Dave Jenkins

As a kid, I remember how cool it was that we had two phone lines (a luxury in the 1970s).  At the time, I figured it was to facilitate compromise amongst the children, so we could use both at the same time.  Now I realize (and remember) that we weren’t supposed to use the first line, it was for the hospital, in case they needed to contact my physician father.  Many times Dad would ask my mother for a ride to see a patient in the middle of the night, or take long phone calls from patients as they talked through their ailments.

When I was 16, we got my driver’s license on the first day possible.  Dad was eager for it, so I could releive my mother of driving duty to the hospital (Wally had lost his central eyesight some years earlier and couldn’t drive by then).  I griped about the drive a lot, and he would sigh and try to tell me that it was his responsibility and his job.  That part is true, but I really think it was his passion– It was all about providing for others.

About twenty years ago I went to lunch with my father.  Hat in hand, I was once again asking for “help” with tuition money.  I say help, but he wasn’t “helping” by paying half or 20% or something, he was writing a check for the whole amount.  It burned him that it was for BYU (and not his beloved University of Utah), but he wrote the check just the same.  Embarrassed and humbled, I muttered some thanks and apologised.

“What are you apologising for?” my father asked.

“For taking your money.  I promise I’ll pay it back,” I sheepishly justified.

Rolling his deep blue-grey eyes, my father came right back. “Nonsense.  What do you think my money is for?  I have a house, a car, and even an old boat.  We go on vacation every year.  I have 5 healthy kids and several grandchildren.  If I can’t spend money on my child’s education, what else would I do with it?”

It was the most honest moment I ever had with him.  He was being as realistic and clear-headed about the purpose of life as he could: it was all about giving.  It was all about providing for others.

In his career, Wally Jenkins M.D. saved thousands of lives.  He mentored dozens if not hundreds of medical interns.  He fixed more boat engines while up to his armpits in cold Jackson Lake water than any man I know.  He gave up medical junkets to exotic locales in order to save up vacation time for week-long adventures through the national parks.  At 17, he skipped his high school graduation dance in order to be on a troop train to Chicago to serve in the waning months of WWII.

Dad never asked for anything himself, even when he wanted something.  He had a coy way of suggesting, “do you want some ice cream?” knowing that whoever he was asking would likely bring him a bowl as well.  It simply was not in his nature to think of himself.

In these last few years, after losing his wife and living alone, we would talk about how I was doing and a couple of errands about this or that.  Even then, he would still ask me if there was anything he could do for me.  To be honest, I never did pay back those tuition checks.  There was no way he would have taken the money if I tried.  To his last day, he was still providing to others.

I promise I’ll pay it back, Dad.

Wallace Jenkins, 1928-2010. Funeral services for Wallace Jenkins will be held at the LDS Church on 13th South, Wasatch Blvd, Salt Lake City on Saturday March 13th.  Services begin at noon, with a viewing the previous evening at the same location.

We’re seeing a pattern, in political town halls, industry conferences, and even award shows: the concept of a ‘panel of experts at the head of the grand ballroom dispensing wisdom to the masses’ is dead.  I blame mobile phones, but we’ll get to that in a minute.

In August 2009, congressmen and senators scattered out of Washington back to their home districts like so many rats carrying plague.  They had to get Health Care Reform passed, and it was time to bring in the proletariat on the deals they had already been cooking.  The problem is that the prols didn’t play ball.  The quick reaction was to chalk it up to sour grape astro-turfing by the GOP– and once it showed up, I have little doubt they did amplify it wherever possible– but I think that people are just as upset with the Town Hall format as they are with the actual message trying to get preached at them by their “representative”.  Thanks to the internet, the masses are much more connected and have their opinions (right or wrong) much more set before they go to the meeting; thanks to social networks, people now have the baseline expectations to participate in a two-way conversation, not get lectured at and told what to think.  The worst representatives actually yelled at their own constituencies to “shut up and listen“.  Ah, irony.

