Unpredictable. Unfocused. Just like life.

Tim O'Reilly comments on how easy it is for online data to go bad, and how difficult it is to correct it. He even uses the whack-a-mole analogy:

We face this problem all the time with book metadata in our publishing business. Retailers demand notification of upcoming books as much as six months before the book is published. As you can imagine, titles change, page counts change, prices change -- sometimes books are cancelled -- and corralling the old data becomes a game of whack-a-mole. You'd think that the publisher would be an authoritative source of correct data, but this turns out not to be the case, as some wholesalers and retailers have difficulty updating their records, or worse, retailers sometimes overwrite newer, correct data with older bad data from one of the wholesalers who also supply them.

But why should online be any different than anywhere else. After all this isn't exactly a new problem, as any victim of identity theft, or anyone who has ever tried to correct an erroneous credit report can easily attest to.

The problem is that in the real or online worlds there is rarely if ever an authoritative source of correct data, because we aggregate the data from so many different sources.Tim says this is a Web 2.0 problem:

As Lou said in one email, "the whole story seems to be such a strong illustration of the downsides of connected and linked databases (and therefore very much a Web 2.0 lesson)."

But this isn't just a Web 2.0 problem.It's a regular old database problem.

Trans fat to be specific. Kentucky Fried Chicken, or KFC, announced today that it will replace trans fatswith soybean-based oil. And as of now there are approximately 820 articles on the announcement at Google News.

It's just frying oil folks. If you want to take care of your heart, then don't eat so much fried food in the first place.

Today's New York Times comments on the increase in television shows with extremely complex story lines, where missing an episode may make the show completely incomprehensible. The only show that really caught us was Jericho, which we now watch. The other ones they list didn't make an impact on us.

But TiVo has changed our lives, or at least our television habits. For us, there is no more appointment television. We merely create a Season's Pass and record episodes only to watch them later, sometimes several in a row. Which means the using shows as leaders into other programming doesn't work for us, or for other TiVo or DVR users.

Now given the increasingly busy lives of viewers it seems that it would be difficult to ensure that you can watch every episode in order, so perhaps this will just lead to increased sales of DVDs or the shows. But I find it amazing that viewers can comprehend shows like this, but just didn't get something like Arrested Development.

Of course I'm not serious, but there are plenty of folks who would certainly like to convince you that obesity contributes to global warming:

This latest contribution to the obesity debate comes in an article by Sheldon H. Jacobson of the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana and his doctoral student, Laura McLay. Their paper, published in the current issue of The Engineering Economist, calculates how much extra gasoline is used to transport Americans now that they have grown fatter. The answer, they said, is a billion gallons a year.

So perhaps the solution to global warming is not allowing obese people to fly. Of course the same problem occurs when they drive:

Their conclusion is in the same vein as a letter published last year in The American Journal of Public Health. Its authors, from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, did a sort of back-of-the-envelope calculation of how much extra fuel airlines spend hauling around fatter Americans. The answer, they wrote, based on the extra 10 pounds the average American gained in the 1990’s, is 350 million gallons, which means an extra 3.8 million tons of carbon dioxide.

It's amazing the kind of conclusions you can jump to with a little imagination.

Today I booked a flight to New York for Thanksgiving. I decided to use some Air Canada frequent flyer points and book through Aeroplan, so I went to their website to do so.

I tried three times to select flights, enter passenger names, and complete the purchase, failing every time. I then tried to call their customer service toll free number. Forty times. Nothing but a busy signal every time.

So I called the web technical support line, and the woman explained that it had failed because I checked a box that said "add this passenger to my profile". Apparently that feature doesn't work, but rather than indicate it on the site they prefer to tell me over the phone. I then tried to complete the transaction and failed. So the web tech support person transferred me to a regular customer support person.

