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I don’t want to get on a rant here, but I’m just someone born very late in the baby boom. Frankly, I have more in common with Generation Y than with Generation X. But both generations have their faults. I saw this yesterday, while I attended Peter Kay’s presentation on crowd sourcing at the May 2008 HTCA meeting. Peter kept asking the audience what web services they had used. The number of hands got smaller with each service he named. Everyone had used Wikipedia. A few people knew about Twitter. Peter mentioned a few sites I had never used, like InTrade and IdeaScale.

I was the only person who raised his hand for Ning, the social networking portal that hosts TechHui and Peter’s latest project, HawaiiConCon.org. The Honolulu Advertiser’s article about the site is available here. and I mentioned TechHui in my billso.com post on 31 March 2008.

The generation gap

A few members of the audience got nervous when Peter discussed corporate wikis. I have heard and read similar questions as managers and academics struggle to keep up with the digital generation.

Tammy Erickson has a top 10 list on Business Week with some excellent comments about generational conflicts in the workplace.

More of the precious little snowflakes - and they’re so many of them in Gen X (the generation born between 1965 and 1982) and Gen Y (those born between 1983 and 1997) - need to wake up and smell the coffee.

It’s not Starbucks coffee.

It’s not even a maple nut crunch latte from the 7-11.

It’s Maxwell House scooped from the big blue can, brewed in a vat, simmered to the consistency of loose mud and served in a tiny styrofoam cup.

If you’re lucky, you get a little red plastic stir stick and some Coffeemate. Denis Leary would be proud of this coffee-flavored coffee.

And if you’re really lucky, someone made some Sanka because you can’t handle the caffeine.

Life sucks and it’s not fair

Many Gen Xers are hitting the ceiling in in their climb up the corporate ladder. There’s fewer CXO spots than there are Gen Xers. It’s not fair, but those stubborn folks in Generation Jones (born between 1954 and 1964) got there first. Their heroes are folks like Bill Gates, who would blow off his Harvard courses and try to make up the study time with end-of-the-term all-nighters.

It’s bad timing as the children of Generations X and Jones are going on to college and getting jobs. Members of Generation Y have feelings of entitlement and privilege that crash against a wall of indifference and disbelief in the real world.

The heroes of Generation Y are people like Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, who has bragged about skipping most of his Harvard art history course while he built a Facebook prototype. Zuckerberg passed that class after he built an online study guide that his classmates poured their notes and content into during the end of term reading period. Zuckerberg and Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard, but Zuckerberg got rich much faster. See this New York Times article for more details.

Helicopter parents

Gen Xers hate how the Generation Y calls their parents to ask advice about everything from class schedules to work responsibilities. It’s awkward when a college student’s helicopter parent calls a professor to intervene on their child’s behalf. It’s dumbfounding when this happens in the workplace. This 2006 MSNBC article about helicopter parents who manage their childrens’ job searches is a great example.

The current recession only makes matters worse for all involved. The home equity line is tapped out. No one wants to buy that piece of investment property that looked like a sweet deal 3 years ago. Bonuses aren’t as common at work anymore. This year’s vacation became next year’s vacation, and that’s just a maybe.

And yes, they’re buying Maxwell House and brewing their coffee at home.

Escape - if you can

There is hope. A few Gen Xers escape from corporate jobs to start their own small businesses. But many of the Xers are uncomfortable with modern technology. Text messaging and social networking are too much to handle. They can deal with their Netflix queue, but email is more their speed.

Members of Generation Y have kept up with the changes. Some Gen Xers are jealous that their younger Generation Y can navigate the Internet so easily and use online services to find new opportunities.

Some members of Generation Y are overwhelmed with communications options. Just read their blogs and feel their pain as they realize that everyday life is hard. ReadWriteWeb has a great collection of Generation Y links and RSS feeds, along with a video and some additional discussion.

But as I mentioned on 19 May 2008 in this billso.com article, many Americans don’t read blogs or send emails. To them, all of this conflict between generations may mean very little at all.

Images courtesy of Roadside Pictures and mark_the_legend_foster through a Creative Commons license.

The other big university on the island of Oahu - and just to be clear, I don’t work at UH.

Related posts on billso.com

• 7 November 2007: New leaks close Hamilton Library
• 28 June 2007: Magoo’s is pau tomorrow
• 25 August 2004: Banner software implementation problems cause havoc at UH-Manoa
• 2 August 2004: Frear Hall sits dormant on UH-Manoa campus
• 16 July 2004: UH-Manoa has no short-term fix for dorm crunch
• 15 July 2004: Oahu students get low priority for UH-Manoa housing

County politicians in Los Angeles have passed legislation championed by the RIAA and MPAA that lets authorities confiscate property from anyone convicted of IP theft or piracy. See Wired for more information.

