Judah Phillips points to a trend of ISP employing packet sniffers on user traffic:

Site owners collect data about what you do on ONE site (or a portfolio of their sites). ISP’s collect data about what you do on EVERY site you visit. As I understand it, some of these companies create an anonymous profile of your surfing activity by assigning a unique key to your browser.

If this technology is being widely employed by ISPs, then there’s a whole additional layer of people observing our behavior.

In addition to highlighting some interesting possibilities regarding this data capture, he proposes some interesting options for consumers:

• Move to an obvious “opt-in” model with full disclosure. Tracking via “deep packet inspection” should be an all opt-in model. If you want anonymous data from your browser collected so that you can be behaviorally targeted, then you should opt-in to be. Right now, it’s seems to be all opt-out. You probably don’t know if it’s being done to you. It’s buried in fine print you’ve probably never read. Is that your fault you didn’t read the fine print? Yeah, but the point is it shouldn’t be buried in the fine print…
• Provide me with access to the data collected. If I opt-in, I should be able to see the data collected from my browser. It’s very simple. I demand to see what you are collecting about my browser. If you are building a profile, then I demand to see the data collected in the profile. If it’s all anonymous, then explain how it is in detail, and then follow rule #1.
• Enable me to edit or prevent the data from being collected. If I opt-in, I want to be able to edit or prevent certain types of data from being collected. If you’re tracking my browser, alert me before the data is transmitted, so I can decide if I want to share it. If a profile is built, I want to be able to edit it!
• Let me opt-out at any time EASILY. If I’ve opted in, and I’m unhappy with the service, allow me to opt-out simply. Having to set an opt-out cookie on my browser is absolutely and completely absurd. I want to be able to fully opt-out at the ISP level, just once forever, not at the browser level every time cookies are deleted. Make it easy and permanent, not easily deletable.
• Disclose who you sell my data too. Like online list rentals, the next step in all this ISP profiling is selling the data to third-parties. Let me know what you’re doing with my data-before you do it- so I can opt out or prevent it from being sold to parties to which I don’t want it being sold.

I think all of these are solid ideas, but they point to a larger picture. ISPs are important because they can monitor all non-encrypted traffic across your total browsing experience. But do the processes of data collection and the rights of data holders change just because of their power? Shouldn’t the same standards hold across the board? I think the five points he listed above would be a good starting point for a lot of discussion concerning online data capture.

Note: If you’re resistant to the idea of packet sniffing, you can: run an SSH tunnel to a trusted proxy, download Tor, or pay for a service like Anonymizer.

For better or worse Django doesn’t have any real blogging software. The mailing list is peppered by green practitioners asking “what’s the best django blogging software.” To which one of the old dogs on the list will lift it’s head, look left and right, reply is that it’s “trivial in Django to write your own” and sink back down to the floor.

The lack of a first class blog unit has become a bit of a problem though. There’s an empty spot in the trophy case. The question will invariably pop into people’s heads, “So do I use Django for my website or Wordpress?” While a perfectly fine question, it belies the fact that your comparing frameworks and an application and wondering which one is better. Are there ‘Wordpress developers’? And if so, do you really want to be one?

So it came with some excitement to learn that Django now has a fairly advanced blogging app, byteflow. Among the selling points:

“It has very clean codebase and developers, which are struggling to keep it so.”

Heh. That’s a dig at someone, but I’m not sure exactly who. Anyway, struggle on comrades.

My question is that with a contingent of great hackers why hasn’t anybody released a Django based blogging platform up until now. One reason is that by making it trivial to write a blog, nobody wanted to do more than the trivial work required to get it going. And great hackers don’t want to release trivial code. Would Beethoven want to release that jingle he wrote for AutoZone?

Perhaps a deeper reason is that blog/cms/site-swallowing software is an unruly beast with complex data flows resulting in spaghetti code. Exactly the kind of molasses you’d rather not swim in.

The reason that I care about this issue, is that there’s really much more you can do with Python and Django with ease than you can with Wordpress and PHP. The Wordpress page definitely looks a lot sexier than the Byteflow page (as do their exemplars). But beware.

Oh, if Python installs (setup.py, cough) went easier and mod_python didn’t require apache fiddling (more difficult in a shared hosting setting), we’d probably have universal health care coverage by now.

Everyday you have thousands of people installing Wordpress, now maybe you can staunch the flow and get them on the Python/Django path.

MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.

Google recently announced that they were retiring support for OAI-PMH in Sitemaps:

We’ve found that the information we gain from our support of OAI-PMH is disproportional to the amount of resources required to support it. Fewer than 200 sites are using OAI-PMH for Google Sitemaps at the moment.

Amen. As someone who once implemented an OAI-PMH service I can say that the web does it what it needs to do quite well without overblown standards. Committee-based ham-fisted over-architectures have their place, the dustbin of history.

Well, we’re in the midst of a redesign. And normally I wouldn’t put out a notice about a redesign until it’s all done, but the last redesign was so horrendous that something needed to be done about it. Well, why would I leave such an important internet property as inkhorn in such a mis-managed state? The answer is both simple and complex. Suffice it to say, I got a new job and was working pretty heavily.  And I would have kept at the last redesign, but it really wasn’t enough of something to build on.

I managed to find a little time in a busy schedule and pushed out an inkhorn that suits my taste a little better. I’m still using WordPress as the engine. Feedburner is now powering the RSS. Stat Counter and Google Analytics are driving the analysis (more later on the choice of analysis). And del.icio.us is fueling the links.

As a smart person once said, “Nothing endures but change.” As a result, I wouldn’t expect a lot here to remain the same for too long. I would expect colors to be tweaked and a font-family or two to change. But I hope that I’ve got enough of a personal platform here to keep things going. Time will tell.

The other morning defining event is email. When I first sit down at the computer and load the morning email, I’m, again, looking for complexity and inspiration. Who on the planet took time to send me a great email? Something I can dig my teeth into and leverage my complex coffee high for an equally inspirational response? This morning the mail read, “What are the pros and cons of having design report into engineering vs. product management?”

-Rands In Repose: Coffee and Design

Stoopid questions at press events now get ‘gates’? Fun times.

I’m the Jackass of the Week.

The lead at Mac Rumors was apparently a bit miffed that he wasn’t invited to the new Apple product announcement today. ‘So what did he do about it?’ He posted a review of the Helio Ocean. I happen to think this is a pretty decent tactic.Nonetheless, this stunt comes at a price. It roiled some of the fan-boys who frequent the site. To wit, one replied,

Mac Rumors lost some points in my book tonight.

Folks, that’s someone claiming that a rumor’s site dropped a notch.  And not for a missed or fabricated rumor mind you.  That would be a ding on the site’s bread and butter. This was far worse. This was stooping to journalistic tactics.  Zeesh. If it’s all about making friends, then the converse has to be constantly taken into account. (Yes, I read some comments on a rumor’s site.  And yes, I feel ashamed about that.)

Normalization Is for Sissies.

Having (years ago) started the tradition of having rowdy presentations to armed audiences, I could hardly complain!

Arming your audience is quite an interesting idea.

real groups that engage in brainstorming consistently generate about half the number of ideas they would have produced if the groups individuals had [worked] alone.

Interesting idea, no idea about the methodologies behind it.