Adventures of an Eternal Optimist

Redbook Editor-in-Chief Stacy Morrison went on the Today Show to defend her photoshop attack, er, improvement on Faith Hill, stating that the picture of Faith Hill was, in the end, not a photograph, but an image.

In other words, it isn’t the magazine’s fault that you & I mistook an artist’s concept for reality. How very bourgeois of you & I, don’t you think?

Let’s face it. We are in a world now where every cover photo is a lie, uh, image, every song is digitally “corrected” to be perfectly in tune; and all of these images and sounds are fed to us like pablum to babies. Most of the time, most of us never even know.

Time breaks most of these fantasies, for those with an interest and a memory for such things. And yet – there is always a current set of supposed ‘role models’ whose white-washed perfection we optimistically adhere to. That is the true role of magazines like Redbook.

Authenticity is so totally nineties. Didn’t you know? OMG!

Who is this image made for? Who is it that would prefer a perfect fiction over a beautiful reality, if they could make an informed choice? The people who make magazines like RedBook see skin and eyes and arms and hair, and somehow think that the only beautiful women are the ones whose every part fits a strict standard. They take all the bits apart, adjust, and then reassemble. Take a minute and study the animated picture at the end of this entry below, if you don’t yet understand what I mean. Pay special attention to the back, and to the arm.

The photograph shown in composite below wasn’t altered out of evil intent.  It was altered because the editors believe the retouched photo will sell more copy — to women who feel their own flaws keenly, because they see not their own beauty, but all the things wrong with each of their parts. If you ask me, the cover would have been just as popular without the photoshop-attack, because in spite of her mortal sin of looking like a real, flesh-and-blood human woman, Faith Hill is truly beautiful. How anyone could not notice that fact, is beyond me.

Check out the original article at jezebel.com (especially the Annotated Guide to Making Faith Hill ‘Hot’), and the follow-up – there are some great quotes there.

Have you seen this?

Virgin Mobile in Australia created an ad campaign around a number of photos taken from Flickr. All of the photos were licensed for commerical use, but it seems that many of the photographers had no idea of what it means to allow commercial use of their photos, and what it specifically means to allow commercial use of photos of fellow humans.

The ad company took photos from and of regular people and added captions that implied often-derogatory situations, meant to resonate with ‘hip’ audience members. For example, the ad shown here is a picture of a young girl in a goofy pose flashing the peace sign, and the caption is ‘Dump your Pen Friend’. The link above is worth travelling to — because the very first comment on the picture is the young girl herself, having discovered that she is in the photo. The second comment is from the photographer, having discovered that his photo was used. The comment stream is enlightening.

Another affected party was geekgirl Molly Holzschlag, who was one of a group of people photographed in an elevator during what I presume to be a tech conference. Their photo was captioned “People who talk in lifts have bad breath”.

There is the beginnings of a collection of the various photos here. More discussion on the subject is here, here, and here.

There are all sorts of debates around this issue – but my personal favorite ironic conclusion is that anyone who wants to be litigious about this matter will mostly likely have to sue not just Virgin Mobile and/or the ad company, but also whatever close personal friend was uninformed enough to take a photograph of their friend(s) and then license it for commercial use without having understood the responsibilities and liabilities involved. Can Virgin Mobile successfully use their photographer-mules as shields to stay out of the court-room?

The other interesting question to me is — how does the world end up regarding companies that make this kind of ruckus? How will Virgin Mobile end up regarding their own campaign? This case has obvious educational value, both from a privacy perspective and also prospective amateur content license users — it is a use case that can be cited over and again, because people will intuitively get the issues at hand – after all, who hasn’t taken or posed for that one embarrassing photo. Meanwhile, Virgin Mobile Australia has managed to garner a world-wide audience for their ads. Perhaps the press is negative — but will the ruffled feathers fade away, leaving only the remembrance of the brand? My guess is that it will.

Photos on sharing sites such as Flickr are a simple example of one person having power over another person’s identity information. For obscure subjects, the power is small, and mistakes in things like licensing are not important. Yet – all it takes is a spotlight to change things. This isn’t new, or specific to Web 2.0 — how may recording artists have signed horrible contracts before they made it big, at the time just grateful to have the contract at all?

All I can say is, I’m off to check the licenses on a few photos that I really wouldn’t like to be part of a national ad campaign :)

Separated at birth?