I saw this same pattern at a recent ecommerce conference in Las Vegas.  Each morning had the usualy Big Name Keynote address which was jsut as much show-n-tell as it was informative, but then the afternoon sessions consisted of smaller breakout sessions with a small (3-4 people) “panel of experts” sitting at the front of a long ballroom pontificating about some facet of ecommerce chellenges (customer usability, mobile commerce, social networks, etc.).  Here’s the thing– very few people actually listened, I think.  Most people had their heads down checking their email, tweeting out what they were hearing in the meeting, or even tweeting out how they’re not getting anything out of the meeting about how to use Twitter.  Ah, irony.

On the flight home, I downshifted with a Newsweek magazine, and saw an article about the Emmy Awards for TV, and how the awards shows seem increasingly out of touch with the will of the people.  “That makes sense,” I thought to myself: awards shows depend on panels of experts, and that model is becoming increasingly flawed.  Anything that is perceived as a one-way street of information transfer, or has a significant amount of time-lag between the chosen opinion coming down from above and the feedback going back up will lose attention with an increasingly twitchy, real-time community.

So what to do?  Here’s some cheap shots:

• For political town halls, obviously not everyone can talk, and even then not everyone has a cogent thought, but everyone wants to participate.  What if everyone was handed a chit or poker chip as they came into the room, and each person could either ask their friends for their chips because she wants to speak, or she could hand her poker chip to someone she trusts to voice her opinion.  The microphone would then be ‘auctioned off’ to those with the most poker chips, and passed around as time allowed.
• For conference meetings, the panels must absolutely integrate real-time tweets, polls, and feedback.  As topics become more tightly defined, the likelihood that smarter people are sitting out in the audience increases.  The poker chips might work here as well.
• For awards shows– I have no remedy.  They really were just a money-scam from the Big Studio era anyway, it seems, to put butts in seats a second time in November, while allowing actors to negotiate higher salaries because they had won something.  With the social networks, rotten tomatoes, and Mr Dynamite, we all have sufficient information to judge they good films, music, and TV from the dreck.  Those that cannot discern quality content deserve what they get.

Times are tough.  Escapism is rising. As with all depressions, movie attendance is up, Hulu actually has a shot at beating Youtube at its own game, and alcohol sales are up, as are random hook-ups.  We can see the trend on TV: two years ago, the prime-time dreck centered around bling and fabulous homes and even more fabulous lives of the fabulous people that live in them.  Now, that same focus on the rich is there, but it’s gotten nasty: they’re being shown as the bunch of back-biting vapid rodents that they are.  I am not going to expand much on that, because you already know your favorite rodent shows that you watch every week.

Here’s the question: spending is down, and escapism is up– do those two factors translate into higher ’shopping by proxy’?  Do you find yourself spending more time online, “researching” products?  Do you use this research time as a methadone substitute to your normal online shopping habit?  My thesis was that page views on shopping sites would be higher, as people spend more time browsing around, but not necessarily buying anything.  So far, my thesis is half-right:

Discounters like ebay and Walmart are up, as is the unstoppable ruthlessly efficient Amazon (which I hate and admire at the same time, like Ash did in the first Alien):

But overall page views are the same, or slightly down.  Page views have steadily declined as site navigation becomes more efficient, and as buyers decrease, less people go through the shopping cart, which also brings down the average– but the point is that people simply aren’t window shopping on the intarwebs like everyone thinks:

Perhaps the time-wasting website traffic is up?  Are we filling our time photoshopping domo-kun and pictures of Kim Jong Il? Nope– flat, with the only gain coming from hulu (likely due to their very expensive ad campaign).

So, what is everyone doing all night?  I hate to postulate, but in the end, I think TeeVee will win the day.  It may come in through our desktops instead of home theatres, but professionally written stories with good-looking people will beat mindless cartoons and witty political banter discussion threads for the vast majority of us.

The haters are out, there is no profitability on the horizon.  Facebook is definitely well on it’s way to Stage 5 of the cocktail party: the cool kids are leaving, only the hucksters and sham artist are left.  This party is no longer cool.

