iVaNz l33t p4g0r

Watching Japanese TV on Sunday night at 11pm… there’s a show called “Salaryman Neo” that reminds me of “The Office,” but from a very culturally Japanese perspective. Interesting!!!!

Will sent this to me, expounding of it as a puzzle given at Japanese job interviews. Took me about 15 minutes. D’oh!

Last week, at Yahoo’s Brickhouse, FlickrFan was demoed. To be honest, the demo was kinda lame and uninteresting, the QA session later proved to be better.

Was cool to see Dave Winer himself in person, though. Also, Scoble made his appearance too, unsurprisingly videoblogging away (you may be able to see me in there somewhere…).

I’ve been running the software on my MBP at home, and at a recently dinner party, I had AP photos as well as Flickr photos from friends screensaving away in the background. Had quite the effect on guests, and the laptop quickly became the curiosity campfire, and discussions were lit.

Much better than a TV with video games or movie that over-consumes everyone’s conversations.

Here’s what’s setup so far:

• March 7-10: South By Southwest
• April 3-??: Kyoto/Tokyo, Naoko’s wedding!
• August 25-Sept 1: Burning Man, sweet mother!

All this, plus a likely weekend trip to LA and maybe one to Seattle; and, there’s always room for Tahoe.

Do you know what VRM is? Vendor Relationship Management. It’s where users control their data rather than organizations, companies, and vendors.

Currently:

• I login to Facebook (or better yet, Bebo)
• I put in my hobbies/interests into their site
• I put my musical tastes into their site
• etc etc etc
• I have to do the same for any other site

Imagine:

• I login to Bebo
• I tell Bebo a URL to where my personal information is (maybe http://ivan.finspot.com/vrm/ or in the further future vrm://ivan.finspot.com)
• Bebo sends a request for information to that URL
• I get an email notifying me of Bebo’s request
• I go to my Personal Data Manager (or better yet, call it my VRM Application, or VRManager), and approve of Bebo’s request for information, and selectively choose the kind of information I want to give to Bebo; in fact, I may even have profiles setup for each kind of identities that I have (work, friends, family, etc.) and just easily choose one of these pre-setup identities
• For the next website, say I signup for MySpace, then I do the same procedure

Maybe this can be streamlined so that my personal information URL will have defaults to give to the requesting service before my approval.

Now, you may ask, what is this magical “personal information URL” that I speak of? Like OpenID, it will likely be a service that you can setup yourself in your own space (likely a web host), but there will be providers that set this up so non-geeks can use it too. Privacy geeks will likely set these up on their own machines, or maybe even have them setup via DynDNS on their local machines.

Essentially there will be 3 layers:

1. User layer
2. VRM layer
3. Vendor layer

Layer 2 is currently the “CRM layer” and is controlled almost entirely by the Vendor. When this becomes the “VRM layer,” users will have the choice of what provider to use for this layer, or they may choose to go away with the layer entirely by hosting the VRM layer themselves–if they are so technically inclined.

So what needs to be done right now?

• Vendors need to begin implementation of a protocol to interact between the Vendor layer and the VRM layer
• Of course, the tricky part is to have all vendors agree on a protocol (not sure if OPML will be suitable or not here)
• VRM/Vendor interaction will need to support encryption for medical/financial data requests

What do you think? Am I crazy and naive?

Disclaimer: I work for Bebo.

• Vinyl Record players, and finding vinyl gems at the local Goodwill for $0.50 each.
• Desperado, by The Eagles
• Getting a Skype number in Japan for $5/mo. that my friends in Japan can dial locally and reach me here in SF; and if I’m not on Skype at the time, the call forwards to my cell.
• FlickrFan
• Meeting other motorcycle riders

Wow, someone’s gotta get Dodgeball working with that!

Much like this. That’s right, Magua power.

Some folks pointed out that there are ads around (outside of California) getting people to come live here. This video was apparently shown in Washington.

And on the bottom right of the Visit California page is another video. Man, is this the kind of place I’m living in? Really?

How about a visit to Israel instead?

The original:

The Homer Simpson Remix version:

Update: copyright powers are taking down the Homer one, but you can always try to do a search on youtube to find a recent upload.