A Bug With A Logo?

Heartbleed

We all know that we need to take our online security seriously, but we rarely do anything to improve our own situations. Even when we hear about data breaches, the odds that we’ll go and change passwords are relatively slim. We might get occasional emails and updates from the sites we log into about our security, but we tend not to get worked up for anything less than proof someone has been messing around with our personal bank accounts.

But Heartbleed has been different.

From the first moment I heard about Heartbleed, everyone I know has been taking it fairly seriously. Part of that is due to the nature of this particular security breach: the amount of data that was made accessible by a vulnerability in OpenSSL is enormous. It would be easier to list which major websites weren’t affected than which were. But while the details of the Heartbleed breach are enough to get programmers and website publishers worked up, they’re probably too technical to really intrigue the average person browsing the web. So why do so many people seem to know about Heartbleed?

A Well-Branded Security Breach

Fundamentally, Heartbleed is different from security breaches that have come before. It’s been branded and marketed, something that no one has really tried to do historically. The traditional approach to announcing you’ve found a security exploit was to write out a brief description of the problem and send it around to everyone you expect the problem affected. There wasn’t exactly an incentive to take action.

For the researchers who uncover security breaches, there isn’t necessarily a clear benefit to promote their work in other ways, however: the status quo was enough to get them credit for their work and collect any financial rewards (like rewards offered by companies to researchers who found security breaches in their systems before those problems could be exploited).

Heartbleed’s branding may prove to be a turning point in what we expect from a security breach announcement.

That branding wasn’t a particularly major effort from the organization that launched Heartbleed.com. That company, Codenomicon, didn’t discover the vulnerability, but does help other organizations secure their systems against malicious attacks.

Miia Vuontisjärvi, a security analyst at Codenomicon, told TechCrunch that the site started as an internal Q&A that Codenomicon’s experts wrote in an effort to get a handle on Heartbleed’s potential impact.

“Experiencing the pain of the bug first hand we got a nagging feeling that this calls for a ‘Bugs 2.0′ approach in getting the message out in an emergency. Ossi, one of our experts came up with Heartbleed as an internal codeame and from there on thing lead to the other. The domain was available and our artist Leena Snidate did a an excellent job in putting our pain into the logo. It all went much faster than expected.

“When the vulnerability became public we realized that this is going to be a crisis communication. We said what we had to say in the Q&A with as little litter as possible. We put it available on a low latency and high bandwidth content delivery network so that it is very accessible for anyone in the need. Based on initial reactions we did some minor edits but we quickly saw the Internet community picked the issue up in an astonishing way.”

Crisis Management in Open Source

One of the most noteworthy points about Codenomicon’s efforts is that OpenSSL is an open source project; Codenomicon had the opportunity to step in because the developers behind OpenSSL are all volunteers. When software is developed by a single company as a proprietary product, there are typically more concrete procedures to handle bugs and security breaches — usually developed in order to minimize liability for the company in question. I can’t imagine an established company being able to vet and publish information about a security breach in this fashion.

But while Codenomicon stepped up and helped make information about a particular security exploit easier to understand and share, there have been plenty of problems with open source code in the past where no one took on that sort of leadership role. That’s partly because taking a leadership role in the middle of a crisis is tough; contributing to open source code bases doesn’t automatically enable you to field questions from the press, manage a user notification process, or brand an exploit so that users will upgrade their systems.

The open source community, as a whole, could benefit from establishing some best practices on how to handle this sort of flaw. At a minimum, just creating a check list that researchers can follow to make announcements more useful to the average internet user could be beneficial. While that’s not my area of expertise, there were both good and bad factors in the announcement of Heartbleed that could be used as a starting point for such a response framework:

  • Advance warning: Some large companies got advance warning of Heartbleed, which allowed them to patch their system before the exploit was announced more widely. While I have no problem with offering advance warning to companies likely to be hit hard by these sorts of breaches, there’s definitely room for a more systematic approach to deciding who to contact and how to handle the question of advance warning after the fact (if only so that complaining about not getting advance warning doesn’t become more of a story than the original exploit).
  • Embedded devices: As more devices are are plugged into the internet, security announcements need to at least mention what sort of systems will be affected by a given breach. It isn’t always possible to guess how a given piece of open source software may be used, but such warnings need to be offered to the greatest extent possible.
  • Points of contact: When we’re dealing with a breach in open source, where everyone involved is a volunteer, choosing who will serve as a point of contact is tough. These sorts of situations can require numerous hours to resolve, let alone to handle email. But someone has to do it, even if it’s someone outside the core development team.

Some of these points could be made easier with the application of a little money. With Heartbleed as motivation, several companies are looking at the value of investing some money into the open source infrastructure that drives their business ventures. Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and many other companies are on board to support a new group called The Core Infrastructure Initiative. Hopefully, this initiative will be enough to help major open source projects handle both security and breaches more effectively in the future.

Crying ‘Security Breach’ Too Often?

Heartbleed’s branding may be new, but researchers are starting to embrace the idea. In a post on a new vulnerability, researcher Matthew Green noted:

“First, if Heartbleed taught us one thing, it’s that when it comes to TLS vulnerabilities, branding is key. Henceforth, and with apologies to Bhargavan, Delignat-Lavaud, Pironti, Langley and Ray (who actually discovered the attack), for the rest of this post I will be referring to the vulnerability simply as “3Shake”. I’ve also taken the liberty of commissioning a logo. I hope you like it.”

But we need to consider if embracing this level of branding is a good idea for all security breaches. Embracing this sort of promotion can make it harder to get people to take action in the future: just like a child crying ‘wolf’ may not get attention when it matters, an important security breach can be lost in the mix. Reserving this level of branding for the truly crucial lapses in security is necessary to ensure it still works.

Security expert Bruce Schneier put it bluntly in an interview with the Harvard Business Review: “There’s a risk that we’re going to be accused of “crying wolf.” If there isn’t blood on the streets or planes colliding in midair, people are going to wonder what all the fuss was about — like Y2K. If you slap logos on every vulnerability, people will ignore them and distrust your motives. But it’s like storms. The bad ones get names for a reason.”

