Weblogsky: Technology Archives

Chris Messina on OpenID

Chris Messina's updated his OpenID Hitlist/Shitlist. [Link]

...via Blogger, Google has become both an OpenID provider (with delegation) and consumer. Separately, Brad Fitzpatrick released the Social Graph API and declared that URLs are People Too.

Making motions

Has Thane Heins, an inventor who dropped out of college, created a perpetual motion machine? [Link]

"It's hard for me to give an opinion," said Zahn, who admitted he was excited to see the demonstration. "I don't believe it will violate the laws of physics. You're not going to get more energy out than you put in."

He said it's easy for people to set up their tests wrong and misinterpret what they see. "You've got to look closely."

It's now Jan. 28 - D Day. Heins has modified his test so the effects observed are difficult to deny. He holds a permanent magnet a few centimetres away from the driveshaft of an electric motor, and the magnetic field it creates causes the motor to accelerate. It went well.

Contacted by phone a few hours after the test, Zahn is genuinely stumped - and surprised. He said the magnet shouldn't cause acceleration. "It's an unusual phenomena I wouldn't have predicted in advance. But I saw it. It's real. Now I'm just trying to figure it out."

MySpace Apps

Following Facebook's lead, MySpace is gearing up to accommodate third-party applications via the MySpace Developer Platform. [Link to MIT Tech Review article] [Link to Developer Platform page at MySpace]

Very interesting info from MySpace on the page that discusses their adoption of Open Social... tragedy of the commons:

While unrestrained CSS and HTML provided users with limitless ways to make their profiles look a certain way, it was JavaScript that allowed them to really plug into the MySpace experience. After MySpace launched, users began building JavaScript widgets that did anything from customizing friends lists to sending MySpace Mail. And applications they coded were not limited to their own profiles. Through a little known technology known as "cut and paste", users could "install" applications they liked on their own profiles.

Where did all this functionality come from? While no specific XML/JSON api was provided, users quickly wrote and disseminated scripts that used JavaScript to screen scrape the existing MySpace markup (in order to gather data), and to emit the proper http values to manipulate the data they gathered.

Of course, a completely open MySpace was a utopic ideal. The exploitation began. As nefarious people began perceiving value in having lots of illegitimate friends, causing mischief, and/or making a profit through spam, they began writing applications that broke the rules. While a well thought out, law abiding "send me a message" app would send messages only at the request of the user, an app built by a spammer would send as many messages as the user's bandwidth would allow.

As spammers propagated through the site, MySpace began blacklisting certain types of JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. We tried very hard to keep as much JavaScript as possible, but slowly and surely illegitimate users hacked away at our filters until finally JavaScript was banned entirely. That left third party application developers with only one dyanmic alternative: Flash. Sites like YouTube saw their birth as widely disseminated Flash decorations for MySpace profiles. Unfortunately, by this time such applications were completely locked out of the MySpace data stream.

Rails in Austin

Lori Hawkins at the Austin American-Statesman has written a good article about Ruby on Rails' adoption by Austin programmers. My company, Polycot Consulting, for years used a php framework developed by my partner Matt Sanders. Matt and Polycot's Ethan Burrows were early adopters. Eventually we made a whole division, Polycot Labs, that does nothing but Rails development. With the Rail framework, coders can prototype quickly, so it's good for rapid, agile development - where you spend less time planning and more time building and tweaking to get the system right.

High dynamic range

I ran across a set of amazing, kind of surreal high dynamic range images on Flickr, in the Japan HDR Pool. (They were all "all rights reserved"; the image posted above is a Creative Commons-licensed HDR posted at Flickr by Christian Meichtry.) Wikipedia has a good overview of HDR. explaining that "its wider usage was, until quite recently, precluded by the limitations imposed by the available computer processing power." You can produce HDR images with any camera - it's a matter of post-processing, combining several exposures to get a greater dynamic range, i.e. the range of values between light and dark areas. You can create HDR images using Photoshop.

ChaCha cha

ChaCha is a search engine that adds a wetware filter: human "guides" field search queries. [Link]

I doesn't always work:

Using ChaCha can be easier and faster than using a smart phone. But it faltered when more than one step was required to answer a question -- like my request for directions to the McDonald's closest to my company's headquarters. The directions, which came a few minutes later, started from the correct address, but sent me much farther away than the McDonald's right outside.

Plus, I didn't get an address for the restaurant, just a direction to head down the West Side Highway and, inexplicably, go ''Left on Canal/Hoboken St.'' (there's no Hoboken Street in Manhattan).

Consciousness in a Box

I wrote this in 1995 for FringeWare Review. Just found it on an old diskette...

Robotics has two sides -- real-world practical application and development, and scifi mythopoetic phantasy construction -- and like most real/surreal dichotomies of the Information Age, these two sides are blurred and indistinct within human consciousness, whatever that might be....

A good question in this context: What is consciousness? This is hard to answer because of the obvious blind spot inherent in self-definition (conscious process defining consciousness), you can’t see the forest for the trees or the neurons for the nerves, as the case may be. Because the “conscious” part of me is as deep as I usually go, or as I need to go in order to play the various survival games, I tend to confuse consciousness, an interface between the internal me and the external “thou,” as the totality of my being, as a real thing rather than a conveniently real-seeming process. (Then again, if consciousness defines reality, what’s real is what consciousness says is real, but that’s a digression....)

The sages tell me I’m delusional (attached to the delusion of samsara, of the world, in the Buddhist view), but I can’t quite figure out what this means. That’s because “I” am as much the noun, delusion, as the adjective, delusional. So much of what I am is filtered ouot, inaccessible to the ego-interface.

But wait. The delusional “I am” is a convenience that facilitates individual survival-stuff, so I’m not dissin’ it. The purpose of this rant is to make a point, not about ego or delusion (I’ll let the sages stew in those juices), but about robotics and AI research and the belief, often expressed in both scifi and real-world contexts, that you, or more precisely “your consciousness,” can be stored digitally. In most scifi depicitons of “consciousness in a box,” the object is immortality: you store what’s essentially you, and it “lives” forever, or until the plug’s pulled, whichever comes first (I know where I’m putting my money). In scifi, this is just another device for exploring the question of immortality, which has fascinated scifi authors and the mythmakers that preceded them as a way to come to terms with the death thing. Trying to rationalize the inescapable. But you find other optimistic folks (Hans Moravec, the Extropians) who are quite serious about the potential for immortality and who consider the consciousness-in-a-box scenario a viable means to that end.

I have a couple of problems with the scenario, myself, the first being that, even if you digitized your consciousness and stored it in a psychoelectronic device of some kind, it would not be you. Your awareness would still fold when you discorporate; the thing that’s stored might emulate your thinking or even your behavior, but it would be a simulacrum, like you but not you.

The other problem I have is best expressed in the form of a question: What are we storing? There seems to be a confusion between process and object. If consiousness is indeed only a shallow process handling the various negotiations between what we call subconscious and external reality, what is the character of the data you’re uploading and defining as you. Rules, implementations, stored memories -- consciousness is really a hash consisting of no single, store-able entity. It’s like trying to package a tornado -- what do you put in the package? Do you include all the chaotic elements of weather formation and all the applied physical rules that are manifest in the tornado’s brief life span as a process event?

The bottom line here is that you can’t really isolate a single entity “consciousness” and divorce it from its generative context.

Can you even simulate consciousness? Or intelligence, which probably has a clearer rule base than the vaguer concept of consciousness, but is still elusive. An “artificial” intelligence with sufficient density and complexity to mimic human consciousness is the very real goal of a particular thread of applied research, but so far no digital simulacrum has been constructed that “thinks” as we know thinking. The problem here resonates with the earlier argument about stored consciousness: we don’t have clarity about the definition and composition of human consciousness, so how can we copy it? It’s hard enough to copy something we know.

The mythic representations of scifi robots like Robbie or Gort or Hal9000 are like consciousness in a black box, deus-ex-machina stuff that might serve to carry a plot forward but, to those who punch code into dumb processors day after day, doesn’t ring any more true than a fairy tale or myth, which is to say that it’s more about wishes and fears than about any current or projected reality. It’s one thing to load a few rules, even with algorithms to simulate heuristic process, into the CPUs of this world, but it’s a real stretch to conceptualize silicon-based thinking or awareness.

Human and animal consciousness are products of code generations and modifications that reach ‘way back, perhaps to the inception of the universe, and are driven by an unfathomable creative force compared to which our efforts to construct artificial minds seem comparatively short-sighted and pitiful. Then again, I suppose in our efforts to mimic “the gods” we’re channeling that creative force, whatever its true origins, because it must be inherent in the coce structure of the human genome. And if that’s so, perhaps we’re destined to coevolve with our own creations, which have themselves evolved from basic practical and conceptual tools to today’s ubiquitous computing systems. This coevolution may produce cyborganic life forms which, though not created entirely by our hands, may be seen as products of an obsessive desire to be as we imagine gods to be, creatively self-perpetuating and therefore, as a race if not individually, immortal.

SCO files chapter 11

SCO's made a business of litigation, and it hasn't worked. The company's filed chapter 11. (Thanks, Sandy!)

Page 4 of the SCO Group's Voluntary Petition tells us that the assets are $14,800,000 and the debts are $7,500,000. That's not counting the debt the Utah court ruled Novell is owed, amount to be determined at the now postponed trial. And a note says those are approximate values, based on "the Company's consolidated and unaudited balance sheets as of July 31, 2007". Here's the most recent 10Q from April for comparison. And this is interesting. There are 21,782,164 shares of common stock, owned by only 402 holders. That explains a lot. Here's the name of any person who directly or indirectly owns, controls, or holds, with power to vote, 5% or more of the voting securities of debtor: Cede & Co. and Ralph Yarro.

SCO Operations, Inc., in the Corporate Ownership Statement, says that the debtor, SCO Operations, Inc., "discloses that The SCO Group, Inc. owns 100% of the Debtor's equity interests." I remember now that when S2 signed a contract with SCO, it was with SCO Operations, described as "a Delaware corporation and a subsidiary of The SCO Group, Inc.". And I do see on the form that they list estimated assets at $1,000,000.001 to $100 million. Not too precise. And estimated liabilities are the same.

Google sees FCC progress

Google notes that the FCC adopted two of Google's suggested four openness conditions for the upcoming auction of 700MHz spectrum.
[Link]

Just two months ago, the notion that the FCC would take such a big step forward to give consumers meaningful choice through this auction seemed unlikely at best. Today -- thanks in no small part to broad public support for greater competition -- the FCC has embraced important principles of openness, and endorsed the unfettered workings of the free market for software applications and communications devices. Moreover, over the last few weeks several leading wireless carriers have reversed course and for the first time acknowledged our call for more open platforms in wireless networks. By any measure, that's real progress.

Follow the bouncing mail

I just got an email that said my Gmail address was inactive with Yahoo Groups and gave me a way to reactivate it. The mails were bouncing with an "over quota" message though I've only used 44% of my Gmail quota. Checking Google's forums, I found that many were having the same problem, whcih according to Google has been fixed. Google wasn't saying much; there was actually more and better info at Yahoo 360. Interesting message from Anthony P indicating how complex and difficult Gmail has become:

As someone who owns a company that runs a large scale email system, I can definitely sympathize with Yahoo and Google. Our service sends under five million messages a day and we often experience delivery issues that can be nearly impossible to pinpoint. I can't imagine what Yahoo and Google must have to deal with with 10-30+ million emails flying through their system. The general public doesn't understand the work it takes to run a system of Yahoo and Google's scale and the endless maze that merely isolating a problem (not even fixing it yet) can be.

Make article doesn't get off the ground

Mark blogs how Make Magazine, which he edits, was going to run an article about a high-voltage antigravity device, but they canceled the article because the magazine's advisory board thought the project too dangerous. The explanation's pretty interesting. [Link]

"You mean Open Source hasn't saved the world yet?"

I wrote a feature about Open Source in Austin for this week's Austin Chronicle.

Open Source Second Life

Wagner James Au comments on Linden Labs' decision to Open Source the code that runs the Second Life viewer. [Link]

The official announcement begins by comparing Linden’s move to what Netscape did (motivated by “acceptance of the inevitable or simple desperation”), when they opened the source to their browser, which led to a fruition of Web development.

For the very young who are reading this, some history: Netscape, you see, was a company that once dominated the browser market. Why sonny, did you know its IPO in 1995 launched the dot com boom? Yes they did. Now, however, its share of the browser market is less than 1%. So while it’s true the source code was a marvelous gift to the web’s growth, in retrospect it seems like a heroic sacrifice— great for the Internet, but not so great for the company that did it.

2012 tech

IBM predicts breakout technologies five years from now, in 2012 (which is, of course, the end of history.) [Link] They include

3D web a la Second Life - and consistent form and identity for the user.
Cellphones that are smart enough to pick up on combined cues and give advice accordingly.
Environmental nanotechnology
Telemedicine... virtual visits to the doctor.
Real time speech translation.

Roomba Rights

Whacky Brits predict that "robots could one day demand the same citizen's rights as humans." Light switches and blenders will be next in line, no doubt. [Link]

Web 3.0?

The NY Times suggests that Web 3.0 will be a mashup of semnatic web with AI. The article mentions Austin-based Cycorp, which has been in development for a quarter century. [Link]

Cyc was originally built by entering millions of common-sense facts that the computer system would “learn.” But in a lecture given at Google earlier this year, Mr. [Doug] Lenat [Cyc's prime mover] said, Cyc is now learning by mining the World Wide Web — a process that is part of how Web 3.0 is being built.

(Thanks to Bobby Law for the tip!)

Parakey

Don Jarrell sent me a link to this swell IEEE Spectrum article about Blake Ross, "The Firefox Kid."

from a user’s point of view, Parakey is “a Web operating system that can do everything an OS can do.” Translation: it makes it really easy to store your stuff and share it with the world. Most or all of Parakey will be open source, under a license similar to Firefox’s. There are differences between the two projects, however. Although Ross plans to incorporate the talents and passions of the free-software community, he’s building Parakey around a for-profit business model. And he’s leading the charge with a simple battle cry: “One interface, not two!”

Net neutrality at EFF-Austin

Thursday night, EFF-Austin had a discussion of net neutrality with Internet expert John Quarterman, entrepreneur Michael Hathaway, AT&T VP Hank Hultquist, and author Austin Bay. It was a great conversation, available as a 98mb mp3... long but worth listening. A few points from the talk:

We're concerned about arbitrary bandwidth limits.

We need both a public and a private Internet. The public Internet brings us ubiquitous connectivity; the private Internet brings reliable service. We already have the private Internet (e.g. Akamai), and it doesn't make sense to legislate against it, if that's how net neutrality would be defined. The private Internet is compensated, managed, and provides some assurance of Quality of Service.
Packet network is where all forms of content distribution are moving. It's the most effective way to to deliver on demand voice, text, images, sound, video.

Hultquist: The Internet is really a set of agreements that includes both best effort treatment and, in some cases, will require better than best effort. There's a certain about of fear and uncertainty because no one knows what the network will look like in the future. However Hank believes that potential consumer-harming behavior is quite unlikely.

More video requires more capacity. So far behavior on the Internet has been very bursty, with 50kbps average use. Video means more sustained delivery at high bandwidth.
Broadcasting is not the future. AT&T is moving to packet video.
Hank feels that all the legislative proposals he's seen are "like Jell-O," and that they represent a form of Ludditism.

John Quarterman says that the FCC did away with net neutrality last year by deciding cable was no longer a telecommunications service, was instead an information service. The FCC also decided that broadband is an information service, not telecom. At the same time the FCC publsihed "four principles of net neutrality."

1. Consumers are entitled to access the lawful Internet content of their choice;
2. Consumers are entitled to run applications and services of their choice, subject to the needs of law enforcement;
3. Consumers are entitled to connect their choice of legal devices that do not harm the network;
4. Consumers are entitled to competition among network providers, application and service providers, and content providers.

