Robert Scoble has become a cheerleader for Barack Obama’s concept of a national Chief Technology Officer. Though he claims that both Republicans and Democrats have asked for a CTO position to be created for the Whitehouse. Senator McCain has revealed his technology plan for America, and so far I haven’t found a part where he calls for a CTO yet.

I’ll leave it for our always colorful commenters to speculate as to why that is, but as for the idea of a CTO four our nation, I’m here to say that I’m not entirely comfortable with the idea it should exist at all.

“But Mark!” you exclaim. “You’re a tech evangelist! You’re a hacker! Most of all, you’re a geek! How can you possibly say this? You know more than any how badly our government mangles all the laws when it comes to technology. We need this.”

The truth is that I see a Chief Technology Officer for America as just another way to spread fear, uncertainty and doubt amongst the populace.  I’ll get into the specifics in just a minute, but let’s take a minute to define exactly what a CTO does. I’ll wait, while you go Google it.

…

Found a definitive answer yet?  I’m guessing not, since there isn’t one.

The Wikipedia, surprisingly, does have an amusing anecdote about the CTO title involving Bill Gates and his CTO. Bill and Nathan Myhrvold sat down and tried to come up a definition. Myhrvold answered, when asked:

Hell if I know. You know, when Bill [Gates] and I were discussing my taking this job, at one point he said, ‘Okay, what are the great examples of successful CTOs?’ After about five minutes we decided that, well, there must be some, but we didn’t have on the tip of our tongues exactly who was a great CTO, because many of the people who actually were great CTOs didn’t have that title, and at least some of the people who have that title arguably aren’t great at it. My job at Microsoft is to worry about technology in the future. If you want to have a great future you have to start thinking about it in the present, because when the future’s here you won’t have the time.

So we’re starting out with a nebulous position, and we’re putting it in charge of interpreting the nations’ technology issues, and hoping that the government won’t abuse the advice to expand their own power and use it to drum up votes.

Let’s Take a Trip Down Memory Lane

What has the Drug Czar done for America?  It’s another nebulous position that’s been around off and on since 1982, and has been a position largely reserved for alternatively drug scandals and public service messages.  Aside from eliminating government unions, the Department of Homeland Security has a visible director that ostensibly advises the president on what’s going on with the security of our infrastructure, and what color our terror alert is.

The office of FEMA was established on April Fool’s day 1979 by President Carter, and since then has just done a bang up job of performing the duties of assisting American citizens in times of great crisis.  I remember after Hurricane Wilma several years ago, FEMA was supposedly dispatched to provide disaster relief to the millions of South Floridians without electricity, running water, food or fuel. I spent about two weeks wandering around trying to get things together and never once ran into one of these mythical creatures. I hear they weren’t too helpful in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, either.

These are all organizations that supposedly have some pretty clear responsibilities, and their mandates are in their titles. If the richest technologist on the planet, Bill Gates, can’t define what a CTO is, does that bode well for the position in our government?

The CTO thing is a Really Popular Idea

I had the conversation last night with a couple of folks privately regarding their thoughts on the office of a national CTO. Given that I polled folks electronically, it isn’t surprising that most of them were for the idea.  One person, though, was staunchly against it.

“National CTO? RUN AWAY,” he said. “Run away as fast as you can. I can imagine the headlines now: ‘America’s CTO today issued a statement about the Russo-Georgian Cyberwar’ or American CTO warning - cell phones may cause brain cancer.”

Quite honestly, I think we’re better off with our government in the dark over this stuff. I think it’s worked to our advantage so far, anyway. Sure, once in a while one of our own takes one for the team. Kevin Mitnick, Napster, and occasionally Microsoft (depending on how much money the DOJ wants to write a check for that year). All in all, we come out ahead.

If we have a CTO advising the president, the congress and any other part of government that’s listening, we’ll end up with a government with a little bit of knowlege, which hopefully you’ll remember is a dangerous thing.

We’ll never have a President or a majority in Congress that uses Twitter, understands the inside jokes of 4chan, has installed Linux at least once in their life, or has coded so much as an HTML tag. It just won’t happen.  We might have an informed and savvy CTO telling them what’s going on in our world, but it’ll only give them more terminology for them to use incorrectly and demonstrate to us how out of touch they are.

And the Best We Can Come Up With is Dave Winer?

Do you think we’ll see the end of exploitation of Craigslist as a political punching bag anytime theirs a prostitution bust with a CTO?  Do you think we’ll see an end to Attorney Generals using pedophilia online as a way to scare the public and major corporations into playing ball?

No, of course not, they’ll just have more advanced terminology to play with.  Semantic web technology will be used to scare the electorate into outlawing the technology so we won’t have a Will Smith I, Robot situation on our hands. Better understanding of how trojans and worms are spread will only encourage congress to pass a law requiring mandatory keyloggers on every citizen’s computer.

If they get really altruistic and industrious, they might just get interested in protecting our privacy.  Of course, to them that’ll mean that every blogger will be required to obtain a license to operate a webserver so they can regulate how data is collected - data handling procedures that will tell you how you treat personal data entered in comments, cookies left by your ads, and disclosure of your sources.

I’m sorry if I’m sounding out of step with the crowd here, but I’d much rather have my government not worry their pretty little head about technology, if you please.  If the government gets too crazy in their technology laws, we’ll call our congressmen if there’s a problem.

In other words, Obama, don’t call us - we’ll call you.