It’s also worth noting that Codenomicon helps its clients handle security issues. Making those security issues easier to understand and respond to is a brilliant piece of marketing work (along with a good deed that benefits internet users as a whole). But this sort of marketing effort is easy to exploit by companies that choose to do so. Whipping up a frenzy over relatively minor security breaches might make sense for some companies’ bottom lines. That’s absolutely not the case with Heartbleed and I’m not trying to make Codenomicon’s motives sound suspect, but it is a factor to consider as we see more security vulnerabilities branded for easy consumption.

Photo Credit: Leena Snidate

The Age Of The Uncredentialed Curator

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Tumblrs full of kitten pictures, websites ranking the helpfulness of individual restaurant reviews, Pinterest pages full of tasty ways to prepare vegetables you’ve never even heard of — at its core, the internet is about collections. We find topics we care about or people who we want to connect with and we build lists.

Some of these collections contain original contributions, like blog posts or memes. Others are purely an organization of what the collector in question finds online. The same has held true of most information management over the years: a library is also a curated collection of books judged to be worth consulting, as well as records or other information the library may have gathered or even created. It’s how we handle anything complex.

You Don’t Need Credentials to Buy a Domain Name

But while it’s tough to get the money to build a new library without a degree in library science, you can set up a new website for under a hundred dollars. Calling the curators who are building the information collections we base our lives on these days ‘uncredentialed’ may be overly kind: not to be cruel, but the only requirements for getting a Tumblr or Pinterest account is a valid email address.

That low barrier to entry isn’t a problem, but it is a fact we need to acknowledge if we’re going to talk about curation. When anyone can publish their curational efforts, effectively by accident, there’s a question of how useful those efforts are to anyone else. I’ve seen plenty of Pinterest boards that are meant to be intensely personal — it’s where people plan weddings and pick out tattoos for themselves, far more than they focus on sharing what they’ve found with other people, no matter what its creators intended.

There is value in that sort of collecting; I spend plenty of time browsing through other peoples’ Pinterest boards myself. They’re sources of things I might be interested in, based on my connection with the curator, as well as information about what my friends and family enjoy.

But there is a lot of noise coming through these channels, as well as through all the various options we have for publishing any sort of collection. No one can pay attention to every single channel that we can access. We have to be selective in a way that a scholar who had to physically go to wherever information happened to be never was.

Who Curates the Curators?

When finding the right piece of information or viewing the right piece of art required days of travel, there was (perhaps surprisingly) less of a problem in figuring out what information to pursue. With only one expert to talk to, you got a good pair of boots and headed out to talk to him.

Today, the wealth of information we can access is dangerous. How many times have you looked at one article on Wikipedia, only to find yourself engrossed in articles about Pleistocene megafauna or glam metal music hours later? We no longer face questions about what information is worth preserving or worth traveling days to learn. Rather, we have the problem of deciding which information is worth paying attention to. The job of the curator is far different right now than it was a few centuries ago.

Personal curation solves some small element of this question: quietly saving links that will help you go back and cook exactly the recipe you’re after or purchase the perfect outfit can let us handle a lot of the small questions in our lives. But when we’re taking on a new topic, either personally or professionally, curators have to provide more information. I recently read an article that covered the entire history of a musical genre I had no familiarity with; when I went looking for information, I was quickly overwhelmed. No single curator had taken it upon herself to create an introductory guide to the genre or even to suggest ten albums a new listener should pick up.

There may be a fan of that particular genre with a great playlist on a website devoted to music somewhere, but that hypothetical playlist doesn’t show up through a cursory web search — all that I’m really prepared to do if I have anything else on my plate I really need to be working on. There isn’t a lot of incentive for someone curating resources for her private consumption to bother publicizing that sort of resource, by the way: it’s rare that such a specialized list will earn the author any money, though a small amount of niche fame can be possible. Even that level of fame can be a double-edged sword: I have a friend who is an expert in an incredibly esoteric topic (as a life-long hobbyist who has published about his work online, he’s essentially one of a handful of experts in the world). He gets oddball questions all the time, to the point where it would take him significant effort to field these questions — but people aren’t willing to pay him for the answers. While a few people will continue sharing information out of love for a topic, there are more who will discontinue their work because of the effort involved.

To get the information we need, then, we’re left looking to a secondary level of curators: people who will seek out those awesome playlists and other collections and point attention to them. I’m not so sure that this is a long-term solution, however: while there are certain bloggers and other online curators making a living from ‘finding cool crap on the internet’ (the folks behind BoingBoing and Dooce come to mind as very different examples), those people are few and far between. In the meanwhile, however, there are plenty of people who aspire to that role or to otherwise make a living on the internet. There are not so many, however, that I can find playlists for somewhat obscure musical niches.

Expert Curation is Getting Expensive

There is an understood value of some sorts of curation: particularly talented curators who can make topics interesting and relevant have already found a variety of business models online. But if an expert curator is willing to specialize in certain fields, the money associated with their work can increase.

In fact, the amount some companies are willing to pay certain types of expert curators keeps going up. This obviously includes people who can curate interesting information to create an alluring social media feed — most companies are happy to pump money into marketing if it results in a corresponding increase in sales. However, other types of curation are in high demand. Anyone who can effectively parse and contextualize information about complicated topics (like business and finance) is very employable these days. Whether they’re writing broad advice for the masses or telling an individual company when to jump, an expert who can pull together different sources of data is incredibly valuable.

But the expense of accessing expert curators is going up, no matter what job description you have in mind. Collecting data is a time intensive process, full of time spent pursuing potentially useful tidbits only to find that they don’t really fit in with what you’re curating. I track all sorts of topics and just evaluating sources can be intense: when anyone can post anything to the internet, you can’t exactly assume that each piece of information you find is equally reliable. The more information a curator needs to sort through, the more expensive that sort of work is going to become.

It’s understandable that with the added cost of hiring someone as a curator, an employer or a client is going to want to see credentials as proof that the curator in question can handle the work. But that sort of proof may not be necessary, at least for any curator who can build a collection before hunting for work. An appealing collection of information, whether it’s a blog, a Pinterest board, or a book speaks for a curator’s ability far more than any other credential might — at least in this era of too-easily accessible information.