The use of the term "consumer" in each of the four principles suggests a broadcast orientation... in the broadcast world you have passive consumption of content, and not the kind of active participation in creating content and value that we see on today's Internet. And there are many other questions one could ask about these four principles. For instance, in #1, what law is used to define lawful content? The Internet is global, covering many jurisdictions. In #2, what are the needs of law enforcement? In #3, who decides what devices are "legal" and whether they harm the network? In #4, where does the competition come from? Can a duopoly (where only phone companies and cable companies provide service) be considered "competitive"?

Technorati supports OpenID

OpenID might just emerge as the identity management standard we've been waiting for. Technorati is the latest system to announce OpenID support.

Code-A-Thon

The League of Technical Voters' Code-A-Thon is under way. Kai Mantsch shot and edited a very cool bit of video of the first night:

I also shot a bunch of still photos, posted at Flickr.

Midas Networks anniversary party

We visited Midas Networks' gala 4th anniversary party yesterday, and Chris Boyd articulated his zippy elevator speech. He provides various levels of service, from colocation with minimal management to managed leased servers. Chris is a member of the EFF-Austin Board of Directors, and has been our resident expert on network technology (now joined by network topologist John Quarterman).

This fourth anniversary batch even had mariachis!

Machine intelligence?

I just posted a response to a message about "machine intelligence" that came over the nettime-l email list. Here's what I posted; feel free to comment:

The concept of AI as "conscious machine" is, in my opinion, bogus. So often we hear terms like "machine intelligence" or "artificial intelligence" where "intelligence" is undefined, and the implication is that somehow machines will become "consious." To me, that's like saying once we have a critical mass of light switches in the world, thrown in just such pattern, the electrical grid will become "conscious."

So the reason machine intelligence is persistently predicted but never quite manifest seems clear to me. You can build the golem and you can assume that the more like a man you make him, the more likely he is to self-animate and do a little dance. However he n ever quite moves, because replication of human form is insufficient... just as machines that mimic intelligence are not truly intelligent, and machines that may seem to be 'conscious' really aren't, unless you redefine consciousness to fit machine reality.

My friends Max More and Natasha Vita-More are more sensible about the singularity - it's not about machines becoming like humans, but about the increasing cyborgization of humans - we become increasingly closer to our machines, and we enhance our capabilities as a result. But we won't become machines and machines won't become human. Our robot fantasies are probably just an indication that we don't quite know what it means to be human.

The Fightin' Frisbees

A variation on the Frisbee is the latest proposed weapon in the Middle East war. Called Modular Disc-Wing Urban Cruise Munitions, the circular drones, according to their manufacturer, Triton Systems, will be launched "from munitions dispensers or by means of a simple mechanism similar to a shotgun target (skeet) launcher." At that point they'll be operated by remote control, or perhaps autopilot.

Cheapbots

Future technologies are suddenly present, especially robots. We don't have Robby to synthesize umpty-gallons of whiskey (a la "Forbidden Planet"), but we do have Roomba to tidy up the house, and we have a whole dheap robots appearing, like Idog, which "resembles a collision between a bag of marshmallows and a cell phone, with vague canine overtones. " [Link]

Open Source to Open Services

Tim O'Reilly writes about some Open Source wrangling at OSCON, but the real story here is about the meaning of open source in the world of 'software as a service.' We need an open services model. [Link]

"Where's Web 2.0?"

The Boston Globe has a new definition for Web 2.0: "...the second wave of Internet start-ups, based on Web content, social networking, digital media." In an article that focuses on Web 2.0 as VC-funded business, Robert Weisman writes

Since the Google offering, however, venture investors have been disappointed by the dearth of successful exits by Web 2.0 start-ups that have gone public or have been sold to established companies. An exception was MySpace.com, the popular social-networking site snapped up last year by Fox Interactive Media for $580 million.

The search for niches that can generate substantial paydays for their venture backers is intensifying as many traditional high-tech sectors, like computers and software, have matured.

This sounds like the sort of VC feeding frenzy that led the boom -->bust in the 1990s/early 2000s. Web 2.0 was the Phoenix that rose from the ashes of that era, as web coders and creatives with nothing much to do kept building to keep busy. Unconstrained by coroporate or VC considerations, they just built, and real innovations emerged. Now that investors are interested again, what impact will that have on creative urges? (Dear Mr. VC: give me some money and I'll research that question.)

Open Source is Obsolete?

"Open services" is the new open source? We were just discussing this last night and Tim O'Reilly blogged about it this morning – with Web 2.0 and "software as a service," open source licenses are, if not obsolete as Tim says, certainly less relevant than open architectures and APIs. [Link] Ian Betteridge comments on Tim's post, saying

I'd question your assertion that Web 2.0 and software-as-service form "many of the most important types of software today." They're certainly important in terms of an interesting (and growing) niche in the overall software eco-system, but not important enough in terms of revenue to make the bold claim that "open source licenses are obsolete".

"Why is congress considering such anti-consumer telecom bills?"

Bruce Kushnick of TeleTruth, the most active of telecom activists, asks this question in an informative piece at the Nieman Watchdog. Don't just read it, Digg it.

These bill names use D.C.-Speak, a modern Orwellian vernacular. Both would give the Bells new incentives in the form of national franchises with no "build-out" requirements for states or cities to be fully wired. The cable companies currently have local franchises, where the companies have to meet specific requirements for local provisioning, such as local access channels. This new corporate “one size fits all” national franchise is not about customers but about expediency and lack of community services, as the House bill allows the new entrants (that is, the phone companies) not to worry about local, existing obligations. The House bill adds an additional 1 percent tax on the cable operators' gross revenues, and the language of the bill states that the operators can “designate that portion of a subscriber's bill attributable to such payment”, meaning that new taxes can be charged directly to the customer.

The phone companies have had extensive financial incentives before, but they have never fulfilled their obligations. Rewarding them for such a record is brazen, and raises the question of whether Capitol Hill lawmakers are in cahoots with the telecoms.

Tim O'Reilly's big four

Tim O'Reilly has identified "four big ideas" about Open Source. He'll present these at OSCON, but he's posted a preview. I'll summarize here:

The architecture of participation beyond software. What we're calling Web 2.0 draws on the self-organizing principles behind the open source movement, but moves beyond that into the architecture of participation, which involves the user in the development process.
Asymmetric competition. Open Source can "compete in a way that undercuts all of the advantages of incumbent players," but companies forming around Open Source don't grasp the implications of the new model. Asymmetric competition means that you compete on resouorces, processes, and values that are different from the competiton's, building critical mass with a more or less different market. Think Linux vs Windows. If open source companies compete symmetrically with other companies, they sink into the same stew of VC-financed build-and-sell bigco wrangling, while bootstrap companies who see a new model for doing business and go with it will build the next round of real innovation.
How Software As a Service Changes The Points of Business Leverage. Tim says it best: "Operations and scalability lead to powerful cost advantages; increasing returns from network effects lead to new kinds of lock-in. The net effect is that even when running open source software, vendors will have lock-in opportunities just as powerful as those from the previous generation of proprietary software."
Open Data. If we value open systems (such as free and open source software), we should remember that data driven systems as we have with Web 2.0 aren't open if the data's locked down.

Google's released its Account Authentication Proxy for Web-based Systems, compared by ZDNet's Garett Rogers to Microsoft's Passport, though I'm wondering if Google's influenced by the work of the Identity Gang and the "Identity 2.0" conversations...

Powerpoints from the Artificial General Intelligence Research Institute's May workshop are online. What's this about? "The field of AI is poised to make a transition from a focus on highly specialized "narrow AI" problem solving systems to confronting the more difficult issues of 'human level intelligence' and more broadly artificial general intelligence. This workshop will focus on AGI issues in general, with a non-exclusive focus on the theme of grounding linguistic relationships in nonlinguistic reality."

Adam Greenfield just gave an Everyware talk at the Institute for the Future. [Link]

How to design systems that respect prerogatives of civil liberties, privacy, etc.? AG suggests five ethical principles:
Default to harmlessness. Everyware "should default to a mode that ensures their users' safety." It's beyond graceful degredation, because everyware takes so much responsibility upon itself to take care of people.
Be self-disclosing. You should be able to see what systems are operating in a space, both to geeks and to people who aren't wired up. This requires "a new universal vocabulary of signs" for everyware; and the ability to look under the hood.
Be conservative of face. Everyware should not "unnecessarily embarrass, humiliate or shame their users." Nor should it completely dissolve the boundaries of privacy that people expect.
Be conservative of time. Don't "introduce undue complications into ordinary operations." Having physical equivalents of Clippy the Office Assistant would be a pain.
Be deniable. Everyware "must offer users the ability to opt out, always and at any point." If ubicomp systems offer some functionality and benefit, opting out should just turn those off. (How do you opt out of being photographed by surveillance cameras?)

Tom Morin of The Robot Group dug up a web relic: a very old "unofficial" Robot Group page the title of which is "One of at least three Robot Group Home Pages," circa 1992.

Wade Roush in MIT Technology Review suggests that "Google fatigue" has set in because bloggers aren't wowed by Google's new spreadsheet. He quotes Michael Arrington at TechCrunch: "When is the last time Google released a product that really changed our lives?" In fact, for me, that was recently, and it was Google calendar, which is incredibly easy to use and shareable, despite a couple of issues (e.g. you can't display a calendar to anyone who hasn't signed up, and its ability to sync is limited).

Roush asks "Is the company searching for a strategy?" My sense is that the company looks for new ways for users to aggregate data and make use of Google's core search technology. And the spreadsheet, like the calendar, is shareable, consistent with the collaborative aspect associated with "web 2.0." And remember what Tim O'Reilly said about "data as the next 'Intel inside'."

Roush goes on to fault Google's use of the concept and word "beta," forgetting that O'Reilly lists "perpetual beta" as one of the design patterns for "web 2.0."

I put "web 2.0" in quotes because I have some issues with the label which I've addressed elsewhere, but to the extent there is such a thing, Google is supposed to be one of it's prime movers, and can't be faulted for continuing to follow the principles and patterns it helped define.

Using "a very thin film made up of layers of metal and semiconducting nanoparticles flanked at the top and bottom by electrodes," scientists at the University of Nebraska have replicated human touch with a high level of sensitivity. Professor Ravi Saraf, one of the scientists behind the technology, stresses its medical value: "The hope is that if you have the resolution close to a human finger in applications like minimal invasive surgery, where the surgeon could actually 'touch' while he or she doing the procedure and tell if the tissue is cancerous or abnormal etc, that would increase the success of these surgeries." [Link]

We haven't seen much deployment of fiber to the home in the U.S. because of the costs involved, but MIT Technology Review says circuits that integrate electronics with optical components may speed things up. [Link]

Today, fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) is available in only about 15 U.S. cities, as well as some urban areas in Japan, Korea, and China, in part because it takes a huge investment of time and money to build all the infrastructure: to dig new trenches, to lay new fiber, and to install the fiber utility box on homes.

But there's another hold up: it's expensive to manufacture and deploy all the individual optic-fiber devices, called "triplexers," that must be affixed to houses. These triplexers, which come into play where the fiber connects to the home, contain the electrical and optical components that guide and collect the data-carrying photons that become Web pages, telephone calls, or video.

While new technology may do little to solve the problem of ditch-digging, it could make it much cheaper to produce triplexers, by integrating multiple functions onto a single chip. This technology, called a planar lightwave circuit (PLC), is already used in some fiber network applications. But there it integrates only optical components -- for applications such as triplexers, the chip needs to incorporate both electrical and optical components.

By way of followup to my "Outlook vs Thunderbird" rant: after traveling with my laptop and suffering long email downloads, it struck me that Gmail might be the right solution, so I started forwarding my primary mail stream to that account. Result was pretty good, actually, but I found some deal breakers:

You can't paste rich content into Gmail and send it as an html mail, something I need to do for some of the lists I manage. (You can create html emails in Gmail, but only using Gmail editing tools.)
Gmail lets you set up any email address as your reply-to, so I could continue to send emails as though from my primary address. However lists where I subscribed with that address wouldn't accept my message if they were set up for member posts only. This is because the better list management systems know not to look at your reply-to, which you can always manipulate... it looks at a sender address that's elsewhere in the header and usually not visible or accessible to the user. I was therefore going to have to change addresses in a bunch of lists to continue using Gmail.

I'm also using Google Calendar instead of Outlook's... it's a little easier to use but they haven't worked out data sync yet. An easy sync with Outlook or Palm, either one, would be handy.

WCIT 2006 I was admitted as a delegate to the World Congress on Information Technology this week because I had served on WCIT2006's technology committee, though I haven't given the conference the attention it deserves – i.e. I haven't had time to participate in most of the sessions, unfortunate because I hear they've gone very well. WCIT, a conference of the World Information and Technology Services Alliance (WITSA), is described as "as a catalyst for social and economic development through the exchange of policies, ideas, and technology" that draws "2,000 business, government, and academic leaders from 80 countries."

This 15^th World Congress seeks to explore issues of impact and create actionable policy recommendations to world and technology industry leaders focusing on three issues of Global Impact: privacy and security, healthcare, and global digital access.

With all the innovative "Web 2.0" stuff going on, who saw this coming? Microsoft and the New York Times have engineered a way to more perfectly replicate print design in web browsers. It's all about branding. [Link]

The design of a newspaper is an indelible part of its identity, and while the New York Times, long known as "the Gray Lady," added color in 1997, its print edition is still distinguished by a somber, restrained design and dignified serif typeface for text (Imperial), which are perhaps the most recognizable in the newspaper industry. And the Times' website has sought to mimic that flavor, most recently with a redesign that uses serif fonts, and which is intended to take advantage of larger computer monitors. But with the advent of the Times Reader, the paper's online version will bear a much greater resemblance to its print product.

SXSW Interactive has posted the mp3 of the 2006 session called Convergence and Transformation: A Whole New Creative World. I was invited onto the panel at the last minute; it was one of the best panel experiences I've had... [Link to the MP3]. The session was moderated by Catherine Crago, and included David Pescovitz, David Michel-Davies, and John Tolva.

As Congress considers new telecom policy, Internet companies are pushing for regulation of broadband operators to enforce network neutrality, described by Declan McCullagh at News.com as "he idea that the companies that own the broadband pipes may not be able to configure their networks in a way that plays favorites--allowing them, for example, to transmit their own services at faster speeds, or to charge Net content and application companies a fee for similar fast delivery." The bill's author, Rep. Joe Barton of Texas, is taking direction from the network operators (AT&T, Comcast, Time Warner and Verizon Communications), who've been more effective in ~~buying~~ lobbying politicians, outspending Internet companies 3-1. [Link] [Link to more background from Declan's Politech email list.]

David Isenberg has managed to schedule his second annual "Freedom to Connect" conference at a crucial time. I'll be there; you should be there, too.

The future of telecommunications starts now; there's a new U.S. Telecom Bill
in the works, there's new networks in Europe, fast fiber in Asia, wireless across Africa and networks a-building in cities and villages around the world. Join the discussion. Shape the debate. Assert your F2C:Freedom to Connect.

The need to communicate is primary, like the need to breathe, eat, sleep, reproduce, socialize and learn. Better connections make for better communication. Better connections drive economic growth through better access to suppliers, customers and ideas. Better connections provide for development and testing of ideas in science and the arts. Better connections improve the quality of everyday life. Better connections build stronger democracies. Strong democracies build strong networks.

