What Would Google Do?

I first heard about this new book from a speech the author, Jeff Jarvis, gave on Fora.tv in February. The book had just come out, and he was making the speaking circuit. I just finished reading the book and it is truly great!

About an hour ago, Tech President blog, posted a message about the keynote address Jeff gave at the Government Web Managers Conference today. Micah Sifry posted many of his remarks, nearly in real time:

• Give the people control, we will use it. Jeff describes blogging about his "Dell hell." Dell ignored the bloggers, their policy was "look don't touch" the blogs. But lots of people started pointing to his post. Then after about a year, they started blogging.
• He asks how many in the audience have read the Cluetrain Manifesto, and only about 3-4 raise their hands.
• There is an inverse relationship between control and trust, says David Weinberger. When you don't give up control, you aren't trusting the people. You're saying they're a bunch of dummies. When you don't trust them, you don't believe in democracy or capitalism or freedom of religion.
• Can we make transparency the default for government? Make everything clickable, linkable, searchable. We'd have millions more people watching and participating in helping make it better.

As I read the passages in What Would Google Do?, I try to imagine what government would be like if they followed these principles. I imagine the joy members would get when professional societies and non-profit organizations were more open and transparent.

A Better Tomorrow

A few months ago, I was asked by some friends at the American Institute of Steel Construction (AISC) to write an article on performance-improvement auditing for their magazine, Modern Steel Construction. I received my copy of the April 2009 edition of the magazine today and was quite pleased with the results.

You can download a pdf version of the article from the magazine site. I also created a snipurl shortcut: http://snipurl.com/whyaudit

The Big Takeover

There's a new story in Rolling Stone magazine about the global economic crisis. It isn't about money - it's about power. How Wall Street insiders are using the bailout to stage a revolution.

Portions of the story are written in salty language and will probably be offensive to those over 30, but the message by author Matt Taibbi is very powerful.

He starts with the rise of Joseph Cassano as head of AIG Financial Products (London) just when Senator Phil Gramm of Texas was pushing laissez-faire deregulation through Congress. Gramm and his pals seriously changed the Glass-Steagall Act, passed after the Great Depression, to allow commercial banks to get into the investment banking business. Those changes also allowed these same banks to get into the insurance business. This allowed Cassano and AIG to bundle and sell collateralized-debt obligations (CDOs). Another change pushed by Gramm allowed AIG and others insure these obligations with Credit Default Swaps (CDSs). Both of these instruments were fluff.

Taibbi's story goes on to tell how Congress and the Executive Branch protected this sham when the Europeans and others were beginning to have doubts in 2007. Hank Paulson, formerly with Goldman Sachs, protected all his pals.

What disturbes me the most from reading Taibbi's story is the lack of accountability from so many people and organizations who knew this was all wrong. If there was ever a need for transparancy in government and financial institutions, this was it. Those who took us for a ride have walked away very, very wealthy.

Conficter Worm Test

Here's a page for a simple test of the Conficter worm:
http://www.heise.de/security/dienste/browsercheck/tests/conficker/conficker_e.shtml