a central body and allowed to "serve the public", again at an astronomical cost.

The irony is that many of the needs that the public are much simpler than the complicated licensing procedure leads one to believe. Just as I don't need a brain surgeon to bandage my stubbed toe, I probably don't need a fully licensed lawyer to prepare basic divorce papers. Unfortunately, however, there are few gray areas when it comes to medicine and law. The intentions are good -- given what's at stake (life and liberty) the licensing bodies want to make sure that the public gets fully qualified staff.

Inevitably, however, this "one size fits all" approach needs to change. The legal and medical professions, in order to keep costs down and best serve the world, need to develop a pyramid structure where basic issues can be dealt with by people with less (and less expensive) training, and more complicated situations are escalated to better-qualified (and more expensive) specialists. We already see the beginnings of this happening in both fields -- walk-in clinics staffed by nurse practitioners licensed to write some prescriptions can efficiently handle fevers and aches without involving a doctor. Online services like LegalZoom can sell boilerplate documents for certain basic legal structures and situations. As a result of these initiatives, thousands more have access to basic care and eager entrepreneurs have one less cost and barrier.

As our country faces escalating health care and tuition costs, as well as a widening gap between classes, the solution isn't adding more laws and limits or fixing prices. The solution lies in the question "what is good enough?", and allowing both suppliers (eg, medical and legal professionals) as well as consumers decide the level of specialization they need.

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In the last 9 months, it seems like just about everyone I know has gotten a new job. They still work at the same companies, calling on the same customers, designing the same equipment. Nine months ago, they would have described themselves as sales representatives, data center engineers, or software developers. Today, they all work with "the cloud".

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What percentage of your customer service questions are reliably answered with a phone bank or automated system? Perhaps one in 20 times I end up getting some sort of satisfactory resolution from an automated system, but most of the time I end up screaming "OPERATOR!" into the phone while simultaneously mashing "0" in the hopes of getting a person. After 5 or more minutes of navigating menus and entering account numbers, someone finally picks up. Their first question? "Hi, what is your account number please?"

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The lesson is -- devices don't matter any more. What matters is interoperability. Dropbox, to their huge credit, focused on wide support from the very beginning -- they had a Linux client early on, and they have mobile versions for iOS, Android and Blackberry. It's a pretty safe bet that they'll support just about anything out there going forward. iCloud, on the other hand, is firmly entrenched in the Apple ecosystem. It works great if you've got a Mac at home that you connect to your iPad and iPhone. You can even throw Windows 7 in there without too many issues. But what about some of the exciting devices coming out from the other guys? Apple certainly doesn't have too much interest supporting their arch-rival Google's Android OS, and they won't be bothered to support Blackberry or WebOS. You can put all of your stuff on iCloud, but moving later when the next shiny tablet comes from someone other than Steve Jobs won't be pretty. There's always going to be some other cool toys, and vendors are always going to try to lock you into their platforms. Stay with the guys that let you take your data anywhere you go -- it's the only way to really be future-proof.

* Recognizing the problem, iTunes has since dropped DRM on files that you buy, and you can remove the DRM from your existing files for $0.30. It's not worth it to me really, but if you have a big collect that you don't want to reassemble, it might be the easiest move.

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Locking down your digital stuff is more important today than it's ever been. Tracking is easy, data breaches are coming up every day (today it's PBS, Lockhead Martin and RSA), and we do everything online. Lately, I've been looking a lot into ways to get better security on my mobile, desktop, and browser. Here are 8 relatively easy ways you can turn your security up a notch without driving you crazy jumping through hoops.  

1. Use LastPass to create super-strong passwords. LastPass is a password manager that lets you create different passwords for every site that you use. Those passwords are then stored encrypted both online and on your local computer (which means that even if the LastPass servers are hacked, your info is safe). Whenever you want to log into a site, simply type your master password, and LP fills in the rest for you. It's far better to use strong, unique passwords across the web than to use fluffybunny1 on everything. LastPass works with everything -- browsers, phones, desktops -- so it's super-easy.
   