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Facebook is looking for platform developers to test a payments system, an administrator announced on the Facebook Developers forum. Details are scant, but it’s more likely than not built on the micropayments software Facebook developed for its virtual gifts. (Which, by the way, is a brilliant Trojan horse strategy: Charge people a token amount for something that costs you nothing, and get their credit-card numbers while you’re at it.) The good news for the rest of us is that the new payment system might mean we’ll see some Facebook apps that are meant to do something besides show us ads while we goof off.

But don’t get too excited. After all, even the Facebook-app advertising economy is scarcely developed. Most of the apps making money are … advertising other apps. It’s as if this were California in 1849 and you had people setting up picks-and-shovels advertising agencies before the picks-and-shovel merchants opened their doors. Online advertising works, obviously, but because no one’s hit on the right formula for Facebook apps yet.

Turning Facebook into a marketplace is another potential revenue stream for the site. As eBay learned with PayPal, it’s not enough just to list goods; you have to provide the means to move cash and close the deal, too. Expect to see a ton of e-commerce apps — and a rash of alarmist articles predicting Amazon and eBay’s doom. There’s always a market for those.

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Source:Valleywag

Twitter isn’t all Jason Calacanis yelling death to Luddites or Jeremiah Owyang pontificating on his own marketing prowess. Sometimes it’s about love. Loooooooooooove. Coooooooool. Like this sweet tweet from blogfather Dave Winer. Want to know what she said?

She’s buying!

Ten years ago, on December 17, 1997, Jorn Barger coined the term “web log” for a webpage where an author “logs” the other webpages they find interesting. Since then, blogging has become serious business for some and a place for nonsensical blabber for others. Though Dave Winer frequently claims that he was the first to launch a weblog at Scripting News, it was really just an online archive of columns rejected by HotWired. Jorn Barger had the first true weblog worthy of the name at Robot Wisdom.

I know what it’s like to be addicted. I was addicted to IRC in the mid-90s. It was a tough time - the bot wars, the ping floods, the no sleeping due to insecurity over potential nick loss, the network splits. It was tough. After a while, my friends came together and got me on some weekly injections and today I can say that I am no longer an addict. Ten days and counting.

Yesterday I posted some ideas on how to deal with the Twitter outage today. I received a variety of emails in my email client about how scared some were to live without their "fix" for 12 hours. I won’t post their names here as some are highly relevant folks in the Internet world and could have their reputations damaged. I just hope that we dont get to the point where we need a McRobertson Report to get the addicted people to stand up. Think about all of the people who lost a chance to be something because of those who pushed them aside because of Twitterdiction.

Some of my closest Internet buddies seem to be infected or on the verge of infection with Twitterdiction. Jeremiah Owyang has a pretty bad case of it, at least he gets paid to sit on Twitter. Jason Calacanis has a mild case of it - how do I know? Simple, when it’s down he gets the shakes because he has no way to get his dog photos to his sheep. Robert Scoble had the disease but I got him the meds and he is off it now which is great news that there is a cure! Marshall Kirkpatrick is close to the edge - even suggesting that Twitter pays his rent. I can’t even get Twitter to find me a date!

Yet these cases of Twitterdiction fall short compared to the entry from Dave Winer this morning. I have never met Dave though I would really like to as he seems like a smart, swell guy. We had a blast on the IRC channel during TC40 - he made the presentations fun. I enjoy reading his entries. But I think he forgot to take his meds today.

Some notes from his entry:

• What other basic form of communication goes down for 12 hours at a time?
• What if the web went offline for 12 hours at a time?
• Same with the phone network. Imagine if all the cell phones and land lines went down for scheduled maintenence for 12 hours. Again, it’s unthinkable.

In the comments Rachel Clarke suggests that more people outside the U.S. are using Twitter than inside the U.S. Side note, I had coffee with Rachel yesterday - she’s very bright and she might be developing a mild case of Twitterdiction but nowhere as bad as any of the other mentioned individuals.

So back to Dave. Is he really comparing Twitter to the Web in general? Or to phone service? All I can do is LOL. Twitter is ONLY a layer of communication. If it goes down, you just revert to the other 1,509,020 methods of communication. The unfortunate thing is that Dave is also speaking for many others who also suffer from this disease. Don’t worry Dave, by tomorrow Twitter will be back! (actually it hasn’t gone down yet from what I can tell)

Dave, send me your address. I’d be happy to help you out during the medication period to help you get over your Twitterdiction.

And to anyone wondering, I am working up a mega batch of the medication which I will bring to SXSW this year as I am sure we will need to get it out in large doses.

“The problem with most conferences is we don’t have enough to do,” laments seminar veteran Dave Winer, who admits to Web surfing, emailing and instant-messaging during presentations. In Las Vegas today, speaker Mike Arrington forgot to show up. Why bother? Instead of onstage pony shows and awkward demo booths, conference sponsors should just set up an open bar and invite potential clients to come schmooze with a few paid celebs and Marc Canter (zzz at left). Think David Hornik’s The Lobby for the rest of us. But first, make sure the Wi-Fi’s rock solid.

Arguing with a child will just leave everyone frustrated, but some people never learn. If you thought blogfather Dave Winer’s recent spat with blowhard Jason Calacanis was childish, you don’t know the depths of the man’s juvenility. In January, he argued with commenter Nick Irelan on his blog, Scripting News, about the origins of RSS, blogging, and podcasts. But unlike most Winer spats, the Internet manchild’s typically disproportionate response could actually land him in legal trouble.

When Irelan persisted — acting like a child himself by trying, unsuccessfully, to delete and edit Winer’s Wikipedia entry — Winer retaliated by cybersquatting on the domain name NickIrelan.com. This could be a real problem for the inventor of RSS — it’s not only childish, it’s potentially illegal. If Dave were a mensch, he’d apologize and let go of the domain name.