Jon Lebkowsky, Jon Barlow, and Richard MacKinnon at EFF/Creative Commons party during SXSW 2006

I took time yesterday to put up SXSW Interactive 2006 photos. Interactive was big this year – I'd estimate twice the number of registrants as last year, far more diverse than the "usual suspects" we see every year. When we set up some business sessions for the Digital Convergence Initiative's track, we weren't sure there'd be interest given the blogging/design focus of SXSW Interactive's usual crowds, however those sessions – in fact all of the DCI's sessions – were packed. (I'm pleased to say they were all very good, too - and that's not just my assessment. People were stopping Alex Cavalli and I in the halls to tell us how much they were digging the track!)

I think many attendees were in business, and of those, many were entrepreneurs or operators of small to medium enterprises with an interest in convergence and/or "Web 2.0." My general sense of the crowd was that they were smart, creative early adopters, and that their sense of something happening was not about exploiting trends to build individual wealth. Even those who were interested in making money were thinking about more sustainable practices than the usual MBA-driven build-and-sell approach.

That might be a reflection, in the biz realm, of Bruce Sterling's vision in his closing comments, summarized by Alex at Worldchanging.com:

The challenge, Bruce says, is that the worst people in the world -- genocidal ethnic mafiosos, fundamentalist fanatics, Washington lobbyists -- are running the show, American government has become the new Soviet Union (ossified, corrupt and widely perceived as illigitimate by the rest of the planet) and things are not good in much of the world. That said, if you look honestly at the world, you see a new story emerging, with millions of smart, dedicated people locked in a struggle to steer us towards a better future using every tool in their power, and that "that's a big story!"

Adam Greenfield's new book Everyware is nearing release, and he'll be talking about it as part of the Digital Convergence track at SXSW Interactive. The book is Adam's take on ubiquitous computing, which he discusses in an interview at Boxes and Arrows.

�Everyware� is computing that is everywhere around us, yet is relatively hard to see, both literally and figuratively. Broadly speaking, it is what you get when you take the information processing we associate with the personal computer and distribute it throughout the environment — embedding it in walls, floors, appliances, lampposts, even clothing. I also use the word to refer to the relatively novel interface conventions everyware requires: gestural, tangible and haptic interfaces, and to some extent, voice recognition.

The incumbent telcos, corporate giants spawned from a trust-busted monopoly, have never quite got away from monopolistic thinking. They go for dominance, and to get there they ignore the paths of innovation and competition in favor of brute-force legislation. Not long ago they were looking for ways to prevent municipalities from building communication networks for their citizens, nonprofits, and small businesses. Now they want to create new fees for Internet services, tiered pricing that would result in different billing levels for different kinds of services. Mitch Ratcliffe takes a thorough look at the implications of this approach, which would do away with net neutrality, an important aspect of the Internet's success as a platform for innovation. Says Mitch:

Tiered services would make data services pricing a complex Chinese menu and would isolate many homes and businesses in narrowband backwaters. This is the carriers' new holy grail, the ability to milk more from their already crappy services.

Instead of embracing the need to upgrade carriage generally in order to justify higher fees, the telcos are seeking to turn IP-based services such as VoIP and video downloads that compete with their voice and video services into subsidies that offset the weakness of their current business models, which tie connectivity to voice and other services. In David Isenberg's words, we don't need a telecommunications law that helps these companies survive despite their inefficiency, the U.S. must let them fail faster.

David Isenberg, organizer of the second annual Freedom To Connect conference in DC, wrote a poem (in Dr. Seuss mode) that suggests this is a free speech issue, since those who pay will will benefit from a higher quality of service, which suggests that they guy with the money is more likely to be heard. This could marginalize potentially innovative new content sources.

Imagine a world where all the highways are owned by a few companies, and they charge significantly more for the roads that are well-maintained, and you get the idea...but this isn't just about transport. Doc has something to say about all this:

...clearly the Net is not a form of carriage, even though it might appear that way to the carriers and the copyright extremists. The Net has an existence that encompasses carriage and content but is not reducible to either � just as human beings have an existence that encompasses the circulatory system and its constituents but is not reducible to either.

There are higher principles involved. Life is larger than the systems that sustain it. The principle we call net neutrality is as essential to Internet life as consciousness is to human life. When we subordinate Net neutrality to the systems that sustain it, we reduce it to those systems. The Net becomes a cable system, a phone system, a content delivery system. And nothing more. In human terms, this is called brain death.

By framing the Net as a neutral place, we assure that it will continue to serve as what it has already been for more than ten years : a public marketplace where private enterprise of all forms can not only grow and thrive, but can do both better than it ever has anywhere, ever, before.

People with no real estate experience will often make incorrect assumptions about their properties' values.

Example: Someone might think "The guy down the street has had his property on the market for $100,000; my house is bigger, so it's worth more than 100K." However, the listed price of a property may have nothing to do with its actual market value. Anybody can list a house for any price; the relevant data point is not the listed price, but the sold price, which tells you what someone was actually willing to pay. If the home hasn't sold for the $100,000 asking price, that could just as easily mean that it was priced too high for the market.

Which brings me to Zillow. Zillow is supposed designed to help ordinary mortals see what a property's worth, the idea being that, if you have access to the same data realtors have at their disposal, and you a apply a smart algorithm to the numbers, that's all you need to make an informed estimate of a property's real value. However it could be that Zillow actually just legitimizes incorrect assumptions about value by associating them with real data.

I'm talking from (admittedly limited) experience. Marsha and I are selling a condo, and our own research suggested a value between 55K and 60K. (Marsha's a realtor, and she knows her way around a market analysis). Zillow shows a value around 72K.

Somebody's off by 20%.

Zillow allows you to look at the comparable properties it used, and we did. Zillow includes three sold properties from 2004. That's an issue off the bat - good comps would be more recent. But what really threw us was the sold data on the three comps: 294K, 5K, and 42K, with a price per square foot of 259, 4, and 71, respectively. The average sold price is 111 per square foot, and the recommended price is based on 79 per square foot, which suggests that Zillow appropriately considered other factors - but that price is still too high.

The sold price data alone suggested that the three comps were hardly comparable. Looking closer, we found that the house that sold for 294K was shown to have a value of 74K, so the 294K may be bad data. A realtor would have have had the good judgement to toss that property out of the mix... in fact, would probably have thrown all three properties out, because one was unusually low, and another was much older.

The local Multiple Listing Service has its own market analysis program that may be more effective, but no algorithm so far has successfully encoded human processing of visual data and judgement calls based on an analysis of property condition, relative size, modifications, condition of the neighborhood and surrounding houses, etc. Some of that is ambient data that isn't stored where a system like Zillow and find it. A good realtor will get beyond the data and spend a lot of time touring and evaluating comparable properties, applying an experienced business perspective to data and physical observation to get an accurate sense of market value.

Which is not to say that Zillow isn't a cool tool for gathering data. I just wouldn't use its results as the basis for real-world business decisions. And I think we have to acknowledge that there are very human aspects of business processes and decisons that you can't address with code alone.

Sascha Meinrath posts about two bills that are favorable to community wireless and network innovation. While your friendly neighborhood monopolistic monolithic telco's been hoping to sew up ownership of networks, ditch the concept of net neutrality, and control your access to innovation, the message seems to be sinking in with legislators - we're in a new world of digital convergence best supported by a network that is accessible to all, neutral, dumb, with intelligence (and freedom to connect) at the edges. (Via boing boing)

In a welcome precedent, a federal district court in Nevada has ruled that Google's practice of caching web pages is fair use. [Link]

My last post, about Yahoo's supposed decision to give up on search market dominance, drew a quick response from Qi Lu and Eckart Walther at Yahoo Search, noting "conjecture and confusion" about "Yahoo's commitment to being the world's best search engine." Great point - the CFO's comment didn't say Yahoo had given up on being the best, but that "it's not our goal to be No. 1 in Internet search." Best and first aren't necessarily the same. Meanwhile Caterina Fake, now a Yahoo insider, posts about her irritation with bloggers who, she says, took the Decker quote out of context... accusing them of "piling on." I didn't read what others were saying, personally, but I can see where people might've read "abandonment of search" into the quote... but that's clearly not what Susan Decker was saying.

Its Q4 earnings report describes what Yahoo's up to:

First, we are expanding our content match services through the Yahoo Publishers Network to take advantage of the growing number of small publishers on the web. We plan to add new features to beta over the coming quarters including search and enhanced ad targeting. We believe the service will ultimately position Yahoo as one of the preferred advertising partners for small and medium-sized publishers.

Second, we are focused on improving RPS to better matching in relevance algorithms. While our matching initiatives will largely benefit coverage, we�re also focused on improving tools to drive higher relevance and click through.

And third, we are increasing the number of easy-to-use tools for advertisers and publishers, so they can buy more keywords, touch more creative and add more listings faster.

Meanwhile, to Caterina's point about bloggers and media getting it wrong, I think the bloggers were following media on this one (headline: "Yahoo! gives up quest for search dominance"), and her real beef should be with Bloomberg, and not with bloggers like Steve Rubel.

Yahoo! doesn't "think it's reasonable to assume we're going to gain a lot of share from Google," according to CFO Susan Decker. "It's not our goal to be No. 1 in Internet search. We would be very happy to maintain our market share." Indeed... this sounds realistic, and I have to admit I haven't even been thinking of Yahoo as a search company. I consider it more of a media aggregator. If Yahoo's smart, it'll move to the intersection of media and interactivity - more community-based. For instance, if I was Yahoo, I'd be trying to buy Salon and its online communities, Table Talk and the WELL. [Link]

Meanwhile Yahoo! says it's not giving up on search... just search dominance. I guess you could call that a capitulation.

What I like about this piece by Scott Canon at KansasCity.Com is that he addresses the the real complexity of "fixing" the Internet.

�There�s no silver bullet,� said Tom Leighton, the chief scientist and co-founder of Akamai Technologies, which makes sure its clients� Web pages remain available online even when they come under organized attack. He is also a member of the President�s Information Technology Advisory Committee. �We have to change as we go. The problems aren�t going to go away overnight.�

Neither, say some, will the system crash in an instant. �Look at the history of the planet. The sky falls very rarely,� said Bruce Schneier, a cryptographer and the founder of Counterpane Internet Security Inc. �We adapt. It�s not fun. It�s expensive. It�s pretty bad out there now. But it�s not critically bad out there.

�Nobody,� he said, �is going back to pen and paper.�

In a comewhat related story, the Washington Post published a good overview of the net neutrality question and the attempt by carriers to take some of the profits that companies like Google and Yahoo are making by making them pay more to push high-bandwidth content over their networks. See my earlier post on "the broadband dance."

Darpa's wanting a prototype of a monster blimp for hauling soldiers and equipment. The blimp, called Walrus, a

"tri-phibian" (air, land, sea) zeppelin with a range of 6,000 nautical miles, ready to go aloft by 2008. "The program will not repackage 1930s technology or upscale the more limited commercial dirigibles of today," Darpa promised in its proposal. The Walrus will rely on new technologies, like static ion propulsion, says Preston Carter, the program manager.

Robocop!
Clever Koreans expect to have a robot-assisted police force and army in five years. They're using their robust network capabilities to mitigate expenses. [Link]

Smart robots need three basic functions of sensing, processing and action. Thus far, robotics researchers have tried to cram the three into a single dummy, causing expenses to soar.

Instead, the planned robots will be receiving most sensing and processing capabilities via a Web connection. Only the ability of movement will be located in the robot.

Failing incumbent telcos have a new model in mind to boost their profits: charge certain kinds of broadband services providers more for moving their content across the telco's network. [Link article at MarketWatch] Mark Cuban agrees, saying that multiple tiers of service are necessary to ensure quality of service, sorta like toll roads and HOV lanes. Randall Stross had a different opinion, in the New York Times. That's the piece you should read and think about. Stross notes that both Bell South and Verizon are pushing the concept of a broadband fast lane, and he explains why it's a bogus request.

Woe to us all if the Internet's content is limited by the companies who also handle the plumbing. "The Future of Ideas," by Lawrence Lessig (Random House, 2001), shows how innovation and creativity associated with the Internet are the byproducts of its openness, its role as a commons that is accessible, by design, to all. Professor Lessig, who teaches law at Stanford, said last week that even now, broadband carriers have failed to demonstrate their commitment to the principle of network neutrality. "They've fought it at each stage," he said, "and they have never embraced the principle."

An illustration of his point popped up the same day. In an interview, William L. Smith, the chief technology officer at BellSouth, described to me his company's trial offering in West Palm Beach, Fla., last year of a speedy download service for Movielink content. When asked whether BellSouth would offer its special service on an exclusive basis to a particular content site and agree to exclude the sponsor's rivals, he did not hesitate in treating the question as a matter of simply settling on the right price. The N.F.L. and Nascar strike exclusive distribution deals, he said. Why not network carriers?

The largest Internet companies are the ones that could easily afford whatever terms the carriers demand for exclusive deals that would lock out smaller rivals and new entrants. But they have not done special deals with the carriers and instead have joined together to try to persuade Congress to protect the principle of network neutrality and prevent the Bells from striking exclusive deals with anyone. Last November, Amazon, eBay, Microsoft and Google, among others, formally registered their concern with a House committee that is revising the basic telecommunications law; they noted that a draft version of the bill failed to make network neutrality a matter of policy without exception. Whether the committee has responded positively to the suggestions from the Internet players should be known soon.

So we don't have network neutrality by accident, but by design, and attempts to balkanize levels of service threatens to stifle innovation while linking the telcos' pockets and rewarding their inefficiency (Stross notes that other countries, like Japan and Sweden, have much faster broadband service as a matter of course).

I should note that the incumbent telcos are not necessarily bad guys in all this; they're doing what they think they have to do to survive and serve their interests, as any business would do. The problem is that they've evolved from the monopoly culture of the old phone company, which included a believe that "what's best for Ma Bell is best for the country." The telcos have never got comfortable with competition in open markets - they prefer to use legislative power to create and protect profitability. They're not bad people, but their culture, if I've read it correctly, is both archaic and counterproductive.

There's a European concept of "broadcaster's right" that suggests TV and radio stations can control the dissemination of their broadcasts. Now the U.S. delegation to the World International Property Organization wants to extend this control to the web, and as Andy Oram says, "this is a new threat to the public domain."

What would a webcaster's right mean? It would mean you couldn't retransmit content put up by someone else on the Web without permission. The proposal tries to indicate that the restriction covers only images and sound, but it's not clear that a line can be drawn between such content and other things, including text. At any rate, the idea of extending the broadcaster's right to the Web is bizarre and fundamentally out of sync with how the Web works. The whole basis of the Web is making links; people don't normally copy and retransmit material.

I take it back. Copying and retransmission happens on the Web all the time. It's call caching, and it's crucial to the efficient operation of the Web. Even if the webcasting treaty leaves a loophole to allow caching, the treaty may hamper another promising way of reducing the load on servers: chained downloads that piggyback on intermediate nodes, the basis for useful protocols such as BitTorrent.

The U.S. delegation is pushing for this strange new right under the catch-all rubric of "harmonizing" the Web with broadcasting, and, of course, that shibboleth of regulators, "technological neutrality." But because equating Web distribution with broadcasting is absurd on the face of it, one has to wonder what is really on the minds of the large portals who put so much energy into forcing this radical change on the public....

[Link]

We're at a point in the web's evolution where adoption is high and growing, and the daily accumulation of potentially useful data is daunting, as is the greater accumulation of noise. If we had tools for finding, indexing, and analyzing for useful research, that might lead us faster to connections and synergies that facilitate knowledge and innovation. Realizing this, the UK has created a National Centre for Text Mining "the world's first centre devoted to developing tools that can systematically analyse multiple research papers, abstracts and other documents, and then swiftly determine what they contain," using AI to look for entities and concepts. [Link]

Once again, I'm leading a State of the World discussion with Bruce Sterling on the WELL. Bruce has just finished a year-long gig as Visionary in Residence at Art Center College of Design, and is in Austin for the holidays before setting out for Belgrade and other parts of the world.

