So I used to be a painter. If you're a painter you have painter friends. One of my painter friends is Edgar Jerins.

This is a drawing that Edger did of our buddy Steve and his girlfriend. (Steve's an artist too.)

As an artist you often hear this: "I don't know art but I know what I like."

That's bullshit actually. If you knew about art, the art you like would drastically change. Saying that you don't know art but you know what you like is a complete manifestation and admittance that wallowing in ignorance is preferable to interest and knowledge. Here's what a critic said of Edgars work.

A recent show at the Tatistscheff Gallery in New York City (May 13–June 26) showed six works by Edgar Jerins that stretched the definition of drawing. There was nothing offhand or intimate about these huge charcoals on sheets of paper often measuring five-by-eight feet. The Nebraska-born artist describes these unsettling interior genre scenes as narrative portraits. The figures—friends and relatives, worked up from hundreds of photographs—are depicted in emotionally fraught domestic situations. Jerins admits to a special interest in the discontents of the middle-aged American male, as one title, The Artist’s Family, “We have to Move” (2004), suggests. Alienation is a venerable American theme, most notably embodied by Edward Hopper, but Jerins’s pictures are far more

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I logged into my account this morning and saw that I've personally invited 100 people into Sendside.

By the way, we've left our Beta and released v1.0 for our Personal and soon to be released Business and Enterprise Editions. If you'd like an account, fire me off a request through the link below and I'll set you up. 

GET YOUR OWN SENDSIDE ACCOUNT >

 
Of interest may be that <jeffbarson> following my name. It's my Sendside 'Member Name' and with this new release you can now send directly to that and I'll receive that message. In future releases you'll be able to send to other unique identifiers just by typing them into the TO field. If they're unique, they'll be delivered directly to that recipient's Sendside inbox.

The takeaway here for all of you 'social network types' is that Sendside doesn't rely on your email address but identifies you in the same way that you're identified by all of your unique identifiers offline.. as an individual with a unique identity. Cell phone, email address, social security number, street address, military ID, name... anything unique, or any unique combination of identifiers could be used to send a message.

There are plenty of identifiers you can send to, but they're generally some sort of username inside the network. As far as I know, Sendside's the only network that has the potential to combine ANY online identifier as well as all things offline to determine exactly who you are and deliver content to you with total precision and security.

That, buy the way, is tres impressive. 

So I've joined Twitter.

While I can see some merit, I'm not yet convinced that it's a killer app and not just a fad. It feels something like a feature looking for an application. Perhaps I'm wrong. I often am. Certainly it looks to be taking off.

Here's Allan Young's take on Twitter: The Twitter Influence Ratio 

With the Twitter Influence Ratio, we’re going to try and get a read on someone’s true influence level. It stands to reason that if you are interesting, have neat thoughts, and add value to the network, people will naturally gravitate to you and “follow you.” Some of the most influential members of Twitter have many more followers than people they follow. So the Twitter Influence Ratio will attempt to express this relationship as;

Followers / Following = Twitter Influence Ratio

Example: 533 / 609 = 0.875

In the above example, one such self-branded “social app guru” has 533 followers and is following 609 others. This gives him a Twitter Influence Ratio of only 0.875 which means this person is not very influential. Intuitively, you ought to have more followers interested in what you have to say than the number of people you’re following. One might say that 533 followers is nothing to sneeze at. I agree, but the fact that this person has so many followers and is following so many more makes it highly probable that he is what is known as a “friend whore” or “follow whore.” Like the desperate high schooler, he’s just trading votes. Someone with a TI Ratio of less than 1 but is only following 30 others is probably not out there actively trading votes or follows. If I were looking for a consultant, I would run away from this guy and find someone more influential.

It's easy to see what Allan's talking about. My own Twitter Influence Ratio is abysmal, roughly two-to-one or .5. I guess I'll have to become more profuse in my twitting about... we'll, there's your problem.

These 'You suck at photoshop' tutorials are masterpieces of intelligent executions edutainment. Slickly produced and very funny. (Educational too if you're looking to pick up some photoshop skills.)

I love this kind of smart-ass information delivery. After I get the 'corporate' look and feel stuff done for Sendside I'll be looking to stimulate the rest of the economy with just this type of tongue-in-cheek delivery. 

CommonCraft rocks. 

Here's CommonCraft's channel on Blip.tv.

