Traveling

I'm currently in Europe for the next month so posts will most likely be absent. Expect stories/thoughts/etc when I return towards the end of June.

Lincoln, NE

I don't live in Lincoln anymore and probably won't again for a long time. I would like to eulogize my experience there from the past 5 years by listing out some of my favorite things about Lincoln, Nebraska. Sorry if this gets a bit long, but it should be in an easily skimmable format. You can also check out all of the places on this list on a Google map I created here.

Food
I love eating out, and Lincoln has a surprisingly wide variety of food options available in a small radius. Below are a few of my favorite restaurants in Lincoln in no particular order. Every one of these restaurants (with the exception of Bison Witches) is locally owned/run as far as I am aware.

• The Oven -- Amazing Indian food. Definitely try their mulligatawny soup. The place also has a cool laid back atmosphere and is pretty reasonably priced.
• Thai Garden -- Pretty good Thai food and you can't beat the price-- or the bridge you cross as you enter. This is my favorite Thai restaurant in town.
• Magnolia -- When I first walked into Magnolia, I expected it to be quite expensive, but it turned out to be very reasonable. The atmosphere inside is as fancy as you'll find downtown. The food is also delicious, and nearly half their menu is vegetarian options. It makes a great date restaurant.
• Lazlo's/Fireworks -- Lazlo's is a locally owned brewpub for Empyrean Brewing located in the Haymarket (original), South Lincoln and Omaha. It is the go-to place for delicious American food and good beer in Lincoln. Fireworks is another restaurant owned by the same people that specializes in wood-fired cooking.
• La Paz -- My favorite Mexican restaurant. Margaritas are a must here.
• Bison Witches -- Not your typical sandwich/soup joint. This place offers huge sandwiches and delicious bread bowl soups. They also have great happy hour beer specials from 4-7. This is a popular lunch stop so if you're planning to go over the noon hour, be prepared to wait.
• Yia Yia's -- Best bottled beer selection downtown, and it's a Pizza joint. Their pizza by is also very good and is made by the slice to your liking. This is a great place to just hang out, have some pizza and beer, and relax to some good music.
• The Watering Hole -- 12 grilled hot wings please. Hands down the best wings in town, served with good beer. My friend also tells me they have the best veggie burger in town, but I was never able to actually order anything other than wings once I stepped in the door.
• Bread & Cup -- A fairly new sandwich/soup shop that offers other dishes at their leisure. They also have great people, good beer/wine, and fresh baked bread. This is one place I wish I would have gone more often while I lived in Lincoln.
• Thé Cup -- Another sandwich/soup restaurant, but is not open in the evening and serves good coffee rather than beer/wine.
• Maggie's Vegetarian Wraps -- A small local restaurant in the Haymarket that makes delicious wraps/soups/etc. They strive to use local ingredients when possible so some of their menu items are seasonal. They also don't take credit cards, so bring some cash.
• Danny's Downtown Deli -- A nice local deli with very friendly people. Makes a good quick lunch stop.
• Ivanna Cone -- Homemade ice cream done right. They always have new flavors for you to try out as well as some of the classics. This is hands down the best ice cream in town.

There are quite a few other good restaurants in town that I considered mentioning on this list, but the ones above are as I said my favorites, and I had to draw the line somewhere.

Coffee
I spent a lot of time as a student at Coffee Shops around town. Below are a couple of my favorites with a brief description. All of these shops are local, offer wireless (except maybe a couple of the smaller Cultiva locations), and offer whole bean or ground coffee for sale.

• The Coffee House -- This is the college indie crowd coffee shop in town, and my favorite downtown coffee joint. They rotate original artwork fairly often and always have plenty of fair trade/organic coffee on hand. My only complaint is that the wireless is sometimes spotty and electrical outlets are sometimes hard to find during busy hours. They have two separate rooms which is nice-- One for conversation and one for studying, with a smaller third back room that can be reserved for meetings/events.
• Meadowlark Coffee -- I started hitting this place more often once I moved off campus. Since it's not near the university, Meadowlark draws a more age diverse crowed, with anywhere from high schoolers and retired people in there at any given time. They also host a lot of community events like open mic nights and poetry slam competitions.
• Cultiva Coffee -- Located near Meadowlark on South Street, this is one of Lincoln's local coffee roasters. They also serve freshly brewed coffee while they are open. Recently they have started serving coffee in the back of Indigo Bridge Books across he hall from Ivanna Cone, and downtown out of the State Theater.
• Kopeli Coffee -- Almost did not throw this one in here. The coffee at Kopeli is so-so, but they have delicious lunch soups and paninis, their wireless is usually superb, and they are open later than most places, so it gets visited fairly frequently.
  