The regular customer support person told me point blank that the website didn't work, and hadn't since it had gone live a few weeks ago. She tried to find the flights I wanted and told me that she would have to transfer me to a ClassicPlus customer representative, and explained that because it was their problem they would waive the normal booking fee since the website wasn't working and I was unable to use it.

She transferred me and when the ClassicPlus rep got on the phone the first thing he told me was that I should have booked my travel using the web so I wouldn't have to pay the booking fee. I explained what the previous person had told me and he then agreed to waive the fee. After a comment about the fact that the poor service was a result of the fact that the company president wanted to make more money, the representative located the correct flights and booked them for me, which took all of five minutes.

It took me about 45 minutes to accomplish what should have been a very simple transaction, and was given a birds-eye view of an organization that doesn't communicate, clearly has low morale, and obviously has a very high cost of support per transaction, given that it took three people to sell me a couple of tickets.

So the lesson to be learned here is make sure your website works perfectly before you open it to the public. And if it doesn't work, make sure everybody knows, and just admit the problem. And please don't waste my time.

Jon Johansen, the man who cracked DVD encryption, has now cracked iTunes encyption, which means that you can now play songs that you legally purchased on devices other than the iPod.

Now I love my iPod, and I'm not about to purchase a different device. But if I've paid for a song, then I believe that I have the right to listen to that song wherever I want, on any device I choose.

Digital Rights Management, or DRM, does not keep music from being stolen. It merely limits what an honest customer can do with something they purchased in good faith. That isn't good for anyone, and it just isn't fair.

My primary machine is a MacBook, on which I run Camino, Firefox, and Safari as browsers, and I'm pretty happy with them. Even if I could, I doubt I'd be running Internet Explorer. Microsoft built a browser and included it free with Windows years ago seemingly for the express purpose of killing Netscape. And then they let it stagnate. It only became a concern when Firefox appeared and started to take away market share.

This time I don't think IE will be killing anything.Even Walt Mossberg suggests that there's really nothing new there. It didn't even take very long for the browser built for security to expose a vulnerability.

Hey, no browser is perfect or secure. But I think I'll stay with browsers that are growing with me, rather than browsers that only respond to customer concerns if their market share is threatened.

I was at the Thoreau Club the other day. It's a private health club in Concord, Massachusetts, close to our former home in Westford. We took our goddaughter to her ballet class, and the grounds consist of a few buildings set in the forest, a beautiful sight as the leaves change color in New England.

Now what I recall most about Henry David Thoreau, the club's namesake, is that he went to live a simple life at Walden Pond.No modern conveniences, even the sparse few that existed at the time. So I guess I was a bit surprised that when I opened my laptop it immediately connected to a free wireless service and I was able to work - with the most modern of conveniences.

While it is certainly pleasant to be connected anywhere, I couldn't help but feel that someone had missed the point of Thoreau completely. Sometimes you should just be able to relax, surrounded by nature.

When I was a kid I was just born a little too late to experience the whole "Duck and cover" response to nuclear weapons. I grew up thinking that the world was becoming a safer place. Yes some countries that had always had nuclear weapons still had them, but they had the relative sanity not use them.

It's over 40 years later and my youngest son came home with his girlfriend the other day and with some concern asked if I had heard that North Korea had launched a nuclear missile. Now my son is almost 19 so he is rational about this stuff, and I explained that they had merely tested a nuclear warhead underground.

But as I said that I realized that we now live in a world that is arguably less safe than it was 40 years ago. That we have actually moved backward to a less peaceful world.

I've worked all over the world and lived in both the United States and Canada, and I personally have found pretty much everyone easy to get along with. I just can't understand this strange need for humans to want to kill each other, which seems to be pretty much testosterone driven.But if we don't figure out how to stop it we've pretty much failed our children's generation.