What do you curate? Do you feel like credentials make it easier to collect the ideas and items you focus on? Or do credentials just get in the way of the work you want to do?

Photo credit: Ginny

Should You Touch The Code On Your Blog?

Looking under the hood on a website can be intimidating, especially if your creative talents don’t lie in that particular direction. Just the same, I consider tinkering with the code for my website to be one of the best decisions I’ve made for my business.

To be clear, I don’t mean building my own website with one of those ‘automatic website builders’ that certain web hosts offer. I mean that I know a little about what makes my content management system (currently WordPress) tick, as well as a bit about HTML and CSS — the parts that drive the design of the site. As a business owner, it’s tempting to try to do everything myself, but that’s not actually a good decision. I know better than to rely on my own coding skills when it comes to putting together a site. Rather, my main goal is to know enough to be an active part of the process.

I like to compare my level of coding knowledge to my level of plumbing knowledge: I can’t fix a major leak, but I can at least deal with a dripping faucet. I have enough general knowledge that I can handle minor fixes on my own, especially if I can Google for a tip or a tutorial. Perhaps more importantly, I know enough that neither plumbing nor web design jargon sounds like a different language to me. It’s a lot harder for someone to sell me something I don’t need or take advantage of me. If only for that reason, I definitely encourage improving your technical literacy whenever possible — even if you don’t need to use it directly.

Do We Need an Algorithm Beat?

The idea of the beat reporter is alive and well, even if the institutions that sparked it aren’t doing so well. Bloggers — especially those who come from a more traditional journalism background — tend to focus very closely on specific topics if they want to do well. They are beat reporters, of a sort, just as many publications train reporters to be experts in a particular niche.

But the beats that may be crucial in today’s world aren’t quite the same ones that most general interest publications rely on. Sure, I still need to read what the health, real estate, and crime beat reporters produce.

The idea, however, that technology is entirely separate from everything else and can be covered by just one beat reporter is severely outdated. First of all, divorcing the relevant technology from topics like business and health removes it from the context that readers need to understand the topics. Technology is integrated into every part of our lives; even someone who doesn’t use technology personally brushes up against it every time she leaves her house.

Second, however, there are certain issues related to technology that, when bundled together, make an overwhelming mess for a reporter. Having the same person covering privacy issues and reviewing the latest hardware specs just doesn’t make sense. Nick Diakopoulos makes a very good argument for creating beat reporter positions that cover algorithms specifically. Personally, I’d love to see a privacy beat.

How these changing beats may play out is more a question of resources at individual publications than pure journalistic idealism but hopefully editors will take note of Diakopoulos’ article and consider who should really be covering what in their newsrooms.

Are Tools Like Zapier the Same as Programming?

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Truly amazing things can happen when you can pair one app with another, integrating the results to get something better.

But the actual integration process slows down the speed at which such mashups can be rolled out — or at least it did. While there are still plenty of apps that require developers to write custom integrations for each set of apps they want to pair together, web-app automation services like IFTTT and Zapier make it possible to come up with new integrations on the fly, without writing a line of new code.

Personally, I find these services to be the greatest thing since sliced bread. While I know the basics of writing code, I’m still at the point where I have to write out exactly what I want to happen in fairly specific detail. That usually happens to be in the format that if this one thing happens, I want this other thing over there to happen next. As it happens, IFTTT stands for ‘If This Then That’ — the short form to the average approach to deciding what simple computer programs will do.

Are IFTTT, Zapier and Tools Like Them Enabling a New Type of Programmer?

As I started outlining this post, I had an incredibly difficult time figuring out just what these tools are called: “web-app automation service” seems to get the most use across various technology blogs, but it’s a mouthful. We just don’t seem to have the right words to clearly describe what’s going on when you log into one of these sites.

Part of the problem is that while the various web-app automation services seem to be doing something novel, the reality is that what’s on offer is more a matter of user interfaces than anything else. Every single app that IFTTT and Zapier offer connections for has some sort of API — an interface that a developer can use to make use of the app in her own programs. That API might be available for free or it might have a price tag attached, but it has to be already present for a web-app automation service to tap into it.

Furthermore, if you look at the actions you can take with a given app through a tool like IFTTT and you’re also willing to dig through that same app’s API documentation, you’ll find that the actions you can take using that app are basically identical whether you’ve got an automation tool acting as an interface or if you’re willing to write some code.

If you’re getting the same results a programmer would, using the same tools (albeit with a little something special added on), are you a programmer automatically?

The question of Zapier’s place in technology today is particularly interesting because Zapier has been on a big push to add new apps to the many it already integrates. The company added a new app every day in February. Last month, Zapier announced an improved developer platform, making it easier for developers to connect their apps up to the platform. (I may have taken the announcement as a cue to nag a few developers I know about why they should invest some time in improving their integrations.)

Good Programmers Use Time-Saving Tools, Right?

It’s tempting to dismiss web-app automation services as not meeting the ill-defined standards of exactly what counts as programming. But we shouldn’t be too quick to judge.

Programmers are well-known for a willingness to embrace all sorts of tools to make their work easier. Consider frameworks that sit on top of programming languages to speed up development dramatically. Ruby on Rails, for instance, has become a favorite of new programmers because it hides a lot of the more complicated aspects of programming under some friendlier tools. As a result, new programmers can build websites and apps much faster with Ruby on Rails than if they were to use Ruby on its own.

While I have heard some grumbling from old school programmers that anyone who uses a development framework isn’t a ‘real’ coder, I’m pretty sure that the same people find plenty of other ways to exclude as many people as possible from the little club they’ve built for themselves. I’m okay with being picky about the development frameworks you personally want to work with, but there’s no doubt in my mind that using such a framework is definitely programming.

Tools like Zapier and IFTTT aren’t much different than frameworks: the user still has to invest plenty of time into figuring out what they want as an end result (unless they’re willing to stick to premade recipes). Even those premade recipes, however, can feel a bit like templates that you should tweak to your own uses, just like every programming tutorial. Sure, using a web-app automation service isn’t a particularly robust approach to programming, but it requires enough of the same mindset that we should take it seriously.

The Real Gateway to Programming

I have plenty of friends and acquaintances who are working on the question of how to get kids interested in programming. One of the favorite approaches seems to involve getting kids playing games that incorporate aspects of programming. But while getting kids to play video games may be a logical strategy, taking a more basic approach may have more value.

