Category: Data Custody

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Data Custody Discovery and Curation

“Notion is eating the web” – Part 5

(Part 4 – A Notion-hosted site I built)

The catch is that, quite simply, it’s a closed system and a closed format. And while you can point your domain to it, it’s also not something you host. Your data and your business is at risk if you’re locked out of your Notion account, or if Notion’s systems are breached. If Notion begins to charge for public hosting or removes/restricts its free plan, you’ll incur costs just like your self-hosted WordPress installation, but without any of the control. This isn’t specific to Notion, but it is definitely applicable to it.

This is the problem with no-code systems and tools in general. The reduction in friction is almost always at the cost of control over data. In this case, you can in theory keep a local copy of all the data you put into Notion – I have all of the icons, the photographs, the text in Markdown, tables in CSV. But the value of Notion isn’t in the data. It’s in the meta-data. It’s in its ability to organise my coffee-related data and text on the same page. To create galleries out of simple tabular data. To make it possible for me to organise my coffee database for myself and offer that same database to the world via the web. It would just not be the same for me to create HTML pages – open format – of each of the roasts and brew methods, to link to different brew methods from roast pages and vice verse. HTML is a linked graph. Notion is databases. There is value in those roast <> brew method relationships.

I’d love to see WordPress implement a version of this. With the Gutenberg publishing system, it has already taken a block-oriented approach like Notion has.

If one of those blocks can be a database – not just a table – of WordPress pages, it could transform what a WordPress site could be.

(ends)

Categories
Audience as Capital Data Custody Discovery and Curation

“Notion is eating the web” – Part 4

(Part 3 – how Notion changes the game when it comes to easily creating flexible, data-rich web page)

The best way to learn a tool is to use it to solve an actual problem.

I’d given Notion a try a couple of times when it was much newer. When they dropped an important limitation on the free plan, I tried it once again, but I still didn’t really get it. More recently, I read, this time in detail, an extraordinary profile of Marie Poulin, who uses Notion to organise several aspects of her life, capturing and displaying detailed personal data. It’s at that point that something clicked. Everything was a database, and the entire proposition of Notion was displaying that data in any number of different ways.

Now I have been working with a friend to create a website and a community around coffee – specifically, people in India who brew their own coffee. The hypothesis is that there are hundreds of such people across the country not, but there’s no destination for all of them to share their journeys, experiences, questions. We wanted to start by sharing our own favourite roasts, cafes, brew methods, roasters, articles, and take it from there. Content → Community → Commerce, like we have seen before in our series on Linear Commerce.

I defaulted to WordPress for this project. I already pay for hosting for this site and have WordPress set up. The idea was to turn it into a multi-site installation and have the domain point to the coffee site’s wordpress. This was exactly what I did over oneweekend. We had written content for the site’s About page, so that went up. And stalled. It wasn’t simple to create a gallery of the roasts, roasters and brew methods that I had wanted us to get started with. Even with Elementor and its Gallery widget – it was just too clunky.

That was where I was at when I re-read the Poulin article. It took me a single weekend on Notion and fewer hours than I had spent on WordPress to create exactly what I had wanted. Not just the setup – all the content too.

This is the Notion site as it stands today. It’s an early public draft and we work on it nearly every day. Notion makes it simple to add a lot of data easily. Because there’s no edit mode, any changes we make to content or layout are available to the public immediately.

Made and published entirely on Notion

(Part 5 – What’s the catch?)

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Data Custody

Dropbox and the Digital Hub

Returning for just a bit to our discussion earlier about Mozilla’s big opportunity to be the trusted, neutral, privacy-first custodian of data in the 21st century. It seems increasingly like Dropbox sees itself as that custodian. [1] It recently released a set of features that points towards that positioning:

  • a password manager
  • support for encrypted files/folders – though in beta at the time of this writing
  • automated backup of common folders – Desktop, Documents and Downloads, which it is calling computer backup
  • digital signatures to sign files stored in Dropbox – also in beta

Dropbox already

  • syncs files in the main Dropbox folder – the core service
  • backs up phone photos
  • allows for collaborative document creation and editing like Google Docs, with its Paper product

This checks off a lot of the services we’d discussed for Mozilla to offer, and is for Dropbox a more ambitious positioning than a cloud storage providers, which Steve Jobs had once dismissed as a ‘feature, not a product’

[1] Without of course Mozilla’s reputation for privacy-consciousness.