At the same time, we have a new administration that owes its existence and success to a mass movement of online communities binding together around key issues.  That same administration is now trying to rally an even larger group– all 310 million of us– around key points of its agenda.   Back in the 50s, the Feds would have duped Jimmy Stewart into making a propaganda film.  That won’t work anymore.  Thanks to those hippies over at the ACLU, the government cannot invade our privacy.

If only there were some way to get down to a majority of the citizenry, and find out their known associates, their political and sexual preferences, and their GPS coordinates.  If only there were some network out there where people were ready to hand over all this information in exchange for some cheap games and zombie bites.

The federal government should nationalize Facebook.  It’s not seeing any profit, yet it is sitting on top of an incredible amount of personal information, all surrendered willingly.  The Obama administration could forward its plans at the grass roots level.  Anyone who doesn’t play ball could be outted to their friend list.  Together with Twitter for up-to-the-minute updates on terrorist threat levels and natural disasters, the Federal Government could finally achieve the true Jeffersonian democracy mass movement that has stood as an idealistic utopia since– well– Plato’s Republic.

Nationalize Facebook Now!

Every year, the geeks declare ‘Year of the Linux Desktop‘.  So often, in fact, that’s it’s become a running gag.  In fact, Apple has made in-roads, and Ubuntu is more popular than ever.  Progress comes in small steps.

We actually may have taken a relatively large step this week: the new Obama adminstration has declared a very open information policy, and their IT structure shows promise in moving this same direction.  While not running Apache and Red Hat yet, they’ve certainly adopted some open social interaction structures.  It would be safe to say that the Obama administration is the best so far at “getting it“.

The missing element here, and the biggest specific step the US Government could make next would be to demand that all documentation be saved in an open format.  Want proof that Microsoft still has a monopoly?  Try sending someone your resume, proposal, or memo in something other than .DOC format.  If the government simply declared that all archives and transactional documents must be saved in .  The ODF is a deeply-flawed, but acceptable good start.  Ultimately, I am not sure the document format will matter.  Within the next 3 years, I bet that words and numbers and tables and figures and images are simply kept in the cloud.  I know I am not the first one to say this– but I can hope that the government would take an active role in pushing documentation into the common external places.  Cloud computing is not a technological hurdle, it’s a social acceptance problem.  I still encounter many people that resist putting things “out there”.  When pressed, there is no specific reason, other than people think the hard drive on their laptop is somehow safer than the huge servers tucked into concrete bunkers somewhere along the Columbia River.

I would hope that the transparency issue continues to gather steam.  I would hope to see the day when the government simply insists that all documentation: project bids, meeting minutes, deliberations, and especially lobbyist efforts, get published in a format that is easily remixed, chewed up, and boiled around in ways that slightly scare the powers-that-be.  We’ve seen a steady march forward with DARPA since the 60s and 70s, early gopher scientific info in the 80s, and then Thomas in the 90s, but the government certainly has dropped the ball in the last 5 years.  If the government can resume its Jeffersonian role in pushing new things for the republic, and allowing the market to fill in where advantageous, then maybe someone’s next interaction with the government will force them into putting things out there for scrutiny (policy or code), and they’ll realize that privacy ultimately depends on open scrutiny, not secrecy.

No home wifi firewall will protect us from an opaque government.

“Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?” –T.S. Eliot

Many people think back to their juvenile literature classes and remember that Farenheit 451 was a cautionary tale.  They then assume to remember that it’s a cautionary tale against oppressive governments that burn books.  I would proffer that this ‘oppressive fascist regime’ interpretation is a remnant of post-war public school social engineering.  I think that Bradbury might just as much have been lamenting the death of the book as a medium.  The populous of his future dystopia voluntarily stopped reading– preferring abridged versions to formal novels, then pamphlets, and finally, a small steady diet of word-pablum from the government.

I am a few days into Twitter so far, and I am starting to think that we may be one step closer: books became articles several decades ago.  The web shortened those further to summaries, and RSS shortened the news even further.  On a personal level, publishing has exploded; everyone’s an author, a film critic, a technomaven, a pop-diva queen.  However, the publishing medium is getting shorter and shorter.  Back in the day, we had to code our HTML by hand (dammit).  Soon enough, we publi-shit-izens [yes, intentional] realized we could get attention and traffic by simply uploading pictures of our cat, or describing the toast we had that morning.  TypePad made this all too easy.  Blogs got shorter.  Now we’ve come to twitter, and we’re down to a simple 160 characters.  Services now can simply ping each other’s mobile phones and tell you if a friend is within 500 feet (physically).