Bars
This list wouldn't be complete as a University student without mentioning at least a few of my favorite bars.

• Doc's Place -- Doc's is a great lounge, but a little bit out of the way from most of the bars. They have a good beer selection and fairly reasonable prices for the most part. Typically draws an older crowd.
  
• Zen's Lounge -- Zen's used to be my favorite bar before they raised their prices, now it is probably the most expensive bar downtown, but is still worth visiting occasionally. They have a nice beer and cocktail list with some originals created by their bartenders. The lounge also has WiFi should you feel the need to work over a beer.
  
• Duffy's Tavern -- The home of the fishbowl, Duffy's is a great all-around bar with pool tables, live music, a beer garden, and a window into the gyro place next door for those late night munchies. They used to do karaoke with a live band on certain nights but I am not sure that is still going on.
  
• Box Awesome -- This is the place for local music in Lincoln, with shows every Friday and Saturday night at minimum. They also recently remodeled to make the place better for shows.
  
• Zoo Bar -- A jewel in the center of downtown, the Zoo bar is a blues bar that pulls some amazing acts, both local and national. They have posters on the wall of some famous past visiters and the list is fairly impressive. The drinks are good and the atmosphere is excellent. This is another place I wish I would have gotten too more often.
  
• 12th Street Pub -- Good drinks, good prices, good people, and live local music. What more do you want? If you get lucky, you might be able to see the famous Nate & AJ band perform.
  

Misc
Just some random places that don't fit into the categories above but are worth mentioning:

• Indigo Bridge Books -- A new, independent bookstore in the Haymarket, featuring books on a variety of topics. As mentioned earlier they also have a coffee stand inside selling delicious Cultiva coffee. This place is also host to The Table, a pay-what-you-want community lunch endeavor focused on bringing people together. I will write more about The Table in a later post.
  
• A Novel Idea -- A locally owned used bookstore located downtown. They have a surprisingly wide selection of books and a good variety.
  
• Empyrean Brewing -- I mentioned Empyrean already when talking about Lazlo's, but I feel the need to re-iterate that this is the best local brewery in Nebraska. They also do free brewery tours the first Monday of every month as part of beer school. Make sure you get there early though, as it's a popular event.
  
• Open Harvest -- A local natural foods co-op. I believe they are currently raising money to build a new, bigger store.
  
• Haymarket Theater -- I've only been here a couple of times, but I was impressed with the quality of the venue and the shows. The building also hosts a youth theater as well.
  
• Illuzion Glassworks -- A new head shop in downtown Lincoln. Much of their glass is locally blown and I believe they have plans for a lounge or coffee shop in the front part of the building.

That pretty much sums it up. Make sure to check out the map if you're interested. I'm sure I've missed something, but I am leaving with a fairly good impression of Lincoln overall as a city (or at least the downtown area). I was skeptical when I first arrived but something I've realized is that if you look hard enough, you will find the right kind of quality people and establishments in almost any city. Lincoln might actually have more than most.

The Effective Anti-Commons

I occasionally stumble across trends on the internet that frustrate and annoy me enough to write about. One of the most recent is what I like to call the "effective anti-commons." The term is a play on the phrase the tragedy of the anti-commons coined by Michael Heller. This tragedy in a nutshell is when numerous rights-holders each control part of a resource to the detriment of everybody involved. Last summer I saw Professor Heller give a talk* in Redomond, WA about his book Gridlock Economy during which he described the phenomenon in some detail. One of the examples he provided is that most airports are basically unable to add runways due to the land nearby being owned/controlled by too many competing interests. If you want more examples, check out the links above.

* side note: Quite a few of the Microsoft Research talks can be found at researchchannel.org, but god forbid you try to watch the videos on a linux box.

I'm taking the "effective" anti-commons to refer to those situations where control of a resource is split between multiple parties, but through technological barriers rather than through legal rights and restrictions. This happens fairly frequently when dealing with information rather than with physical resources. Technological barriers are necessary because data and other factual information is not copyrightable in and of itself (although the display or compilation of the information may be... the copyrightability of databases is somewhat hazy). So in order to provide protection to a database, companies keep it behind close doors and throw up a scary license that says you cannot copy the facts they display on their website. There have also been attempts to apply the legal concept of trespass to chattels to prevent data extraction techniques such as web scraping.