Just because an individual happens to be young doesn’t mean that she doesn’t have problems in her life that she wants to solve: I can’t even count the number of times I get calls from younger friends and family members asking how to do something technical (I might be considered technically savvy in some circles). And, sometimes, I have to tell them that there isn’t currently a tool to accomplish exactly the results they’re after. Suggesting that they learn to program and build their own solution rarely goes over well.

But what if there was a web-app automation service that focused on the tools that younger users rely on? How hard would it be to convince kids to sign up for the service? Finding the apps to include certainly wouldn’t be a problem: Snapchat is pretty popular, but the various educational apps that teachers now use to assign and manage homework. Most of these apps already have APIs in place, even if those APIs aren’t widely advertised. With the right connections in place, I’m certain that it would be easy enough to get younger users to use such a service.

Having to start thinking in that if-this-then-that format provides a certain entryway into a programming mindset — one that would making teaching the process of writing code much easier. Even better, once kids start using such a service, they’re almost certainly going to come up with more ideas for combining pieces of technology, some of which will require more advanced programming skills. Making the leap just isn’t that hard at that point, especially in comparison to the change between thinking that you’re doing something just for fun and suddenly needing to shift to be able to think of that same process as work.

These Tricks Aren’t Just for Kids

Clearly I’m a big fan of web-app automation services (even if that name makes me cringe every time I type it). At the very least, I see them as a way to minimize copying and pasting information from one computer window to another. But I also see them as an amazing opportunity for how businesses can move forward.

We don’t have to have big behemoth software packages that all come from the same company in order to guarantee our tools work together seamlessly. We have more options (or at least will when tools like Zapier are a normal part of our day-to-day processes). We have the freedom to use the best application for a particular task, no matter who makes it, as long as the developer in question has built an API — and that’s fairly standard practice, even when an application doesn’t advertise its API as a feature. Just go through the web-based apps you already use and check for the word API. It’s usually down in the footer of the front page.

But these tools also do good things for how we think about business problems. We’re moving into an age where every business generates absurdly large amounts of data. Just being able to move that data around efficiently makes a web-app automation service valuable. But getting us in the mindset of thinking about how we can use that data in different contexts — if I take in this piece of information here, how can I push it out over there? — improves our ability to run our businesses.

Not everyone needs to know how to write code to run a successful business, but I would argue that every entrepreneur does need to understand at least the basics of programming. In particular, knowing what’s possible is crucial, whether tools already exist with a given capability or if you’ll have to go out and find someone to put together the code. If you don’t have the right mindset, you’ll slip behind the competition as they find and build new tools. But if you can just write simple statements of what should happen after a certain triggering action, you have the skills to team up with an experienced programmer to create the application that will revolutionize your industry. Beyond that, you don’t need much more than a good idea.

Image by Flickr user Thomas Amberg

Our Tools Dictate the Way We Think

The tools we use for writing change what we have to say. While most of the time I write in front of a computer, I also spend a lot of time writing long hand.

I use a fountain pen and a legal pad — an echo, perhaps, of reading about an author who did just that when I was still in high school. I’ve had an obsession with fountain pens for longer than that. I remember my dad letting me use his pen when I was you — a massive pen that I could barely write with, let alone write in cursive.

But, obsessions aside, I’ve noticed some major differences between the words I write with a pen and those I write on a computer. The self-editing process is one of the most obvious changes: on a computer, it’s practical to keep going back to the previous line and making changes. I shape my sentences, add transitions, and even eliminate repeated words all through the process of writing.

Making changes when writing by hand is far more difficult, so I tend to just write. I tell myself that when I type up a particular project I can edit it then. It’s more of an ideal way to write — it’s easier to get into the flow of the process and press on.

I like to say that I don’t get writer’s block. Wanting to eat keeps me motivated and moving forward. The reality is, of course, more complicated: I can’t afford writer’s block, so I build approaches into my day that keep my brain rolling. I write on my legal pads first, getting myself in the flow of writing. I essentially prime the pump so there are already words coming out before I start working on the computer. I rarely handwrite anything for a client, but getting to work on something I enjoy first seems to help even more, so I don’t worry about my topic first thing.

Part of the reason I keep client work to the computer is that I’ve noticed some key differences between my style on paper and on screen. I’m more willing to describe my own experiences away from the screen — a part of me feels that paper is less judgmental. But even my sentence structure varies: when I write on a computer, my sad addiction to parentheticals and appositives becomes evident. On paper, I use them much less often. I prefer simple sentence structures, perhaps because they are easier to construct when you don’t have the option of self-editing. I do have a tendency towards colons when writing by hand.

Word choice is another place where my writing diverges, though perhaps not for the reasons you think. When I work on my computer, I have a piece of software called TextExpander turned on. There are certain words and phrases that I don’t want to appear in my writing, mostly because I overuse them. When I type those words, TextExpander ‘expands’ them into glaring reminders to avoid using those verboten word choices. Of course, there is no way to automatically delete words when writing by hand. I do sometimes notice that I’m spelling out a word that Text Expander will take me to task on. I’ve got an anti-authority streak a mile wide, so I generally take pleasure in writing those words all the way out

Science has demonstrated that we think differently with a pen in our hands than with our fingers on a keyboard. That’s why students with learning disabilities, like dyslexia, are often handed a laptop. One is not better than the other — they’re just different options. And for anyone doing creative work, having those options is useful. When you re trying to create and there’s a problem, having a way to entirely switch the way you think about your work — perhaps just by taking a few steps — is invaluable.

I see a tendency in many fields to teach only computer-based skills — usually because working through a computer is so much faster. But the underlying skills are valuable. Even in computer programming, being able to step back and write out some pseudo-code can be a useful skill. Sink some time into doing your work the old hard way. You may be surprised by the results.

The Family Business Advantage Puts Some Entrepreneurs Ahead of the Game

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I started freelancing in high school. Even though I didn’t really know it at the time, I’d started my own business at a time when most of my peers were applying for whatever jobs would work around their school schedules. Some how this experience has translated into an assumption that I know something about how to help younger entrepreneurs get a start.