2.  Install BugMeNot (Firefox, Chrome extensions) to give you quick throwaway accounts. BugMeNot lets you log into many sites that require registration by providing you with a dummy account, so you don't give them any info.
3. Clear out your Adobe Flash cookies and user data. Flash stores a bunch of information about you that doesn't get nuked when you clear our your cookies and history. Get rid of it by going to Adobe's Privacy Settings panel, and setting all the options to 'never'.
   
    
4. Use AdBlockPlus (Firefox, Chrome extensions) to fend off tracking and behavioral cookies, as well as hide ads. I don't specifically mind ads, but unfortunately they have a creepy tendency to follow you around the internet. I'm not terribly comfortable with any number of third parties having a complete profile on me, so I use ABP to stop the ads in their tracks. 
5. Use Lookout Mobile Security on your Android Phone. Lookout is an all-in-one security suite for your phone, and it's free. It scans incoming apps for viruses, but more importantly, it gives you an easy remote interface to do locking and tracking on a phone that you've lost or stolen. You have to upgrade to the premium to do the locking or tracking, but you can do that retroactively and then go lock or locate a lost phone. There are other utilities like this one available, but I love the easy interface and security. I definitely want to be able to remotely disable my phone if it's ever lost, and LMS does the trick. 
   
6. Use Gmail's 2-factor authentication to keep your email safe. Google recently introduced 2-factor authentication, which requires you to input a pin number along with your password when you log in. The pin comes from an app that you download to your mobile phone, or alternatively, a text message. With your PIN (and consequently, your phone), even a hacker that has your Gmail password cannot get into your account. For convenience, trusted computers can be saved so they only require the password every 30 days  
   
7. HTTPSEverywhere (Firefox extension) protects you against sending your passwords and other info in the clear. An app called Firesheep can be used by people on your network (wireless or otherwise) to grab any information that you send without encryption. That means passwords, websites and messages. HTTPSEverywhere will help defend against this by defaulting to HTTPS (encrypted) on any site that supports it.  
8. Turn on Facebook Login Notifications. Login Notifications, found under Account Settings > Account Security > Login Notifications will send you an email every time a new computer signs into Facebook. Most likely, it's you signing on from a different location. But good to know in case it's not.

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It's been a terrible month for user data security. Epsilon and Sony, both high-profile and data-rich companies, have been breached and revealed sensitive personal data to hackers. In Sony's case, the 77 million users affected weren't even notified that their names, addresses and potentially credit card data were compromised until six days after the attack. Many speculate that in the rush to get out new product features, Sony neglected to carefully think through their security model for protecting the valuable user data they they stored. Clearly, the current system of data storage and retrieval is broken. As today's New York Times reports, there is currently no U.S. federal law regulating data theft, penalties, and notification requirements, so states are left to determine their own protocols. Companies have little downside to collecting troves of information, since the penalties for losing it are unclear while the benefits to having it are potentially great. Meanwhile, consumers have little or no control over what happens to the increasing amount of personal information that they give or leave as they interact online and in person with well connected businesses.

So what's the solution? I've been following the Diaspora project since it was first conceived about a year ago. The still-unreleased project is intended to be an open-source, peer-to-peer social network that allows users to own their own data. The gist of it is that instead of posting all of your pictures, comments and information to Facebook, where you lose control of it, you instead post it to your own Diaspora "seed" which then makes it available to users that are allowed to request it. When I create a network of friends with Diaspora, somewhere on my computer is a list of the computers that hold my friends' information, and my computer then connects and retrieves that info (all behind the scenes) when I want to interact with my friends. Facebook, on the other hand, has all the information on their own computers and simply allows me to see it when I'm connected to someone. The differences are slight, but very important. If I want to remove my information from Facebook, I can request that they delete it, but I don't specifically know exactly how they are doing it. Could it still be retrieved from offline backups if subpoenaed for a court case? Is it still being used to create advertising profiles for members of my family?

