Special Interest Group on CRAP

I’ll take the opportunity to recommend the recent book by Susan Landau on wiretapping. Privacy is increasing in importance over time, and I’m noticing a lot of fuzzy thinking about how to respect privacy. One incident that recently came up is the fact that my car reports latitude, longitude, position, and speed whenever it downloads an RSS feed (yes my car actually downloads RSS – it’s a Nissan Leaf).

There is a traditional list of anniversary gifts, and there is the revised list below.

1. Paper
2. Plastic
3. Caulking
4. WD-40
5. Duct tape
6. Styrofoam
7. P.V.C.
8. Gelatin
9. Latex
10. Naugahyde
11. Rayon
12. Spackle
13. Fiberglass
14. Oil
15. Salt
16. Cortisone
17. Vinyl
18. Ink
19. Plexiglass
20. Straw
21. Aloe
22. Terra-cotta
23. Teflon
24. Salmon
25. Silver
26. Soy
27. Balsa
28. Sponge
29. Cardboard
30. Soup
31. Terrycloth
32. Suede
33. Glue
34. Down
35. Burlap
36. Leaves
37. Glycerin
38. Wicker
39. Soil
40. Ice
41. Paprika
42. Spandex
43. Foil
44. Tissue
45. Cork
46. Velcro
47. Rope
48. Cast iron
49. Frosting
50. Gold

My proposal for tax reform is very simple. Make every senator and congressman do their own taxes.

Only then would they understand the colossal mess they have created. In fact while we’re at it, give them pencil and paper and calculator and make them do it that way. We’d have tax reform so fast …

I saw a news story today saying that the price of UC tuition might go as high as $20,000 to $25,000 per year. As distressing as that sounds, I’d like to remind people that universities typically offer a lot of financial aid to students from needy families. While nobody likes the idea of paying more tuition, I think it could be helpful to charge tuition of $25,000 to families who can afford it, while maintaining a strong financial aid program for families who can’t. Why should I receive a subsidy for my daughter to attend UC when I could afford to pay the tuition?

If +1 is the equivalent of “Like”, then +0 is the equivalent of “Meh”.

A few years ago I worked on a coupons project at Google, and I ended up getting on a mailing list from the Food Marketing Institute in order to understand manufacturer’s coupons. The email they still send me is pretty funny.

I suppose they are related…

When I first set up my blog at sigcrap I enabled comments on the site. This quickly became a pain in the ass, so I ended up disabling the feature. The whole point of social media is to encourage discussion, but it was simply too annoying to moderate comments.

Later on I imported the RSS from my blog into both Facebook and Google Buzz, so I could do my own posting on my site, but let the conversation take place wherever my friends preferred it. This works pretty well, but when someone visits sigcrap.org, they wouldn’t see the conversations that had evolved among their friends. I recently went through the exercise of installing the facebook and google widgets for embedding comments (You’ll see them on the left). Neither one of these is very compelling, but they hint at a future in which your view of a website is tailored to your own social context. When you go to sigcrap.org, you’d see whatever lame comments your friends made about my post, but everyone gets their own view.

I think we have a long ways to go on this, since neither of these widgets is very good yet.

Matt Blaze’s blog is always interesting, but he hits the nail squarely on the head with this one. It even gave me the inspiration for my blog. http://www.crypto.com/blog/copywrongs/.

If I rank my activity in social networking sites, it probably is proportional to the number of friends that I have on these accounts. In decreasing order this would be:

1. my corp buzz friends on my google.com account
2. my facebook friends
3. my public buzz friends on my gmail account
4. my twitter account.
5. my quora account

I’m sure that if you get too many friends on any particular network, your participation will decline due to spam and friendships that are too faint to sustain. What is the tipping point and how would you measure it?