India and China are tremendous stories. Even big pieces of Eastern Europe are getting onto the EU carousel. America's being run by corrupt Lysenkoist morons, but, debilitating as that may be for us Yankees, it also means that the remaining 94 percent of the planet has some chance at the limelight. Hey, South Korea could have been full of cloning superstars -- if they could just get over their endemic Asian urge to cook the books.

The USA right now is the buried shadow of the Confederate States of America. You can watch GONE WITH THE WIND, and it's the secret textbook of the Bush Administration. The South lost that war for a reason. The South didn't have it in them to be a major power, because they were bold, gallant, devout, crooked, dumb and full of unexamined anxieties.

The thing is, though: when a culture is "gone with the wind," it's never utterly and entirely gone. You can't make things go away by distributing them into the wind. It's just... up in the atmosphere. The emissions of the past form a smog. A breathable compost. You can't throw the past away and start over with a Year Zero. There is no "away." Tomorrow is this place, at a different time.
WFMU's Greed Watch
Telcos are trying to figure out how to charge companies like Google and Vonage for competing successfuly and taking away their business. They're talking about a "two tier" Internet and an end to net neutrality - the point being that the Internet and its technologies are becoming so pervasive and effective that they're killing the telcos. In the USA, of course, we should have no right to compete so effectively that we kill business models that have been flowing huge profits into various money bins, hence the various moves by telcos and others to preserve their turf via protectionist legislation. [Link]
Google's not perfect after all
Evidently Google is quietly ignoring the failure of it POP feature, as reported by Steven Johnson, who says the problem's existed since mid-December and "here are hundreds of posts about it in the Google forums." Felix Salmon posts a comment saying he doesn't know what he can do when he reaches the Gmail limit, other than start a new email account. I haven't tried the POP feature, and I don't have critical mail going to Google, but I point some of my spam-ridden and list-intensive email accounts there and review for the occasional jewels. I've only used 5% of capacity so far, but I make occasional runs where I delete old mail. Might be interesting to watch the piles accumulate and see how searchable they are and how much spam's in the mix.
Spamato
UPDATE: Sad news: I had to uninstall Spamato; it was interfering with Thunderbird's ability to send mail. It was promising, but not quite ready for heavy-user prime time.

In response to my rant about spam, online friend and sysadmin wiz Bryan Venable sent me a few potential solutions, the first of which was a new GPL spam filter sysetem called Spamato, which plugs into several different email clients, including Thunderbird. It's beta, but works pretty well, certainly better than Thunderbird's own system. Spamato lets you choose any or all of several methods to filter spam, and sends all the bad stuff into a spamato mailbox where you can check for false positives. There's some overhead - you have to have Java installed, and you have to specify the location of your Java_Home (which sounds geeky, but clear instructions are immindently googlable). You have to enable for each install, and that takes a little time, and while it's happening you can't do much else. It also comes with annoying sounds turned on by default; you'll want to turn that off quickly. When I first turned it off, I missed the 'save' button for the sound configuration and thought it wasn't working - look carefully, it's at the bottom of the display.

Anyway, fingers crossed - I hope this is a winner.
Year-end #1: Web 2.0
The year-end toptens and summary blusters are popping up, should I add to the noise? It's tempting to make a top ten list ('cause they're fun and they force you to pay attention to all the media that's piled up over the year... though I suppose it's odd for a web consultant to create a list of his top ten albums or films or books. The Austin Chronicle used to ask me to contribute top ten lists of technology stories for the year – since this year's been pretty rich where emerging technologies are concerned, I could do that again here.

One important tech story in 2005 lives somewhere behind the buzzword "Web 2.0," a label that suggests we've taken web development to the next level, though for some it means that we're looking for a way to bring the investors back to the table, and that aspect of the story is so perilous that a backlash has developed among those who'd just as soon keep the secret ("Investors - move on, nothing to see here...") After all, money changes everything, and the code phrase for web+money in the 90s was irrational exuberance. The origins of Web 2.0, though, are in the months following the implosion of the Internet bubble. Web innovators and content developers wanted to keep doing what they'd been doing, and since there was no money in it, they reverted to the gift-economy thinking of earlier years in cyberspace, and developed technologies – and approaches to technology – that fed into Web 2.0. Part of the impetus for Web 2.0 was Tim Berners-Lee's concept of a semantic web, which is "an extension of the current web in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation."

Dale Dougherty and Tim O'Reilly created the authoritative overview of Web 2.0, including several more or less related developments that have reached critical mass over the last year or so – but aren't new; e.g. "software as a service" has been around for a while as the "application service provider" (ASP) model, and what's new about the "long tail" is that it's acknowledged (via Chris Anderson's
article in Wired, and having been acknowledged and explained, it's better understood by more people.

The problem with "Web 2.0" is that the term doesn't mean anything specific, and if you haven't read the O'Reilly piece, the reference would be meaningless in the same way that other too-vague, too-general buzzwords are meaningless. "Social software" is another example. I thought it was a good label when I first heard it, better than "virtual community" or "online social networks." However in the minds of many the term was not inclusive of earlier "social" technologies, like forums, chats, and email lists. "Social software" was generally taken as a label for blogs, wikis, social network platforms (like Friendster/Orkut) and syndication (RSS and Atom).

Terms like "Web 2.0" and "social software" may be useful on some (very high) level, but when you're getting down to the nitty gritty of consulting and development, they're useless. You have to be very specific about goals and objectives, and the kinds of functionality that will be most effective in meeting them.

If I was setting out to write a top ten list, I didn't get past the first item, but that's okay. I have three days to come up with more stuff. *8^)
Thunderbird and Spam
Eudora was my email client for years, then Netscape Communicator, before I fell into a couple of corporate jobs that forced me to use Outlook. I was looking for a way out until Outlook 2003 came along; it was very good, so I lived with various issues (like storage in the proprietary pst format) until Thunderbird came along as a well-regarded Open Source alternative. I stalled on making the transition, but Outlook became slow and crashy, and eventually cratered, evidently due to a corrupt pst file. I took the opportunity to make the move, and I've been pretty satisfied with Thunderbird since then, though it's not as robust as Outlook. Give it time.

One thing that irritates me, though, is Thunderbird's handling of spam. The junk mail controls are limited (basically an on/off switch), and though the junk mail filters are clearly catching a large percentage of the umpty hundreds of spams that fall into my mail bucket every day, there's a bunch more that the filters miss. I spend way too much time "training" by marking mails as junk, yet I seem to get the same kinds of spam over and over. I almost never see false positives, which is good, but I'm not clear why the filtering is not more successful, and I can't find much by way of documentation, just as there's no real tweaking of the junk mail controls. I've looked for additional spam-blocking products, but what I find are products created specifically to work with Outlook.

I shouldn't complain, since so much of my spam is filtered successfully, but since junk mail handling is supposed to be a key feature of Thunderbird, I'd love for it to be more useful.
SiteAdvisor
David Weinberger blogs about SiteAdvisor, a software company that indexes web-based security threats of various kinds, including spyware, viruses, phishing, etc. Sounds very cool from David's description. [Link]
SA has set up a slew of machines that crawl the Web, download whatever software they can find, and sign up for every email offer. They then run the downloaded software on virtual machines and note exactly what gets installed and how the registry is altered. They make up a unique email address for each site and note how many messages they get as a result. They also analyze the links to see if sites are part of nasty affiliate networks.

They then make all that information public via a Creative Commons license. You can go to the SA site and see exactly what will happen if you download software from an unknown Web site.
Galactic Southwest

Virgin Galactic is building its spaceport in New Mexico, not far from Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin Spaceport, which will be near Van Horn, Texas. It ain't science fiction anymore... and I suspect the arid desert where I grew up will be crawling with space entrepreneurs in a few more years. I used to have a job painting oil rigs, maybe I can go back and paint spaceships.
Another year for Austin Wireless
Austin Wireless Board Meeting was tonight; Rich MacKinnon and I are on board for another term. We acknowledged that some of the novelty has worn off with wireless; in Austin we've been operating hot spots long enough that the people who use 'em have come to take 'em for granted (until they visit other cities that are not as unwired). Over the last year the organization put other initiatives aside as we worked with the Save Muni Wireless coalition to educate the public about legislation that would prohibit municipal networks in Texas. Following that, some were involved in projects related to the evacuation of New Orleans and technical infrastructure to connect evacuees who'd been separated. Over the next year we'll have meetings, events, and projects, probably working more with other organizations like IC², Austin Wireless Alliance, Austin Technology Incubator, and EFF-Austin. Maybe it's time to build a mesh network?
EmailList-Managers FAQ
Another useful link from Nancy: this is a web site for the growing army of people who start and manage email list. Email's is the Internet's killer app, and it's increasingly complex and demanding. This site also has a FAQ for list members, incidentally, as well as a General Tips and Info FAQ. The FAQs are actually blogs that allow comments. [Link]
Entrepreneurs in space
This could be a great little business on the side... NASA's looking for private companies to fly cargo and crew to the international space station... 2001 is a little late, but it's coming! Jeff Bezos clearly saw this coming. [Link]
Visitors from CapeTown

Tony Carr, David Horwitz, and Stephen Marquard from the University of Cape Town's Centre for Educational Technology were in Austin for a conference, and dropped by Polycot for a visit with Honoria Starbuck and I today. They were in town for the Fourth Sakai Conference, so we talked about the Sakai Project, a Java framework for educational technologies. We also talked quite a bit about the effective use of blogs and wikis in educational environments. The meeting was a blast, We're looking forward to their online conference, Emerge 2006, next July.
Printing Organs

In a cool bit of convergent biotech, a project at the University of Missouri is experimenting with a method for "printing" organs based on a study of multicellular self-assembly. "The knowledge gained from these studies will serve as biological validation for new methods for building three-dimensional living structures of specific geometries....In the course of this project we anticipate that we will discover new principles of multicellular self-organization (morphogenesis, organogenesis), which in turn will enable us to develop functional biological structures for basic science purposes (e.g., in vitro studies of mechanisms of development and tumor formation), and applications such as targeted drug testing and delivery, and organ (module) replacement." According to Wired News, "they've made tubes similar to human blood vessels and sheets of heart muscle cells, printed in three dimensions on a special printer."
Here's how it works: A customized milling machine prints a small sheet of bio-paper. This "paper" is a variable gel composed of modified gelatin and hyaluronan, a sugar-rich material. Bio-ink blots -- each a little ball of cellular material a few hundred microns in diameter -- are then printed onto the paper. The process is repeated as many times as needed, the sheets stacked on top of each other.

Once the stack is the right size -- maybe two centimeters' worth of sheets, each containing a ring of blots, for a tube resembling a blood vessel -- printing stops. The stack is incubated in a bioreactor, where cells fuse with their neighbors in all directions. The bio-paper works as a scaffold to support and nurture cells, and should be eaten away by them or naturally degrade, researchers said.
"Intimate visual co-presence"
Via SmartMobs: Howard Rheingold posts a pointer to Mizuko Ito's position paper on "intimate visual co-presence," where couples leverage the convergence of online photo sharing services and camera phones. [Link]
Just as text messaging created new kinds of modalities for co-presence and communication, we can expect that pervasive photo sharing will lead to a new set of social practices that differ from what we have seen in the PC Internet space and the mobile texting space. I suggest that intimate visual co-presence may be one of these new social modalities.

Just as text messaging created new kinds of modalities for co-presence and communication, we can expect that pervasive photo sharing will lead to a new set of social practices that differ from what we have seen in the PC Internet space and the mobile texting space. I suggest that intimate visual co-presence may be one of these new social modalities.
Open Source House
Doc is building a house, and he says his fantasy is "to make it as Linux-y as possible." He's looking for some last-minute home audio/video/networking advice. (Hey, Doc, hope you're building a sustainable OS house! [Link]
Rules for Web Startups
Evan Williams of Odeo, Inc. (and cofounder of Blogger, which is now part of Google) posts a good, commonsense set of Ten Rules for Web Startups, many of which are very close to the counsel Polycot gives in consultation with our clients, especially the user-centric approach and agile development. (Via an email to BootStrap Austin from Brett Hurt of BazaarVoice).
Map mashups
CNet has an article, "Mapping a revolution with 'mashups' ", that explores various hacks using the Google Maps API with other data sources. "Mashup" is a key convergence technology "...first used in pop music when artists and DJs began playing two songs simultaneously. In technology, it refers to a Web site or application that combines content from multiple sources but appears seamless upon use." One item that I would have included: Google's request to the creators of the Google Maps Wallpaper Generator that they take their tool offline. According to a comment at Google Maps Mania, "it's not that Google is being mean, it's that their license from DigitalGlobe doesn't allow that sort of activity, which could potentially interfere with DG's capability to sell data in to the commercial marketplace." It would good to know just what kind of hacks are not permitted.
"Computer R&D Rocks On" (Googles on?)

Computer R&D is happening like never before, according to EETimes Online. The article "Computer R&D rocks on" assumes that most folks thought hardware development was done (though I can't say that I know anybody who thinks so), but we're just getting into digital convergence, and the new web paradigms labelled "Web 2.0" are creating new tools, new directions, and new demands. The article mentions Google's distributed clusters... I've been thinking of Google as a vertical layer along side the stack of Internet or OSI layers, but maybe it's more like the Sherwin Williams logo - "Cover the Earth."
Wi-Fi everywhere, Nintendo everywhere
The connection between Wi-Fi and gaming is in transition from visionary to obvious as Nintendo announces its Wi-Fi connection plans for Europe: more than 7500 hotspots in the UK as of November 25, and 15,000 hotspots throughout Europe as the global Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection service is launched. (Via Dave Farber's "Interesting People" list.) [Link]
Senate spyware bill
A Senate committee has passed a spyware bill - passed it out of committee, that is. The House already passed two spyware bills, but this is the first from the senate. Hopefully this will get traction and lead to actual legislation soon. And hopefully it'll have real teeth. (I haven't read the bill or summary info, but infoware says the bill "would prohibit hackers from remotely taking over a computer and prohibit programs that hijack Web browsers. The bill would protect antispyware software vendors from being sued by companies whose software they block." [Link]
Microsoft discovers an elephant in its living room
Yikes! Bill Gates has written one of his memos, this time acknowledging that web services (aka "Web 2.0") are a big deal. I thought we all agreed not to tell him?[Link]
As with previous memos, Microsoft is widely perceived to be late to the party. Mr Gates and Mr Ozzie have announced plans for Windows Live and Office Live, two products intended to become just the sort of free internet services that Web 2.0 is supposedly all about. But both are, in fact, little more than new names for Microsoft's existing offerings, and look feeble in comparison with services offered by its rivals.

This prompted yet another memo from Marc Benioff, the marketing-savvy boss of Salesforce.com, a leading proponent of the “software as a service” model. If Microsoft were serious about Web 2.0 and Microsoft Live, he suggested helpfully in an “internal” memo sent to the press, it should rename its traditional software “Microsoft Dead”. Web 2.0, he said, was not about old companies constrained by their legacy products but new firms such as, naturally, Salesforce.com, Writely, Numsum, Zimbra and Goffice. For his part, Zach Nelson of NetSuite, another software-as-a-service company, says he decided against writing a memo. Writing memos is cheap, he says, whereas “writing software is a whole lot harder”.
"Building a Better Boom"
I found myself sending this around to several people and lists... in this NY Times Op Ed, John Battelle nails the business implication of "Web 2.0." [Link]
The Web has since become a platform, and building new businesses on that platform is no longer a multimillion-dollar proposition. Most new Web businesses nowadays are started with less than half a million dollars, and it's rare to find one that wants to use money from an initial public offering to get to profitability.

