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Have you become the Mayor of Buttita Plaza Pawn on Foursquare? Or the Archbishop of Myung Dong Tofu Cabin, or the...Deputy Sheriff of the Twilight Bowl? Yay for you! Meanwhile, bloggers in Morocco and Vietnam have become the Governor of Prison and the Water Commissioner of the Interrogation Room. Feel bad? I'm not going to tell you you shouldn't. All this technology we use and write about and enthuse on has higher stakes than we think. Here are some of them. Sponsor Moroccan blogger Abdellatif Ouaiss arrested. Ouaiss was arrested Sunday for "an article published in his English-language blog in which he criticized the ten-year rule of King Mohammed VI" according to Rihab Alhoria . Vietnamese human rights lawyer and blogger Le Thi Cong Nhan rearrested. In the middle of March, only three days after Le Thi Cong Nhan was released from prison after a three year sentence, she was arrested again. "Police took her to a Hanoi police station for allegedly violating the terms of the supplementary sentence of three years of house arrest that she is now supposed to serve," according to From The Old , which has more information. Germany blocks content country-wide, imitates China and Iran. Germany, according to the OpenNetInitiative , has instituted "block lists." What starts with porn ends with you shutting the hell up. (What was that thing about the lessons of history? Ah, whatever. Let's dance! Ganz toll! ) Google gets hacked in China . Intermittent hacking and other mysterious interference slows, and in some places, blocks Google. Google stammered in response. More from ReadWriteWeb . Yahoo gets hacked. In China. Over a dozen Yahoo email accounts belonging to foreign journalists, activists and analysts in China were hacked. Effectively, the email accounts were shut down. More from ReadWriteWeb . Still. Iranian blogger Hessam Firouzi 's still in prison. Egyptian blogger Kareem Amer is still in prison. Omid Reza Mir Sayafi (murdered March 18, 2009) is still dead. Top photo by Adrian Van Leen End photo by FreeKareem.org The author was a co-founder of the March 18 Movement. Discuss
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This Week in Online Tyranny
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If you've ever done SXSW before, then you know about the music here in Austin. If you haven't, let us tell you now - there's a lot. But how do you find it all? And how do you find out which show is best? And how do you share blogs, photos, videos and tweet about it all at once? SuperGlued , which has integrated with both Foursquare and Twitter , will be your your one-stop shop for the more than 1,200 bands that are set to invade Austin over the next week and a half. Sponsor SuperGlued is a can't-miss app for navigating SXSW without having the schizophrenically switch between iPhone apps just to keep up. With the release of a new version of its iPhone app, users can find shows, buy tickets, tweet and read what others are tweeting, post photos and check-in to Foursquare. And if you find yourself at a lame show, the new "Where My Friends At" feature will let you know what shows your friends are seeing so you can ask them if it's any better. A new partnership with BandsInTown not only helps the service find all the shows going on, but lets you buy tickets from your iPhone. And for special events, like SXSW, Superglued brings all the shows together into a separate event listing. Aside from the iPhone app, the website lets you continue to interact around the shows you've seen long after they've ended. Rush Doshi, who co-founded SuperGlued with Gawker CTO Tom Plunkett, told us on the phone the other day that SuperGlued is the water cooler for everyone to gather around and talk about that crazy show they saw last week. "The idea came about from going to a lot of shows and wondering about who else was there - it just seemed that there was no one place to go to see what everyone else thought," said Doshi. "We built SuperGlued to be that place." SuperGlued connects with Flickr, YouTube, Blogger, WordPress and Tumblr, so when the shows all over, you can both add and check out block posts, videos, set lists and more from the website. Doshi told us that they have made extra efforts to make sure that all of the SXSW shows are list, but if a show isn't there, users can add shows via the website. With the number of shows springing up in parking lots and backyards, this is a must-have feature. In the near future, the company is looking to include show-specific merchandise in its iPhone app, letting you browse and even order show merchandise from your phone and having it shipped to your house. Beyond SXSW, SuperGlued is available around the world with nearly 200,000 show listings, many of which it pulls from BandInTown and Last.fm, in 140 countries. So, wherever you are, get off your duff, download the iPhone app and go see some live music. Discuss
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SuperGlued: The Can't-Miss Live Music iPhone App for SXSW 2010
