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A coworker forwarded me a story from a Nigerian newspaper about a cat turning into a woman in Port Harcourt, Nigeria. The story is excerpted below

This woman was reported to have earlier been seen as a cat before she reportedly turned into a woman in Port Harcourt, Rivers State, on Thursday. Photo: Bolaji Ogundele .

WHAT could be described as a fairy tale turned real on Wednesday in Port Harcourt, Rivers State, as a cat allegedly turned into a middle-aged woman after being hit by a commercial motorcycle (Okada) on Aba/Port Harcourt Expressway. Nigerian Tribune learnt that three cats were crossing the busy road when the okada ran over one of them which immediately turned into a woman. This strange occurrence quickly attracted people around who descended on the animals. One of them, it was learnt, was able to escape while the third one was beaten to death, still as a cat though. Another witness, who gave his name as James, said the woman started faking when she saw that many people were gathering around her. “I have never seen anything like this in my life. I saw a woman lying on the road instead of a cat. Blood did not come out of her body at that time. When people gathered and started asking her questions, she pretended that she did not know what had happened," he said.

Reading this reminds me how commonplace it was to read about the kind of mind boggling supernatural stories that you'd expect to see in the Weekly World News in regular newspapers alongside sports, political and stock market news in Nigeria.  Unlike the stories of alien abduction you find in the U.S., the newspaper stories of supernatural events often had witnesses and signed confessions from the alleged perpetrators of supernatural acts. Nobody doubted these stories, everyone knew they were true. Witches who would confess to being behind the run of bad luck of their friends & family or who'd confess that they key to their riches was offering their family members or children as blood sacrifices to ancient gods. It was all stuff I read in the daily papers as a kid as I would be flipping through looking for the comics. 

The current issue of Harper's Bazaar talks about the penis snatching hysteria from my adolescent years. The story is summarized in Slate magazine shown below

Harper's, June 2008
An essay reflects on the widespread reports of "magical penis loss" in Nigeria and Benin, in which sufferers claim their genitals were snatched or shrunken by thieves. Crowds have lynched accused penis thieves in the street. During one 1990 outbreak, "[m]en could be seen in the streets of Lagos holding on to their genitalia either openly or discreetly with their hand in their pockets." Social scientists have yet to identify what causes this mass fear but suspect it is what is referred to as a "culture-bound syndrome," a catchall term for a psychological affliction that affects people within certain ethnic groups.

I remember that time fairly well. I can understand that this sounds like the kind of boogie man stories that fill every culture. In rural America, it is aliens in flying saucers kidnapping people for anal probes and mutilating cows. In Japan, it's the shape changing foxes (Kitsune). In Nigeria, we had witches who snatched penises and could change shape at will.

In the cold light of day it sounds like mass hysteria but I wonder which is easier to believe sometimes. That a bunch of strangers on the street had a mass hallucination that a cat transformed into a woman or that there really are supernatural things beyond modern science's understanding out there? 

Now Playing: Dr. Dre - Natural Born Killaz (feat. Ice Cube)

As I'm getting ready to miss the first Super Bowl weekend of my married life to attend the the O'Reilly Social Graph FOO Camp, I'm reminded that I should be careful about using wireless at the conference by this informative yet clueless post by Larry Dignan on ZDNet entitled Even SSL Gmail can get sidejacked which states

Sidejacking is a term Graham uses to describe his session hijacking hack that can compromise nearly all Web 2.0 applications that rely on saved cookie information to seamlessly log people back in to an account without the need to reenter the password.  By listening to and storing radio signals from the airwaves with any laptop, an attacker can harvest cookies from multiple users and go in to their Web 2.0 application.  Even though the password wasn’t actually cracked or stolen, possession of the cookies acts as a temporary key to gain access to Web 2.0 applications such as Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo.  The attacker can even find out what books you ordered on Amazon, where you live from Google maps, acquire digital certificates with your email account in the subject line, and much more.