Storing information in your own Diaspora seed, on the other hand, ensures that you have complete control (yes, technically users could save the information as they browse) and can change access confidently and fully at any time. You know who is seeing your data, what they are requesting, and what is being provided. This exact distributed model would be ideal (from a consumer's point of view) for data of all types. Imagine if users could create their own "data silo" that could be plugged into by any company for purposes of interfacing and interacting with that user. When I went to the store, if I wanted to join the discount club, I could provide the store with access to my data silo, and they could store the information that they wanted to keep about me. When I went to the doctor, I could give them my data silo address and they could save my medical records to my system. Basically any company that needed to preserve information about me as a consumer/patient/customer could use my own silo to do so. The silo itself would take care of ensuring that companies could see only the information that they provided or the information that I chose to allow them to see. Later, if I decided I no longer wanted to participate in the shopper club or I wanted to switch doctors and no longer wished to allow my old doctor access to my history, I could revoke it or change permissions. It would be my data, my decisions, and my control.

Of course, there are security implications for this setup as well -- users tend to be worse than big companies about keeping their systems up to date and securing physical access. However, this is a solvable problem. Open source tools could be created to set up the data stores, and users that didn't want to host their own silos could choose to allow a professional service to do it for them. The data on the silo would remain encrypted, so the service would not have access to the actual information -- they would simply manage the logistics. For users that ran their own silos, updates would occur regularly and automatically by default, and systems that had security vulnerabilities could be temporarily taken offline until the patch was applied. In the end, perhaps the biggest benefit of a system like this would be decentralization of user information. Sony, with 77 million records and credit card numbers, is a pretty big target for a determined group of hackers. Data siloing would spread out the information, and lessen the occurrence of huge collections of information -- instead of storing credit card information and user addresses, Sony would just store pointers to the silos of their customers. When a breach was discovered, an automatic process could run to quickly and automatically notify every silo to revoke access. Carrying out a breach on one computer is much easier than on 77 million computers, so the data would be far safer.

Ultimately, companies need to be held more accountable for the information they collect and retain. Giving control back to users would put the burden on the users, who would understand the importance of securing their own information. Finally, there's something in it for the merchants too -- if consumers are confident that they have full control over what a company knows about them at any given time, they're much more likely to share info. If I know that my grocery store will give me better prices if it knows my Amazon history, I might just share it with them if I have the option to pull that access back at any time. That's good for everyone.

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Those of you that have undergone a wedding (and more of you that are currently planning a wedding yourself) know that just about every aspect -- from the food, to the flowers to the transportation -- is heavily marked up. Printed materials, like the program, are no exception -- printers charge an arm and a leg to churn out a good looking program. But what alternatives do you have? I've seen many, many ugly and stereotypical programs created with Microsoft Word that lacked the polish and pizazz that the professionally-done ones have. There is just something about the ordinary, boring fonts and predictable spacing that makes Word programs, well, less than special.

There is a solution, although it requires a few notches on the geek scale. LaTeX is a free, professional-level software package to typeset just about anything. Academics use it to make their papers look great, publishers use it for crisp looking books -- and now you can use it for your wedding! Here are some screenshots -- check out the beautiful calligraphy font (called calligra (get it here)) and other niceties. This one is for a Catholic wedding, but you could definitely modify it to fit any style wedding. Here are the files: Download: wedding_program.zip

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These are the Glengarry leads. And to you, they're gold. And you don't get them. Because to give them to you is just throwing them away. They're for closers.