So much happened at Catalyst this year! I’m a little daunted at the idea of describing it all. This year was my first time onstage at Catalyst, unless you count my cameo with Mike Neuenschwander a few years back, where I smashed his guitar to smithereens. Ah, the good ol’ days…

From a logistics perspective, things were fantastic. The right people were in attendance. The right amount of food and beverage was present. Interesting product announcements were made. Future community efforts were fostered. Men in superhero outfits scampered through the halls. It is obvious that the Burton folks have been doing this for a long time, and know how it all goes.

From a conference ‘architecture’ perspective, I thought that this year’s Catalyst was run very differently from previous years. I’m very happy that they ditched the ‘cross-cutting concerns’ concept this year, as the concerns they chose were never very interesting to me, and without that interest, a whole morning was written off. Instead, Burton chose a number of themes that they placed during various time slots during the week. As long as you were interested in seeing every talk within a theme, you could generally park yourself in a given hall and enjoy for the space of an afternoon or a morning. If you were more interested in who was speaking than in following the theme concept, things were a little tougher — talk beginning & ending times were staggered, so sometimes you’d have no choice but to walk out in the middle of one talk to get to another. For the most part, there always seemed to be an interesting theme going on somewhere at any given moment.

Another difference that I noticed was in the pacing of the content. Things seemed much more fast-paced this year — did anybody else notice this? My recollections of past Catalyst conferences are of fewer people talking longer. I don’t mind this new format for the most part — getting people to be more concise about what they say is almost always a good thing. The only problem with having so many people within a given time period, is that overages on the timing become a big deal, and there were times where everything seemed too frenetic, too much about being on time and not enough about delivering useful content. The worst was when the last person in the time slot was squeezed out — literally unable to give their presentation because others before them used time that wasn’t theirs. It isn’t fun as an audience member to watch a speaker attempt to edit their slides on the go, frantically changing a 15-minute story into a 5-minute travesty.

Then there was the Q&A. In the ‘old days’, I remember a single presentation on a single topic, followed by a healthy Q&A session, at least for the analysts. This time it seemed like a lot of content went by without any way for the audience to discuss it. Personally, I was a little distracted by worries about my own talk to be my usual mouthy self in the Q&A — but the truth is, it isn’t as much fun to riff on a topic that’s already 3 topics old by the time you get to comment on it.

I think that if I could have anything, I’d keep the frenzied pace for vendor & end-user presentations, but go for a more relaxed, more audience-discussion-enabled experience with the analysts. Oh, and it would have been really useful if you could actually READ the titles and names of the talks inside the official conference book that contained the schedule. Anyone who had a long title but a short time slot was doomed to an unreadable caption, which strikes me as completely contrary to the purpose of such things. I heard a number of people complaining on this point.

As far as guest speaker choice, I think Burton did a great job – and not just because I was one of them, I swear! I imagine that in general, the feedback will be very good this year — I felt a lot of good vibes and very few bad vibes from the attendees. My favorite presentation was probably Mark Wahl’s, I like the talks that bring real-world questions to the abstract level, I think they help people to leave with more than just generalizations. Dick Hardt does an incredible job of humanizing user-centric identity, and his report card on user-centric identity was not only provocative, but accurate. Ken Ross and Jim Harper were both excellent final day choices — Jim talked about sex in elevators, and Ken talked about video game economies — concepts which were just crazy enough when combined with identity that people were able to shrug off their hangovers and pay attention.

I’m also happy to report that my own talk went well. At least – I was on time, and I managed to cover the main points on my slides without descending into long explanations. I tried to pack a *lot* of different concepts into those slides (~20 slides in 20 minutes), and as someone who is very into the technical details, it was a supreme effort of will to change from slide to slide with only the barest of coverage of what was within. I can only hope that the descriptions I did give were reasonable. I have to say, I had a great time putting that deck together, and a great time presenting it. My thanks to the Burton folks for giving me such a great opportunity to pass on my experiences with and my enthusiasm for this particular new-school metasystem!

I must say – I feel privileged to have learned a lesson today.

At this year’s Catalyst conference, I saw Jonathan Schwartz speak at the Sun hospitality suite. Jonathan’s vision of the future is that one day, systems he deems as “uninteresting” such as e-mail systems, ERP systems, and such will be outsourced to Web 2.0 darling companies, who will host these boring but necessary functions, so that companies can focus on the sexy stuff.