Gmail in SSL https mode was thought to be safe because it encrypted everything, but it turns out that Gmail’s JavaScript code will fall back to non-encrypted http mode if https isn’t available.  This is actually a very common scenario anytime a laptop connects to a hotspot before the user signs in where the laptop will attempt to connect to Gmail if the application is opened but it won’t be able to connect to anything.  At that point in time Gmail’s JavaScripts will attempt to communicate via unencrypted http mode and it’s game over if someone is capturing the data.

What’s really sad is the fact that Google Gmail is one of the “better” Web 2.0 applications out there and it still can’t get security right even when a user actually chooses to use SSL mode. 

Although the blog post is about a valid concern,  the increased likelihood of man-in-the-middle attacks when using unsecured or shared wireless networks, it presents it in the most ridiculous way possible. Man-in-the-middle attacks are a problem related to using computer networks, not something that is limited to the Web let alone Web 2.0 (whatever that means).

Now Playing: 50 Cent - Touch The Sky (Feat. Tony Yayo) (Prod by K Lassik)

Today some guy in the hallway mistook me for the other black guy that works in our building. Like we all look alike. Or there can only be one black guy that works in a building at Microsoft. Must be a quota. :)

Then I find this video in my RSS feeds and surprisingly I find my name mentioned in the comment threads.

Too bad it wasn't funny.

None of these was worth an entire post.

1. Universal Music Group Refuses to Renew Apple's Annual License to Sell Their Music on iTunes: So this is what it looks like when an industry that has existed for decades begins to die. I wonder who's going to lose out more? Apple because people some people stop buying iPods because they can't buy music from Jay-Z and Eminem on iTunes or Universal Music Group for closing itself out of the biggest digital music marketplace in the world in the midst of declining CD sales worldwide. It's as if the record labels are determined to make themselves irrelevant by any means necessary. 
   

2. Standard URLs - Proposal for a Web with Less Search: Wouldn't it be cool if every website in the world used the exact same URL structure based on some ghetto reimplementation of the Dewey Decimal System? That way I could always type http://www.amazon.com/books/j-k-rowling/harry-potter-and-the-goblet-of-fire or http://www.bn.com/books/j-k-rowling/harry-potter-and-the-goblet-of-fire  to find the Harry Potter book on whatever book website I was on instead of typing "harry potter goblet of fire" into a search box. Seriously.

   This is the kind of idea that makes sense when you are kicking it with your homeboys late at night drinking 40s and smokin' blunts but ends up making you scratch your head in the morning when you sober up, wondering how you could have ever come up with such a ludicrous idea.
   

3. Facebook has 'thrown the entire startup world for a loop': This post is by a startup developer complaining that Facebook has placed limits on usage of their APIs which prevent Facebook widgets from spamming a user's friends when the user adds the widget to their profile. What does he expect? That Facebook should make it easier for applications to spam their users? WTF? Go read Mike Torres's post Facebook weirdness then come back and explain to me why the folks at Facebook should be making it easier for applications to send spam on a user's behalf in the name of encouraging the "viral growth of apps".

4. Does negative press make you Sicko? Google ad sales rep makes impassioned pitch to big Pharmaceutical companies and HMOs to counter the negative attention from Michael Moore's Sicko by buying Google search ads and getting Google to create "Get the Facts" campaigns for them. I guess all that stuff Adam Bosworth said about Google wanting to help create better educated patients doesn't count since patients don't buy ads. ;) Talk about making your employer look like an unscrupulous, money grubbing whore. Especially 
   

   Do no evil. It's now Search, Ads and Apps

5. People Who Got in Line for an iPhone: I was at the AT&T store on the day of the iPhone launch to pick up a USB cable for my fianc´e. It took me less than ten minutes to deal with the line at around 8:00PM and they still had lots of iPhones. It seems people had waited hours in line that day and I could have picked one up with just ten minutes of waiting on launch day if I wanted one. I bet if you came on Saturday the lines were even shorter and by today you could walk in. Of course, this is assuming you are crazy enough to buy a v1 iPhone in the first place.