Categories
Data Custody Decentralisation and Neutrality Privacy and Anonymity The Next Computer Wellness when Always-On

The New Middle – Part 2

(Part 1)

Take privacy. There is a near-critical mass of people aware and concerned about how much data faceless companies have about them without their informed consent and how disparate data sets may be combined to manipulate their choices. But many of them aren’t aware of browser-based ad-blockers, their capabilities, how to install and update them. Network-wide ad-blockers such as pi-hole are simply beyond them.

This will change. Privacy-consciousness is going to be an attractive positioning for a business to take in the near future, because the New Middle is searching for them. The email service Protonmail, the browser Brave, the password manager 1Password, the two-factor authentication service Authy (now part of Twilio), the self-hosted personal information manager Nextcloud – these are all the vanguard for well-designed privacy-centric software but I don’t think they have yet marketed to the New Middle, which still reads, watches and listens to the same things the Mainstream does. Apple is the lone company I see having already staked out an unshakeable positioning here. We have recently discussed Mozilla’s opportunity to own this market as well. There is an opportunity for hardware too – imagine a router with firmware that bundles pi-hole, that does not need OpenWRT to be user-installed (side note: Apple’s hardware is already privacy-conscious).

All this is still just one area – privacy. Think about similar New Middle companies in the other areas we listed above. Pervasive anonymity as a service, anonymous-only social network and communities. Attention preservation for you and your kids. ISPs and communications providers publicly committed to net neutrality. Since there are overlaps between many of these, companies can and will compete and win the New Middle in more than one of these areas. Lastly, for large-scale reach, they will need to raise capital. Many of these will do so via the public market. They’ll make for attractive investment opportunities.

(ends)

Categories
Data Custody Decentralisation and Neutrality Privacy and Anonymity Wellness when Always-On

The New Middle – Part 1

The New Middle is a emerging class of people who are beginning to care about the issues in technology we frequently discuss here on the site.

Until recently, when it came to privacy, anonymity, attention fatigue, data custody, net neutrality, intellectual property and patents, even ergonomics and sustainable computing, people either used to be part of The Mainstream or used to be nerds that worked in the technology industry. There were a few outliers for sure, but no overlap.

The Mainstream neither cared for nor understood the implications of such issues on themselves, their community, their society. This indifference would shock, even offend, the nerds. The nerds on their part understood at least some of these as a result of their education. Some of them built software, hardware, service as part of their day job that involved these issues. Consequently, they cared passionately enough to make deliberate choices that would seem very odd to the Mainstream.

As technology in all its forms across all domains has become part of everyday life, over the past twenty years it has gotten extensive coverage in the national press, in print, TV and for the recent past with Netflix and such services, online. The coverage has shifted from being effusive about the transformative possibilities of new technology – “your life will never be the same after you buy a personal computer!” – to a more sober take on the effects on their ill-effects on our wellness and safety.

That has created a vastly more widespread awareness among the Mainstream. It’s affected a sizeable minority of them to think and care enough about how technology affects them, their kids, their friends that they’ve begun looking for ways to gain some control. They are no longer the Mainstream. They are the New Middle.

The New Middle is searching for tools and means to exercise this control at their level of technical competence but are underserved because they haven’t existed as an identifiable segment before.

(Part 2 – an example)

Categories
Data Custody Decentralisation and Neutrality Making Money Online Privacy and Anonymity The Dark Forest of the Internet The Next Computer

Mozilla’s Grand Internet Opportunity – Part 2

(Part 1)

But it means so much more to be a viable alternative to the internet giants of today, particularly with regard to being a good steward of public information and interpersonal communication.

Imagine a neutral paid subscription service for the following:

  • Contacts, calendar, reminders/todos
  • Documents
  • Notes
  • Photos

Now imagine that neutral service expanding to include

  • A secure email service and client a la Protonmail
  • A private 1:1 and group messaging service a la Telegram
  • A private video-calling service – there is no good privacy oriented provider today. Telegram has claimed it will add video support later in 2020
  • Collaborative documents, such as that available with NextCloud Hub if you self-host

Let’s talk about self-hosting. Mozilla could improve upon the Nextcloud concept to bundle domain, hosting and productivity/communications right out of the box. We saw a few months ago how web hosting companies could be the new internet giants if only they could be more imaginative of their own role in the internet. Mozilla could be that web host.

The arc of awareness is bending inexorably towards a substitute to the centralised web that came to characterise the 2010s.

Tight bundling of PIM, media and messaging on mobile leaves little room for a third party. Microsoft has tried to be it, but has little to offer by way of differentiation. Mozilla on the other hand has a clear positioning – and two decades of delivering on its promises. It doesn’t need to win the majority of phone users today – it can count on a minority that cares growing into a plurality.