There are any number of ways of explaining complex systems. Duarte Design is another company based out in Silicon Valley who has built a business on information design. They produced Al Gore's presentation 'An Inconvenient Truth' and if you've seen that, you know that it's probably the most interesting two-hour Powerpoint presentation you've ever seen. (Although they did it in Apple's Keynote.)

CommonCraft wows you with clarity rather than production values. They're not the first to use this paper cut-out technique or draw diagrams on a whiteboard, but they're great at distilling out the information that's relevant and putting that into a two or three minute spot that doesn't bore you to tears while you're watching it.

I had dinner this week as a guest of the Park City Angel Network, an angel group that formed up here in Park City towards the end of 07 and around the same time that we put together our little angel group.

One of the immediate benefits of this group is that it's started out with a larger group, somewhere around 25 right now, allowing them to have some ability to fund more deals and spread the love around a little. 

Last week's meeting was more than four hours long, with two pitches and dinner. I can see that the Park City Angel Network will be around for quite some time and the the members are serious about creating a sustainable group. I mentioned that I thought it would be beneficial to roll our smaller group into this larger one. There's a considerable amount of bandwidth needed to manage these groups and 7 is just too small.

There's a growing community of quality startups out there. Park City is set to be the place to bring the best of them if you're a Utah startup. 

Sendside's user base is growing steadily, which makes us all happy around the campfire. And the release of the 1.0 code is moving the product ahead by a giant leap.

The constant rethinking and retooling of how we handle our members experience with the product put me in mind of something that Seth Godin posted about Google and their push to make the user experience better. 

From Seth Godin:

Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google,

"We knew that Google was going to get better every single day as we worked on it, and we knew that sooner or later, everyone was going to try it. So our feeling was that the later you tried it, the better it was for us because we'd made a better impression with better technology. So we were never in a big hurry to get you to use it today. Tomorrow would be better."

...As a result of Google's decision, they made counter-intuitive decisions. No ads, for example. No clutter. No popups, no tricky interpretations of privacy policies. Instead, every decision was, "If this is going to be the one and only choice, the best search engine in the world, what should we do?" The feeling was, if they built that, the money would take care of itself. And the investors who bought in were in on the game from the start.

Sendside has no ads in the personal edition. (Sendside's business editions will be software as a service and generate the revenue.)

We're very aware that the experience users have with our free personal edition will impact our growth. We're going to be pushing very hard to make it perform.

One point of interest that strikes me is that even with the relatively small number of users we currently have, that some of them have already asked it it's possible to port all of their email addresses into their Sendside account. Of course that could well negate the ability we have to prevent all spam and phishing and destroy the very value that's inherent in the system.

Of course the real option is just to accrue more members.  

If you're among the RSS subscribers of this blog, Allan Young's blog, Incoherence, is one you might think about adding.

I know Allan. I like Allan. He's smart and a very critical thinker. 

I've recently been editing me RSS feeds down to what I consider something of a manageable level. (I had over 300 and it was not manageable.) Allan's blog is one of only two I've added to my feed reader in the last four months. 

Everyone's aware of the trojans and the zombie computer botnets that often spawn from them have been a problem for many years, but now the attacks have been getting downright nasty. Attackers are using more and more sophisticated methods, including social engineering, to get past users' defenses. Like an attack targeting eBay members and stealing their online identities using multi-stage attacks in order to perpetuate fraud.

 

The eBay attack began with hackers compromising third-party web sites using a technique called SQL injection. Extra code was dynamically added to the main page of these web sites using a hidden IFRAME tag which loaded a malicious web page. This page contained a VBScript file that used AJAX to download and save a file called MISuvstm.exe into the Windows system folder. Once this file was downloaded, it attached itself to the Windows Explorer process and went hunting for a further trojan, called SRTops32.exe, which was the basis for a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack on eBay itself. The attack uses eBay's own Application Programming Interfaces to guess eBay users' passwords by brute force, although more traditional phishing techniques are also being used. 

More on security threats:

"The future outlook isn't promising -- bot-affected software is growing more powerful and stealthy, making it harder to find and return to a secured state. The pressure is on computer users to become savvier about security and on organizations to spend more money on proactive defenses, and detection and reaction capabilities. Law enforcement will also need to deal with an increasing number of crimes that involve potentially thousands of computers at a time."