From Mike Arrington's post $100 Million Payday For Feedburner - This Deal Is Confirmed we learn

Rumors about Google acquiring RSS management company Feedburner from last week, started by ex-TechCrunch UK editor Sam Sethi, are accurate and are now confirmed according to a source close to the deal. Feedburner is in the closing stages of being acquired by Google for around $100 million. The deal is all cash and mostly upfront, according to our source, although the founders will be locked in for a couple of years.

I use FeedBurner to track stats for my blog and RSS feed so this is great news because it means the service is here to stay. I've exchanged mail with Eric Lunt a bunch of times about issues I've had with the service and he was always quick to respond with a solution or an ETA for a fix. Google has landed some great folks who built a killer service.

I hope now that they have Google level resources at their disposal users of the service can now get historical statistics for their blogs and feeds instead of being limited to only the last 30 days. I'm curious about what my most popular posts of all time are not just the most popular in the last 30 days. 

From Mike Arrington's post $100 Million Payday For Feedburner - This Deal Is Confirmed we learn

Rumors about Google acquiring RSS management company Feedburner from last week, started by ex-TechCrunch UK editor Sam Sethi, are accurate and are now confirmed according to a source close to the deal. Feedburner is in the closing stages of being acquired by Google for around $100 million. The deal is all cash and mostly upfront, according to our source, although the founders will be locked in for a couple of years.

I use FeedBurner to track stats for my blog and RSS feed so this is great news because it means the service is here to stay. I've exchanged mail with Eric Lunt a bunch of times about issues I've had with the service and he was always quick to respond with a solution or an ETA for a fix. Google has landed some great folks who built a killer service.

I hope now that they have Google level resources at their disposal users of the service can now get historical statistics for their blogs and feeds instead of being limited to only the last 30 days. I'm curious about what my most popular posts of all time are not just the most popular in the last 30 days. 

This morning I was flipping through last Friday's issue of the The Daily Sun: Nigeria's King of Tabloids and came across some of the personals in the section of the paper called Muslim Matrimonials. It was a bit of culture shock for me to see how different they were from personals on U.S. sites like Craig's List, Yahoo! Personals and Match. Here are a few of them

Profile 496: Muslim male, 49, 1.7m tall, genotype AA, from Oyo state, an engineer holder of a Master's degree, married for long without children wants for marriage a practicing Muslim female from any part of the country, honest, tolerant, neat, slim and moderately attractive with at least a minimum of diploma, gainfully employed or employable, aged between 23 and 33 and ready to start a successful family

Profile 502: Muslim male, 43, 1.73 meters tall, Hausa from Bauchi in Bauchi state, Master's degree holder in English, lecturer in higher institution, married and blessed with five daughters, needs a new wife who is loving, hardworking, caring, prepared to share the ups and downs of life with hubby and above all understanding. She may be from any part of Nigeria, any tribe or social class. She must be light-complexioned, exceptionally tall and not be above 25.  

Quite different from the usual fare in the Men Seeking Women section of Craig's List isn't it? The glimpse that online personals give into the culture and social fabric of society is quite revealing.

I should be on my way to the airport but this was just too good to share. Below are the opening paragraphs of a LiveJournal post by chalain entitled So Beautiful, So Disturbing

I wake. For a moment, I stare at the ceiling trying to remember something. Something important. Something important happened last night, but the details escape me. Something fascinating yet sinister, like touring the CIA offices. Something exotic yet somehow familiar, like putting hot sauce on meatloaf. I wonder if I have a hangover. I wonder why I am thinking about the CIA and meatloaf. I roll onto my side.

There is a strange woman in bed with me.

A lot of things happen at once. First, I realize that this is the most beautiful woman I have ever seen, and I am a lucky, lucky man. Second, I realize that this is not my wife, and I panic. Third, I realize that she's awake, has been watching me sleep. Fourth, before I can really react to thoughts 1 and 2, she smiles at me and speaks with a lovely accent I can't quite place: "So. You like new wife, yes? Yes. Up now, I make breakfast."