(Part 3 – Mozilla seems rather far from that vision today)

Categories
Data Custody Decentralisation and Neutrality Making Money Online Privacy and Anonymity The Dark Forest of the Internet The Next Computer

Mozilla’s Grand Internet Opportunity – Part 1

Mozilla recently announced that it’d be laying off a quarter of its workforce. This also includes a “new focus on technology” and “a new focus on economics”.

The Verge’s article has the Mozilla Corp CEO say “… Mozilla will initially focus on products such as Pocket, its VPN service, its VR chatroom Hubs, and new “security and privacy” tools.”, although I cannot find that in the blog post she authored.

In the original blog post, the CEO stated that Mozilla’s long-term goal was “to build new experiences that people love and want, that have better values and better characteristics inside those products.”, which is neither here nor there.

I think Mozilla has a huge opportunity here, but its vision, at least as articulated publicly, is not broad enough.

The opportunity I see is the following: there is a growing section of people who have become aware, through increased press coverage, of the dominance of a few american internet companies and their own dependence on these companies [1]. They aren’t going to be Stallman-like in their use of technology any time soon – the trade off is far too unfavourable – but they are looking for reasonable alternatives and are willing to pay for them. Baker the CEO has said exactly this, that Mozilla plans to “build and invest in products and services that will give people alternatives to conventional Big Tech.”

Well to begin with, Mozilla should create a set of paid privacy-oriented products that anyone can setup on their phone to attain a basic level of privacy protection: the Firefox browser (exists), a VPN (available in a small set of countries), an DNS-sinkhole adblocker, a password manager and a second-factor authenticator app. They’ll need great documentation and guides about how to set this up – in this regard the Mozilla community is a great asset.

[1] See the reporter Kashmir Hill’s 2019 attempt to go a month and a half without services from Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft.

(Part 2 – It gets even bigger)

Categories
Data Custody Discovery and Curation Privacy and Anonymity Real-World Crypto

Use cases for real world crypto

This bit an interview with the founder of the ecommerce checkout system Fast:

Most of what people have predicted with cryptocurrency hasn’t happened. They’ve identified the right problems – payments need to be easier, identification needs to be better, we need to remove friction – but cryptocurrency isn’t the right technology for that. Part of the reason is the solution needs to be formed within the sphere of existing regulations and government identification.

It’s a strikingly different take and it’s articulated clearly what I have felt for so long. Blockchain-based alternatives to existing regulated use cases will have to fight a series of uphill battles to get traction. With regulators and governments, as the founder Allison points out. With entrenched interests and incumbents, and their vendors/suppliers. And with customers, who’re used to known processes and norms.

This is why tokenized real estate offered as investment has not taken off. Ditto with tokenized financial instruments such as ETFs. Or KYC on-the-blockchain. Or why Facebook’s Libra is highly unlikely to make it in its original avataar. All are great ideas, but there are too many entities that militate against them.

However. There are other problems that have no good solution today. Online trust is a problem that, as Facebook’s story has shown, is far too valuable to place in the hands of a single entity. Just yesterday we saw how in the news media, new institutions may emerge that become custodians of online reputation. Of brokering trustless relationships between source and publisher, between producer and writer.

DLT is also uniquely suited to solve issues with non-repudiation. Some weeks ago a consultant had reached out asking about a potential blockhain-based solution to problems of data access within a client company. It turned out that the problem was one of non-repudiation, and I suggested a fairly simple framework around an existing workflow that could have used either private or public blockchain (explaining the pros and cons of each). It was simple precisely because non-repudiation is inherent to DLT.

I also see provenance, or similar problems in supply chains, as an opportunity where the value of DLT hasn’t yet been captured by an company. This is not for lack of trying; it’s just very hard for all participants in a supply chain to sign up for it, both technically and because it disrupts special interests. It’s likely it’ll take off in a relatively self-contained subsection of a supply chain, and expand from there outwards. Perhaps it’ll even be this trial that the port of Rotterdam recently kicked off.

DLT – real world crypto – is a paradigm shift in the truest sense of that overused term. For instance solutions to the problem of online identity have so far tried to create improved versions of physical-world implementations, but because DLT makes possible trustless transactions, if obviates the need for verifiable identity itself for many use cases.

The killer app for Blockchain isn’t going to be an app that has killed before.

Categories
Audience as Capital Data Custody Discovery and Curation Real-World Crypto

From trust in institutions to trust in individuals – Part 2

(Part 1)

Like we saw in the series on Linear Commerce and communities, we are in the early stages of emergence of thousands of people, each a trusted source in their niche area of interest. When this comes to news, we’re going to see the golden era of independent journalism, where the person, not the institution, is the brand, is where trust resides.

