Like many other people I use a Bloglines for reading various RSS feeds to which I am subscribed. Bloglines has a pretty nifty feature, it lets you pin various items in an RSS feed so that you can re-visit them later. Pretty nifty, and I use it a lot.

Except that I find right now that I am pinned to Bloglines. Let me explain.
Any feed reader lets you export your OPML file which contains your feeds grouped into categorie and this feature pretty much lets you travel from feed reader to feed reader without many headaches. No feed reader would take its users hostage by refusing to export their OPML file because every user will refuse to be taken hostage in such a way.
However, if you use Bloglines’ pin feature a lot you will find yourself hostage to Bloglines because you cannot export the items that you have pinned and leaving Bloglines would also mean leaving behind the items that you have pinned and that are probably important to you. You cannot export these pinned items typically because this is a feature which is not widely-used by other feed readers and when it is used by other feed readers it is implemented in a variety of flavors which makes its export inefficient.

So I would say that I pretty much taken hostage by a feature. A niche feature, which makes a pretty interesting case for niche products: if you manage to get your user to create data while using your niche product, chances are that your user will be hostage to the data that it created and the feature consuming this data because this data cannot be exported easily to your competitors’ services. Pretty interesting…
P.S. Initially when I started pinning items on Bloglines I realized that I will be taken hostage to this feature and I thought about bookmarking them on del.icio.us. But I decided that I am too lazy for this. So I guess I’ll have to use Bloglines for quite a while…

This is what carrying the Olympic torch thru San Francisco looked like:
The first torchbearer held the Olympic flame aloft triumphantly. She waved to the crowd and set off — and promptly ran into a warehouse.(src).
After, of course, being carried thru London (seconds 25 thru 35 are particularly telling) and Paris (carrying the torch in a bus amids boos and police on roller-blades stands out).

I am wondering if the IOC realizes what these events are doing to its brand (*) because lately the Olympic torch has become the symbol of collaboration with a brutal regime which has to be put out rather than a symbol of peace and fraternity. I am also wondering how things will play out in Beijing, because this is where the next episode of this saga will probably play. Right now the torch is safely out of the Western world where dissent is allowed (**) and it is passing thru a string of authoritarian regimes where it will not encounter any serious resistance.
I would not be too surprised if the Olympic stadium will be empty, most of the Olympic tourists preferring to stay at home. I would not be too surprised if the Chinese government would fill this stadium with people picked up at random from the street. And I would not be too surprised if we will have some similar incidents in Beijing as well. If we do have these incidents the last place that I would be in is in IOC’s shoes: they would pretty much have to wait on the sidelines and pray that the Chinese government will not quell these dissenters (which happen to be all IOC customers) with too much brutality.

Personally, I think that these events are good. They are bringing home to the IOC the dangers of doing business with dictatorships: they could devalue your brand and beat the hell of the people that believe in your values in front of the cameras. Maybe they will think twice before awarding the place where the next Olympic games will take place…

* Unlike the IOC the Chinese government doesn’t have these PR problems. It will probably continue to act the way that it does, brutally that is, after all its interests lie exclusively in providing cheap labor to the Western world and using the gains from it for consolidating its regional position. China is light years away from having any meaningful dialogue with a regular guy living in the Western world.

** The fact that the IOC banks on the success of this torch-bearing missing on collaboration with authoritarian regimes will not be lost on many. If I were in a decision-making position within the IOC I would play down the passing of the torch thru these countries because it would stress this collaboration even more. After all, IOC’s main customer is living in the Western world and you probably don’t want to alienate it by playing down its values…

I find that insufficient knowledge about a system or a package poses a moral hazard because it encourages people interacting with that system or package to take all sorts of short-cuts in order to get something done and do so thinking that they know what the effects of their actions are.

Knowing how a package implements some business requirement may make a developer pick up a method from that package and use it because it fits its requirements. Unchecked this may lead to spaghetti-code, pretty much everybody calling methods from all over the place in order to get their job done quickly.
Using restrictive access attribute (such as private methods) is not really a work-around, if someone thinks they need a private method to be made public because they “know” the package they will usually make it public without any second thoughts.

The right approach to interacting in a new way with a package or system is to delegate that interaction to that package, i.e. to code this interaction in the package itself if possible. As I was arguing in a previous post knowledge about a package is one of the transaction costs of interacting with that package. Transaction costs usually delimitate who does what because resources will typically cluster together into larger entities in order to bring these transaction costs down. Transaction costs, when handled correctly, will prevent methods whose usage requires extensive knowledge (and which carry large transaction costs) to be called from all over the application. Methods that get called from all over the application are typically methods about which little knowledge is required, helper methods being a good example.

So I would advise people to either make sure that whoever is using their packages either understands them well or very little, having people in the middle that think they “know” the package may result in incorrect usage of their packages.
I would also advise people to refrain from spreading knowledge about their packages indiscriminately and rather target the recipients of this knowledge carefully.

I was walking down the aisles at Walmart the other day when I came across this product: fair trade coffee.

You have to wonder what is the relationship between Walmart and the producers of fair trade coffee: does Walmart reins in the urge to apply its enormous clout in order to drive the prices down on these producers, most of whom are pretty small and un-organized? Or it does apply its clout, but reluctantly? Or it doesn’t exert any price pressures on fair trade coffee producers and uses fair trade coffee to increase its appeal among a particular demographic?

Strange, I was a bit shocked to find this on a Walmart shelf…

BTW, the price for that coffee was pretty high by Walmart standards, I could have bought 2 1-liter coffee jugs (I can’t believe that coffee can be bought this way unless you have a coffee shop or something) for the price of 250 grams of fair trade coffee.