She gets out of bed and stretches, perfect curves sliding under silky lingerie and momentarily making me forget about breakfast, meatloaf, and whoever it was I was married to before last night. She seems to know this, and smiles at me again, but apparently she's serious about making breakfast. She turns and strides confidently from the room. As she does, I see for the first time the large Microsoft logo splayed across her back. My stomach lurches as I suddenly remember everything.

Windows Vista. I bought a new computer yesterday... and it came with Windows Vista.

Read the entire thing here. It's pretty good stuff and is kinda cool that software can invoke such positive and negative emotions from its users.

Mac OS X Ad

Which do you prefer and why?

I noticed that the top headline on Techmeme this afternoon is a couple of posts from Robert Scoble complaining that not enough people link to his blog. at first, I was scratching my head at this given that Robert's blog still manages to rank in the top 50 most linked blogs according to the Technorati Top 100 then I saw a post by Jeff Sandquist that made things clearer.

In his post entitled Scoble Intel LinkGate 2007 - Bootstrapping a new business via blogs Jeff Sandquist writes

I can empathize with Robert to a point on this.  I am well aware of how damn hard it is to build an audience.   Robert is tasked with doing this for PodTech a relatively new business and the stakes are high.   Exclusive content like Robert's Intel piece took time and money to produce (flight to Portland, cameras, bandwidth, a crew and more) and needs to show a return.  I can imagine that PodTech looked at a piece like this as a bootstrap for their network.  The hope being that the exclusive piece will get Slashdotted, Digged or high profile tech blogs (Engagdget / Gizmodo) will also follow suit.   The hope is that a few of those viewers will stick around, view other PodTech content and maybe others will subscribe to the feed to return another day.  Building an audience, inch by incch is hard work.  This all takes persistance and time all while you are justifying to your sponsors and leaders your content style and tone.  So when the Intel piece doesn't result in a lot of flow (guess we're still in the eyeball game ) from the big sites Robert flew off the handle in frustration. 

I believe as this business grows, it is going to get even harder to bootstrap the businesses soley through traditional grass roots/link based marketing.  With the number of blogs and media sites continuing to grow, it will get harder and harder to get links to even exclusive the most content.

From that perspective it now makes sense to me. PodTech hired an A-list blogger in the hopes that he'd bring in lots of traffic due to the popularity of his blog but it looks like that isn't working as much as they like and now Robert is beginning to feel the pressure. I tend to agree with Jeff that perhaps PodTech should look to more than the blog of their A-list blogging employee as their primary source of traffic and buzz. 

This also explains why Robert felt obligated to give a shout out to PodTech when he got listed as one of the Web's Top 25 celebrities instead of basking in the glow of getting such props from the mainstream media. There's probably a lesson here for folks who plan to parlay their blog fame into an endeavor that requires driving eyeballs and capturing an audience.

I've been spending my free time putting the finishing touches on the next beta of the Jubilee release of RSS Bandit so I've been remiss at blogging and have accumulated a bunch of things to blog about which I never got around to posting. Here is an outpouring of links from my 'to blog' list

• 20Q.net: The classic game of twenty questions powered by a neural network. It is uncanny how good this game was at guessing what I was thinking about. This is the closest to magic I've seen on the Web.

• programming.reddit.com: If you are the kind of geek who find Jeff Atwood's blog to be a fun read then this is the meme tracker for you. Light on fluffy A-list geek wankery over the latest from Apple & Google and heavy on programming culture from the trenches.

• The Story of XMLHTTP: The most complete account of the creation one of the cornerstones of AJAX, I've seen online. I 've actually worked with some of the people mentioned in the story.