A few weeks back, Groupon, everyone's favorite startup, offered a nationwide Gap coupon -- $25 for $50 at Gap. By the end of the day, Groupon/Gap had sold over 400,000 of the deals -- over $10 million in discounts to customers purchasing the offer and likely around a 75% discount to Gap stakeholders after Groupon's cut. Based on their latest 10-Q (June 2010), GAP Stores has a gross margin of 42.1% (this is averaged across Gap, Old Navy and Banana Republic). Therefore, every $50 Groupon they sell has a cost to them in the neighborhood of $29 (technically a bit less, since a few costs like rent are fixed but included in the gross margin calculation). After Groupon's cut (assuming 50%), Gap receives $12.50, leaving a shortfall of $16.50. For Gap to break even, every customer entering the store must therefore spend an additional $40 (.421*$40=$16.84). So with the numbers out of the way, how does Gap, or any business, make this deal worthwhile? They key is how much value a company is able to extract out of a customer once they're in the door. In Gap's case, they effectively pay $16.50 to get customers into the store. Once the customers are inside, the make or break is how much value the enterprise can extract from them. In the case of Gap, they're very effective at this -- they have to be. A pair of jeans costs roughly $50 -- but once you try them on, the sales staff [in what I've generally found to be a helpful, non-pushy way] shows you a few other pairs of pants or shirts that may go with it. Before you know it, you've got the jeans and 2 shirts, and your total tab is around $150. At checkout, you're presented with another option -- sign up for a Gap Visa card and save 30% today. Judging by the amount of people that signed up for the Gap card last time I was in the store, it's a pretty popular move. As you're walking out, Gap may have broken even (if you signed up for the card), but they've potentially gotten a new customer into their clothes, and they've diversified their revenue stream into credit (branded cards typically pay the brand 1% of all purchases) in addition to retail. Today's transaction may be a wash for them, but when you come next month for the a 10% off event, and over the course of the next year, they'll more than make it up.

Customer acquisition is expensive. But once they're in the door, it's really the ability of the franchise to capitalize on that acquisition cost that makes the difference. Gap pairs jeans with shirts and credit lines. Goldman Sachs advises clients, handles the capital raising for them, and then trades the new securities with other clients. Microsoft (perhaps more effectively a few years ago) sells operating systems but also office suites, browsers and advertisements to go with that OS. All of these companies use a suite of complementary products to extract maximum value from their customers once they're in the door -- they "own the customer".

At the end of the day, you can always pay more money to acquire customers -- it's how you keep these customers coming back and spending money that makes the difference. The company that can best extract lasting value from each customer can afford to spend more, which likely leads to greater market share and more efficiencies, and ultimately, the best chance at success.

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When an organization is still in the small, startup phase, it's not hard to have employees that each feel like they have a stake in the company and are willing to rally behind it. As the company grows, however, subsequent employees get distanced from management and from company success, so it is easier for them to treat the job less like their own undertaking, and more like a paycheck. Too many employees treating their work as just a job will end up affecting company culture and ultimately, product. Identifying and rewarding torchbearers helps to ensure that the cultural message is effectively conveyed and carried out at all ranks.

I witnessed a prime example of this last weekend when I was, of all places, in a bar. Not just any bar, this was a "trendy" place that specialized in exotic drinks crafted by "mixologists". We sat down at the counter, and began conversing with the mixologist, who was extremely knowledgeable about the menu and obviously took much pride in his craft. When I didn't like the first drink I ordered, he offered to "surprise me" with the next one, and made me one of the most interesting concoctions I've ever had. Needless to say, we were sorry to see him go when his shift ended and he was replaced by a listless bartender who barely spoke a word.

The first mixologist, Steven, was a torchbearer. The interactions with him defined the experience for us, the customers. It's easy to imagine that his enthusiasm for the job rubs off on many of his coworkers (with the possible exception of the bartender that replaced him), and elevates the quality of the entire establishment. Employees like him are by far the most valuable, and must be retained even at high[er] cost. The idea of paying every worker the same is fine if you consider your employees to be commodities, but for a truly differentiated business, this shouldn't be the case.

