The move to virturalization leaves stone is being left unturned. It touched the public network via EC2 (and now a host of hosts) it formed the Cloud and fused a new generation of the Internet. Service orientated also hits the data centers and this means things like switches, servers, and disk.

At the core of the movement of virtualization movement is freedom of the physical environment. Optimize hardware performance and set the workload free. In the process of doing this, a promise of cost savings has set a off a storm in re-factoring the data center.

This is the first in a series of posts taking a look at areas of the data center and how an openness strategy become a driver for winning customers by bringing costs down.

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We took a look at the storage landscape from the eyes of Hitachi Data Systems, “HDS”.

We spoke with Hu Yoshida, CTO of HDS. He gave us a practical overview on how the needle of enterprise costs are being reduced focusing on reducing operational costs.

One thing the he mentioned was that Hitachi’s HDS division was able to grow in the storage business in this tough climate, which is amazing considering it is an industry that follows economic spending as a whole.

Yoshida attributes part of this to HDS decision to deliberately disrupt their own “closed” box solution where storage and management are sold together. This allows IT shops to have more choice, and decouple vendors. He said that this was a big decision for the company, as it opened up more competition to a core business.

Protocol vs. API

Yoshida said that the team at HDS decided it was inevitable for this protocol level standardization to exist. His team felt that HDS needed to be a leader in this opportunity. He cited a customer that uses an HDS head as a management function that had NetApp behind it as a pattern they supported that several years ago would have been done by partnership rather than protocol level support.

Although in this scenario HDS didn’t win “all tiers” of this storage solution, it was able to be a fabric and join a customer that “loves NetApp” and loves HDS too.

Mr. Yoshida said that his company decided to fully embrace the protocol level integration with the surrounding systems, instead of only releasing only APIs, as a means to allow more competition – and cooperation in the ecosystem through technology rather than selective partnerships.

Considering the Tiers

An area of storage that is ripe for cost savings is supporting different types of solutions, e.g. production vs. development and classes of storage based on the application.

In his blog post, New Considerations for Tiered Storage, Hu examines reduction of costs.

Looking under the covers we see that there is a lot of questions to ask in the details of these strategies, and marketing matters in how solutions are perceived and how different types of hardware (for example Seagate vs. HDS) make a difference for buyers, and that to be a leader, it is key to have answers across the industry ecosystem.

When we look at the decision being on moving the cost needle down for operations management instead of hardware savings, it becomes clear that playing nicely pays. HDS is a company that plays on both sides of the storage spectrum (management layer and disk) and it’s partnerships include relationships with HP (as OEM) and companies like Cisco and Brocade as go-to-market partners. It is tempting to “hardwire” solutions together, but it is a bigger win when instead these are loosely coupled and partner-ready.

Looking at it from the angle of cost reduction for open standards gives the pivot point to consider this natural tension offered by virtualization has a promise binding vendors together to optimize their solutions for the plug-and-play data center.

Does an open protocol powered data center reduce total costs? IBM, HP, Cisco, NetApp, Oracle…Hitachi thinks so, do you?

Discuss

This week we are reporting from RSA, the security conference in San Francisco. We’ve seen hackers, threats, and industry leaders roaming these halls – and among these we found leaders of the identity community, people who are thought leaders focused on creating a safe Internet for all individuals.

This includes folks who in the Identity Commons and OASIS workgroups, and the 1-year-old Kantara Initiative. The latter was announced to the public at RSA 2009, and this year it hosted an all-day workshop that brought cloud computing into the forefront of the dialog.

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Diverse Community of Interests Coming Together

Today’s all-day workshop offered by the Kantara Initiative focused almost exclusively on identity services and included viewpoints from several perspectives: enterprises (CA, Ping Identity, Aetna, Oracle, HP), service providers (NTT), consumer applications (Paypal, Google), and government agencies (NIH).

The room was packed – standing room only. After the kickoff we had a chance to ask Trent Adams, chair of the Kantara leadership council, to share his thoughts about identity, cloud computing and year one of the new organization.

He talked about the potential big win that existed for the organization because of its involvment in preparing standards for federal government approval. These are in historic times, he said, and embracing openness at the federal level was an opportunity the organization decided was valuable for the community. We’re keeping our ears open to learn more about how identity services will be enabled and approved through the government.