The RIAA uses automated methods for collecting information fom LimeWire and other peer-to-peer programs. Data including the IP address and the files offered for trade are collected. The trade organization also has an automated takedown notice and settlement system that targets universities and students. The RIAA uses a manual process when investigating commercial ISPs. This article from the Chronicle of Higher Education has some details.

Meanwhile, BoingBoing reports that the US House of Representatives has passed a similar measure (HR 4279, PRO-IP (Prioritizing Resources and Organization for Intellectual Property Act of 2008). The bill may not get through the US Senate this year.

See Ars Technica and TechDirt for more information on this ridiculous piece of legislation.

Related posts on

billso.com

• 11 May 2008: Qtrax makes a free music download deal with Universal
• 15 March 2008: 10 years of MP3 players
• 21 February 2008: Copyright and fair use
• 4 February 2008: Better than free
• 13 November 2007: File sharing and campus security
• 5 October 2007: What’s wrong with copyright?
• 17 July 2007: A quick explanation of copyright law
• 29 September 2006: US copyright law in verse
• 15 August 2004: American Library Association promotes fair use
• 27 June 2003: Sue your best customers

I recently implemented OpenID on billso.com. OpenID is a single sign-on (SSO) system that lets web users log on to multiple sites with the same username and password. SSO support is becoming a key success factor for social networking and social media web sites, as new users struggle to manage a growing number of passwords.

With OpenID, no one needs to apply for a user account on billso.com. They can use their username and credentials from another site to join billso.com, or to post a comment on a billso.com article.

Kyle Neath posted a long rant about OpenID yesterday. He won’t be implementing OpenID on his site because he thinks the system too confusing for users. I don’t think OpenID is that difficult to understand - here are two brief explanations from OpenID.net and Wikipedia.

Phishing phears

Kyle’s concerned that phishers might target OpenID users, and he uses PayPal as an example. That site has become a primary target for phishing attacks.

OpenID does have an identity system that lets an authorized user revoke their OpenID as a last resort. Anyone who uses an OpenID should select a strong passphrase, as I described in this billso.com article from 24 Aprill 2008. OpenID can also add multifactor authentication to their service. Checking a user’s location, or asking for a token or passphrase that only the user should have, in addition to the regular passphrase, would provide a strong defense against phishers. Virtual keyboards and other systems could also be used, as I described in this billso.com article from 17 April 2008.

The provider’s burden

I understand some of Kyle’s points. Any web site that implements OpenID for SSO could also become a provider of OpenIDs. I decided not to do this right from the start. I don’t want to provide perpetual support users who request a billso.com OpenID username. There is a system that lets departing OpenID providers delegate their users to another provider.

On 30 April 2008, I posted some programming code that lets a popular WordPress OpenID plugin use JanRain’s ID Selector tool. There are several providers of OpenIDs that can carry the long-term burden of maintaining these accounts, including VeriSign, AOL, Google, Flickr, and WordPress.com.

Universities could become OpenID providers. It makes sense to give students and employees access to a global SSO system, as long as schools are willing to provide stable, permanent usernames for their stakeholders.

Users can also purchase a personal identity domain for around US$10 a year and get a personalized OpenID URL.

Related posts and pages from billso.com

• OpenID
• 30 April 2008: Updating WP-OpenID to support ID Selector
• 24 April 2008: Change that password into a passphrase
• 17 April 2008: Virtual keyboards and monitoring software foil keystroke loggers
• 12 April 2008: Finding business contacts and passwords on the Internet
• 14 March 2008: Social media in action
• 2 July 2007: CXOs face malware email attacks
• 11 January 2007: How to create a secure password

I recently read a review of the Amazon Kindle on BlogNButter.com. The Kindle is a nice idea… but Amazon charges a conversion fee for every DOC, TXT file or PDF you want to put on your device. Since the Sprint connection charges are built-in to the purchase fee, these seems really petty. RSS and newspaper subscriptions are also on a pay-as-you-go basis, which is a shame. I’d use Kindle if unlimited RSS reading was bundled into the purchase price.

US$399 is a steep price tag, especially when the Kindle was on backorder for several weeks after its initial release. Amazon has the Kindle back in stock, and I won’t be ordering one any time soon.

If Amazon really wanted customers like me to use the device, they’d give me a free Kindle. I buy enough books from Amazon every year, after all. We can’t get Amazon Prime here in Hawaii, but we still get free shipping on most orders over US$25. I’d rather get the content through a device.

If the Kindle does survive, expect the price to drop through the floor within 2 years. As I mentioned on 24 March 2008, Kindle would be a great tool for students if the content was free. Perhaps universities could build the textbook charges into the usual fees that get tacked onto tuition bills.