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Jotted down in a file I keep called "life rules", I have a simple phrase. Create, don't destroy. It sounds trite, and perhaps it is. But I firmly believe that the most successful people in the world follow this principle every day, whether or not they have specifically written it anywhere. While it may not make you rich and famous, if you spend your time creating instead of destroying, it will undoubtedly make your life far better.

What does it mean, "create, don't destroy"? There are countless opportunities every day where we make decisions to add to or subtract from something. Projects at work started by an adversary that you'd rather see fail, cynical observations that don't have any constructive benefit, favors that you could easily do for someone, but choose not to -- these are all chances that we have to build on something, but instead choose to detract from it. There are all sorts of underlying roots -- jealousy, political gain, personal grudges -- but in each case the effort in the task is designed to undermine.

Instead, spend your time improving anything and everything you can. Even if you secretly want a project to fail, put that aside and contribute earnestly. It might feel good or be easy to criticize or be cynical, and often it is. Far more difficult is actually helping out and building. You'll find, however, that those that build are far better rewarded and end up far happier than those that destroy. Creation itself is an additive process -- the more you create, the more you'll be able to create. Why waste effort in making something fail when you could have a hand in making it succeed?

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Last week, while I was making sure my privacy settings were fined-tuned after reading all the buzz about
Google Buzz, I stumbled onto a neat feature of Google Accounts that I hadn't seen before. It's called Dashboard, and it's a great concept: most of the information that Google has accumulated about you is collected in one place, and you're given options to manage how you share it all. If you're like me, you have almost a dozen Google services -- Gmail, Picasa, Voice, Reader, Checkout, Alerts, Analytics, etc. Making sure that everything is set up correctly and not inadvertently exposed to the world is an otherwise painful task that is made easy with Dashboard. By scrolling down and glancing at the summaries of your various services, you can make sure that the pictures of Grandma's birthday party aren't visible to the world.

So, despite some other privacy setbacks (but hopefully they have all that worked out with Buzz), I think this is a leap forward for a company to expose the data they have about you and give you choices about what they do with it. Imagine the grocery store doing this with your preferred card or your phone company with the data they collect from your wireless bill (and location data they get from your GPS). It's great when consumers have the choice about how their information is used, and kudos to Google for getting this one right. They still have some work to do given how much info we end up giving them, but definitely a step in the right direction.

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1. I used a shot glass to trace the circles. It was a perfect size.
2. It's important to get as perfect of a triangle as possible, so that your ornament fits together correctly. The best way to make a perfect triangle is to cut out a circle, fold it in half, then in half again (so that you have a quarter circle). Unfold, and mark a strip of paper the length of the radius of the circle (see picture). Then use this to make 6 marks around the perimeter of the circle. Connect 3 of them and you've made a perfect triangle. Cut out this template triangle to use when tracing onto the other circles.
3. Make sure that pictures and circles you glue in are facing right-side-up
4. Glue a piece of ribbon through the hole in the top piece before you glue everything together

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The most successful companies are the ones that work every day toward building what I call a "culture of ideas". Google is the prime example of this -- if you work at Google, you're encouraged to spend 20% of your work time on ideas that interest you. Think about this -- Google "loses" one day a week of productivity from their workers while they pursue projects that they find interesting! Dig a little deeper, however, and you'll find that it is anything but losing for Google. In fact,

In a talk at Stanford University, Marissa Mayer, Google's Vice President of Search Products and User Experience, stated that her analysis showed that 50% of the new product launches originated from the 20% time. [wikipedia]

Some of their best products, such as Gmail and Adsense, originated from this revolutionary policy! So what does an ordinary company get out of encouraging employees to dream up ways to do things better? Perhaps a day a week is a bit much for most enterprises, but this sort of out-of-the-box thinking can do wonders to spur new innovation or improve operations at any company. Traditionally, change follows a top-down approach: managers devise a new product, process or protocol and the employees implement the change according to instructions they receive. The communication is often one-way so feedback doesn't effectively flow. The result is few sources of innovation and an inefficient system for improvement.