Landscape Change: Cloud Computing Invigorates Identity Efforts

One thing that is clear is that things get more complicated when combining identity services with cloud computing. We were reminded that many of the technologies that have been developed, including things like OpenID and SAML were designed around the same scenarios of sharing across domains. Identity can be solved in a multi-vendor, multi-protocol, and multiple-infrastructure world.

Matthew Gardiner of CA summed the importance of the link between identity solutions and cloud computing in his talk, “Identity as Security Glue for the Cloud”:

“I want to say the phrase cloud security in the first few moments of my talk because you’ll be hearing it a thousand times before the end of the conference. Cloud security can be viewed as a Rubik’s cube of security implications, when identity services and combining them within the vectors of Iaas, PaaS, and SasS combined with private, public, and hybrid clouds.”

The West Coast Perspective on Health Care

RSA and HIMSS fall on the same week this year. While nearly all of the healthcare IT leadership headed to Atlanta, several companies also came to San Francisco.

Yesterday, MEDecision presented their solution and connections to different Web applications and health care records and systems, and gave a very tangible set of scenarios showing how cloud computing and identity meet around sharing information about a person who is a patient.

At the same time on the East Cost, MEDecision was also at HIMSS demonstrating open exchange of health information in a HIE product offering that helps connect services across providers in order to aggregate a view of an individual. The company offers software and services to insurers to negotiate their cloud-based work flow, including moving private data across pharmacy, doctors, insurers, and the entire health care landscape.

No Passwords in the Cloud

Patrick Waring of Ping Identity spoke about his company has learn about cloud computing in this session, “How the Cloud is Changing Federated Identity Requirements”. A few of his observations:

• Software is no longer build vs. buy. It now includes subscribe, which by definition is a shorter term relationship.
• Cloud computing is an evolution of architecture. It arrives after Web services, which evolved from Web, client server, and mainframe.
• Complexity of the identity layer is harder than ever for the simple reason that there are more apps per user than ever before.
• Services are becoming any-to-any, where internal (employee) and external (customer) classifications don’t matter nearly as much as before. Because of this firewalls are losing their usefulness.
• Audit is no longer an afterthought. Auditors don’t care how or where applications hosted, but hey do need their reports! This includes Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA, Gramm-Leach, Bliley, and more.

A core theme of this session was how the consumer mindset is driving requirements for application experience. Consumers expect it to work on any device, be secure, and be portable. To deliver on this, it must be easy to use. At the same time, password risk must be reduced.

A key trend that Waring pointed out is moving identity systems from “push” models into “pull” models. Instead of updating partners and directories by batch services, companies need to be building real-time identity resolution in applications.

We asked Waring if he had any predictions for where that type of service will come from. His response led us to the conclusion that the leader will be a brand and service that people trust and understand the motivations of. It will likely enter the market from a higher realm of credentials than Twitter or Facebook – perhaps from financial services.

Context is Fundamental: Person, Father, Employee, All of the Above

One thing we learned today is that Google’s App Engine is worth watching as this space evolves. Several interesting things are being done in this sandbox that haven’t been accomplished other places, including how to connect consumer services to enterprise login discovery using domain.

Google has inserted itself into the sweet spot by getting consumers and enterprises alike hooked on their applications, giving the company a unique view of the challenges and solutions in joining identity with cloud computing. We’ll be taking a closer look at these offerings and where Google is headed.

Another thing we observed is the power of the network. NTT gave a demonstration of the power of mixing identity protocols (SAML and OpenID) for the purpose of connecting social, information, and financial transactions in the browser with one login. It starts to show how the next generation Internet might work, where the application requests profile from the cloud rather than a user typing it in.

A summary of overlapping-world-multi-protocol integration has been shared on Google’s site.

Discuss

Last year, we ruffled a few feathers when we posted some OKCupid data on dating and race. We’re sure this latest news is going to be equally unpopular, but the data support the conclusions, so here we go.

