Amanda Mooney posted a note about being told she needed corporate permission to take a picture in a store. Mooney’s interest was in telling others how much she likes the products and the brand — exactly the sort of word of mouth advertising most brands are anxious for, but imagine some more pedestrian uses: what about the customer who wants a friend’s opinion about a new skirt? Can that customer snap a cell phone pic to send?

Meanwhile, Bruce Schneier reports on increasing limits to photography in public spaces and the supposed link between terrorist threats and photography. It’s nonsense, he says, but the trend is increasing.

Taking and sharing pictures builds community. Flickr knows this. Facebook, with more than 14 million photo uploads daily, knows this. What exactly are public officials and sales executives worried about?

(photo credit: Xava du)

Will, Jon, Joe, Ted, and I arrived at Telos Landing with plans to run the Allagash Wilderness Waterway. As we prepared to embark, the park ranger appeared with a tape measure and told us our kayaks weren’t canoes.

Section 2.3 of the Allagash rules and regulations is quite clear: “A canoe is defined as a form of small watercraft long and narrow…. The width at the widest point shall not exceed 20% of the craft’s overall length.” Of our three kayaks and one canoe, only one met those regulations. The canoe, it turns out, was a cannot.

It’s worth knowing that I’ve been told stories about how Maine Game Wardens are among the most empowered law enforcement officials in the US. “They can shoot you if they want to,” an older, drunken friend said once. Ranger Rick in front of us didn’t appear to have a gun, but I didn’t see the tape measure until it was too late either. And the difference between a ranger and warden seemed a bit argumentative if the gun did come out.

And those thoughts are what helped me keep a straight face while the ranger repeated “yep, they’re not canoes, you can’t go on the river with ‘em.”

Jon, however, was fearless.

“I’m not trying to argue, but these are kayaks.”

“They might be, but I can tell you they’re not canoes. And you can’t go beyond Lock Damn in ‘em.”

Jon and Ranger Rick continued for a bit. We all wanted to know why. What did the width and length matter? Why?

Rick was able to point out the regulations, but couldn’t explain them. “Nope, it’s not for safety,” he was able to say, but couldn’t offer any other insights to what the rules were about or why. He was quite excited to help us contact an outfitter friend of his who could rent us some official canoes, and he warned us that other rangers at the various portages would each stop us if we tried to continue.

Choose your own adventure indeed.

We cancelled our plans to have our cars shuttled to the end of the river and consoled ourselves with kayaking in the, um, brown waters of Lake Chamberlain. We spent three nights on the lake, paddling a 20 mile loop (to sustain our pride, we usually add that it was against the wind each way), long enough to enjoy the lake fog and some wooded sunsets.

Will lit our campfires with a bow. Ted feared our doddling would attract aliens. Rain blew in on the last night, and Joe taught us all fantan. Huddled around the picnic table under a just too small tarp we played game after game.

Allagash Wilderness Waterway, Allagash, river, kayaking, canoeing, canoe, kayak, maine, rules, regulations, vacation, mancation

Web 2.0 has matured to the point where even those who endorse the moniker are beginning to cringe at its use. Still, it gave me pause the other day when Cliff (a sysop) began a sentence with “Web 2.0 standards require….”

Web 2.0 is now coherent enough to have standards? We used to joke about rounded corners and gradient blends being the rule, but something more has indeed emerged. O’Reilly defined Web 2.0 by example, Time Magazine echoed Kevin Kelly’s assertion in naming You as person of the year: Web 2.0 is about people. And “the rules” are emerging as a matter of market forces and natural selection.

Open Source

No matter your position on the Free Software Foundation’s philosophy, open source development reduces costs while improving quality and helps projects get to market faster with new ideas.

Flickr is among those that’s been rather public about their use of the LAMP stack, though Google and others have quietly built their business on it too. WordPress, a rare example of a downloadable Web 2.0 application, has enjoyed active development (and even a resurrection) due to its GNU license.