A better way is to "design" all aspects of the company culture so that any employee can have an input on key aspects of the company. Simply telling workers that "the boss's door is always open" is insufficient, since it still requires a person to put themselves on the line. Mechanisms like encouraging employees to pursue their own ideas, setting up constant feedback and suggestion sessions (online is particularly good, since people may tend to be more honest), idea contests and frequent communication from management work far better and allow employees to feel that managers are listening and valuing their contributions.

Putting power in the hands of employees to suggest and improve their daily routines has several advantages. It allows the people who know the processes and systems the best to have a hand in improving them, instead of relying on higher-ups who may not be as well versed in the day-to-day. Furthermore, it makes employees feel like they have a chance to stand out in their company and contribute more than a 9-5 workday. The entrenched culture of many companies that exist today makes it difficult to establish such a culture, but the ones who do will find themselves amply rewarded.

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As legend has it, the humanities program at MIT was started by an MIT president who quipped "too many MIT graduates end up working for Harvard and Yale graduates". The thinking then, which remains to this day, is that engineering classes make a person narrowly focused whereas humanities classes help a student to see the full picture. Although I can see some truth in this, I would argue that a person is far better equipped to be a great manager having taken engineering than its "softer" alternatives.

So how is management engineering? A business, by nature, is a system. The parts are the inputs -- employees, inventory, capital -- and profit is the (hopefully steady) output. It's popular for business managers these days to say that "the value of our business is our employees", and that is certainly true, but the human nature of an employee means that they are inherently unreliable. Plans change, new jobs come along, retirement beckons -- all of these things mean that the human element of the system needs to be designed to be fault-tolerant. An engineer understands this concept, and has a natural insight into ways of building efficiency and redundancy into the organization. A more streamlined process that reduces needless overlap while maintaining critical redundancies will maximize profit and ensure business continuity.

The sweet spot in management is a manager who can balance the vital "soft" aspects of motivation with the organizational awareness that an engineering background can provide. Either trait by itself can do an adequate job, but the combination creates a truly capable and effective motivator and manager.

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The New York Times today has an article about how YouTube is transforming the nightly news. As more high-quality, user-generated content is uploaded to YouTube by professional news networks, semi-professional hobbyists and amateur aspiring Ron Burgundys, the potential for customized, localized news delivered directly to your computer whenever you want it becomes a reality. Google, which owns YouTube, has already built out Google News to deliver fresh and personalized news that they've harvested from news sites around the web, and YouTube video news is a logical next step.

No doubt, this is great. However, with smaller city newspapers failing across the country and even the venerable Times in trouble, the long-term sustainability of content providers is a serious question. Right now, Google News and YouTube news videos are fueled largely by professional journalism companies that make their money selling advertisements in print and video media. However, as Google steps in and uses the content without providing an adequate revenue stream back to the content creators, the prospects for professional journalism look dim. Clearly journalism as a money-making endeavor will not go away. What will happen, on the other hand, is that news outlets will find ways to capitalize on what is actually an amazing opportunity to reach a huge audience with dramatically lower costs. As an example, I've never paid a dime for a newspaper, yet after getting an Amazon Kindle2 about 2 months ago, I now pay for subscriptions to two newspapers. The key for me was convenience and quality -- the ability to have a full news source on my Kindle every morning on the train was well worth the $10-$15/month I pay for my subscription. A content delivery device that didn't exist 2 years ago is what it took to get a 24-year-old guy to start paying for the paper.

What about the web? How can providers continue to afford to let Google assemble their content into dynamic newspapers and give it away free? The solution is micropayments. Want to read an article on Google Reader? Why not charge a nickel (or a penny!), the bulk of which goes directly back to the content provider? Of course, a few cents doesn't sound like much, but obviously the key is making it on millions of users. Collect a nickel, and watch what happens to the web. The best content providers -- professional and amateur -- will now have a way to make money off of their work directly. News outlets will still exist, but there will also be plenty of semi-professional, independent authors and creators who will churn out material that will be just as good.