• Zeichick's Take: Remember CUA Compliance? Microsoft Doesn't: The most amusing rant about the new ribbon in Microsoft Office 2007 I've seen yet. My favorite quote, "Microsoft says that the problem was that users couldn't find and use the more obscure features of Word, Excel and the other Office tools. No, that wasn't the problem. The problem was that there were too many features". I guess his solution would have been for Microsoft to cut a bunch of features from Office instead of redesigning the UI. Yeah, right.
  

• To DTD or not to DTD: It looks like Netscape is getting ready to break all of the RSS 0.91 feeds on the Web which reference their DTD which is practically all of them. I need to ensure that this doesn't cause problems in RSS Bandit. I like how the Netscape guy tries to blame RSS reader developers for using XML as designed. Another example of how XML schemas in general and DTDs in particular were one of the worst concepts foisted on XML. We should have been trying to make our programming languages as dynamic as XML not make XML as rigid as our programming languages. Maybe we'll have better luck in the JSON era.

PS: If you are an RSS Bandit user then check back this weekend for the final beta. We are now feature complete and should now work just fine on Windows Vista. However some of the podcast-related features had to be scaled back for this release.

Moishe Lettvin: Large companies and 'A' talent

But then I got an offer from Google and after a little bit of waffling (I was having much fun with the hackers) I started there back in January. And holy shit I hope I can convey to you what sort of geek heaven I'm in now.

Above I talked about NT4 being the "new hotness" back in '94 -- the guys who made it that way sit right next to me. In the same office. And that sort of expertise is everywhere here... it seems like every office is occupied by at least a couple of industry leaders, guys whose names you'd recognize if you're even a casual observer of geek culture.

Google's culture values independence and transparency of communication in ways I didn't think were possible at a large company. We've of course got our 20% time, but beyond that there's a sense that everyone here is competent enough and trustworthy enough to be clued in to many parts of the business -- not just engineering -- which would typically be hidden. That trust nets huge gains in loyalty and excitement.

There aren't many places in the world where you could can come up with the idea for a feature or product, implement it, and launch it to an audience of millions, with the infrastructure to support it. Yes, you can do it at a startup or on your own, but getting eyeballs and servers is non-trivial. For every YouTube there are hundreds of sites nobody's heard of.

Aaron Swartz: The Goog Life: how Google keeps employees by treating them like kids

The dinosaurs and spaceships certainly fit in with the infantilizing theme, as does the hot tub-sized ball pit that Googlers can jump into and throw ball fights. Everyone I know who works there either acts childish (the army of programmers), enthusiastically adolescent (their managers and overseers), or else is deeply cynical (the hot-shot programmers). But as much as they may want to leave Google, the infantilizing tactics have worked: they're afraid they wouldn't be able to survive anywhere else.

Google hires programmers straight out of college and tempts them with all the benefits of college life. Indeed, as the hiring brochures stress, the place was explicitly modeled upon college. At one point, I wondered why Google didn't just go all the way and build their own dormitories. After all, weren't the late-night dorm-room conversations with others who were smart like you one of the best parts of college life? But as the gleam wears off the Google, I can see why it's no place anyone would want to hang around for that long. Even the suburban desert of Mountain View is better.

Google's famed secrecy doesn't really do a very good job of keeping information from competitors. Those who are truly curious can pick up enough leaks and read enough articles to figure out how mostly everything works. But what it does do is create an aura of impossibility around the place. People read the airbrushed versions of Google technologies in talks and academic papers and think that Google has some amazingly large computer lab with amazingly powerful technology. But hang around a Googler long enough and you'll hear them complain about the unreliability of GFS and how they don't really have enough computers to keep up with the load.

"It's always frightening when you see how the sausage actually gets made," explains a product manager. And that's exactly what the secrecy is supposed to prevent. The rest of the world sees Google as this impenetrable edifice with all the mysteries of the world inside ("I hear once you've worked there for 256 days they teach you the secret levitation," explains xkcd) while the select few inside the walls know the truth -- there is no there there -- and are bound together by this burden.

The truth is always somewhere in between.