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As the cloud is getting more players and interfaces, best and worst practices are emerging. As the market grows and more companies try to plug in, the cloud may benefit from guiding principles. Similar to new technology movements in the past, a natural process is underway to define "what is good", which, for some in the industry, equates to "what is open". Like religion itself, open can be defined in ways that are uplifting, or on the other side of the coin, restricting. Also, we learn again, nothing is free. Sponsor Cloud APIs Must Walk on Water If you've been part of a software development project, you know that sometimes it's hard to get the team to all agree on best practices for interface design, database optimization, or even what technology to use. In this analysis, we take a look at some of the movements in cloud computing that start to lay a framework of good as it relates to this technology. In this context, API designers for cloud applications need to think ahead and avoid common pitfalls. For several reasons, more than ever before. First, because many people will be accessing your one piece of code. Second, is that in this world of open APIs, it's easy to compare your code against another. We notice that data management practices are at the core, and details matter when provisioning in platforms. At the same time that groups are forming to align practices and forms of virtualization and cloud standards, a voice whispers that perhaps this is a free-market problem. People who benefit at solving it, will; others will ignore it or compete directly. We enjoyed this post from Joyent on where standards matter in a practical sense. In essence, the question raised: If a vendor makes it easy and bakes in the ability to "just do it", do you know or care about the standards? This seems to mirror an iPhone development paradigm, which is to expect work from the vendor SDK or libraries. The SDK wraps standards implementations, which is done in the way best understood by that vendor. Do Unto Others as You Would Have Done To You We know the cloud is big - perhaps it will inevitably be bigger than the Internet itself as it usurps our conception of location, space and time. Where power forms, rules, groups, and organizations do as well. In information technology there is always tension between open standards and defacto standards. The former are crafted through agreements, the latter through leadership and market dominance. We asked in a prior series " Will a single company become the dominant provider in the cloud? " Today we look at the more practical side of "who is winning now" - who is setting the rules and who is in the trenches. Quite a number of the responses to our earlier posts emphasized that "the cloud should be free", meaning that it should have governing principles to avoid one vendor from owning the landscape. Here are a few groups that have emerged to provide some context in how this may come together, both philosophically and practically. In both, the devil is in the details. A good summary of some of the current combining of forces is by the Open Grid Forum . (In our opinion, grids have given way to clouds as the dominant concept in this technology makeover). A resource directory of initiatives is located at the Cloud Standards Wiki , which in itself was formed by a handful of organizations and movements working to align around setting rules and patterns for cloud computing. The Open Cloud Consortium is organized around developing practices around sharing resources and has recently focused on a developing a test bed. The DMTF is working at the core definition of virtualization. It recently focused on the 1.1 version of the Open Virtualization Format (OVF) specification that focuses on packaging virtualization instances and creating a portable mechanic distribution by defining envelope and collection parameters around the virtual machine and its services. The organization, which contains members of IBM, Microsoft, Dell, VMware, XENSource, Sun, and NEC, has submitted 1.1 for consideration as an ANSI and ISO standard. The efforts by the federal government in its data.gov initiative shows that there's a market that's starting to see the value of raw government data formats . Soon, we would expect this to be powered by a mesh of computer resources that allow all sorts of jobs - integrated jobs - to work with these data sets. It would comprising an active government cloud. Do Not Covet Thy Neighbors Network Resource When looking for things to avoid, we found a lot of philosophical questions around data ownership, logging and portability. These discussions are alive and well and seem to be being absorbed into vendor solutions and consortiums like the ones mentioned earlier. For a more practical view, we turned to a friend of ReadWriteWeb, Thorsten von Eicken , and have summarized his thoughts from a recent post, " Top Cloud API Sins . Bold items are our (loose) mapping to biblical terms. Do not covet your neighbors resources. : Listing of resources without the details, e.g., a list-servers call that doesn't return all the details for each server. This makes it very expensive to poll for server state changes ... Do not make cast idols : Not returning a resource id on creation. Some APIs don't give you a server i.d. when you request a server ... Labor six days, rest on the seventh : Providing a task queue. Several APIs I've seen have a task queue that is supposed to provide updates on tasks that are in progress E.g., you launch a server and you get a handle onto a task descriptor. For us that's just overhead ... Though shall not bear false witness : Not returning deleted resources in a "list resource" call. In particular, terminated servers must be returned in a list servers call for a certain duration, probably at least for an hour. Ouch! ... Shall not covet his neighbor (or force me to repaginate) : Pagination that goes page-wise instead of using a marker, e.g. where you get page one or the first 100 resources and then issue a query for "page 2″ or "from 100 on". Explain to me how a client can get a consistent resource