Women users of the online dating site state a range of preferred ages for partners that is relatively normal, and when it comes to reaching out to other users, they stay pretty strictly within their own self-imposed guidelines. However, men on the site continue to state a preference for 20-something girls well into their later years. And even when male users state a cut-off age, they continue to contact women who are below that age.

Culture of sexual exploitation or personal preference? Check out the graphs below and let us know what you think in the comments.

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For starters, OKCupid’s blog states, “Men between 22 and 30 – nearly two-thirds of the male dating pool – focus almost exclusively on women younger than themselves… A man, as he gets older, searches for relatively younger and younger women. Meanwhile his upper acceptable limit hovers only a token amount above his own age.”

Here’s what that looks like in a graph format:

Women, on the other hand, display an “admirable openness to both reasonably younger and reasonably older men,” with the exception of early-20s young women who generally prefer to date slightly older young men.

Here’s where the plot thickens: Stated age preferences are fine and dandy, but how different genders actually interact with potential dates of varying ages belies male users’ statements about who they’re really looking to meet.

Here’s a heat map overlaid with the women’s stated age preferences. You can see that, with striking regularity, women mean it when they say they want to find a partner within a given age range:

As you can see, the data show that 29-year-old women generally stop messaging significantly younger men.

Now, here’s the data on men’s messaging habits:

The men in this study consistently reached out to the youngest of the women in their preference range – which already heavily favors younger women. Moreover, they don’t cut themselves off at their stated minimum age preference. “No matter what he’s telling himself on his setting page,” reads the OKCupid blog, “a 30-year-old man spends as much time messaging 18- and 19-year-olds as he does women his own age.”

Taking into account this data about sexual desirability and women’s responses to frank questions about sex acts and exploration, the OKCupid researchers determined a socio-sexual sweet spot for men to consider:

To some, this graph might look like an episode of Cougartown. But the folks at OKCupid feel that “older” women get a bad rap in the online dating world – one that they don’t necessarily deserve.

What’s your experience or opinion on the matter? Let us know in the comments.

Discuss

Google announced today that is planning to build and test "ultra high-speed" broadband networks in a small number of trial locations around the U.S. This means Google will deliver Internet speeds of 100 times faster than what most Americans have access to now, according to the company.

Google says it has the following things in mind:

• Next generation apps: We want to see what developers and users can do with ultra high-speeds, whether it’s creating new bandwidth-intensive "killer apps" and services, or other uses we can’t yet imagine.
• New deployment techniques: We’ll test new ways to build fiber networks, and to help inform and support deployments elsewhere, we’ll share key lessons learned with the world.
• Openness and choice: We’ll operate an "open access" network, giving users the choice of multiple service providers. And consistent with our past advocacy, we’ll manage our network in an open, non-discriminatory and transparent way.

"Like our WiFi network in Mountain View, the purpose of this project is to experiment and learn," says the company says. "Network providers are making real progress to expand and improve high-speed Internet access, but there’s still more to be done. We don’t think we have all the answers – but through our trial, we hope to make a meaningful contribution to the shared goal of delivering faster and better Internet for everyone."

Google is putting out a request for information to help identify communities that are interested. They’re taking responses until March 26. Then they’ll announce the chosen communities. We’re awaiting response from Google on the criteria for how communities will be chosen.
 

Related Articles:

> White Spaces Officially Cleared For Wireless Broadband

> Google Sees White Spaces Filling With Internet

> Google, Verizon Weigh In On White Space Test

This day will go down in history as the day of Google Buzz. After Google’s press event (which we live-blogged and discussed here) Google put up several posts explaining more about the "buzzworthy" new product.

"Google Buzz is a new way to start conversations about the things you find interesting," says Gmail and Google Buzz Product Manager Todd Jackson. "It’s built right into Gmail, so you don’t have to peck out an entirely new set of friends from scratch — it just works. If you think about it, there’s always been a big social network underlying Gmail. Buzz brings this network to the surface by automatically setting you up to follow the people you email and chat with the most. We focused on building an easy-to-use sharing experience that richly integrates photos, videos and links, and makes it easy to share publicly or privately (so you don’t have to use different tools to share with different audiences). Plus, Buzz integrates tightly with your existing Gmail inbox, so you’re sure to see the stuff that matters most as it happens in real time."