The problem with this is one of longevity. Simply: institutions outlive individuals.

The person who you end up trusting for information and insight into an area that matters to you could take a break, come down with illness, retire or pass away. They are the brand. The trust you repose in that brand isn’t transferable, even to the staff they work with.

A small example of this is Tim Carmody’s Amazon Chronicles newsletter. It was ambitious, and it delivered. His introduction:

There’s no shortage of good Amazon stories, and good Amazon coverage… I think stories like this are just as important and just as interesting (more so, actually) as the latest on Jeff Bezos’s sex life or speculation about Amazon’s earnings and stock price. I like stories that help me see how a company like Amazon, with its tangled web of services and products, entwines itself into our lives, both consumer and commercial… But who is going to gather stories like these and help put them into context? Who, really, is able to take the time to get the big picture when it comes to what’s intermittently the biggest and most influential company in the world?

Also—it’s been a while, so I’ll forgive you if you don’t remember—I was a damned good Amazon reporter. At Wired and The Verge, I wrote stories about Amazon, its reach, and its ambition before it was clear to everyone that Amazon was going to be AMAZON. I’m proud of those stories. It was my favorite beat. I missed it, and wanted to find a way to cover it again.

– Statement of Purpose

The less than two dozen posts between Jan and August 2019 were each some of the best writing I have read on the matter.

But sometime last year, Tim underwent a shoulder replacement surgery and put the newsletter “on hiatus”. He brought it back for a couple more months later in the year, but the last post on was 1st August. He also seems to be off social media so the status of the newsletter is unclear.

This would be different if it were set up and run as a media operation. There’d be other cons, for sure, and perhaps Tim himself wouldn’t have liked to run it as one. But it would be about more than one person, with some provisions for continuity.

Institutions vs individuals also reminds me of the book Sapiens, which in one chapter discusses how humans’ ability to think in the abstract as a group meant they could create virtual entities vastly more powerful than themselves. As this review states:

Yuval uses the example of Peugeot, a limited liability corporation intersubjective. You could kill every employee and stakeholder in Peugeot, but the corporate entity would still exist. The building isn’t Peugeot — it can move offices. Peugeot could make planes rather than cars, so it isn’t what they do that defines them. The only thing that makes Peugeot Peugeot is everyone’s agreement that Peugeot exists, duly noted in the papers of some lawyer.

Yuval also goes on to state how a judge could decree Peugeot disbanded and the company would cease to exist, despite the factory, employees, supply chain exactly as they were before the judgement. The point is that institutions aren’t subject to human limitations: they can’t fall physically sick, there are no physical constraints on their growth, no natural caps on their lifespans.

I think that the shift of trust from institutions to individuals, while real, welcome and exciting, is a pendulum that’ll soon swing back towards institutions, although of a different kind. It may be that some of these new institutions are custodians of reputations of individual publishers, of social norms that define reputation. That trust may reside on a distributed ledger; those social norms codified in a contract. Other institutions that solve the problem of discovery of online publishers may emerge. Their mechanisms of discovery too may be published on blockchains. Still others will broker trustless cooperation between these tens of thousands (more?) of independent publishers – again using DLT.

This is going to be fascinating to watch.

Categories
Data Custody Product Management The Next Computer Wellness when Always-On

Feedback and motivation, app edition – Part 1

We saw yesterday that I moved my Fitbit app to the home screen. This placement of the app is solely for me to log my water intake, available as a home screen quick action:

I have ended up using this despite me creating my own iOS Shortcut. Even though my shortcut is easy to launch, offers a menu of sizes instead of having to type an amount, and stores my intake and timestamp in an open plaintext format. This was puzzling to me.

When I reflected on this, I understood that the Ftibit app gave me a view of my progress towards the day’s goal (which I had set), and compared it with previous days’. My Shortcut logged data with less friction, but I have yet to build in any feedback about the day’s total intake.

That little gap, that failure to close the loop – led me to unconsciously gravitate towards something less elegant and more time-consuming. There’s a little bit of the Hooked framework at play here:

Trigger, Action and Investment are self-explanatory in this context. The reward here is not variable in the way checking for new email and for Instagram likes is, but it’s good to know how close I am to my daily intake goal – I’ve forgotten from the last time I logged my water intake and checked.

Understanding this has helped me be aware of how much I’m influenced by such signals. I’ll be more deliberate in building these into systems I create for myself, and to watch out for such patterns in systems I interact with, beyond obvious ones like badgers and notifications.

(Part 2 – another app in my routine that incorporates feedback and motivation)