The exact logistics of such a strategy were left to everyone’s imagination, although what was implied was that such a strategy would result in fewer servers being maintained, and fewer IT staff to do the maintaining. In other words, a CxO’s wildest dream.

Risk & Liability involved with such a strategy were not discussed.

Now – as it turns out, I happen to be a student of Mr. Schwartz’s methodology, on a very small scale. As someone who did not wish to pay for or maintain a server from which to publish my personal blog, I contracted with a Web 2.0 darling company called wordpress.com to host my blog alongside hundreds of thousands of others. It is and was a steal of a deal — they maintain the machines & the software, and I get to blog for free!

Today, however, I feel that I may have encountered the fly in Mr. Schwartz’s enthusiastic ointment. As you may have seen from my last blog entry, I was the subject of some syndication feed shenanigans this afternoon. Apparently so were a lot of other people.

During the course of administering their many separate hosted accounts, the wordpress.com staff installed software that mixed RSS feeds up for some unknown number of blog accounts, resulting in content from one persons’ blog being published under the name of someone else.

I can’t help but wonder – did somebody get my content? Was it a swap, or an off-by-one? I don’t suppose I’ll ever know.

How about a quick post-mortem cost assessment based on the following factors:

1. Probability of loss of reputation due to my identity being associated with someone else’s content or vice versa.
2. Probability of loss of income or other tangible asset due to either my identity being associated with someone else’s content or vice versa.

In my case, there was little cost. A few people might have come to erroneous conclusions about my personal life – but for the most part, my reputation and income stream were not affected. Additionally, it is technically possible that a bunch of strangers saw my content and assumed it belonged to someone else. Heh, more power to them if they were able to make sense of it.

But. What if this wasn’t my personal blog affected. What if this was, instead, my corporate ERP system affected? Or my corporate Email system? What happens when a hosting company mixes up the account identifiers of two different companies’ finanical accounts? What could the possible cost be, in both reputation and income, of your company’s confidential data being temporarily disclosed to another company’s users? Or of your company’s identity being temporarily associated with somebody else’s confidential data?

Can’t happen you say? Surely those kinds of hosting companies would be more careful? Yeah. You keep on believing that. It will be impossible until the day it happens. Then it will be irreversible.

Here be dragons. Mark my words.

For those of you who don’t know me well enough to have become suspicious at seeing my name next to a blog post entitled “Help! My two year old is a screaming monster!”, it appears that there has been a mix-up over at Planet Identity.

My name & the name of my company are currently attached to blog entries from an incorrect web address within the Planet Identity aggregator. I have no idea whether my own web address has been replaced altogether on the site (if so, this post is somewhat futile, since nobody on Planet Identity will see it), or whether both my blog entries and this other blog’s entries both get to make it to Planet Identity under my name. All I can hope is that this problem can be fixed as soon as possible, and the incorrectly referenced blog entries removed.

In the meantime, please don’t assume that everything with my name attached within the last day has come from me. I would ask you to click through to the actual blog page and to ensure that the blog you get to is http://eternaloptimist.wordpress.com.

Thank you,

The real (as in really mortified) Pamela Dingle.

Well alrighty then:

Travel to San Francisco for the Burton Group Catalyst Conference.

See presentations from Jamie, Bob, Mike, Lori, Gerry, Jonathan Schwartz, Jim Harper, and of course Dick.

Learn a whole bunch of new vocabulary, like decisioning and LLP and digital natives.

Have a great time giving my talk (entitled “What I learned when I stopped thinking about information cards and started using them – a Drama in 3 acts”).

Participate in the the long-awaited & highly successful OSIS/Burton Group User-Centric Identity Interop.

Meet all of the great people who have been collaborating via email and conference call for the last several months in person.

Spend large amounts of time in the Hilton sports bar with all my favorite Identity people.

Sum Total: A ripping good time!

So. What’s next? How do we keep up this kind of momentum?

• we need to collaborate on identity schema and raising the profile of the work to be done in that area.
• we need to continue to use OSIS to communicate interoperability problems within the community.
• we need to do the interop thing all over again, but at the next level of sophistication.
• we need to create a body of knowledge around best practices, industry expectations, and minimum security/validation requirements for Relying Parties.
• we need to keep enjoying ourselves, this time of day-by-day discovery and learning won’t last forever, eventually the marketing people will get involved and the fun will truly end :)

I think we demonstrated a vibrant, growing community this week. I can’t wait to see where we go next.