"We’ve relied on other services’ openness in order to build Buzz (you can connect Flickr and Twitter from Buzz in Gmail), and Buzz itself is not designed to be a closed system," he says. "Our goal is to make Buzz a fully open and distributed platform for conversations. We’re building on a suite of open protocols to create a complete read/write developer API, and we invite developers to join us on Google Code to see what is available today and to learn more about how to participate."

We looked at the promo video for Google Buzz in another article, but Google has also now provided one focusing specifically on Buzz’s mobile aspects.

Google Buzz Tech Lead Edward Ho talks about the Gmail aspects of Buzz:

To make sure you don’t miss out on the best part of sharing, Buzz sends responses to your posts straight to your inbox. Unlike static email messages, buzz messages in your inbox are live conversations where comments appear in real time.

You can follow the specific people whose posts you want to see, but Buzz also recommends posts from people you’re not directly following, often ones where your friends are having a lively conversation in the comments. If you’re not interested in a particular recommendation, just click the "Not interested" link and your feedback will help improve the recommendations system. Buzz also weeds out uninteresting posts from the people you follow — collapsing inactive posts and short status messages like "brb." These early versions of ranking and recommendations are just a start; we’re working on improvements that will help you automatically sort through all the social data being produced to find the most relevant conversations that matter to you.

Software engineer Justin Zaren talks about photo sharing through Picasa on Google Buzz:

Google Buzz is built right into Gmail and is fully integrated with Picasa Web Albums. Any photos you upload to and share from Buzz are automatically stored in a new unlisted album in your Picasa Web Albums account, so you can view them from either site. It’s easy to upload multiple photos at once from Buzz – just click "Insert: Photo" from a new post, select "upload files," and click "Add photos to post" once they’re fully uploaded. Since photos are meant to be viewed fast and full-screen, clicking a photo in Buzz opens an embedded viewer designed to give you an optimal viewing experience.

Google Reader users can link their accounts with Google Buzz as well. "Just head over to Gmail and you’ll be able to link up your Google Reader account with just a few clicks," says Google’s Mihai Parparita  on the Google Reader Blog. "Then, anything you share in Reader will automatically be posted to Buzz. Comments are even shared between both products, so you can view and participate in the conversation wherever you’d prefer."

Remember that Google Buzz is rolling out over the next few days, so if you don’t have it yet, you will soon. Google Buzz will become available to businesses and schools using Google Apps, with added features within a few months, according to Google Enterprise Product Management Director Matthew Glotzbach.

Read this article if you want to see what I have to say about search implications and business uses of Google Buzz.

Related Articles:

> Will Google Buzz Change the Social Media Game?

> Whose Got The Buzz: Yahoo or Google?

> Is Gmail Google’s Real Social Network?

This day will go down in history as the day of Google Buzz. After Google’s press event (which we live-blogged and discussed here) Google put up several posts explaining more about the "buzzworthy" new product.

"Google Buzz is a new way to start conversations about the things you find interesting," says Gmail and Google Buzz Product Manager Todd Jackson. "It’s built right into Gmail, so you don’t have to peck out an entirely new set of friends from scratch — it just works. If you think about it, there’s always been a big social network underlying Gmail. Buzz brings this network to the surface by automatically setting you up to follow the people you email and chat with the most. We focused on building an easy-to-use sharing experience that richly integrates photos, videos and links, and makes it easy to share publicly or privately (so you don’t have to use different tools to share with different audiences). Plus, Buzz integrates tightly with your existing Gmail inbox, so you’re sure to see the stuff that matters most as it happens in real time."

"We’ve relied on other services’ openness in order to build Buzz (you can connect Flickr and Twitter from Buzz in Gmail), and Buzz itself is not designed to be a closed system," he says. "Our goal is to make Buzz a fully open and distributed platform for conversations. We’re building on a suite of open protocols to create a complete read/write developer API, and we invite developers to join us on Google Code to see what is available today and to learn more about how to participate."

We looked at the promo video for Google Buzz in another article, but Google has also now provided one focusing specifically on Buzz’s mobile aspects.