The reason? Start-ups are leveraging nearly a decade's worth of work on technologies that are now not only proven, but also free, or very nearly so. Open-source software can now do nearly everything that Oracle, I.B.M. and Microsoft specialized in back in the 90's. And the cost of computing and bandwidth? You can now lease a platform that can handle millions of customers for less than $500 a month. In the 90's, such a platform would have run tens of thousands of dollars or more a month.
Expression Under Repression
Ethan Zuckerman and Rebecca MacKinnon set up an 'Expression under Repression' panel at the World Summit on the Information Society in Tunisia, and their Tunisian hosts tried to shut the discussion down... but they ignored the cancellation and held the session anyway, to an SRO crowd. [Link]
Rebecca rejects as absurd the idea that expression under repression isn�t relevant to ICT and development, as had been suggested by Tunisian authorities in reacting to our panel. She points to the spread of SARS in China as an example of the ill consequences of blocking communications between citizens. The blocking of sites that report on anti-corruption efforts probably costs real money, as politicans continue putting money in their pockets at the expense of the wider populus. But she points out that filtering occurs in the United States as well, through things like filters in libraries that prevent teenagers from finding out about reproductive health.
U.S. hangs onto Internet management role
Some members of the UN wanted to end US dominance of Internet management, but the Bush administration made a compromise, an agreement to set up an "Internet Governance Forum" for global discussion of various Internet issues. [Link]
What the agreement does not do is require the United States to relinquish its unique influence over the Internet's operations. The statement takes "no action regarding existing institutions," David Gross, the ambassador leading the U.S. delegation, said Wednesday. "It created no new international organizations."
Vint Cerf on Net Neutrality
Vint Cerf reminds Congress that the Internet's end-to-end architecture is a key, or THE key, to its greatness as a communications environment. If they don't pay attention, we're all probably screwed. [Link]
The remarkable social impact and economic success of the Internet is in many ways directly attributable to the architectural characteristics that were part of its design. The Internet was designed with no gatekeepers over new content or services. The Internet is based on a layered, end-to-end model that allows people at each level of the network to innovate free of any central control. By placing intelligence at the edges rather than control in the middle of the network, the Internet has created a platform for innovation. This has led to an explosion of offerings � from VOIP to 802.11x wi-fi to blogging � that might never have evolved had central control of the network been required by design.

My fear is that, as written, this bill would do great damage to the Internet as we know it. Enshrining a rule that broadly permits network operators to discriminate in favor of certain kinds of services and to potentially interfere with others would place broadband operators in control of online activity. Allowing broadband providers to segment their IP offerings and reserve huge amounts of bandwidth for their own services will not give consumers the broadband Internet our country and economy need. Many people will have little or no choice among broadband operators for the foreseeable future, implying that such operators will have the power to exercise a great deal of control over any applications placed on the network.

As we move to a broadband environment and eliminate century-old non- discrimination requirements, a lightweight but enforceable neutrality rule is needed to ensure that the Internet continues to thrive. Telephone companies cannot tell consumers who they can call; network operators should not dictate what people can do online.

I am confident that we can build a broadband system that allows users to decide what websites they want to see and what applications they want to use � and that also guarantees high quality service and network security. That network model has and can continue to provide economic benefits to innovators and consumers -- and to the broadband operators who will reap the rewards for providing access to such a valued network.
"Wireless Fidelity"
While researching a spread on Wi-Fi for the WorldChanging book recently, I saw instances where Wi-Fi was referred to as an abbreviated form of "wireless fidelity," which I thought was pretty weird. Fidelity to what? "Hi-Fi" meant "high fidelity," a 50s term for better sound reproduction on records... I always figured Wi-Fi was a play on that abbreviation, a pun, not meant to convey a similar literal meaning. Cory Doctorow writes about this in boing boing... [Link]

Last week, I wrote in passing about how WiFi doesn't "stand for" wireless fidelity. It's a pun on "Hi-Fi" and "wireless fidelity" doesn't mean anything. Innumerable correspondants wrote in to say that the Wi-Fi Alliance said different. I disagreed -- and still argue that a litmus test for whether a given article on WiFi is likely to be ill-informed is whether it takes pains to utter the nonsense, non-instructive phrase, "WiFi (short for 'wireless fidelity')"...
Kind of a Penguin Day

Spent today at Urban 15 in San Antonio, at an Open Source workshop based on Aspiration's Penguin Day events. Despite Aspiration co-director Allen Gunn's presence and leadership, we saw this as more of a precursor to a larger regional Penguin Day that we'll put together sometime after the first of the year, probably in February. Today's event wasn't far off the mark, though. We started with general explanations of Open Source for the diverse group that showed up, the discussed actual Open Source implementations such as the use of Webmin to manage the sites hosted by the Metropolitan Austin Information Network, the San Antonio Independent School District's use of Open Source content management systems to support school web sites, the Drupal-based Write On Austin! web site, and the Urban 15 project Nos Unimos, which hosts family photos from San Antonio's historic West Side. In breakout sessions we talked about content management systems, licensing, and Open Source history. We also had a speed-geeking session (where I demo'd WordPress via the "You're It!" blog). Check out a few photos.
WiFi in rural Oregon
An AP article (linked here from Wired News) notes Fred Ziari's rural wifi project in Oregon, saying that he drew none of the resistance we've been seeing to municipal wifi projects. This piece suggests that's because it's a rural project where phone companies see little profit potential. This isn't exactly a correct interpretation, though: the big telcos have opposed urban wifi projects, not because they're urban, but because they're operated by municipal governments, which they see as unfair competition. In Texas, the telcos have seemed just as interested in protecting whatever potential there might be for them to offer rural broadband services in the future.

What's great about Ziari's project is that he's doing it - he's figured out how to blanket a large rural area, which can be difficult, and he's succeeding partly because he was smart enough to contract with cities and counties to provide funds, and this has worked because he's pitched the various innovative ways they can benefit from pervasive broadband.
"Internet service is only a small part of it. The same wireless system is used for surveillance, for intelligent traffic system, for intelligent transportation, for telemedicine and for distance education," said Ziari, who immigrated to the United States from the tiny Iranian town of Shahi on the Caspian Sea.
This may be the first large project to combine WiMax with WiFi to create a mesh network. If it's a sustainable success, expect to see a lot more of these.
gada.be
Chris Pirillo's behind a very interesting new metasearch engine, gada.be. Sez Chris,
It was borne out of several frustrations. If you've ever tried to visit a Web site over a mobile device, you know it's a pain in the knuckle. The domain had to be simple to key-in from anywhere. gada.be is 4232.2233 on most cell phones and/or PSP. Normally, when you want to find something online, you have to choose a Web site (wait for the page to load) enter the query (wait for the second page to load) then see results from that provider. With "gada.be," you insert the query *AS* the subdomain!
http://corpse-bride.gada.be/http://corpse.bride.gada.be/
Those are two different URLs, each with a different set of results. A dot between two keywords implies a quoted statement, whereas a dash implies the AND operator. Note, too, that you can easily change categories by adding the designated category slug to the end of the entire URL. Too geeky for you? Then you're thinking too hard about it.
PlaNetwork Austin: Katrina Response
Last night I spoke at a PlaNetwork event at City Hall in Austin, which was about the response to Katrina. First speaker was Austin's CIO, Pete Collins, talking about Austin's IT Incident Preparedness Group. Pete said they essentially had to build a cityw ithin a city within 20 hours when they set up the local evacuee center. Some of the lessons learned:
They needed a boundariless prequalified IT pool representing key skill sets.
In an emergency response situation, it's important to get to operational mode as quickly as possible.
There's more pure labor than you would expect in moving and setting up PCs.
Focus on communication - very helpful to have phones so that people can let others know where they are, that they're okay.
We need to be better prepared overall or "we might not be able to do this again, especially in a situation that's far worse.
There was a sense that the Red Cross was ill-prepared for Katrina; someone who'd been involved in the response noted that RC focused more readily and effectively on raising funds than on actual relief efforts.

Gary Chapman showed the Austin Helping New Orleans web site he'd set up with help from volunteers. The site, based on pMachine's Expression Engine. His focus was on aggregating information for people who were confused about what was going on and how they could help. Gary said there had also been work on an online volunteer database for Austin, not finished in time for the Katrina effort, but it'll be there in the future.

I talked about my work with the Katrina PeopleFinder Project and its sister project, ShelterFinder. Check out this pdf from my presentation. I've blogged about PeopleFinder here, at Smart Mobs, and at WorldChanging.
"Robust yet fragile" Internet
The Internet is "fairly resilient to attacks," according to a study that uses describes the net as "robust yet fragile." According to TRN News Roundup,
The study showed that the Internet's network of routers, which controls the flow of data between computers connected to the Internet, is different than the scale-free structure of Web sites and the connections between them. While scale-free networks have a few highly-connected sites, or hubs, in the center and many peripheral sites with far fewer connections, the physical router network that underpins the Internet has highly connected hubs at its periphery and less well-connected central hubs, making it resistant to targeted attacks.
Disaster relief via database
The Red Cross has deployed its Family News Network for the South Asian Quake region. Similar to the PeopleFinder project set up following Hurricane Katrina, though we don't think the Red Cross has adopted an open format like PFIF (the PeopleFinder Interchange Format). Global Voices has a summary of online community responses to the quake, and a longer summary of the generally ignored problem of flooding caused by Hurricane Stan in Central America. ("Current events are making me tense," as Larry Monroe usedta say.)

It's gotta be a real nightmare to lose people, and have no way of knowing whether they're alive, injured, or dead. These database projects for tracking people down need more development, and we need ways to provide access on or close to the scene so that searches will yield meaningful results. And it has to be more than a volunteer effort. The Red Cross is probably the right organization to be putting the databases together, but distribution of a common format that many can use to gather data that feeds into the central authoritative search respository is crucial, and I don't think the Red Cross has that as one of their priorities. I know there are PeopleFinder volunteers still mindful of that goal.

We're going to talk about the high tech Katrina relief efforts at Austin's first PlaNetwork meeting this week, October 13th, at City Hall. Gary Chapman and I will be talking about efforts we were involved with. It's an evening meeting; I'll post details here asap.
Yahoo blog search
Yahoo launched its own blog search... actually revamped its news search to include material from blogs. You can search news and blogs, or news only, but not blogs only. However blog results are displayed separately in a column on the right side of the results page. So far the aforementioned results are underwhelming, and Google's blog search isn't much better. Technorati's stilll got the best handle on blog searches, maybe it should add a news search? (Just kidding.) [Link]
Internet power grab
There's a huge fuss over the idea that the United Nations (or some other international group) should assume responsibility for "Internet governance." The Internet is decentralized and the concept of "governance" doesn't quite seem applicable, but we're talking about governance of a fundamental part of the Internet's structure, the assignment of domain names and numbers, currently managed by The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN. If you look at ICANN's site, you get a sense of the complexity of governance. Declan McCullagh has a very good piece about the proposed "power grab" and the implications of a possible balkanization of the Internet:
This may seem like a complicated political muddle that only Talleyrand could love, but this process is important. If it spirals out of control, we could end up with a Balkanized Internet in which the U.S. attempts to retain control of its root servers and a large portion of the world veers in an incompatible direction.

This would amount to a nuclear option in which a new top-level domain would not be visible in the U.S. and its client states--but would be used in many other nations. The downside, of course, comes when two computers find different Web sites at the same address.
He goes on explain a key concern about governance via the UN:
The autocratic, bellicose Bush administration is no paragon of civil liberties virtue, but letting delegates from Cuba, Iran and Tunisia decide on the principles for an open and democratic Internet would be an even worse alternative.
Google Office?
Looks like Google and Sun have been working together on a "Google Office," based on Sun's StarOffice, which is a slightly better version of the Open Source office suite, OpenOffice. The word is that we'll hear something about this today. Google and 37Signals are definitely making this boy's life easier.

Update: Link to CNet article
Much ado about net.governance
Should the United States control the Internet? Or the United Nations? Fact is, the Internet has no real "control" other than the system for assigning domain numbers and names, so politicos focus on that aspect as "Internet governance" and argue at length about it. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) . It is more specifically responsible for "Internet Protocol (IP) address space allocation, protocol identifier assignment, generic (gTLD) and country code (ccTLD) Top-Level Domain name system management, and root server system management functions." There's political contention now over U.S. control via supervision of the Internet addressing system, and some want that to be a cooperative international endeavor. Jeanette Hoffman of the Internet Governance Caucus has a good point about the potential for the UN to assume reponsibility: "The UN is not a good body to run the Internet," she says. "We don't want nondemocratic countries to have influence over a system that is so important to the freedom of expression." From the International Herald Tribune:
Groups representing Web surfers at the talks complained that the dispute between the United States and the rest of the world over administration is overshadowing more important issues, such as cleaning up spam from e-mail systems and combating cyber crime and identity theft, areas where they say governments should play a more active role.

"I think the debate here is not all that relevant to people that use the Internet," said Lynne St. Amour, chief executive of the Internet Society, a nonprofit organization based in Reston, Virginia. "The row is largely because of the geopolitical situation."

While nations feud over who should authorize the use of domain names, experts say the real power is likely to remain with the one billion users of a system that unifies almost a quarter million networks and is largely democratic in the way it operates.
Computers are idiots
Earlier tonight I saw a presentation on 4th generation computing by Jim Brazell. Jim mentioned how we're at a point of "renewing our contract" with machines, revising the line between machine-driven decisions and human decisions. Afterward Jen Hamre and I discussed our skepticism about computers making critical decisions; I've just seen that Jamais posted a thank-you to Stanislov Petrov, whose human override of a computer's erroneous suggestion that the U.S. had launched a missle attack on the then-Soviet Union saved the U.S. from nuclear annihilation.
It makes grisly sense
Corpses in the Katrina zone are being chipped with RFID tags to expedite identification.
“These bodies are in an advanced stage of decomposition,” said John Procter, VeriChip’s director of communications. “Many of them have no identification marks, no wallets, no IDs. In some cases a toe tag is not even viable.”
[Link] (via Bruce)
Permission to kill the Internet
Jennifer Granick's started a column at Wired News with a piece about the many challenges to the concept of a free and open Internet, focusing on the Katrina PeopleFinder Project and Katrinalist.net as "tangible evidence of the beauty and power of internet technology in the hands of well-meaning citizens," which she says is "also an endangered species."
...many ISPs and some prosecutors are arguing that it's a crime to use unsecured wireless access points without the explicit permission of the owner. Antispam crusaders advocate blocking any e-mails that haven't been whitelisted first. Airlines like American and auction sites like eBay -- which want customers to visit their websites, view their ads and "join the community" -- have won court injunctions against companies that collect price information on plane fares or auctions to help consumers comparison shop.

Under ancient legal theories like "trespass to chattels" and ill-advised modern laws like the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and state computer crime statutes, courts are holding that if you don't have authorization, you can't access computers

And if you can't access computers, you can't collect data about airfares, auctions or evacuees.
Data, data, everywhere....
Data entry for the PeopleFinder project was suspended temporarily tonight to try to get a better, more understandable data entry interface. Because the project is so distributed people are having to step up and make decisions and try not to reinvent the wheel. You can search all records here, though I've suggested we need a more focused search that is name only in addition to the broader search of all data. Meanwhile Rebecca posted an appreciation of the volunteers and their accomplishment. Jon Garfunkel says the Red Cross database is better; Ethan and I say that's an apples and oranges comparison. My comment was held as spam; I finally got it to post by removing my url. Couldn't figure that one out at the end of a long day....