My money is on the iPhone app that can sense your mood from your body heat and movement while it sits in your pants pocket– and broadcasts out to all your peeps when it judges that you’re likely in heat.

Mind you, I’m not passing judgment one way or the other on this.  It’s not evil or good– the text is just getting progressively shorter.  I am still trying to figure out if it’s because the reader attention-span is getting shorter, or because 99.9% of the masses have anything viable to say beyond 160 characters.  I suspect the latter.

This post took me ten minutes to write.  I still haven’t said jack that has not been said a thousand times previously.  Do you feel smarter now that you’re at the end?  This post was really just a way to get my twitter address out: @davejenk1ns

note: that is a real photo of a real book burning in 2007 New Mexico, United States.  Some Christians think Harry Potter is evil.

Google is worth bazillions of dollars because they’ve created a commodities market: people bid a price on a keyword, and when someone clicks, that keyword bid is consumed, just like a barrel of oil, pork hind, or frozen concentrated orange juice.  The trick is that the core commodity here, marketing budgets, is pretty large and very renewable, and with constant upwared pressure on prices.

If we were to look at this system like a commodities market, would it be possible to create a derivatives market?  Could one short-sell keyword bids?  Could one create meta-bids on the value of a group of keywords?  One possible model might be to offer a time-limited, set price for clicks for a given keyword regardless of the current “market price” trading on that keyword position.

For example:

1. Let’s call our derivative trading company “Keyword Derivatives, Inc”
2. An online shoe company buys a contract from “Keyword Derivatives, Inc” for 100 clicks before the end of the week for “Chuck Taylor High Tops” at $1 each.  Total price of the contract: $100.
3. Keyword Derivative traders in turn will bid to get position for “Chuck Taylor High Tops“.  Depending on demand, they may pay Google $.05 per click, they may end up paying $5 per click.  Keyword Derivatives is assuming that risk.
4. Keyword Derivative traders must increase their bid amounts in order to fulfill the 100 clicks before the end of the week, while trying to maintain their profit margin by keeping bids under $1.  Keyword Derivatives may end up spending $50 to google, it may also end up spending $172, depending on its ability to optimize keyword placement and bidding strategy.

Many ecommerce companies try to manage their keyword budget as a certain percentage of sales.  Most companies who are buying keywords have a set price in mind for the cost of acquiring a customer.  The problem is that the bid structure of Google keywords is highly volatile and only trackable in hindsight  This makes keyword management very hard to manage and track for optimization.  There are many keyword management companies out there with predictive modeling to try and guess the optimal price for a given bid, but what if these companies were to go ahead and offer their own set price, and take care of the optimal bid themselves?  The keyword management software company could actually become a keyword brokerage.  They have the expertise, the software, and the ability to contract with their client to deliver the clicks.  The only missing part here is the in-house arbitration expert to figure out how much risk is in the keyword, and what price to charge the client for the guaranteed 100 clicks.

Hmmm… this might just work.  Does anyone know any quants looking for a job?

OSCommerce, long in the tooth and somewhat widely distributed with 200,000 known stores, has bit the dust.  Evidently, the founder/coder/mad genius at the center of the project could  not manage well: the project never left beta, forums went unmanaged and fell into pr0n, and team after team of frustrated developers quit.  We’ve seen this movie before.

Every successful project, especially in the Open Source world, has a charismatic leader bean at the center.  There’s no money in there, so developers must be drawn in by the concept, but also by the visionary personality of the creator.  Some types have this in spades: Steve Jobs, Dean Kamen, Sergey Brin.  Some have the management chops to a certain level, but ultimately let some self-ascribed non-negotiable prinicple screw up an otherwise solid run: Jerry Yang, Jerry McGuire Sun Microsystems, and a whole zoo of half-assed half-built open source projects.