I’m not really an expert in how to get kids to start their own businesses, but I know that I had a clear advantage: I surrounded by entrepreneurs from the day that I was born. The grand majority of my family run their own businesses. That translated into a very different approach to earning money than most of my friends had. I never automatically assumed that I needed to find a job to put money in my pocket. Part of that approach was a result of a long progressions of helping out with various family businesses as needed. There was always a relative who needed someone to handle a big data entry project or hand out flyers. — which may have lead directly to freelancing as an easy starting point.

One of the biggest advantages I’ve had in life comes from growing up around entrepreneurs. It’s an experience that business school just can’t replicate.

The Advantage of Growing Up in a Family Business

I’ve talked about the situation with other business owners and coming from a family of business owners does seem to normalize the idea of entrepreneurship, at the very least. Ashley Brooks had some seriously similar experiences. She comes from a similarly entrepreneurial background: “My grandpa started his own business and passed it on to two of my uncles; I have an aunt and uncle who own their own print shop; another uncle left his day job to start his own insurance company; and I have an aunt who’s done some freelance editing herself. People in my family just didn’t seem to do well with day jobs, and they were all extremely successful at their own endeavors. I never questioned that I could do it that way too.”

That last bit echoes one of my experiences. After spending enough time with entrepreneurs, especially those who you are related to, it becomes a lot harder to land and hold one of those day jobs that I’ve heard so much about. Part of it is sheer practicality: it’s hard to get results from resumes with big employment gaps or with a work history where your last name matches the sign on the door. But part of it is that, especially these days, it gets a lot harder to accept that you’ve got to do all your work between 9 and 5 or the whole world will fall apart. If I decide to do my work between 10 and 7, nothing truly dramatic is going to happen, but a lot of jobs assume otherwise.

Recognizing that there are options beyond that 9-to-5 grind can be incredibly difficult if you haven’t seen the alternatives in action. I’m a pain, constantly trying to help certain friends strike out on their own, but when I’m the only person who those friends know with a business of her own, I’m far less persuasive. Having people in your circle of friends and family who actually show that there’s not just one way to make a living is almost a necessity for someone who really wants to become an entrepreneur.

The Advantage of Not Having to Explain Yourself

One of the reasons that entrepreneurship is at least a little easier for someone who grew up in a family business or in a family of entrepreneurs is because those family members will generally be supportive of the idea of someone else in the family striking out on her own. Starting a new business is incredibly difficult. Starting one while listening to your family tell you that you’re crazy is much harder.

Only two of my family members have ever questioned my ability to launch my own business. It’s no coincidence that both of those family members have held a succession of day jobs and aren’t entrepreneurs themselves.

Don’t worry, though: I do get plenty of those concerned calls from relatives wanting to check up on particular aspects of how I run my business. My family doesn’t leave me concern-deprived, by any means. But, in addition to that concern, I get a bit of a pass when it comes to prioritizing my work over other parts of my life. Sure, the whole family would love to spend more time together — but most of us are realistic about picking which holidays to celebrate as a clan and which we’re each going to be open for business.

(That isn’t to say, however, that certain people can’t take that permissiveness too far. We all know which member of our family won’t make it to any family get-togethers because he spends 80 hours a week at his business.)

The Advantage of Seeming Perfectly Normal

Going back to those questions I get about how to encourage kids to take a look at entrepreneurship, I’ve got to say that the most important step is to make running your own business seem like the normal thing to do. Otherwise, you’re going to be in a situation where business ownership seems entirely aspirational — something everyone would like to do eventually but that is out of reach right now.

While I don’t have a ton of numbers to back me up, my experiences show that young entrepreneurs usually only emerge when they have friends or family who have also gone into business for themselves. Having a mentor who can provide advice on the nuts and bolts of running a business is part of the reason, but that’s not all of it. Knowing that your uncle, who has gone through four wives and shouldn’t be left alone with a six-pack, can run a business does a lot for making entrepreneurship really seem possible. It may even make starting your own business seem like a complete no-brainer.

In those sorts of circumstances, a kid may start thinking of her own future without quite as many constraints. While I went through quite a few potential career paths (I thought I was going to go to law school for quite a while), I definitely assumed that I would work for myself and wind up at the top of the food chain through most of my plans. Ashley seemed to have a similar experience, despite have somewhat more focused goals: “As for my entrepreneurial family, I guess I’d never realized how much it impacted my outlook on work until I graduated college. I knew I wanted to freelance way before it was the cool thing to do. When I was in 8th grade, I remember knowing that I wanted to be an editor, and I wanted to work from home on my own schedule.”

Family isn’t Everything for Encouraging Entrepreneurship

College tends to screw with an entrepreneur’s plans: while there are plenty of schools that put heavy emphasis on helping students, most schools are very clearly set up to feed students straight into jobs after granting those all-important diplomas. Both Ashley and I spent several months post-graduation applying to jobs that we didn’t particularly care for. Ashley was a lot smarter than I was: “Once I was in college, I adjusted my plan a bit: I assumed I’d work as an in-house editor for a few years to build connections before I struck out on my own. Long story short, that plan changed after I spent four months applying to jobs I wasn’t crazy about, for companies I didn’t care for, in locations that meant a long commute. I was already doing some freelance work, so I said ‘screw it’ and started putting all that extra time into building my business.”

I actually landed one of those jobs I applied for, took it, and then quit after a week and a half. I might have been able to stick out that particular job longer if I hadn’t had some freelance work already coming in, as well as a belief that I actually had to. But it was an awful job, in the way that many jobs immediately after college are, and I had no driving assumptions that the world had to be that way.

In fact, I was working off of assumptions that directly opposed the idea that I had to deal with a job that made me miserable. With freelancing, and even with the odd jobs I’d had both with family members’ businesses and assorted college departments, I’d had a pretty good time. I usually wound up doing work that I enjoyed, with people I enjoyed hanging out with. I’m not about to suggest that you should only do work that you’re passionate about, but I’d like to believe that we should all be able to find work that we either don’t dread every morning or that we get paid more than enough to make worthwhile.

But because I had that sense that I could be doing more, plus some real world business experience from my time in family businesses, and the belief that running a business just wouldn’t be that hard, I went whole hog into working for myself. I see my family background as a major advantage in that respect.