Google Buzz Tech Lead Edward Ho talks about the Gmail aspects of Buzz:

To make sure you don’t miss out on the best part of sharing, Buzz sends responses to your posts straight to your inbox. Unlike static email messages, buzz messages in your inbox are live conversations where comments appear in real time.

You can follow the specific people whose posts you want to see, but Buzz also recommends posts from people you’re not directly following, often ones where your friends are having a lively conversation in the comments. If you’re not interested in a particular recommendation, just click the "Not interested" link and your feedback will help improve the recommendations system. Buzz also weeds out uninteresting posts from the people you follow — collapsing inactive posts and short status messages like "brb." These early versions of ranking and recommendations are just a start; we’re working on improvements that will help you automatically sort through all the social data being produced to find the most relevant conversations that matter to you.

Software engineer Justin Zaren talks about photo sharing through Picasa on Google Buzz:

Google Buzz is built right into Gmail and is fully integrated with Picasa Web Albums. Any photos you upload to and share from Buzz are automatically stored in a new unlisted album in your Picasa Web Albums account, so you can view them from either site. It’s easy to upload multiple photos at once from Buzz – just click "Insert: Photo" from a new post, select "upload files," and click "Add photos to post" once they’re fully uploaded. Since photos are meant to be viewed fast and full-screen, clicking a photo in Buzz opens an embedded viewer designed to give you an optimal viewing experience.

Google Reader users can link their accounts with Google Buzz as well. "Just head over to Gmail and you’ll be able to link up your Google Reader account with just a few clicks," says Google’s Mihai Parparita  on the Google Reader Blog. "Then, anything you share in Reader will automatically be posted to Buzz. Comments are even shared between both products, so you can view and participate in the conversation wherever you’d prefer."

Remember that Google Buzz is rolling out over the next few days, so if you don’t have it yet, you will soon. Google Buzz will become available to businesses and schools using Google Apps, with added features within a few months, according to Google Enterprise Product Management Director Matthew Glotzbach.

Read this article if you want to see what I have to say about search implications and business uses of Google Buzz.

Related Articles:

> Will Google Buzz Change the Social Media Game?

> Whose Got The Buzz: Yahoo or Google?

> Is Gmail Google’s Real Social Network?

The Chrome OS is a bit different than most operating systems. Scheduled to be unveiled late this year, the Chrome OS is entirely cloud-based.

It’s still speculative to say if Google is really working on a tablet computer. But let’s assume for a minute that Google is developing such a device with a Chrome OS.

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I guess that’s not too hard to do considering this concept video Google created.

The Chrome OS opens some interesting opportunities for Google. A cloud-based operating system would make a tablet unique compared to the iPad. No data would be stored on the device at all. A lost tablet would not mean lost data. The information would be retrieved simply by going online.

But the absence of actual data on a device is also an inherent weakness. There are some things you always want to have on your device. For instance, client-based software. You can’t do that with an operating system that’s all in the cloud.

Further, since the Chrome OS is not coming out until late next year, it does face some challenges. First off, Windows Mobile 7 will most likely be unveiled before Google launches the Chrome OS, giving Microsoft a head start in the market. The iPad OS is more mature. Apple has more experience with UX development in this regard.

Speed

In the tech press, we get caught up with issues such as openness. Do customers really care that much? We think they prefer open systems because of the options that come with.

What they really want, though, is speed. A goal for Google with the Chrome OS is to make it very fast. But the iPad is lightning quick. By developing its own processor for the iPad, Apple is realizing a customer desire. Would a Google Tablet with a Chrome OS be as fast as the iPad?

Security

The Chrome OS is a browser-based operating system which inherently raises issues about its security. Browsers are widely acknowledged as prime targets for malware. Remember, Google suffered a cyber attack through an employee’s compromised browser (Internet Explorer).

But are the criticisms founded? The Chrome OS is an open environment. It’s not an air-tight vault. Google knows it has bugs. So, they have gone out to the community, like good developers do, and challenged people to find the flaws. We like what Threat Expert has to say about the matter:

“By openly discussing the security challenges and suggested approaches to circumvent them the Chrome guys talk to us this way:

‘Look, in our bank there is a vault with so much gold in it. The system is secure, but we’re not sure about that air con duct – we think it’s a weak point and the intruders may potentially crawl through it.’

