Greg Palmer

I’ll echo Tim Dickinson here…this New York Magazine review just about sums up the Kindle’s aesthetic appeal:

It looks like the unloved remnant of one of those wild nights back in 1987, when an Etch-a-Sketch drank too much Bartles & Jaymes and ended up locked in a three-way with a graphing calculator and a credit-card swiper.

This weekend, I had the privilege of joining open government advocates from around the world to discuss the future of government data. Governments around the world produce a massive amount of information, and usually it’s held close to the chest rather than shared with the public. When it is shared with the public, it’s often done so in a way that limits the public ability to fully utilize that data. This prevents citizens from fully engaging in civic decision-making and from using the vast power of the internet to remix, re-visualize, and develop innovative perspectives on government information.

While I think it’s inappropriate for me to talk about most specifics of my time working in Congress for Chairman Waxman, I’ve developed a passion for open government and citizen access to government.

After gathering in Sebastopol, CA, we worked vigorously this weekend to propose a set of eight principles of open government data. My hope is that these principles are a starting point for serious discussion of how government entities can enhance the value of their data and fully open it to citizens.

While I won’t rehash all the principles here, there are a few key points I want to remark on.

The government’s data is your data. In a democracy, information produced by government belongs to citizens. I think we often forget that, and our government does too. We’re looking for a paradigm-shift that changes the presumption on the part of government from “name a good reason why we should release X” to “name a good reason why we shouldn’t.”

Not only should government’s presumption of release change, but they have a responsibility to ensure that information is readily available to the public. This means more than “we have a website.” You should be able to download, query, and remix government information as much as you want. For techies, this means bulk download, API, and consumer website access. For non-techies, think of it as retail versus wholesale; government should offer data at a retail level on their own website, but also allow bulk access to encourage the unknowable creativity that results from making data public on the web.

There’s much more to say and much more work to be done, but I think this past weekend was a good start.

Update: I’ve found a bit of time to read a few posts out there and I’m still searching for more.
Bradley Horowitz, Ethan Zuckerman, Micah Sifry, John Geraci, and you? (E-mail me or comment if you’ve written about this!)

(PPS - To everybody at the meeting [and other interested folks]: I’ve been trying to find you on Facebook so we can more readily stay in touch. You can find me first by clicking here.)

Sorry I haven’t been attentive lately; I’ve been traveling much more than is healthy, but that will change in a few weeks. In the meantime, I am trying to find some time to write about some important open government work I’ve been helping with.

So I have a new version of Gmail (maybe everyone does?), but it really doesn’t seem all that different. Anyone know what the deal is?

Update: Ok, I spoke too soon. In addition to the new refinements, the address book is all new. (See this post.)

Update II: The new Gmail is, at best, underwhelming. Other than the new address book, I’m not seeing and productivity or workflow enhancements, which is what I’d hoped would come out. The UI is tighter and the whole product is much faster, both of which are welcome enhancements. But the changes seem to be merely cosmetic, and frankly I think that despite the fact that Gmail is a great product, it’s starting to show its age.

My number 1 feature request would be a “merge contacts” button so I could select 2-3 contacts that are actually a single person and merge them. Apple’s address book does this fairly well and it’s a heck of a useful feature when you’ve got thousands of contacts, some of which are clearly duplicates.

What’s your number 1 request for Gmail?

Worked like a charm, and yes, Leopard is faster than its predecessor. I’d like to see someone claim that about Vista! Right now I’m waiting for the first Time Machine backup to complete (42gb takes a while).

So I’m taking the plunge and installing OSX 10.5 Leopard tonight. I’ll let you know how it goes.

(Also, comment: Apple did a fairly cool thing on their online store. They didn’t talk about shipping times, costs, etc. They just said “Ships free. Arrives October 26.” And it did, even though I ordered it yesterday.)

Here’s a simple idea that would improve my online scheduling experience with Tivo:

When you schedule a recording, you can request e-mail confirmation when the recording is scheduled (or when Tivo finds a conflicting recording). So today, I scheduled tonight’s Frontline for recording and received an e-mail with the subject “Status of your request for ‘Frontline’”. How much better for users would it be if that subject said “Success! Your Tivo will record ‘Frontline,” as requested.”

If you are going to offer a downloaded software service, please make sure that downloads are (1) reliable and (2) fast. I’m on a super-fast government network and getting 50 kb/second off of your servers.

“Hi, we’re Amazon and we just changed the entire marketplace.” Again. I’m super-excited about this.

I’ve had two tabs open all morning because I know they deserve to be written about, but I can’t figure out what I want to say. So here goes.

Matt at 37 signals cherry picks some great tips from a more comprehensive list of Amazon.com’s strategies for scaling and managing a web business. I’ll distill it even more into a few of my very favorites:

Work from the customer backward. Focus on value you want to deliver for the customer.

Force developers to focus on value delivered to the customer instead of building technology first and then figuring how to use it.

Use measurement and objective debate to separate the good from the bad. I’ve been to several presentations by ex-Amazoners and this is the aspect of Amazon that strikes me as uniquely different and interesting from other companies. Their deep seated ethic is to expose real customers to a choice and see which one works best and to make decisions based on those tests. (favorite!!)

In any case, check out Matt’s favorites and the original list itself, which contains more details about Amazon’s specific architecture and implementation.