listing when resources can be added and removed concurrently ... Randy Bias added to Torsten's post: Treat others as you want to be treated Your UI MUST use your API so you understand how to be a consumer of your own API ... We plan on keeping up with this list and seeing how it intersects with implementations and standards that evolve. Please let us know your thoughts below. Nirvana: Smells Like Services Orientation Torsten goes on to describe a picture of the future. "Now here's what I'd really like to see. This is what we're working on for internal purposes and it's not easy, which is an event based interface instead of a request-reply based interface... " This sounds like a vision where we all win. Smart services in the cloud, rather than resources alone. This starts to get us closer and closer to an object-orientated network. Maybe that's what the cloud will be for platforms, infrastructure and software. The industry has been quick to identify the layers. But perhaps the point is piecing them together in a smart transactional framework. A way to engineer highly reliable systems around these architecture challenges may sound familiar to those who monitor existing data centers today. Torsten continues, "We run a good number of machines that do nothing but chew up 100% cpu polling EC2 to detect changes. Fortunately cpu cycles are cheap 
". This is practical intervention between vision and get it done. We find it refreshing to hear this type of dialog in the industry and see a fresh opportunity for defining efficient patterns for this next generation of the cloud infrastructure. Perhaps a new concept is forming: "Divine Computing". Where do you sit in the "just do it" spectrum? Photo credit: tsarkasim , Amsterdam Esogna Discuss
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Cloud Religion: Do's, Do Not's, and a Glimpse of Nirvana
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Anthony Tjan is a venture capitalist at the Boston-based VC firm Cue Ball , but he also blogs for The Harvard Business Review where last week he posted an article about packaged pricing deals in business. The article, The Pros and Cons of Bundled Pricing , points out the differences between bundles and "à la carte" pricing as well as benefits to both customers and businesses. Most Web startups offering an array of services will often bundle features into tiered pricing plans rather than an "à la carte" selection, and here's why. Sponsor Using bundled pricing over "à la carte" pricing isn't just a simple decision of choosing the method that makes more money; bundled pricing can benefit businesses (and their customers) in other ways. While bundled pricing doesn't always necessarily benefit the customer, it can provide them with a better overall experience with the service being sold. Tjan's example is a 5-star hotel that charges $750 per night, but the bottle of water in the room is an extra $10. To most people, $10 is a lot for a bottle of water and they will make sure they don't crack it open lest they see that extra $10 on their bill. If the hotel chose to instead bundle the cost of the water into the room and charge $760 per night, they could advertise bottled water as a feature. In most cases, someone willing to pay $750 for a hotel room is also willing to pay $760, but they don't know that they're being charged $10 for the water, it's just a hidden cost rolled into the bundle. They get to their room and think, "Wow! Free bottled water!" The hotel in this example is banking on the percent of people who won't drink the water that they unknowingly paid for in the bundle. As Tjan points out, the same can be said for Web startups and software services. "Think also of the fact that while most users of software use only a fraction of the available functionality, it is the basic users who are subsidizing the long-tail product development of features used by a relatively small number of advanced users," writes Tjan. Bundled pricing can be a good and bad thing for both customers and businesses. In the case of the hotel, customers are paying a higher price which is an obvious benefit to the hotel, but in the end, the customers are also enjoying a better experience with the perceived "free" water. The opposite is true in Tjan's alternate example of fast-food restaurant value meals. In this case, the customer benefits from a lower price by bundling a burger with fries and a drink, but the restaurant can also benefit from a more streamlined workflow in preparing the meal. For customers, there are times when seeing a breakdown of a bundle's pricing is advantageous, but most businesses are cautious about revealing such information. As Tjan points out, the key for businesses in this case is finding the right blend of these two ideas. "The answer is simple: you should not confuse transparency with a pricing strategy. If you are the seller, focus on the total value provided which is fair for the customer and you," writes Tjan. "Show the list of all activities performed for a service without individually valuing them. Providing individual price breakdown can kill any perceived or real synergistic total value." Obviously there are exceptions to any rule, and not every bundled pricing situation offers a mutual benefit to both parties. But are there situations when "à la carte" pricing could be beneficial to both customers and businesses? Let us know your thoughts on pricing in the comments. Discuss
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How Bundled Pricing Can Benefit Both Customers and Businesses
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