Given the source code is open, the potential intruders will get access to the internal scheme immediately. But the moment they start studying it, the highly qualified white-hat professionals will start doing that as well. The idea is that any bugs, flaws or weaknesses will be revealed and fixed instantly, without leaving the intruders any chance to plan an attack.

Compare it with an alternative approach: ‘Look, in our bank there is a vault with so much gold in it. The system is secure.’ After the robbery: ‘The system is secure.’ After another one: ‘Ok, we fixed it, the system is secure’, and so on.”

It is smart. But that is what we expect from Google. A smart approach. Here’s Google’s take on how it approaches the security issue with Chrome OS:

Conclusion

A Chrome OS makes sense on a device like a tablet computer. Google’s focus is on cloud computing. Perhaps the most valid criticism is Google’s broad approach and lack of experience in the hardware market.

Google is learning and they have some clear advantages. The iPad does not support multi-tasking. The Chrome OS makes it easy to manage multiple applications. Lacking features means Apple won’t dominate with the iPad. But the Chrome OS is a first-time operating system that is unprecedented in its approach.

That’s not always a recipe for market domination.

Discuss

Scott Lockhart used to tell his co-workers in the real estate industry that there was a lot of valuable information to be found by reading blogs. They, like all of us, would try blog search engines and end up frustrated with spam, abandoned blogs and low-quality content. So Lockhart quit his job and built an application he thought could solve that problem by unearthing just the most high-quality blog content concerning a wide variety of niche topics. In doing so, he stumbled onto one of the most important issues in the future of the web – the tension between controlled user experience and chaotic freedom.

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That sounds crazy, but Lockhart’s now three-person Atlanta company has actually done a remarkably good job of unearthing good content in a compelling user experience. Regator offers users a curated collection of high-quality sources on more than 500 topics, everything from martial arts to ceramics, aviation, cheerleading, law and Antarctica. Of course there are tech and business channels, too. Regator just got its $2 premium iPhone app into the iTunes store and it’s the best “channel clicker” for niche content we’ve seen yet.

There’s something a little bit odd about having the borders of your internet limited by someone else, but the Regator user experience is excellent otherwise. It’s well designed and fun to use. User experience is key to making the web…usable. I’ve wished for years that more people got excited about sharing OPML files, bundled collections of dynamic RSS feeds, but that just hasn’t happened.

Curation, bundles of content, discovery – these are functions of a prolific web that a new crop of services is trying to tackle with good design and tough decisions about openness versus…something else. Regator is an interesting entry into this place of tension and possibility.

The new premium iPhone app offers subscription to the selected blogs you like, video viewing, recommendations of related posts and issue tracking by keyword search. You can view the most recent posts from sources, or the most popular posts with other Regator users.

But is this just a pretty looking walled-garden? Regator brings to mind an admittedly paranoid but important blog post that consultant Chris Messina wrote this week called The Death of The URL.

“I see signs that the essential freedoms of the web are being undermined by a cadre of companies through the introduction of new technologies and interfaces that, combined, may spell the death of the URL…As a user experience designer, [the responsibility lies with] my discipline and peers to provide the right kind of ideas and leadership. If we get the design right, we can empower while clarifying; we can reduce complexity while enhancing functionality; we can expand freedom while not overwhelming with choice. Surely these are the things that good, thoughtful user experience design can achieve!

“If I were forced to choose between all the messiness of free will over the ‘comfortability’ of a contrived existence, I’d choose the red pill, time and time again. And I hope you would too.

From WebTV to the tightly controlled iPhone app platform, though – these interfaces can be very compelling to use. One of the risks of a controlled platform, perhaps secondary to the inherent loss of freedom, is that whoever is in control might not do a good job of picking out what shows up. Editorial control risks conflicts of interest and a lack of broad editorial knowledge compared to what topic experts know. It’s not an easy role to play.

Kimberly Turner is the editor of Regator’s selection of blogs. She’s a former magazine writer and she works with volunteer reporters and editors who suggest top blogs in niches when they have free time. Turner doesn’t believe that Regator is guilty of the sins that Messina calls other companies out for.