Image by Stock.xchang user Bubbels

The Memory of Money in the Modern Age

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Deep down, I’m always surprised when I can give someone a dollar and I get something back. Money — paper or plastic — doesn’t really seem like it should be worth anything. We’re all in on this giant unspoken conspiracy to agree that money will continue working and that we can exchange it.

But while we all do a good job of playing along, I spend a fair amount of time thinking about why the concept of money works. I read an interview with economist Neil Wallace that provides a little insight. I’m going to copy a chunk of the interview here (you can read the whole thing here. The TL;DR is that money is memory — a way to track and exchange favors more than anything else, but Neil Wallace says it better. ‘Region’, by the way, refers to The Region, a publication put out by the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, which published the interview.

Wallace: Now think about Robinson Crusoe, after he meets Friday. They don’t need money, but again, there might be plenty of absence of double coincidences. Now think further. Here we are in the middle of Pennsylvania. There are lots of Amish communities around here. When they’re isolated, the usual story about an Amish community—or an isolated Israeli kibbutz—is that they didn’t use money.

Region: Trust was their currency.

Wallace: Well, that’s a word that Douglas Gale used, but it’s probably not the best word. Think about this Amish community. The vision is, if my barn burns down, then everybody will come and help me rebuild it. In economics, we try to rationalize behavior without altruism, if we’re able to; so what makes that work without altruism? Everybody notices who shows up to help rebuild it.

Region: A sort of credit accounting.

Wallace: Yes. And the guy who doesn’t show up, if he does that repeatedly, will get kicked out eventually. This can work without money because people remember what people have done in the past.

Region: So, money is memory.

Wallace: Yes, “money is memory” is a casual way to state that. Now, that’s a hugely powerful idea that I and other people have been working with.

Cryptocurrencies Are Just Memory, Too

The concept of ‘money is memory’ works surprisingly well when we think about Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. Effectively, every Bitcoin has a record of who mined it and who has held it since — not by name, but by an identifier that lets users be sure that a Bitcoin is a genuine piece of spendable currency. The unbroken chain of provenance lets everyone (at least those who use Bitcoins) agree that a particular Bitcoin is real and not fradulent.

That sort of memory of exchange shows, over and over again, that currency really is a series of shifting of obligations on to the next person. With a cryptocurrency that is essentially unbacked, the only way to get value back out of the money that you have somehow earned is to keep it moving.

Dogecoin is a cryptocurrency with a sense of humor. Based on the ‘doge’ meme (where pictures of a Shiba puppy are surrounded by broken English discussing something amazing, usually in Comic Sans), Dogecoin is similar to Bitcoin but worth far less at this point. A small community of users has sprung up, many of whom have started using Dogecoin as a way to tip people who are doing cool things online. On the Dogecoin subreddit, for instance, there’s now a tool to allow you to reward other reddit commenters with Dogecoins when they share something clever or useful.

Perhaps even more so than other currencies, Dogecoin’s use as a way to tip or otherwise acknowledge small bits of awesomeness reflects the real value of money as a way to trade memories. It’s a way to share a memory that is not quite big enough to be worth paying for — building a barn is a big memory, while sharing a witty comment on a link isn’t nearly as momentous. But even those tiny transactions will build up over time: on a site like reddit, a respected contributor has access to an audience. The same holds true for most websites. When someone consistently shares interesting things online, they’re rewarded with attention, which can lead in turn to financial benefits. Dogecoin tips just allow us to track smaller increments of memories.

The Long Memory of the Internet

It’s funny, in a way, that we have this sense of the internet as the elephant that never forgets: sure, technology has an awkward way of ensuring that your high school shenanigans you shared to Facebook will come back and bite you. But we’re talking about tools that are only a few years old — perhaps as old as a few decades if we’re going to include email — and that are already dealing with an overwhelming amount of data.

Yes, our collective memories are all online, including the ones we regret, but we’re already approaching a point where sorting through all the details is getting tough. What happens when Facebook actually has twenty years of your photos, updates, and likes? What about fifty years? Sorting through all that data to pull out value is going to make current big data efforts look rudimentary at best.

But having that data available also going to make the real value of memory clearer — and make sense of ‘money as memory.’ As we do business on a global scale, we need to be able to comparatively value products and services. Most currencies are essentially contextual: we know the local currency’s value within our day to day activities, but we can’t really guess what another country’s currency is really worth (and the whole idea that people get rich off of trading currencies can be downright scary). But with a shared currency, we can make financial decisions we trust on a global scale. We can trade the memory of painting a house in the U.S. into the memory of a meal in Argentina into the memory of writing software in Thailand.

Cryptocurrencies Aren’t Ready Just Yet

While I am enthusiastic about the concept of digital currencies, I haven’t jumped in — I’m certainly not one of those devotees who have committed themselves to using nothing but Bitcoin! That’s because Bitcoin, and other cryptocurrencies to a lesser extent, aren’t yet stable enough to truly act as a useful global currency. Over the course of 2013, a Bitcoin’s value had two zeroes tacked on to the end, going from $13.50 to well over $1000.

That sort of extreme variation makes it impossible to use Bitcoin in day-to-day business. Even if there were business owners willing to rely on Bitcoin (rather than to accept it as something of a novelty act), the fluctuations have led many users of the cryptocurrency to hoard their money, with the expectation that the value can only continue to increase. We’re essentially in the middle of a Bitcoin bubble — sooner or later, the whole thing is going to fall apart.

And that’s okay. Consider this a first go at the cryptocurrency learning curve. The first recorded fiat currency (currency backed by a government but not pegged to gold or silver) was in 11th century China. The situation fell apart pretty quickly, with the government printing more money and causing inflation. It took a couple of tries for fiat currency to work out. It’s going to take a couple of attempts for cryptocurrencies to work out the kinks. But in the long-term, there’s an incredible potential for the effectiveness of the concept of a digital currency.

Image by Flickr user dilettantiquity

Why Libraries Would Make Great Ebook Publishers

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I’m a big fan of public libraries. The sheer amount of time I’ve spent in libraries (including those I didn’t actually have a card for) makes every library feel a little like home.