Every morning I go to a coffee shop called Williams Coffee Pub near my house. I go there because it has free internet, and it is comfortable enough to work there. But their service isn't that great. It takes quite a while just to get a regular cup of coffee. If you want a latte or anything special they give you a number to take to your table, and I've waited as long as 10 minutes for my order. It can sometimes take over an hour for them to get around to cleaning the tables, and since there is no self-bussing area, I've sometimes had to push over several breakfast dishes in order to get a table to sit down at.

Contrast this with Starbucks, where I've rarely waited more than a minute for any beverage, and the tables are cleaned very frequently. But they don't have free internet.

So I keep going to Williams in the mornings to work, but I'm constantly reminded of the poor service, and the lack of attention to detail, so I never recommend it to friends. But I go to Starbucks to relax, and I always recommend it, and often meet folks there.

And I always think to myself, why is it that Starbucks can accomplish what Williams can't?

Among the millions (quite literally it seems) of comments on Google's purchase of YouTube, Mark Evans' comment about focusing on the customer caught my attention. He also commented about YouTube's lack of paying customers.

But who is YouTube's customer? It seems to me that would either be the creators of the video - and there were plenty of non-infringing videos - or the consumers of those videos.

While the consuming customers didn't pay (though advertising would soon change that) the content creators paid by providing content that in turn attracted consumers. This isn't unique to the web. The television show America's Funniest Videos has generated revenue for years using free video sent in by just plain folks. AFV just monetized that free content in the same way that YouTube would have.

The social aspect is important as well. Shows like Survivor don't do well because they are classic television. They excel by involving the viewer, just as YouTube does.

Google started out providing a service for which there were no paying customers; I still don't pay to use Google's services but they seem to do ok anyway.

It's perhaps no longer correct to assume that the only paying customer is the one who pays to consume your service. Other customers may choose to pay in other ways, and content may be even more valuable than cash. In fact, in view of the theory of the Long Tail, niche content may be even more valuable to the targetted consumer.

When will a new technology break through? It is important that it is user friendly and easy to understand, but first you had better make sure that it solves a real problem.

If your technology doesn't solve my problem it doesn't matter how simple it is to use, because I don't need it.

Via Seth Godin.

The usual brilliant observation from Kathy Sierra:

So yes, I'm thinking Mr. CEO of Very Large Company would say that their company should take the upstart whatever-it-takes person over the ever-compromising team player. "If that person shakes us up, gets us to rethink, creates a little tension, well that's a Good Thing", the CEO says. riiiiiiiiiight. While I believe most CEOs do think this way, wow, that attitude reverses itself quite dramatically the futher you reach down the org chart. There's a canyon-sized gap between what company heads say they want (brave, bold, innovative) and what their own middle management seems to prefer (yes-men, worker bees, team players). "

I worked for a short while for a company that shall remain nameless in Waterloo, Canada, that produced software for healthcare. This company couldn't seem to make a decision about anything. I on the other hand made numerous decisions, not always correct, but always justifiable and supportable. And my division shipped product and had happy customers.

So obviously I had to go. Which is fine. Business is business. But the most telling moment came when someone who also worked at the company was talking to my wife and heard that I had left. Her proud response?

They get rid of people that rock the boat.

I was shipping product, delighting customers, and increasing revenue. But I had to go because I was rocking the boat.

Every company claims that they want people that will do what it takes to take them to the next level. People with a fire in their belly. Insert your favorite metaphor here. But in my experience less that 1 in 10 companies want anybody that might attempt to change the way they do things now.

I was recently speaking to a recruiter about a senior management position. They stressed the need to someone that could motivate people, explaining that the staff were long term employees, overworked, and somewhat burned out. The current management wanted to improve the culture and to motivate the employees.

So a posed a couple of questions for the management. And one response came back that they expected to improve the situation by adding more process. Let's think about that for a second:

We're going to make our employees happy by adding more process.

These are signs of failing companies, possibly on a permanent decline.If you are a CEO, you should make it a mandatory part of your day to meet with some of the folks your staff are about to hire, and see just what type of person is being chosen to take your company to the next level.