Whether you’re finding sites through Google’s algorithm, the community votes at Digg or your friends on Twitter “we all use some service or site to help us find what we’re looking for,” Turner says “and those are all ‘curated’ in some way.”

“Regator’s human-powered curation is simply less likely to yield poor quality content than some others’,” Turner contends.

Thousands of blogs are included on Regator already and Turner says new features like related posts and searches help users “explore and wander into fresh territory rather than getting stuck in a rut and going to the same small subset of blogs repeatedly.”

So far there are 20 blogs in the wine category for example, just 1 in the beauty/nails subcategory, 4 hockey blogs, 22 law blogs, 3 blogs about cheerleading and 7 about Emergency Medical Services.

The service adds new sources based on user suggestions and other discovery methods. Turner says, “once a blog has established itself as a well-written and trustworthy source, we want to make sure it is included.” The fact is, though, that if a blog Regator turns you on to then links to another related blog that’s not included in the Regator index – you as a user cannot subscribe to it. If the company offered a “suggest” button next to its “share” button in the Regator browser, that could be helpful.

Does that sound reasonable? It’s not as free-form and dynamic as other services. Collected.info, a new service for sharing and subscribing to other peoples’ collections of feeds, is a particularly interesting recent entrant into this market from perhaps the other end of the spectrum. Both services take a little time to get your reading list set up well, but Regator delivers high-quality content from the start.

I like Regator and am already using the new iPhone app to discover interesting new content while on the go. A service that gives me access to fresh, high-quality content about ceramics, anthropology and museums with just a few clicks? Sign me up!

Still, there’s something about the sources available being limited by someone else’s choice. It’s an interesting tension that may never be resolved – but is the basis for some very interesting software in the meantime. The Regator crew is right to identify as a problem the way people new to this social web struggle to find the best content. They offer a compelling solution to the problem. Time will tell which solutions catch on and what the consequences will be.

We’d like to take this opportunity to thank one of the companies that makes it possible for us to bring ReadWriteWeb to you.

Groupsite is a long-developed, feature-rich, self-serve, professional grade social networking and collaboration service. If you’ve got a group of people you want to facilitate online conversation between – you should check out Groupsite. We really appreciate Groupsite’s support here at ReadWriteWeb.

Discuss

There’s a short but interesting blog post up on Google’s official Public Policy Blog, which states six principles the company holds with regards to competition and openness.

"As Google has grown, the company has naturally faced more scrutiny about our business principles and practices," says Google’s Senior Manager of Global Communications and Public Affairs. "We believe that Google promotes competition and openness online, but we haven’t always done a good job telling our story."

He notes that the company has been meeting with policymakers, think tank reps, academics, journalists, ad agencies, and trade associations in the US and Europe.

1. Help other businesses be more competitive.

2. Make it easy for users to change.

3. Open is better than closed.

4. Competition is just one click away.

5. Advertisers pay what a click is worth to them.

6. Advertisers have many choices in a dynamic market.

Google actually has a 53-minute webinar available for download

on the topic of Google competition and openness. The webinar took place back on April 9th, but presumably in an effort to be more open with this, Google is throwing it in the spotlight so others can learn from it.

The posting of these materials appears to be a response to recent media coverage of antitrust concerns regarding the company. Earlier this week the FTC launched an inquiry into whether the overlap of directors on the boards of Apple and Google violates antitrust laws. CEO Eric Schmidt sees no conflict with the Apple Board seat. WebProNews has more on that here.

Several months ago, Consumer Watchdog asked Google to "cease a rumored lobbying effort aimed at allowing the sale of electronic medical records."  Google responded by calling the claim totally false.  Now, Consumer Watchdog’s come back with evidence that Google lobbied for something health-related, and the group’s demanded an explanation.

A letter addressed to Eric Schmidt was released today.  In it, Jamie Court, Consumer Watchdog’s president, and John M. Simpson, a consumer advocate, wrote, "The public record shows that you were lobbying on H.R. 1."  Which is true enough.

The pair then continued, "Based on the records and the issues being debated at the time, the only reasonable conclusion is that Google was lobbying to prevent the privacy provisions applicable to HIPPA providers applying to Google Health – in plain English, that you were lobbying against strong privacy provisions and in favor of allowing the sale of information from medical records."