While I love wandering through the stacks, I’m comfortable with how the best libraries firmly embrace technology. As long as there is still a librarian around who can direct me to the next great novel I need to read or tell me how to find that incredibly obscure fact I need for an article, I don’t care if that librarian points me to an ebook, a website or a physical book. That’s because one of the greatest values librarians provide is that of curation — without an expert, it’s hard to navigate the giant piles of both data and stories the human race has managed to produce. In fact, my experience of wandering the stacks is not universal: many libraries require readers to request a book from a librarian or through an automated system. That in turn means that readers must know what books they need, which makes curation ever more necessary.

With that in mind, there seems to be an opportunity for libraries to take their position as curators a step further: why don’t libraries publish ebooks?

I don’t mean actually printing books, mind you. I’m talking about finding material, editing it and releasing it online in a digital format. Libraries can act as small presses, releasing publications only in electronic formats.

Let’s Talk Problems First

I pitched the idea to a friend of mine who is a librarian and the whole conversation got pretty excited very quickly — the idea has a lot of appeal, at least to those of us who nerd out on information sciences. We did manage to make a couple of passes at what the big problems are going to be for the average library considering whether to start publishing ebooks.

On the most basic level, resources are always a problem. Libraries are typically non-profits or governmental departments. As organizations, libraries aren’t exactly known for having giant piles of cash to throw at experiments. Many libraries have a hard time keeping the doors open. In theory, at least, publishing some ebooks could bring in revenue for a library, but building that revenue stream is going to take upfront investment, at least of time.

I’d like to say that running an ebook publishing house — especially at the small press level — is easy enough to do. After all, I’ve published a stack of ebooks without any special training. But while it’s easy to get started publishing online these days, it’s also incredibly easy to get into trouble. Copyright law, for instance, is so arcane that most people just throw up their hands, rather than trying to figure out how it works. The average small library isn’t going to have an intellectual property lawyer on staff and also lacks the resources necessary to handle any sort of copyright lawsuit.

But these seem to be the biggest problems that a library interested in publishing ebooks faces. They’re at least as manageable as raising the funds for new buildings, which libraries have to do on a somewhat routine basis.

Libraries Can Win at the Publishing Game

The average library actually has some resources that put such institutions ahead of typical self-publishers, if not many small presses.

The biggest asset most libraries possess is that they already employ librarians — a class of workers who absolutely have to be tech-savvy to hold a job. The need for technology is not something new for librarians: my grandmother was one of the first people I knew who had an email address, because she had to have one in the early Nineties as part of her job as a university librarian.

Digitizing records (a routine process in many libraries) requires many of the same skills as setting up an ebook. Anyone who can handle the necessary technology to operate a local library is going to be able to learn at least the basics of publishing ebooks online.

Digitization represents an additional benefit: any organization that bothers with making electronic copies of paper documents (and other non-digital records) sees at least some demand for those records. The typical library owns collections of materials that people are interested in accessing, such as family history records and local information, as well as the personal papers of local notables and other documents that sneek into the backrooms of any such institution. Just creating ebook versions of such records could at least support the necessary efforts to preserve such documents. Given the people willing to pay to travel to the areas their families once lived in, I can’t imagine that family tree researchers wouldn’t be willing to pay for curated local records in digital format, especially if they can’t travel to the library in question.

Build From the Local Community

My local library district offers books and other media. But the individual libraries are also crucial parts of the community because they have meeting spaces and even arrange for certain types of experts to speak. That sort of tie makes the idea of ebook publishing even more appealing, at least in my mind.

Having community ties means that a library has supporters it can rely on for the funds and volunteer power necessary to build a publishing program, as well as a built-in audience that may want to purchase ebooks (rather than just checking them out temporarily from the library). But given that many writers’ groups meet at their local libraries, there’s a lot more opportunity there: libraries can work to curate the local writing available, helping the community publish its own works and accessing writing with a local bent.

Local authors always need evangelists, like the librarian or bookstore owner willing to take the time to set up a ‘local author’ display. Librarians can be champions for their communities on a whole new level in this little thought experiment. On a certain level, the idea of libraries publishing ebooks makes me think of the monastaries that housed libraries and scriptoriums before printing presses made wide-spread publishing an option. Librarians in those days might have effectively decided what books would continue to exist by choosing which would be copied. They curated the information important enough to be preserved for their communities. Today, just about any piece of information can make it into a format where it will be preserved, but we need curators to decide which pieces are important enough to be read — a purpose that libraries are uniquely suited for.

What Libraries Need to Get Started Publishing

Libraries, as a general rule, have some sort of fundraising mechanism already in place. There are similar systems for finding volunteers. I’m not going to suggest reinventing those particular wheels.

But there are some specific resources that the average library will need to recruit. These could be resources that the libraries in question pay for or they could be provided by volunteers.

  • A graphic designer: While it’s possible to format and publish an ebook with nothing more than the word processing program already on your computer, it’s always easier to sell an attractive package.
  • A copyright expert: Just having someone review proposed book contents to make sure that a library has the right to publish the necessary material will save a whole lot of trouble. I don’t know how in-depth that process needs to be; it would be nice to have an intellectual property lawyer weigh in on the question.
  • A commitment to some specific ebook formats: Ebook publishers spend a lot of time chasing each other’s tails on what formats to publish in. I’m not prepared to make that sort of decision for anyone, but I’m personally banking on Kindle and PDF for most projects.
  • Marketing help: This one is probably the toughest. Libraries have great local audiences, but promoting anything beyond those nearby groups will be hard. If the money’s available, spending some on marketing help is going to be one of the most useful investments.

I could see a startup or even a non-profit creating a turn-key solution for libraries interested in publishing their own ebooks (if you decide this is an idea you want to pursue, email me so I can introduce you to my librarian friends). I could also easily see a few consultants popping up who offer to parachute in and teach a ‘publishing for librarians’ program (ditto).

Personally, there’s a whole stack of books my library could publish that I’d be happy to slap down some virtual dollars for. I’d love to be able to support local authors and local libraries at the same time. I’d like to think that people who don’t spend quite as much time in libraries as I do would be willing to do the same.