Undoubtedly, there are many stumbling blocks to charging people for what they've become accustomed to getting for free. Dan Ariely, the MIT behavioral economist and author of Predictably Irrational has found that the difference between even 1 cent and free is enormous from a psychological perspective. Things that are free just have a certain allure that even the cheapest alternatives do not. The way to overcome this stumbling block is to disassociate people with the money they're actually spending. We could do this by allowing (but not necessarily requiring) people to prepay their nickels every month with their internet bill -- perhaps include $2 worth of content in a "bank account" with the monthly internet. Alternatively, Google could pay these nickels for you -- in this case they would simply be a structural mechanism to allow payment to flow back to the originators.

The internet has irreversibly changed traditional content distribution models, but so far, revenue models have largely stayed the same for content providers. The providers that push for and embrace new models will be the ones that generate incredible profits. Micropayments are the solution that will fix the content-revenue link on the web.

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I have a ton of photos that I've taken over the years, and managing them is a constant challenge. Part of the problem is simply the fact that there are so many great things you can do with digital photos -- view them online, make cool photobooks, create collages, order prints, send them to friends and family, etc. There are many different applications that are useful for photos, and while some of them come close to doing it all, there still isn't one solution that works for everything. 

1. Save pictures to some folder on the desktop of whatever computer I happen to be using. Remove the obvious "bad" photos.
2. Add the library to my Gallery2 library that's hosted by Dreamhost. Gallery2 is one of the best online photo-view apps I've found, and since it's hosted on my Dreamhost account, I have unlimited space to put pictures (unlike Picasa Web Albums which caps you out 1GB)
3. However, Dreamhost is by no means a secure backup location (they don't claim to be, and they recently lost a bunch of user data), so I don't feel very safe having my photos only stored there. Therefore, after my photos are uploaded to Dreamhost, I rsync the photo directory onto Dropbox. Dropbox is a great online storage and file-syncing utility, so it doesn't matter which computer I'm using -- the Dropbox folder is always the same on all of them. When I rsync to my Dropbox folder, the files are automatically backed up online and synced to the other computers that have Dropbox installed. If you're curious, here is the rsync command I use: rsync --verbose --progress --stats \ --compress --rsh=/usr/bin/ssh \ --recursive --times --perms --links \ /source/directory ~/Dropbox/Photos/. Note: That's a space between /source/directory [space] ~/Dropbox/Photos From here, all of my computers have Picasa installed (since it works on Linux, OSX and Windows), and the Dropbox photo directory is set as a "watched" directory. This means that as new pictures are synced to the Dropbox folders on other computers, Picasa on that computer picks it up and adds it automatically.
4. The final, and probably unnecessary step is rsyncing the files to Amazon S3 via Jungledisk. This doesn't really offer anything in the way of additional backup security, since Dropbox is S3 based on the backend anyways (so if anything happens to S3, both will go down). The reason I do this is because I look at S3 as my long-term "vault" and Dropbox as a shorter-term, more convenient storage place. The rsync itself is the same command as above, but replace the Dropbox destination directory with your Jungledisk directory.

If you're on Windows, you can replace the rsync steps with a straight copy -- you'll still get most of the functionality. Rsync works fine on OSX and Linux. Clearly, it's an involved process when I add pictures. However, it's not too bad -- a bulk upload onto Dreamhost and then running 2 commands from the command line to get the photos onto Dropbox and Amazon. You can even remove the Amazon step if you want. Last time I checked there was no way to add photos to Gallery2 using a script, but if and when that becomes available, this whole process can be turned into a quick script to run in the background. Follow these steps, and you'll have secure, accessible and useful photos on all of your computers.

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