These attempts to legally control factual content have been hit or miss at best, so organizations have resorted to using technology to protect the data instead, partially because it is so easy to do. In general these barriers exist by default and a certain amount of effort must be spent to remove them (through providing web services or periodical database dumps, etc). This leaves few alternatives beyond web scraping for a third party to access the data. Many third-party sites do take this scraping approach, the most popular are probably airfare aggregators.

In many domains this sectioning off of information is harmful both to the consumer and the provider of the data. A few examples of where this is a problem are listed below.

• Recipes -- There hundreds of different recipe collection sites on the web, some of the most notable are Allrecipes, Epicurious, RecipeZaar, etc. I still haven't found one with an open API. There are also a few web scraping aggregate sites like Supercook and Food.com, but surprise surprise they don't have an API either.


• Car Pooling -- There are many carpooling websites, many of which sprang up in the last few years when gas prices were on the rise. Here is a list of 25 of them.
  


• Guitar Tabs -- Just searching for guitar tabs will bring you quite a few different websites, each with their own collection of tabs. Lyrics websites are the same way.
  


• Events -- Let's say you have an event coming up in Omaha, NE that you want people to know about, where would you post that event to so people saw it? Yahoo? We Go Places? Eventful? Or maybe a city specific site like Hello Omaha? Yahoo and Eventful at least realize the importance of data-sharing in this domain and provide developer APIs for access to their data.

Examining these examples illuminates a few specific problems with this setup.

For consumers:

1. Where do I find information? An obvious problem when the information for a domain is split across multiple locations is where to look for something you need. Using recipes as an example, where would one know look for a desired recipe or recipe type? There is little to no way to tell which website has the highest chance of providing the best results. You have little choice but to search all of them (or Google might provide decent results).
   


2. Where do I contribute information? Similar to problem 1, a person has to make a choice about where to contribute information so others can use it. In the case of events, how do you choose a site where the relevant group of users is likely to see it? Different people probably check different websites so you have to post the same information (facts) across many of them if you hope to advertise to the most people (this actually happens fairly often with guitar tab websites).
   


3. How do I most effectively connect with other users? Carpooling is one of those domains where the goal is to connect people to each other. This is incredibly problematic when somebody advertising a ride and somebody looking for that same ride are on different websites. The problem of connecting these people is only a problem because the relevant information is not shared.
   

For producers:

1. How do I accumulate information? For sites that rely on user-generated content, it is necessary for the owner of the website to convince users to actually generate that content. With an effective anti-commons, websites are forced to compete for users not only as consumers, but also as producers. Through this competition some users choose one website while others choose a different one, and the total amount of usable content for any one website is a fraction of what it could be if the information was shared.
   


2. How do I leverage that information to provide value and attract users? The goal of many web applications is to leverage a set of data to provide value to customers. In many cases the amount of value provided correlates directly to the size of the dataset. In many of the example domains listed above, the amount of value possible increases as the data size increases (carpooling, recipes, etc). As mentioned in problem 1, this data set can be increased quite a bit if information is shared among producers rather than fragmented. With the current model of information hoarding, it leaves the door wide open for web-scraping mashups to come through, aggregate data from multiple websites, and win the market. If the data were shared to begin with, this would be far less of a concern.
   


3. How do I differentiate myself from my competitors? In a free market competition is inevitable and can be a good thing. However competing for data accumulation and hoarding that data is counter-productive for the reasons just mentioned. It is much more useful and attractive to spend your time competing on features, usability, integration, etc built on top of a shared data set rather than shooting yourself in the foot competing on data accumulation itself. Knowing where to actually compete is a basic business principle, and is also a reason many for profit software companies leverage open source software (so they can focus on competing in more relevant areas of the software stack).
   

Consumers and producers are both harmed by technological barriers that restrict data sharing. I don't have the space to list out technological solutions to this problem, but many of them exist and do not take that much extra work. In most cases it is in a business' best interest to explore these options, especially in the user generated content space.

One area I didn't mention above, because it deserves it's own post (or series of posts) is the identity metadata domain (i.e. social networking sites). However many of the same problems pervade this domain as well.