Data entry should be back tonight at some point, but I'll be sleeping and trying not to dream about all this.
Communications technology for New Orleans
Florida's Freedom4Wireless is sending a team to build ad hoc wireless networks in New Orleans so that emergency workers can use voice over IP to communicate. MIT Technology Review reports this development, and the possibility that WiMax and mesh networking might be used to build emergency data networks.
Motorola put its mesh networking technology into place in Florida last year after Hurricane Charley. It was used to monitor staging areas that were vulnerable to looting. Rather than positioning a dozen police cruisers around a parking lot filled with food and water, public safety officials positioned mesh-network-connected video cameras around the lot. The cameras fed a video stream to a police crew in a single cruiser, thereby freeing up other officers for more pressing concerns.
Internet life cycle Henry Blodget op-eds a good business-perspective piece about the Internet's life cycle at the New York Times. I would note that the biz perspective has always been short-sighted and wrong-headed about the nature and significance of the Internet... the same way you leave a lot out if you write about cities/communities from a business perspective, failing to give sufficient weight to noncommercial factors. But I think Blodget gets it right when he says boom and bust phases "should be seen as natural, inevitable bursts of trial-and-error adaptation, the mechanisms through which industries are formed." Darknet

JD Lasica's Darknet is a very good overview of the tumultous evolution of the perception of content and distribution as all media is digitized and increasingly available online, sometimes through legal channels but more often via the Darknet, i.e. file sharing networks of trust (not to be confused with the euphemistic label trusted computing). I'm leading a discussion with JD at Inkwell.vue on the WELL. If you want to join the conversation, you can send questions and comments to inkwell (at) well.com.
The Darknet, at bottom, is the collection of spaces where unauthorized or illegal file sharing takes place. Most media outlets use the Darknet in the narrow sense to refer to the private, secure, encrypted spaces online set up to exchange files without fear of detection -- sites like Blubster and WASTE and the new initiative Ian Clarke announced 2 weeks ago that will expand darknets from small groups of a few dozen people to potentially millions of people.

My book deals with these kinds of darknets, but also points out that Darknets in a wider sense refer to any kind of illicit file-sharing network -- including the years-old sneakernets on college campuses, where kids trade, buy and sell CDs and DVDs of movies and software downloaded from warez sites and the Internet; Usenet and IRC Chat, where strangers exchange files; and a new wave of legitimate darknet companies like Grouper and imeem and Outhink's Spin Xpress (which I'll bet most of you haven't heard of!).

Darknets are not evil -- at least in my book. They're the public's reaction to overly restrictive copyright laws and bass-ackwards media business models. In some ways, darknets are becoming the last bastion of the digital freedom fighters (alongside the folks who just want to snag free stuff). So it's a decidedly mixed bag.
Murdoch and Skype
Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation evidently attempted to buy Skype, but
...talks have broken down and Skype has denied it is for sale. But sources in the telecoms industry say they expect it to be taken over shortly.
Texas consumers to elected leaders: "Please listen to us."
This is a press release/open letter re. the evident intention of the Texas Legislature to consider telecom legislation sometime today, as part of the special session. I would have said "Texas citizens" rather than "consumers," but it appears that our role as consumer is more important to the lege these days... //Jon L.

To: Governor Perry, Lt. Governor Dewhurst, Speaker Craddick, Members of the Texas Senate and Texas House

Today we are calling on you, our state's leaders, to stand up for Texas consumers. We are asking that you resist the pressure by telephone company lobbyists to pass hasty telecommunications laws in the last days of this second special session.

We know that phone companies like SBC and Verizon have continued to push, almost daily, for the leadership of the House and Senate to pass HB 13 (Rep. King) and SB 5 (Sen. Fraser). We know you're outnumbered; there are more registered telephone industry lobbyists than members of the House of Representatives. But this session was called to reform school finance and lower property taxes, not to appease lobbyists demanding special interest legislation simply to increase their profits.

We know the availability of advanced communications networks and services is vital for the people and communities of Texas. That's why consumers of these services deserve well-considered legislation, not 'one-day' lobby bills passed by tired, divided legislators. We ask you to take the time needed to do this important job well. We ask that you consider the fact that no interest group or constituencies, other than big phone companies who stand to benefit, support the current versions of telecom legislation you are being asked to enact.

We are here today to tell you again the reasons we oppose these bills – to tell you why these bills will increase prices for consumers, how they will divide Texas communities, and how fair competition and consumer choice will be undermined by HB 13 and SB 5.

Please listen to our concerns. Texas needs your best efforts to consider and enact telecom laws that serve the interests of consumers rather than corporations.

While the groups standing together in opposition to these bills may see different reasons for opposing SB 5/HB 13 – including increased rates, economic redlining, loss of community control, harm to competition and local businesses, plus pressures for hurried, secret passage – we all agree on one thing, that these bills are bad for Texas consumers.

Who, besides SBC and Verizon, wants these laws? Consumer groups, city leaders, competitive business have consistently opposed the ever-changing versions. Our Legislature would not pass these during previous sessions. So why let a lobby steamroll them through now? Telecom is vital for our state's economy and the daily lives of our families. Please get all the facts and hear all the viewpoints as you consider and decide the future of telecommunications in Texas.

We hope our leaders stay true to your commitment that no other issues are going to be taken up until our school finance system and property tax system are reformed.

When he called the first special session in June, Governor Perry set very clear priorities:

We're not going to talk about tuition revenue bonds, we're not going to talk about judicial pay raises, we're not going to talk about a telecom bill. We're not going to talk about anything until this is finished. None of those are going to be addressed until we address the most important issue in front of us… reforms of our schools and the property tax reduction.

In July, Lt. Governor Dewhurst promised to block all other legislation until there is a final agreement on school finance reforms and a tax bill to fund those reforms:

We're here to take care of school finance for the schoolchildren and parents and for the businesses of Texas… We want to go ahead and get Senate Bill 2, which is education reform, passed out of the Senate. We want to see the tax bill come over from the House and vote on that, and then I'll consider taking up those bills.

And just six days ago, Speaker Craddick made his recommendation to end the session:
We are wasting time and money, and it is unproductive to prolong this process.

We agree with the Speaker. As consumers, we strongly oppose the proposed telecom bills. As citizens, we resent lobbies' interests coming before our children. As Texans, we expect our leaders to keep their promises. Please don't let a lobby push a bad bill through today. Instead, let's talk and work together to create good laws for tomorrow.
SEO
You know you're a real geek when you dream about Search Engine Optimization. I dreamed last night that somebody wanted to bring me in to consult on SEO, and I told 'em "You only need to know one thing: don't bury the lede!" This is journalist jargon, explained here under "structure." On the web it's not so much a question of getting the right lede as getting the right information on the page so that it'll turn up in relevant searches. Search engines don't focus so much on the keyword metatag, which ain't that important anymore (probably because so many people tried to work screwy metatag voodoo (reflected in this list of keyword myths compiled by Jono Craig).

Actually, I could never see myself consulting on SEO best practices since all you really need to know, you can find in online references like the WikiPedia page on subject. However I could imagine consulting on content development for SEO, or strategies to improve page ranking (by getting linked by other sites that already have a good page rank). But there's no SEO voodoo - you "optimize" by being very good at what you do.
eweek on muni broadband
eweek has a good piece by Chris Nolan about the various legislative battles over municipal wireless, including the one that's shaping up at the federal level, where U.S. Rep. Pete Sessions from Texas,a former SBC employee, has proposed legislation to ban muni wireless projects nationwide. Sessions bill is the opposite fo the McCain-Lautenberg Community Broadband Act of 2005, which would allow muni networks.

Unfortunately Nolan gets it wrong about the recent battle within the Texas legislature against a municipal broadband prohibition in a telecom bill sponsored by Representative Phil King. She suggests that the broadband prohibition defeated by Austin Wireless City, a nonprofit that uses volunteers to set up wifi in various venues around Austin. Austin Wireless City is part of Austin Wireless, an organization that also include the Austin Wireless Group (this gets complicated, especially considering that there's also an Austin Wireless Alliance... but I digress). Austin Wireless had a minor role in the effort, but the real work of challenging the legislation was orchestrated through the Save Muni Wireless coalition, with a few players doing much of the work, including Adina Levin, Tim Morstad, Chip Rosenthal, Wayne Caswell, Gene Crick, and others, including folks who are already planning or working on various muni broadband projects around the state.
Criminal malware
If you've noticed more and more malicious garbage hitting your inbox, it may be because professional criminals are moving to cyberspace, according to a CNet article.
The IT security landscape has changed over recent months, with credit card fraud gangs, virus writing gangs, spammers and malicious hackers becoming more closely entwined, Cluley said. He cited three gangs who he said epitomized the threat: Superzonda, HangUp and ShadowCrew.
The article also sez that antispam legislation might actually have increased the level of "malware" by educating users to avoid unsolicited mail, forcing spammers to "widen their activities" (argh).
Stopping spam by retracing its path
A team from IBM and New York's Cornell University has developed a new way to spot spam, called SMPT Path Analysis. [Link to article at NewScientist.com]
The algorithm at the heart of SMTP Path Analysis studies Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) information, which is added to an email message "header" as it is passed between servers on the internet. This remains hidden when a message arrives in a recipient's inbox but can be used retrace its steps between different mail servers.

Most spam filters try to catch spam by looking at the content of a message, rather than its hidden header. Many already learn to identify new spam by examining previous message. But spammers are constantly coming up with new tricks in an effort to outwit such content-filtering techniques.
Drupal finds love
After its recent server meltdown, Drupal make a public call for help and got a donated Sun Fire V20z server and 10K in cash, with more on the way! (However I couldn't get drupal.org to come up this morning... slashdotted!) [Link]
Firefox GoogleBar
Google's expected to release a Firefox version of its toolbar (and it's about time!) [Link]
flickr's organization: aha!
My ears stood up when I started reading Jeff Veen's post about flickr's organization as close-knit collaboration between extremely talented people... "the abstraction of a tiered architecture is an efficient way for people to work, communicate, and collaborate. But that seldom works without a deep respect built from working together side-by-side, at least at first. In other words, designing things works better together, and building things works better with structure." Jeff also points to Tom Coates' overview of Cal Henderson's presentation on "How We Built Flickr," which led me to an aha! moment or two because it resonates so well with our evolution and thinking at Polycot:
One particularly interesting chunk was about the relationships between various people operating at different layers - with the developers able to easily create page logic-level functionality that allow the designers to take it away and build user-facing features around them. This relationship is phrased as a negotiation, with the designers coming back and asking for page logic level functionality as they see a need for it (and then being completely responsible for the building of the front-end elements of the site, and for checking it before launch). The whole enterprise is around continual development and improvement and reaction, which probably explains another fairly jaw-dropping moment of the morning - when Cal revealed that on 'good days', Flickr releases a new version every half an hour. In order to support this kind of working, they've built structures that 'supports rapid iteration but enforce at least a little rigour'. Stunning. Although clearly not right for everyone...

A lot of this stuff really fits with my aesthetics of developing products effectively for the web, because - I guess - it's actually a very responsive and very web-native way of building. This process cycle of rapidly building, creating structures that support future iteration, being connected to the users on your site and being able to react and redevelop your proposition almost on the fly - these all seem to me to be the way that most of my peers worked before moving to large organisations that attempted to enforce standard software development methodologies on a completely different medium. And of course, it all hooks in with elegant ways of writing and producing web pages in ways that allow rapid change and evolution, making design about interactions and services and components and design swatches and aesthetics and change rather than about .psd files, yearly redesigns and distant heavy-handed top-down management (and sign-off) from a distance.
Community Broadband Act of 2005
Also posted at Save Muni Wireless. Senators John McCain, R-Ariz., and Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J. will introduce legislation (called the Community Broadband Act of 2005) Thursday that would allow municipalities to offer broadband service. This Senate bill is a counterbalance to Pete Sessions' proposed bill to prohibit muncipalities from offering broadband. Lautenberg says that "government should work to open doors to greater technology for the American people, not slam them shut. Our bill will protect the right of communities to offer wireless broadband access to their citizens, creating a powerful tool for education and economic development." [Link]
The two senators are offering the legislation because they want to remove all barriers to broadband deployment, the congressional source said -- noting that 14 states have enacted laws restricting localities from establishing wireless or wireline Internet systems. It is also a response to recent statistics showing the United States dropping to sixteenth in broadband penetration worldwide.
Dormouse Clicks
John Markoff's new book, What the Dormouse Said: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer, is a great history of the genesis and evolution of personal computer technology, the roots of which are in the psychedelic era, the Free Speech Movement, and Doug Engelbart's cyborganic vision of computers that would enhance or augment human capabilities. Markoff is discussing the book in a conversation on the WELL.
On the specific question posed by Matisse - my interests are sociological rather than psychological. That said there are some minor parallels to Kerry Mullis (who conceived of PCR while he was in an "acid fugue state" driving up to Mendocino). Two examples, one minor, one not. Tim Mott had smoked dope before he thought of the double-click UI concept. Dan Ingalls, who invented bit-blt, which is the key idea underlying the modern GUI, would only say generally that he would get in the mood for programming while smoking dope.

On the other hand, two well known techies who were instrumental at PARC were hiking/tripping in Foothills Park behind Stanford one day when one of them realized that he had come upon the solution to the natural language understanding problem. They sat down in the grass to discuss the issue and the other one noticed some purple snakes crawling around them. Thus distracted, the natural language solution was lost... 8) (this story wasn't in the book)
Identity Metasystem

Doc Searls has parked an interesting set of questions about a proposed Identity Metasystem in his IT garage. This concept's being driven by Microsoft, specifically Kim Alexander, Microsoft's Identity and Access Architect, who's in a position to realize and think about the issues of identity online that are cropping up and haven't been addressed very well in a standard way across the Internet. As Kim's Laws of Identity white paper says, "The Internet was built without a way to know who and what you are connecting to." Without a native identity layer, we're seeing the emergence of a patchwork of "identity one-offs"...
As use of the Web increases, so does users' exposure to these workarounds. Though no one is to blame, the result is pernicious. Hundreds of millions of people have been trained to accept anything any site wants to throw at them as being the "normal way" to conduct business online. They have been taught to type their names, secret passwords, and personal identifying information into almost any input form that appears on their screen.

There is no consistent and comprehensible framework allowing them to evaluate the authenticity of the sites they visit, and they don't have a reliable way of knowing when they are disclosing private information to illegitimate parties. At the same time they lack a framework for controlling or even remembering the many different aspects of their digital existence.
Kim feels that "the diverse needs of many players demand that we weave a single identity fabric out of multiple constituent technologies." This is complex, there are many obstacles, but it's time to take the first steps. I can't claim to have my head around this quite yet, but it's sinking in, and it seems extremely relevant to the concepts of "constituent relationship management" and "group relationship management."
RepRap
The machine on the right is a robot that was built with "self-replicating rapid prototyper" or "RepRap" technology. It's a universal constructor, "a machine that can replicate itself and - in addition - make other industrial products. Such a machine would have a number of interesting characteristics, such as being subject to Darwinian evolution, increasing in number exponentially, and being extremely low-cost." According to an article at CNN.com, the machine can be relatively inexpensive and, according to its creator, Dr. Adrian Bowyer, "is the first technology that we can have that can simultaneously make people more wealthy while reducing the need for industrial production."
Spam: It's about time!
The Federal Trade Commission is getting serious about spam, and planning to work with ISPs to find and disable zombies. [Link]
Executive Challenge in the news
Austin's Enspire Learning made the Wall Street Journal with their Executive Challenge simulation, "a multiplayer business simulation focusing on leadership, strategy, communications, and team work." I haven't worked directly with the simulation but heard great reports from folks who used it at the McCombs Business School at the University of Texas. The description at Enspire suggests the richness of the simulation:
The Executive Challenge�s multiplayer format creates a high pressure environment characterized by the asymmetrical flow of information, rich strategic options, and decisions and tradeoffs that reflect the real world. Players must balance corporate objectives with personal ones, clearly communicate information to their teammates, and demonstrate real leadership.

