Roland Tanglao's Weblog

My sincere apologies to all if I tend to be too "technical" when I'm speak. After almost 30 years in the technology business, it is really hard to avoid being technical...

I firmly believe that I didn't plug my product when I spoke at Bloggercon. In fact, if you listen carefully to what I said, one could conclude that I was actually speaking *against* my interests as a "vendor." My comments were made in response to a suggestion by a previous speaker that services and aggregators should do a better job of filtering out various kinds of messages. In my comments, I put on my "user" hat and was trying to warn other users not to give too much control over what they read to the intermediaries that deliver content or help them discover new content. (i.e. PubSub.com, Feedster, Google, etc.) The problem is that almost all filtering systems impose *subjective* bias into the filtering process. It is vitally important that people be aware of what subjective bias exists in the filtering -- or that they be able to control/turn-off that filtering themselves. If not, then the intermediaries are given unacceptable control over the flow of information on the network.

Frankly, from a "vendor" point of view, it would be crazy to say the things that I said. From a "vendor" point of view, I should be assuring everyone that using my service and similar services is 100% "safe" and you should rely on us to do the "right thing" at all times. But, I wasn't speaking with my vendor hat on. I was speaking with my user hat on. Thus, I was rather stunned when told that I should be quiet simply because I was a "vendor" -- no matter what I had to say.

I should also note that, for me, one of the really striking realizations of being at Bloggercon is that "We're all Vendors now..." Seeing everyone in one room, I was impressed by the number of commerical products, one-man open source efforts, garage operations, etc. -- all vendors. Additionally, there were dozens of people whose "business" was their blog. Those folk are "vendors" in much the same way that the New York Times is -- just smaller. One of the amazing things about the blogging world is that we have, in fact, *all* become vendors. This is an interesting impact of having finally created the "writable web" at the same time as we've made the development tools and technologies easy enough that they can be used by a much larger population then they could in the past. There is an outpouring of creativity in the blogosphere that simply hasn't been possible in the past. One of the results of this is that "We're all vendors now..."

Over the years, I've learned alot about "information" in computer systems and I like to share that knowledge. I built one of the first commercial email systems in the early 80's. I built the predecessor to the world's most successful groupware product. I built the world's first wide-area-network hypertext system. I've built search engines, editors, etc... Thirty years is a long time. In all this time, I've learned a great deal about the good and bad aspects of the way that information flows in a network. It is unfortunate, I think, that when trying to share some of what I've learned, I was accused of having nefarious goals in mind. My intent was to help -- not to sell.

bob wyman