And to make sure that the next level is a higher one.

And if stealing almonds wasn't odd enough, criminals are now using forklifts to "smash and dash", removing the automatic teller machines, according to the New York Times:

Around the country, thieves have been hot-wiring forklifts at construction sites, driving up to banks and scooping up automated teller machines.

Even though the machines are often embedded in bank walls, it seems that the banks foresaw their movement and equipped them with GPS locators:

Many banks use A.T.M.’s equipped with global-positioning technology that keeps track of where the machines are. Some have an alarm that goes off if someone tampers with the machine. Even if thieves get away with an A.T.M., they have to pound away pretty hard to get it open.

You wouldn't think thieves would bother stealing a few nuts but when you're talking about almonds, one of the top 5 California crops with sales over $2 billion dollars last year, it's a whole different story.

And the crooks know enough to steal them when they are already loaded on the trucks: For Scott Phippen, a third-generation almond man, the hole in his fence was the first sign of trouble. And sure enough, a quick once-over confirmed the worst: two of Mr. Phippen's trucks were missing.

But the thieves were not after vehicles. They were after almonds. And at Mr. Phippen’s farm here in the Central Valley, they had hit the mother lode: 88,000 pounds of the nuts, with a street value of some $260,000.

Farmers estimate that they have lost $1.5 million so far this year.

The Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony is facing bankruptcy:

The Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony will be out of business by the end of the month unless it raises $2.5-million in emergency funds, says the orchestra's board chair.

Now to me it suggests stunning fiscal mismanagement if we only hear of this problem now, less than 30 days before the crisis hits.This sounds much more like political grandstanding, and I have no doubt that the local governments will cough up the cash, even though this crisis is the Symphony's own fault.

So we'll blow $2.5 million of local taxpayers money to save an organization that a relatively elite few (and fewer and fewer apparently) go to see.

Yet I've seen my son's friends try to put on concerts with hundreds, even thousands of students attending, where the city won't even cover a couple thousand dollars of insurance coverage. There is a thriving arts and local theater scene that the local cities barely acknowledge, let alone provide any funding for.

I live in Waterloo, a city with two universities that speaks often of how much it wants to ensure that graduates stay here after they finish school. But new graduates don't generally attend the symphony, but they do look for a vibrant local cultural scene.

Perhaps we must keep the Symphony running because it would be a shame to lose it. But it would be a far greater shame to lose a vibrant art community that is growing organically by myopically viewing culture as that which appeals to only a certain segment of the community.

There is a place for the Symphony, but if you want your town to grow, and keep people in it, then there is also a place for many other things as well. And there should be some support for those other communities as well.

I'm a member of a small group of folks in my town called the Voter Support Committee. There's about ten of us, and our mission is to find good quality candidates for local public office to ensure that there are no accaimations, and to increase voter turnout. We also run town hall meetings where local citizens get a chance to meet the candidates, hear what they have to say, and ask them questions about the things that matter to them.

This is the second election for which we've done this, and we've had a good turnout, but it still amazes me that most people don't seem to give much consideration to who runs their town. Local government is the most accessible to the public of all governments, yet most people elect a councillor based on the position of their name on the ballot, or whether or not they recognize the name. And only 20%-30% of the people even bother to vote.

I like being a party to helping improve voter knowledge of the candidates. I just wish I knew how to make people care about this.

After all, you get the government you deserve.

My youngest son is a first year student at Wilfrid Laurier University. Tonight I watched him do an online Economics quiz using WebCT software. I watched him work for over an hour and save every answer successfully. He had one question left, but he had to go to a night class.

When he came home he went back to the quiz only to find that it had saved none of his answers.

It's great that students can do their work online. However, at the very least the university might consider ensuring that their software works as expected. Software the students are forced to use and depend on demands a much higher level of quality than I witnessed from that WebCT product.Students shouldn't have to suffer through poor software.