Learning in the simulation experience flows not only from playing the simulation, but also from interactions with teammates and team leaders, detailed debriefing and strategy sessions, and a �board of directors� meeting led by senior executives or business professors.
Former RIAA chair tries Podbusting
Former RIAA Chairman Hilary Rosen complains that she can't play music on her iPod unless she buys it from the Apple iTunes store. [Link]
The problem is that the iPod only works with either songs that you buy from the on-line Apple iTunes store or songs that you rip from your own CD�s. But those other music sites have lots of music that you can�t get at the iTunes store. So, if you have an iPod, you are out of luck. If you are really a geek, you can figure out how to strip the songs you might have bought from another on-line store of all identifying information so that they will go into the iPod. But then you have also degraded the sound quality. How cruel.
This is news to me, I've put stuff from pretty much any source into my iPod without any particular problem. And did you ever hear of podcasting, Hilary? Or are you just miffed that Apple did what the record industry should've done: get a handle on the online distribution channel for tunes...?

(It's more than a little weird for the former RIAA Chair to complain that a system is too proprietary.)

Tag: clueless
These kids today!
Successful cracker attacks on attacks on computer systems at Cisco and others serving the American military, NASA and research laboratories were evidently the work of a "malicious teenage hacker running around with no sense of ethics." [Link]
"Community Networking in the 21st Century"
I posted thoughts about community networking, in response to my experience at last week's Open Space Austin conference, at WorldChanging.com.
MuniWireless on San Antonio
MuniWireless follows up on the San Antonio Express article I mentioned a few days ago, noting that SBC is not excited about free wireless in its home town. A quote from Gene Acuña of SBC in the article: "When a city seeks to provide such information services like Wi-Fi to nonpublic places in direct competition with the private sector, then we have some real concerns." However MuniWireless notes that "it does not look like the city itself will be providing Wi-Fi, rather it's a private initiative with some city support." My pal Ed Preston, VP of SalsaNet posts a comment saying that his organization is not supporting municipal wireless networks, but advocating all sorts of WiFi developments, fee-based and free, and advocates working with the major telecoms. Ed says
The major Telecomms are NOT the enemy here, all you MuniWireless folks... they simply need to be educated and enlightened as to how they can make profit AND offer free access (like ad-sponsored portals). Remember also that they are responsible to shareholders at the end of the day, same as we are to our families and children, to put "food on the table".
I'm not completely in agreement with Ed here – municipal wireless projects make sense in many contexts, and municipalities shouldn't be constrained from offering services and support that make sense. And SBC would seem less like an enemy if the company changed its behavior. If it looks, smells, and acts like an enemy, it's hard to think otherwise. It would be helpful if there was a frank and open discussion between big telco and muni wireless reps, but I'm afraid that ain't gonna happen. Companies like SBC don't have to listen or think about new paradigms. They can buy lobbying and advertising that has so far been effective in protecting their position as a de facto monopoly and emasculating the competition, and while some see evil in this, I think you'd be hard put to find evil individuals within SBC. SBC is part of the old AT&T culture which evolved over years of unchallenged monopolitic practice, which was supposedly more efficient without the chaos of competition. The 1982 AntiTrust Decree wasn't going to change the culture of AT&T and the Bell Operation Companies overnight. The problem we face today is that the large incumbent telcos have been fighting competitive local exchange carriers for years (which is to say, the "Baby Bells" have been fighting the new competitors enabled by the antitrust decree), and they're pretty nervous about the potential for tax-funded municipalities to become competitors, as well... not to mention the VOIP companies that offer a whole new paradigm for telephony. Companies like SBC and Verizon must feel like mountaineers who're neat the top of Mt. Everest, only to be stalled and turned back by a monster blizzard.

I really want to appreciate SBC's side of the discussion about community broadband, but only after the change their tactics, start listening to us, too, and back their lobbyists off. I'm not holding my breath. [Link]
Bad design can kill
Jakob Nielsen summarizes the findings in a JAMA paper on a hospital's order-entry system. The paper reports on a field study that shows design flaws in the system that could result in patient deaths. (Nielsen being Nielsen, he also takes time to analyze the usability of the JAMA web site). [Link]
WiFi in San Antonio
Spurred by the great enthusiasm of a revived and happening SalsaNet, San Antonio's getting fired up about WiFi. An article from the San Antonio Express-News talks about efforts by WiFi-Sa.com and Salsa.net to get free or low-cost Internet access to underserved areas, and WiFi adoption by Urban-15, an SA-based regional arts group.
"WiFi as urban renewal"
WiFi has become an inherent part of municipal economic development and urban renewal efforts, according to David Strom, who acknowledges the Austin Wireless City Project: "...volunteers are getting organized and community-level projects are bringing techno-geeks together to build their own hot spots. The best example of this is Austin Wireless City Project in Texas. They have even produced a training manual to show how they have built out their network..." [Link]

Austin
Nancy White's notes on activist tech at SXSW
Nancy White did a great job scribing/blogging the Activist Technology discussions at SXSW Interactive:
Activist Technology
Deliberative Democracy
Are Political Parties Obsolete?
How to Think About Democracy and Technology?
Perspective on Multimedia
Working through unsorted files on my hard drive, I found this piece that I wrote March 29, 2004. Might as well blog it!

A history of multimedia should probably start with the invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century. The printing press was the first technology for replicating information so that it could be distributed to the masses, one consequence of which was a broader distribution of literacy and sharing of knowledge. Other communication technologies followed: the inventions of the telegraph, the telephone, radio; the first uses of photography and the creation of motion picture technologies and the convergence with sound recording to make �talkies�; the advent and broad adoption of television; the evolution of computing from massive mainframes to today�s personal computers and palmtop devices; the development of the Internet and the World Wide Web. If you look at a timeline for development of these various technologies, you can see that their evolution accelerated as communication capabilities advanced. Much of the development, definition, and refining of these technologies occurred in the last century; over the last couple of decades we�ve seen a convergence of technologies in multimedia.

Multimedia is the seamless integration of diverse technologies for delivering information and entertainment. We think of multimedia as a digital phenomenon � computers enable the integration of various media. Originally computers were number crunchers, data processing machines. In the mid-1980s, however, our conception of computers expanded with the introduction of the first graphical user interfaces (GUIs) and the mass deployment of the mouse for efficient interaction with visual data. The GUI and mouse were first demonstrated by Doug Engelbart in 1968 as part of the NLS (oNLine System) developed at Stanford Research Institute beginning in 1962. This system included many of the components of today�s digital multimedia systems: GUI, mouse, hypertext, manipulation of graphics, hierarchical controls, etc. Doug described NLS as "an instrument for helping humans operate within the domain of complex information structures." Within the NLS environment, users could compose, study and modify conceptual content, and handle complexity and cognition beyond the normal limitations of human endeavor.

The visual interface model proposed by Engelbart and others is now widely implemented as an inherent part of computing systems, which have become sophisticated media processors. Audiovisual development was driven to a great extent by the development of increasingly sophisticated computer games with 3D graphical environments and high-end audio requirements. As processor speeds have escalated and media content increasingly produced in digital formats, computers have become tools of choice for delivering various kinds of media, and media formats (text, graphics, audio, video) have converged into a seamless mix. At the same time broad implementation of broadband networks facilitate the delivery of high-bandwidth digital services. This is changing the way that media are distributed. Users can download books, records, television programs and films and play them on high quality audio and video systems.

Improved handling of multimedia has resulted in increasingly robust presentation packages, the most dominant of which is Microsoft PowerPoint. Originally launched under the name "Presenter" by a company called Forethought, the program that became the first version of PowerPoint was built with a �slideshow� metaphor where the slides were similar to in layout and presentation to transparencies created for overhead projectors. Microsoft acquired Forethought in 1987, meanwhile similar products appeared (e.g. Lotus Freelance, Aldus Persuasion, and Harvard Graphics). The Mac version of the program included color, and version 2 in 1990 added support for 256-color systems and a "WYSIWYG" ("What You See Is What You Get") interface. The next version included sound and video along with outlining and drawing tools � i.e. PowerPoint was evolving into a true multimedia product.

PowerPoint has evolved to become a standard for presentation as competing products have fallen away. The tool has become a popular, flexible multimedia platform that includes animation, broad selection of aliased fonts, and an ability to save as a web-based presentation. Critics of PowerPoint include Edward Tufte, a leading authority on the graphical presentation of information, who says that �slideware� is insufficiently robust for the presentation of complex information, Tufte has written an essay called "The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint" that is critical of the system. According to Tufte, "In day-to-day practice, PowerPoint templates may improve 10% or 20% of all presentations by organizing inept, extremely disorganized speakers at a cost of intellectual damage to 80%." In an article called "PowerPoint is Evil" (Wired 11.09, September 2003) Tufte is a bit more charitable: "PowerPoint is a competent slide manager and projector. But rather than supplementing a presentation, it has become a substitute for it."

Tufte�s critique of PowerPoint has implications for multimedia: media convergence implies increasingly complex media environments, the value of which is lost if presentation and interface are poorly designed. Multimedia applications should be designed around clearly articulated goals, with attention to usability principles: keeping the interface as simple as possible, reducing memory load by providing memory aids or cues, reducing information overload, etc.

PowerPoint is just one example of an application or environment integrating various media. Another obvious example is the World Wide Web, a set of protocols and standards which revolutionized content delivery over the Internet. Formerly text-based, the Internet became a multimedia environment based on the publishing metaphor of the page. Web pages combined text, graphics, and layout, and the hypertext markup language (html) evolved quickly to accommodate increasingly sophisticated layout options, background colors, and embedded media. Web browsers integrated more and more plugins for various kinds of presentation, including audio, video, virtual reality, and interactive communications through asynchronous or realtime messaging. As bandwidth has increased and high-speed broadband connectivity has become widely available, network multimedia applications have become more robust.

The character of the Internet and the World Wide Web is social. The vast global system is a network for interactive communication, therefore operating on a different paradigm from broadcast models like television and radio. Network users will not be passive consumers of media. The net-based multimedia applications of the future will be interactive, facilitating a high degree of user involvement. Online games are one natural form of collaborative multimedia entertainment that will become increasingly popular in the near future, especially with mobile interactive games designed for wireless systems. Games have always been a force driving development of computers as media devices with increasingly sophisticated display and sound, and in the future games will also guide the development of computers as collaborative technologies. Already popular massively multiplayer user games such as Ultima Online and Everquest offer virtual environments where players are represented by graphical avatars that can construct alternative lives and realities interactively with other players – these are more fully realized forms of virtual community, and as they grow and evolve, they will inspire innovations that will be adopted for applications that serve other purposes: collaborative work, or simulations for education and training. The military already uses virtual reality combat simulations, and the University of Texas hosts a project called Entertech that uses digital media simulation training for workforce development.

If you want to get a powerful sense of the state of digital multimedia convergence today, wander through a large urban Best Buy store and try to find something that is not related to digital media. All the television sets have digital components, especially the HDTV sets. DVDs have all but replaced videotape, and CDs are the medium of choice for music. Digital cameras are everywhere now. And computers are displayed as platforms for multimedia, even the Palm top computers and digital cellphones. Eventually with wireless these devices can be interconnected as pieces of media systems for interactive information and entertainment. The interactive aspect is important: it means that users will create as well as consume content.

This isn�t exactly a utopian vision; there are obvious potential downsides – information overload, too much content with too little quality, invasive technologies (sort of like email span, but on a grander multimedia scale). There are still technical and policy issues to be considered, and the "digital divide." But it�s an exciting time, and the promise of the future is, as ever, ongoing innovation.
Municipal broadband: access for all
The Texas Legislature wants to continue to prohibit municipalities from providing network services to citizens. I say continue, because that's been the law since '95. In an overhaul of telecom legislation, they seek to make the prohibition even stronger. Their argument is that cities shouldn't compete with private industry. Rep. Phil King, chair of the House Regulated Industries Committee, made a strange analogy during last week's testimony. He asked of more than one person testifying against the bill, if there was no grocery store in a town or city, would they expect the city to open one? What was strange about that analogy is that there is no law on the books prohibiting cities from opening grocery stores, and none proposed.

Other analogies come to mind:
Private companies sell water, therefore cities shouldn't offer water service to citizens.
Private companies operate taxi services and bus lines, so cities shouldn't provide or fund transit services.
Private companies can build and maintain roads, so the city should stop competing; all roads should be private toll roads. (Austinites would love that, right?)
Private companies can build commercial swimming environments, so cities should stop operating public pools. (After all, every community should have its mini-Schlitterbahn, no?)

In fact, the reason municipal public network projects are popping up around Texas and elsewhere is because they make perfect sense to dang near everybody... except for large companies, many of them incumbent telcos (aka "baby bells"), who were hoping to limit competition and control pricing. They definitely don't want cities in the mix. They especially don't want to have to compete with projects that are subsidized by tax dollars and are not necessarily priced for profit maximization. That's mighty tough competiton.

However I would argue that the cities that are their natural markets won't try to compete in a big way, because those cities will already have robust advanced service offerings from multiple sources, as in Austin we have SBC, Time Warner, Verizon, and various smaller ISPs. From an economic development perspective, a city would want these companies to succeed, and would offer limited public service where it makes sense (libraries, parks, publid events, economic zones, etc.)

Though some cities may offer broader network access (e.g. the Corpus Christi Wireless Project) because it fits specific needs and/or supports their plans for economic development, and they shouldn't be constrained from doing so.

However the only communities likely to offer substantial advanced wireless services to most if not all citizens are smaller rural communities that are outside the market focus of big telcos. There are some parts of rural Texas where even dialup won't work – and I hear there are areas where there's no basic phone service at all. The larger providers suggest that they'll address these markets, but they don't tell you what level and quality of service they'll provide. As Consumers Union says at the just-launched hearusnow.org,
Throughout the U.S., a growing number of Americans are tired of the cable and telephone company bottlenecks to Internet access. What's at stake are people's ability to come together to offer alternative ways to connect themselves and their neighbors to the Internet. Policymakers, industry groups and community activists will continue to debate these network opportunities, and whether or not sufficient spectrum is available for them to expand. (http://www.hearusnow.org/index.php?id=401)

Texas and other states shouldn't constrain municipalities from deploying networks to protect corporate profits. A better way to frame the issue is not that municipalities will create unfair competition, but that they will lay the groundwork for competition where there was none, in traditionally underserved markets. Where information services are concerned, "underserved" means excluded from the evolving network economy and society. Legislation that constrains municipal networks will inherently support and grow the "digital divide."

See "Save Muni Wireless" for more information.
Michael Powell's departure
Michael Powell announced he will resign from the FCC this March. A rumor of Powell's impending resignation has been in the air for a while. [Link]
Technorati Tags
Technorati now supports "folksonomy," the practice of categorizing content with tags. David Weinberger has some thoughts about what this means. Look for a taxonomy of the web to emerge from grassroots tagging efforts. [Link]
Adaptable Software
On an email list, somone said my point has been that the blog isn't structured enough. My response:

Blogs and wikis are part of the changed approach to software development that includes free software, open source, and various "open source-ish" projects. With proprietary software sold in shrinkwrap, especially when far fewer people had net access and bandwidth was narrower, you would make software adaptable by making it feature rich, building in everything any potential user might need or want. Now we build adaptable software by making simple pieces that can be adapted through user-imposed structure (think wiki) or and a modular approach (integrated or aggregated). From this perspective, I wouldn't say that blogs aren't structured *enough*... I figure we define blogs formally (where the form includes reverse chronological order, short form, permalinks, feeds, etc.), but we can also integrate other features, or incorporate blogs as modules of systems with more features (a la CivicSpace) in order to adapt.

In my response, I didn't quite complete the thought about the impact of a network environment that makes is so much easier for us to get access to software packages and modules and use various web-based application services to create custom environments that give us the features we need. There is a trend away from all-and-everything software packages. (I wouldn't call this a monolithic trend; I think Microsoft and Intuit and Symantec &ndash with proprietary approaches and at least partial delivery via shrinkwrap distribution – will always be there. However even those companies are tending to deliver patches and modules via the network where it makes sense according to their business plan.)