Someone once told me, “It’s not the strength of the idea, it’s the strength of your ability to convince other people of the strength of that idea.”  The most successful projects that eventually flourished into a viable open source application/platform all made that transition from mad-scientist-in-his-lab to wide corporate/commuinity acceptance because either one of two things happened:

1. the founder has enough charisma and business acumen to hire and manage around them (and let someone else do the day-to-day)
2. The founder happens to have a best friend early on in the process to do the business, and all the grovelling, compromising, yelling, coaching, and convincing that is needed to build up and run the circus.

So, If you’ve got that genius scheme out there, and it’s just not getting enough love on Freshmeat, it may be because you’re not sexy enough.  That, or you’re not writing enough polemic diatribes and visionary screeds on your project website.

I am working on a project, and could use your help: how do you rate a sushi bar?  The simple “4 stars!” doesn’t really work, because I firmly believe that one cannot reduce a good sushi experience to a single dimension: the food, the preparer, the server, the atmosphere, the drinks– so many elements go into a dining experience, and even more so for something as ethereal as sushi nite. And, to be blunt, I am not sure most of the unwashed masses out there can judge good sushi from great sushi (not on the fish, at least).  Simply rating by 1-5 ’stars’ or whatever doesn’t work.
What goes into the decision on where to eat?  If you could rate a sushi bar on maybe 3-4 dimensions, what would they be?
So, here are my initial thoughts:

1. Atmopshere:

Traditional < ---------------> Modern

2. Menu:

Fresh Fish< ---------------->Nice Sauces

3. Service/chef:

Middle-aged Japanese Men< ------------------> Good Looking Young Hipsters

What else do you consider when choosing a sushi bar?  What would the different points of the dimension be?

Posit: All software becomes commoditized over time.  Either the original developing company reduces its price point to maintain market share or extend into ubiquity (MSWindows), goes freeware to maintain format hegemony (Adobe PDF), or more often– gets reverse engineered and released into the wild by those communists in the Open Source community.

Posit: The online user community has swung from corporate-driven top-down groups (slashdot, classmates, espn.com) to individualistic spewing (blogs), to childish connected networks (friendster, myspace, facebook) to now swinging back somewhere in the middle of all three: new corporate startups using grass roots networking to tie together individuals within their tribes with a more complex purpose than just zombie biting and superpoking each other.

Posit: This evolution is the result of the combination of those two points: facebook-like social networking software is now commodised and freely available.  People will no longer blog in their separate spaces, but will collectively blog within their tribe.

Just today I signed up for another social network: planetetail.com — a network limited to ecommerce professionals with only one apparent rule: no job postings (not sure why, but okay).  Last week I signed up for geni.com — a social network with all my in-laws, sisters and their extended families.  Literally, my blood, my tribe.  It is no longer enough to just be a random collection of people, it now must be a social network with some purpose.

Ironically, this may actually hold some value for MySpace if they took a draconian step: kick off every person who doesn’t play in a band.   That network was supposed to be a place for indie rockstars to get their message out.  But just like MTV, it soon became cursed with tweens, hangers-on, and the droodges that read gossip magazines.  If MySpace kicked them all off, and required people to submit just one original MP3 recording of their band/song/rap/whatever to get back on, the site could retake the high ground, and become the network of musicians.

At a recent conference in Las Vegas, everyone was yaking on and on about social networking and tapping into “web 2.0″ (which shows you how far behind the marketing people are).  There were plenty of vendors there to try and sell me such packages, but every last one of them suffered from three fatal flaws:

1. These software services wanted money– a lot of money– stupid corporate big software-like numbers.  Nope.
2. No one could explain to me what/how it would work, other than to simply try and stick something on at the bottom of every page with all the other suckerfish.
3. Online communities hate corporations (just like someone else I know) telling them what to do and how to think.  If anything, the only real communities come up by themselves with two 15 year-old kids hacking things together in a basement somewhere.

I’ve got a couple of ideas myself cooking up on some network sites.  Now, thanks to Drupal and the other freeware packages out there, I can build my social network concepts with just two turntables and a microphone.