Still other Web 2.0 applications extend the open source model further. Open source content, or the user’s ability to declare a Creative Commons license on their content in these Web 2.0 applications is becoming common (and demanded by some). We may argue about the efficacy of Wikipedia, but the fact is that it’s among the most likely sites to appear for a web search and it’s consistently ranked among the top sites for traffic.

Wikipedia’s early contributors, looking at a young site with an unclear value proposition, could trust that their work would be protected by license (specifically, the GNU Free Documentation License).

Built for Remixing

Amazon reports that almost a third of their sales are attributable to remixers and boasts 180,00 registered developers of their API.

Google Maps didn’t include a public API when first released, but the community responded with enthusiasm and quickly reverse engineered the JavaScript to build new applications. Google responded by releasing a public API, making internet mapping and Google almost synonymous.

Dan Cat mashed up flickr and Google Maps on his own before Yahoo!/flickr snatched him up to build those features into flickr’s own site. But the company still enjoys the efforts of developers building applications to the flickr API, independently developing new features and adding value to the service.

Like open source, remixability and APIs engage a larger pool of talent than is available inside any company and serve two very important audiences: those who want features and those who care about their exit strategy. Neither group is remarkably large, but both are influential, passionate users. (More: Usability, Findability, and Remixability, Especially Remixability.)

Well Behaved and Social

Predictable and reliable URLs are essential to allowing users to bookmark and link to your site; well-formed semantic markup makes it easier for screen readers and search engines to make sense of the content. Semantic markup and microformats aid in remixability, contribute greatly to the Semantic Web, make site redesigns easier, and generally display better in a broader variety of formats and clients (think HTML vs. RSS).

People are anxious to leave comments telling us how right or wrong we are, so a site without comments/trackbacks/pingbacks is turning its back on its users. Good sites recognize the value of their users and cultivate the community. Caterina Fake did a lot of that for flickr (see her comments on my first photos there), while MetaFilter exists entirely as a community.

That doesn’t mean users are itching to build somebody else’s site, the lesson is that personal value precedes network value. Good sites make it easier for people to do what they want to do, not what their boss or the site’s creator wants.

If it isn’t obvious already: empower the user to achieve their own goals and control their experience.

rules, web 2.0, web applications, open source, remixability, social software, well behaved

I wasn’t really paying attention in June when WiFi Net News reported on a FCC decision regarding control of WiFi:

The FCC says landlords, associations can’t regulate Part 15 use: The FCC’s Office of Engineering and Technology says that the function of regulating and coordinating frequency use is reserved to the FCC itself. It’s a clear refutation of mall owners, airports, and condominium associations to limit use of Wi-Fi and other wireless technologies.
And it’s hard to put their conclusion any better than they themselves:[quote]The rules prohibit homeowner associations, landlords, state and local governments, or any other third parties from placing restrictions that impair a customer antenna user’s ability to install, maintain, or use such customer antennas transmitting and/or receiving commercial nonbroadcast communications signals when the antenna is located “on property within the exclusive use or control” of the user where the user has a “direct or indirect ownership or leasehold interest in the property, except under certain exceptions for safety and historic preservation.”

So this recent report that the Tampa Airport Thinks FCC Rules Don’t Apply was a more interesting news hit than might have been expected. It seems the Tampa airport authorities have retained counsel and are planning some appeal.

There was a recent spat at the University of Texas where they first tried to prohibit WiFi, the spent some time considering the use of private WiFi, then, recognizing the June FCC ruling rescinded the WiFi ban.

This would, of course, have local implications, if anybody tried to test it.

My opinion: this FCC ruling is actually good for consumers. If the FCC left it to landowners, they’d be creating local monopolies that charge high premiums for service. Further, since the ruling effects all unlicensed services, not just WiFi, it could be creating a regulations nightmare where other non-commercial spectrum uses, like FRS, might be banned or limited. Further, the ruling is actually about the use of radio spectrum, unlike recent copyright limitations mandated by the FCC.

fcc, wifi, unlicensed spectrum, rules, spectrum, University of Texas, regulation, frequency allocation