Image by Flickr user Saint Louis University

Keeping the Open Source / Creative Commons Eco-System Healthy

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When writing blog posts, particularly for clients without a budget for images, I rely heavily on the kindness of strangers — those strangers who post their photographs to Flickr under one Creative Commons license or another. I’ve been known to get downright snooty about how carefully I search out the images I can legal use; it irritates me to no end when someone tries to tell me that they can just use any image they find online. But while I have my nose in the air, I also feel a bit hypocritical: I’m not contributing images back to the Creative Commons pool that other people can use for their own projects.

Photography isn’t my passion; I mess around with Instagram and other photo apps, but I don’t do much else. I don’t have a lot of photos I feel are worth releasing to the world.

I don’t think I’m taking advantage of all those photographers who feel comfortable sharing their work despite my pangs of guilt. I’m religious about providing links back to the work of the photographer (or other creative) who provided the work I’m relying on. When requested, I’ve even gone back and edited old posts to make sure that I’m linking to a creative’s preferred online presence or using the anchor text the photographer prefers.

Appropriate attribution is the least I can do, though. Good stock photography is expensive and photographers licensing their work under Creative Commons are (at least theoretically) foregoing some income. Links are something of a currency, at least online, but they may not be enough to keep the Creative Commons ecosystem healthy. What I should do, at least in my own mind, is to release some amount of my own writing under a Creative Commons license, to be freely used.

So why don’t I release my own work under a Creative Commons license?

Part of it is a question of mechanics: I earn my living from my writing, at least the first time a given article or ebook appears anywhere. Licensing work in such a way that I can get paid requires hanging on to copyright, at least in the short-term. I’m not saying that those photographers posting their work under Creative Commons licenses shouldn’t be able to earn a living. However, more than a few of those photographers have other sources of income.

But part of the problem is that there’s no clear incentive for me to release copyright: if I write well, I’m going to get those inbound links (the currency of of the web). It’s relatively rare that anyone wants to republish an article that’s already freely available on the web on some other website. The search engines don’t reward such behavior, after all. I do occasionally get requests to reprint my work offline, in actual print. I routinely allow non-profits to reprint my work without charging them a fee. I’m even open to allowing someone who stands to turn a bit of a profit use my work without recompense. But there are plenty of companies that I’d rather not license my work to without compensation (such as textbook publishers, who have occasionally approached me in the past).

The Existing Incentives for Open Source

The Creative Commons and open source communities have a huge amount of overlap. But open source is more effective: more people using open source software seem to make a habit of putting work back into the eco-system. The open source approach to software is very well established: if you’re currently reading this, you’ve touched multiple pieces of open source software even if you didn’t realize it. Many content management systems, servers and other online technologies run entirely on open source software.

WordPress, for instance, is made available under the GNU General Public License, an open source license. Anyone who wants to download WordPress’s files and use them to set up a website can. There’s a clear benefit to that kind of availability: WordPress has been downloaded over six million times, which doesn’t even take into account the number of WordPress.com accounts there are or the number of developers who have set up multiple WordPress websites from a single download. There is no way for a software product to grow that dramatically in a closed system — and that kind of growth can be a major incentive for someone to contribute to open source software. While WordPress’s contributors haven’t exactly become household names, they do enjoy a certain amount of celebrity among people in the know.

There isn’t a lot of money that goes with that relative fame. There are a few particularly profitable WordPress-based businesses, as well as other companies based on building open source software. The licenses, however, aren’t built with developing strong business models in mind, purposefully. There are some options, like Creative Commons’ Non-Commercial license which allows for free use of creative work, provided that it isn’t for a commercial process, while still allowing the creator to financially benefit from her work, but these licenses aren’t always the easiest to earn a living from. That’s not necessarily a problem, provided that the creatives making their work available under some sort of open source license feel adequately rewarded.

Some people just want an excuse to work on cool projects and to make sure that other people have access to those cool projects. But altruism and fun aren’t the strongest of incentives. If something else comes up, it’s easy enough for an open source contributor to walk away from a beloved project: maybe someone else will take over maintaining it, maybe not. It’s a question of whether someone else has as much passion for a given project as that project’s founder.

There are certain side benefits that have evolved that lead people to contribute to open source for less noble reasons. For software developers, writing code under open source licenses can be one way to build up a visible portfolio. That in turn can make finding paying employment much easier: recruiters routinely go through popular open source projects to find prospects, as well as browse through profiles on GitHub.

Are Those Incentives Enough?

Even with the incentives present in building open source software and releasing other work under extremely permissive licenses, there are plenty of projects that just wither away. The underlying files may be available online somewhere but they aren’t updated to work with newer software versions or kept current otherwise. These are often projects that individuals and organizations depend on and have a vested interest in improving.

In my mind, these situations are proof that there’s room for further incentives for open source communities. I’ve seen more than one situation where a company wound up hiring a developer just to bring an open source project back up to the point where the software was usable again — and then choose not to release that code for some reason or another. There needs to be a cultural incentive for companies (as well as writers like myself and other creatives out in the world) to pass material back into the open source and Creative Commons ecosystems.

At a minimum, that means creating mechanisms for streamlining that process and educating users about ways to support open source. Returning to the WordPress community for a moment, it’s worth noting that many users who set up blogs on WordPress.com or even on their own sites don’t understand what open source software is. They just know that they can use WordPress for free. Even a little education goes a long way with such users.

Where does all this leave the open source ecosystem?

Perhaps it’s not in the easiest place in the world, but the situation is actually pretty good. We’re incredibly lucky at this point that enough people are willing to give their time to creating amazing projects that the rest of us get to use and enjoy. The ecosystem is healthy enough, at this point, to keep going for the foreseeable future.

But just because things are humming along now doesn’t mean that there isn’t opportunity for improvement. It’s a good time to discuss how we want to grow open source communities in the future and what we want the norms of these communities to be. We are starting to reach a point where some of the original proponents of open source may be thinking about retirement (Richard Stallman, the author of the GPL, turned 60 this year, for instance). That means that those of us who are newer to the worlds of open source and Creative Commons are going to need to step up.

So, what do you want the licensing of your creative works to look like in the future? How do you want to benefit from them and what are you willing to give back to the community?

Image by Flickr user Dennis Skley