This part is more debatable, since the public records don’t state Google’s intention.  But Consumer Watchdog appears to have the search giant backed into a corner.  For the sake of not having consumers run screaming from Google Health, Google will likely have to get very specific about what stances it promoted.

Stay tuned.  And if you feel like doing a little more reading about Google Health, something interesting about openness and accuracy was posted on the Official Google Blog just yesterday.

The question of what constitutes art may not be as difficult to answer as what constitutes fair use. Though fair use isn’t a new legal concept, it’s never been as challenged as it in the Internet age.

We arrive at the latest conundrum regarding both art and fair use by way of Wikipedia as parent company Wikimedia attempts to enforce its trademark as gently as possible; a heavy hand in this case would belie the organization’s founding principles of openness and creative commons licensing.

The current debate begins in mid-February. A Wikipedia page titled “Wikipedia Art” survived just 15 hours of spirited debate before meeting swift and controversial deletion along with the deletion of the article’s debate history. The creators of the page—contemporary, mixed media/conceptual artists Scott Kildall and Nathaniel Stern—made no sustained objection to deletion, as deletion subsequently became a part of the evolving art piece itself, and moved the project to a new domain: wikipediaart.org.

A Wikipedia article itself being a work of art is now only the secondary debate. Editors debated this point in discussion, though the general contemporary consensus seems to be that something is art if one calls it art. The nature of the project, though, influenced the nature of the debate and informed the art itself: Would anonymous, collective authority allow such an injection into the Wikipedia reality?  

Some editors felt the subject at least deserved reasoned debate. Others objected to articles being self-referential, mirroring a debate long settled by postmodernists of previous eras, coming out in support of that very concept. Still others compared the intrusion to drawing in the margins of an encyclopedia or graffiti in the library while all of this debate unwittingly was absorbed by the art project itself, now a self-propagating and evolving exploration of authoritarian interventionism and shared hegemonies.

Which is probably why it was promptly (and perhaps ironically) deleted, reportedly along with the discussion history (since reposted), by a myopic 18-year-old, and subsequently endorsed by the rest. A reality with such porous and elastic boundaries is often as disturbing to the young products of structure as it is to the creators of structure; Wikipedia Art absorbs all that touches on it, probably this article included. By debating the art one becomes part of it, likewise by deleting it; it’s suddenly rather immortal in that sense.

Good art is infinitely debatable, and in that way it finds an unlikely relative in law. As mentioned earlier, the artists did not object to deletion as deletion became a part of the art of it. But Wikimedia is objecting to the use of its trademark in the domain wikipediaart.org, and as such even the demands by Wikimedia attorney Douglas Isenberg that the artists transfer ownership of the domain are now part of the project itself.

Wikimedia’s demands are straightforward and atypical of lawyer-crafted nasty-grams sent from other companies in that an amicable resolution is sought in the sole pursuit of trademark protection as the company is obligated to do. Threats were implied rather than expressed, but nonetheless attracted the attention of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a lawyer for which defended the artists’ fair use of the Wikipedia name and threatened to file for summary judgment if any further “threats” are made.

Uncharacteristically of these types of disputes, Isenberg took issue with the idea Wikimedia had made any threats whatsoever, only that he was asked to investigate the matter and try to reach an amicable solution. Obviously Wikimedia is in a tight spot; they don’t want to appear an enemy of art or fair use or collaborative projects—that’s a bit like tearing down its own principles.

Wikimedia founder Jimmy Wales, who did not return request for comment, seems rather conflicted at this point. Wales was signed up as a member of the Wikipedia Art Facebook group until things got legally dicey.

Whatever happens in this truly odd case—nothing, in all probability—the fair use debate rages on with even less clear-cut answers. While the Associated Press launches infringement claims against everyone from artists to Google to those who link to its content, other litigious organizations print off DMCA notices the way the government is currently printing money. Unlike an art debate, though, the fair use debate has major implications for the future of the Web. But, like the art and pornography debate of last century, the debate needs its day in court.

In an era of settlements and compromise, though, it’s hard to know if that will happen.