Author Archives: Sean Gallagher

Administrivia

I was a social software outcast

The world of “social software” sites is, for some unexplained reason, hot right now. I don't quite understand the allure, frankly; maybe it's because I'm a loner whacko or something, but I find the sites like Friendster and Tribe.net to be a bit like college bars–filled with cliques and guys on the make.

That's not to say I avoid them completely. I have accounts on both Friendster and Tribe (and I'm a little miffed that I didn't get invited to join Orkut; there's something about an invitation-only”0social network” that's, well, antisocial ).

I've used Tribe more regularly than Friendster (which from my experience is as slow as molasses). Tribe is in some ways similar to craigslist, which started basically as a job-posting service but has turned into what I call “community-ware”–a place where people can trade information, find services, and generally do a lot of the things they used to do on Usenet before the bozo and spam level choked off any remaining usefulness.

But I digress. Tribe.net has features like event planning, classifieds (which you can filter based on how close your relationship to the poster is), discussion boards with their own URLs (which I've set up a few of), and a number of other interactive features that go beyond just trying to score a date.

To tell the truth, the killer feature that Tribe, Friendster and Orkut all lack is what LiveJournal has–permission-based sharing of stories.

LiveJournal is, on the surface, yet another blog hosting site. But it has one feature that other blogs don't–you can designate people as “friends”, and set the level of privacy on entries to allow only them to read them and/or post comments. You can also look on a page tied to your journal and see all the recent postings by your friends, and set up community journals.

My wife has a LiveJournal, and she finally succeeded in getting me to sign up for one. LiveJournal doesn't have the social networking aspect of “social software”, in that it doesn't automatically reveal to you who friends of your friends are. But it does have the effect of building tight communities of people quickly because it allows them to share things over the web with relative privacy–something that Tribe and Friendster don't have, really. I mean, sure, Tribe and Friendster restrict access to your identity info to a limited network of people (four degrees of separation for Tribe). But with 6 official “friends” on Tribe, I have a network of over 21,000 people who can read my details; and I can't mix friends-only and public commentary in a “tribe” discussion board.

So I finally succumbed and set up my own Livejournal account because of the privacy controls–I can write something there with certainty of who will be able to see it, and others can post knowing that I can read what they post (if they let me) without causing problems with work or family. If there were some way to combine some of the features of Tribe with the journaling capabilities of LiveJournal, well…that would be social software I could give a testimonial for…

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politics

Iraq, incompetence and malice

The real news out of Dr. David Kay's report on the investigation into weapons of mass destruction programs in Iraq is being brushed under the carpet by most politicians and pundits because it doesn't suit their arguments. That news: that scientists were running a con on Saddam to get money from him for programs they had no intention of taking to completion.

Kay says the evidence suggests the following scenario: Saddam had basically eliminated any power those underneath him had to vett new programs, and was personally handing out the money to scientists that came to him with cockamamie schemes. They took the money (in Iraq's crumbling economy) and ran with it. While documents and official notices, on the surface, indicated massive biological, chemical and nuclear weapons development programs, none of them was actually doing anything.

The CIA and other intelligence agencies failed to detect the fraud, just as Saddam did. They placed the most dire meaning on any evidence they found. Bush, looking for an excuse to go to war, found it in the evidence he was handed, and like Saddam took the information at face value.

But, in fact, there was no threat. The Saddam government was falling apart at the seams because of internal corruption and the growing delusions of Saddam. He was a nut with what he thought was a gun, but was in fact a bar of soap. There's room for blame all around on this one.

So now, can we finish up with the finger-pointing and figure out how to get out of this mess?

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