I'm interested in hearing your comments.
More on DRM: Blazing Strawmen
Cory clarifies that some comments on the Digital Rights Management issues he's been debating include straw-man arguments, so he's made another long post clarifying the debate (setting the straw men ablaze). [Link]

"I noticed last month that Chris A (as befits an ex-Economist writer) is keen to encourage commercial companies to sueeze every last penny of value out of their intellectual property"

This is a straw-man. Neither Chris nor I question Disney, Fox, et al's desire to suck the consumer electronics companies' customers dry with DRM. The argument we're having is over whether it's in the CE companies' best interests to be accomplices to this.

To have a functional market, you need companies and individuals who act in their own best interests. Traditionally, the entertainment companies have wanted fewer devices of less capability in the market -- which is why they strongly opposed the phonogram, radio, jukebox, cable TV, VCR and Internet.

Traditionally, the CE companies have perceived a market opportunity to give their customers more devices and more capable devices, because customers want to get more for less.

This has resulted in a tension that yielded a balance to everyone's benefit. The CE companies built devices that were capable, customers got more freedom, and entertainment companies discovered new opportunities to expand their revenue.

Today, the CE companies are agreeing to participate in secret consortia where a maximum threshold for functionality is being set out by the studios. The CE companies are promised that if they play within the cartel's rules -- i.e., if they don't ship the products their customers want -- then the cartel will sue into oblivion any competitor who enters the market with a more-capable device.
"Cory responds to Wired Editor on DRM "
Cory boings back at Chris Anderson of Wired Magazine after Anderson repsonds to his earlier DRM rant in a post about Wired's BitTorrent article.

DRM, "Digital Rights Management," is a breaks your technology and limits your access to content that you paid for, requiring you to pay more. And more. DRM advocates with their hands in your pocket say they're protecting themselves from piracy, but "DRM is not protection. There has never been a DRM-covered file that was kept off the Internet. Ever. DRM has never once in the history of the field kept a file from appearing online, or from being booted by organized crime pirates. Despite its rhetoric on this, Hollywood is perfectly aware of how bogus the DRM-is-protection claim is...."
DRM isn't protection from piracy. DRM is protection from competition. If you believe that "much as we might want it to be otherwise, content owners still call most of the shots," then you believe that the guy who makes the record should get a veto over the design of the record player. That the film studios should be able to ban the VCR. That the recording industry should have been able to shove SDMI down all our throats and make MP3 disappear.

This is a profoundly ahistorical proposition. Never in the history of media from the dawn of the printing press right up to the invention of the DVD have we afforded this kind of privilege to incumbent rightsholders. Quite the contrary: at every turn, brave entrepreneurs have engaged in "piracy" of copyrighted works (through devices like the record player, radio, cable television and VCR) and kept at it until the law caught up with the technology.

It's different with the DVD. With the DVD, the electronics companies completely wimped out. They traded their customers to the studios for two packs of cigarettes, and the result has been a decade of stagnation in DVD players. There's no indication that movies are being released sooner or more cheaply on DVD than they were on VHS; and in fact, the release of movies on VHS was preceded by incredible, absurd hyperbole about the video-cassette's inevitable destruction of the film industry and the compelte impossibility of a movie ever being released by a studio for viewing on your VCR.

If you believe that "content owners still call most of the shots" then you believe that the studios will make movies and just not release them, they will amass a great pile of unreleased material in their Hollywood vaults and sit before the doors, arms folded, glaring at the world until it arranges itself into a more accomodating configuration. It is ridiculous. DRM hasn't convinced the studios to put new material online -- the offerings that the studios have put online are a pathetic shadow of the material one can download from the P2P networks. The studios have all the DRM in the universe at their disposal, but they're not using it to bring new material to market.

Nope, they're using it to sell you the same crap for more money....
[Link]
Cory on Wired on BitTorrent
Cory Doctorow on Wired Magazine's article about Bram Cohen, creator of BitTorrent p2p file-sharing software. Cory takes issue "where Clive talks about Microsoft DRM being useful to 'keep content out of pirate hands'"...
...there is not a single piece of content in the history of the universe that has been "kept out of pirate hands" (i.e. kept off the Internet, or prevented from being stamped out in pirate CD factories abroad) by DRM. It's a weird kind of Big Lie strategy by the DRM people to talk about how DRM can prevent "piracy" when there has never, ever been an example of this happening.
and later
It's a statement that's so categorically untrue, it seems to come from a parallel universe with different laws of physics and economics. BitTorrent proves the futility of DRM as surely as DRM turns honest customers into studio-hating downloaders.
Cory also discusses the use case for BitTorrent:
I bought a Sopranos Season Three DVD set for a friend's Christmas this year. When the friend opened the gift on her Christmas holiday in France, the discs wouldn't play in her hotel's French DVD player; nor would they play in the on-site English PowerBook -- because the discs had DRM. At that point, the rational thing to do would have been to sell the discs on Amazon and just download Season Three using BitTorrent -- the studios have rigged the game so that you get a superior product (e.g., something you can actually watch) when you download bootlegs from BitTorrent, and they actively punish customers who buy their products instead of downloading them.

[Link]
Buddhabrot

Cool Mandelbrot-style generated images resembling the traditional depiction of the Buddha in meditation. [Link]
The Buddhabrot Set is a re-visualization of the familiar Mandelbrot Set using a technique invented by Melinda Green. Instead of selecting points on the real-complex plane, initial points are selected at random from the image region. The point is iterated through the function, z = z�2 + c, where z has components in both the real and imaginary planes.

If the particle escapes (exits the viewing area with high speed), its path is reiterated, exposing its position onto the image surface with each step. In this fashion, areas of dense particle travel appear bright white. The result is an amazing universe of structure, spirituality, and mathematical intrigue.
Tenet calls for an end to "free and open" Internet
George Tenet calls for new Internet security measures - just what those are are't specified in this article, which quotes him as saying "I know that these actions will be controversial in this age when we still think the Internet is a free and open society with no control or accountability, but ultimately the Wild West must give way to governance and control."
Mr. Tenet pointed out that the modernization of key industries in the United States is making them more vulnerable by connecting them with an Internet that is open to attack.

The way the Internet was built might be part of the problem, he said. Its open architecture allows Web surfing, but that openness makes the system vulnerable, Mr. Tenet said.

Access to networks like the World Wide Web might need to be limited to those who can show they take security seriously, he said.

Mr. Tenet called for industry to lead the way by "establishing and enforcing" security standards. Products need to be delivered to government and private-sector customers "with a new level of security and risk management already built in."
The national press, including United Press International (UPI), were excluded from yesterday's event, at Mr. Tenet's request, organizers said.

[Link]
Relic: Hohocon Talk
This is kind of funny... a relic, really: a talk I gave at Hohocon, the hacker convention, almost ten years ago... I also linke to somebody's review, which says my talk didn't really have a point...

HO HO

jonl, FringeWare, Inc. TAZmediacrat, at HoHoCon (1/1/95)
(Not a direct transcription, no not a-tall... in fact, it's been fleshed out a bit, made clearer and more consistent, slightly less of a ramble...all those things one wishes one could do before the speech is out o' the bag....)
I've been thinking about how commercialism on the internet and net activism are related, and the best way to get into that is by looking at World Wide Web. How many here have home pages on the web? (many hands) How many pay someone to create and maintain yer home page? (no hands, only grimaces and weird cackles....)
Well, SRI futurist Tom Mandel was saying the other day that, in his opinion, there's no competition within the World Wide Web, that there aren't enough folks sufficiently browseworthy to `get it.' Ha! What an underestimation. At FringeWare we're set up to do commercial home pages, and we've been watching what other folks are doing. We've seen some weird developments -- like the folks in Austin who want to charge over $300 a month to handle a home page. And then there's the development of online magazines. HotWired, f'rinstance...operated by Wired magazine, tightly controlled, supported by sponsors whose home pages are included in the browse. HotWired's onto something important: if you're gonna charge an arm or two to carry what amounts to advertising, or webvertising, you have to produce evidence that somebody, or many bodies, are going to look at the site, and you have to figure out how to attract `em to the home page, and produce some kinds of statistics to show that they're really looking. The way to pull traffic to home pages is by having compelling content, and of course HotWired's got the content. This is sorta like television, where the ads carry the content, and we all know how well that's worked out.
Except with television the ads are right in yer face, whereas on a web server, they're pretty easy to skip, unless you force the browser to look at them. And of course, if you do this, if you're coercive, you're (hopefully) gonna rub the libertarian instincts of the net community raw; you're gonna find that you don't have the same kind of passive consumeroid that television's created. (If this proves untrue, please don't tell me, let me live with my illusions about digital community....)
(Guilty admission: since poetry don't feed the bulldog, FringeWare, Inc., who're capitalists, after all, will try to attract you to our site with lotsa sound and fury...and we're gonna sell space for what is really, however else it might look, ADVERTISING. But we won't shove it down yer modem, and that's a promise.)
Political digression of sorts: All this WEB activity is going to make the Internet HOT, highly visible, very crowded. Browsers will take more and more bandwidth, though I'm told we can always create more...cyberspace may be finite, but not so limited as physpace, which only allows one reality per plane and one plane per existential yuk, etc.
However, there's this other cultural thing, old thinking an all. Have you noticed that some folks want to tell you just how to butter yer toast? As more folks come online they're going to be like `civilized' settlers on the electronic frontier -- and the computer underground is going to be like the Indian nation. (Many rousing yuks of laughter) You know how well the settlers and the Indians got along...
In the online world, your freedoms are as easily yanked as depriving you of access to the technology, to those electronic spaces, however hidden, where you do your more or less (often less) private thing. You may be content to live in yer own enclaves, yer temporary autonomous zones hidden from the AOLtobahn, but beware, freedom and privacy require diligent defense, something the Indians understood too late.
`Til now, nobody's cared much what you were doing online, on the electronic frontier, but with the settlers arriving, the sheriff and the cavalry may not be far behind, whatever that might imply. It could mean that they simply want to keep your space and theirs discretely separate, but then again, it could mean that they'd want to restrict yer freedoms because they don't like the sound of...computer underground! oh shit! is that like the Internet porno online rape of the innocent mind of christian bubbahood kinda thang? Consider the Carnegie Mellon flap, the one about alt.sex -- how long had they been carrying those threads? Why are they just now taking issue? It's the settlers, man, they're forming a circle with their virtual wagons....
Austinite Jim Hornfischer wrote a piece for Omni magazine (Continuum, 1/95) where he used some comments I made to support his contention that hackers are apolitical and won't organize. (laughter) That might be true in a sense, but I don't think it's absolutely true, because when you get that somebody's working schemes that aren't in your best interests, that would ultimately deprive you of your freedom just `cause somebody's moral fine- tuning differs from your own, you're just liable to organize. And if you're somebody like Steve Jackson, following all the rules but busted anyway over somebody's paranoid cyberpunk fantasy, then you're just liable to organize (and, perhaps, create something like EFF-Austin).
And what I really said or tried to say to Jim Hornfischer was that hackers aren't really into organizing around party lines, because with the global telecommunications revolution, the information superhighway or infobahn or whatever hype label you want to put on it, the party line thing is archaic, anyway. Political parties were formed to hold support together from issue to issue, so the power brokers would have the votes or voices they needed to push their agenda along... but who needs political parties when you can build support overnight, ad hoc, by putting the word online? You get immediate natural constituencies, polarization, debate, flames, and eventually, some sort of resolution, often before the clueless politicians even catch on that there's an issue! And this can mean that you don't have to toss yer heart and mind to Republicrats or to some political action scamittee or to anybody else. You can choose your battles not according to somebody's bullshit dogma, but according to yer own thinking and perception.
So back to commercialism (from the fringe perspective, at least). FringeWare set out to build a kind of street market in cyberspace where we'd sell our wares, but we'd also be part of the community. We think that's the right way to do commerce...what E.F. Schumacher called "economics as if people mattered." So we built our street market, and as commercial development within the vast interconnected Matrix of online systems proceeds, we see developers moving in from outside the community, making it their own, and rebuilding the thoroughfares to carry Heavy Traffic.
Well, we're not buying no virtual earth-moving machines. What we're doing is hanging in, staying plugged into the community we know, which is free and loose, a neotribal diversity of folks who respect each other's freedom to create new spaces within a digital universe where the imagination rules and reality is infinitely malleable.
And we tune into the Immediasts and other folks who turn media on its ear, and look for clever ways to expose for what it is the heavy-handed brainwash-driven capitalism that would gladly trash yer freedom to THINK openly and creatively while telling you how great it is to live in a free world. How can you be free when somebody's pumped yer brain full of hype? We're capitalists, yes, but we're noncoercive capitalists. Just a few freaks on the virtual street, selling our wares from a stand on the corner....
The End!
The Next Billion
David Isenberg just told me about the VON-sponsored conference called "The CEO Forum on the Next Billion: Finding ways to move access to communication from 1 billion people on earth to 2 billion and beyond" at the Berkman Center. David Weinberger is blogging the conference here and here (so far; I'm sure he'll blog more). Community network people have been talking about universal access for years, but as VoIP and other technologies progress, more and more recovering telco people are getting into the conversation, understanding that we must ensure pervasive freedom to connect, in developing as well as developed nations – and at the same time we have to think through the implications of Internet technology, the need for a "stupid network" with intelligence at the edges, and the fact that it will be increasingly tough for monolithic corporations to sustain revenues by providing access to communications networks. We're not just talking about technology here; a global, open communications network has far-reaching political and economic implications. And for obvious reasons it's not just going to happen. (Therefore, I'm paying attention to the current evolution of network thinking, and I hope you are, too.)
Joi Ito and ICANN
Joi made himself available to serve on the ICANN Board, which is an uphill thing to do, but as Joi says, "ICANN is changing and it's critical that ICANN is successful." Because Joi is so highly cooperative, collaborative, and polite, he's probably just the kind of catalyst that ICANN needs. (As one who often takes the bull-in-china-shop approach, I can say that uncommon courtesy is much more effective.) [Link]
Semantic Web
Sir Tim Berners-Lee explains the Semantic Web in an interview published in the latest Technology Review. The interviewer is Mark Frauenfelder of boingboing.
The Semantic Web technology tackles the problem in two stages. The more mundane is a common data format. You can take a database or a calendar or an address book or a bank statement or a weather reading�basically anything with hard data in it�and make the machine write it in the basic Semantic Web language, instead of some proprietary or application-specific format. This solves the �syntactic� problem.

It still doesn�t solve the �semantic� one, though. For that, the Semantic Web first gives names to the basic concepts involved in the data: date and time, an event, a check, a transaction, temperature and pressure, and location. These are all defined just to mean whatever they mean in the system which produces the data�for example, �Transaction date as I get on a bank statement,� and so on. This set of concepts is called an ontology. Then, where there are connections between ontologies, such as when the date and time on a photograph is the same concept as the time on a weather report, we write rules to take advantage of these connections. This allows one to query the Semantic Web agent for photos taken on sunny days, for example. Bit by bit, link by link, the data becomes connected, interwoven. The exciting thing is serendipitous reuse of data: one person puts data up there for one thing, and another person uses it another way.
Internet Zero
Originally posted at WorldChanging: Another World Is Here:

Frank Coluccio posted about an article in the October Scientific American about Internet Zero of Internet-0, "described as an architecture that defines the protocols and internetworking relationships of everyday objects found in the home and the business place." The Scientific American article isn't online yet, but Frank posts from a sidebar summary of the project:
Giving everyday objects the ability to connect to a data network would have a range of benefits: making it easier for homeowners to configure their lights and switches, reducing the cost of complexity of building construction, assisting with home health care. Many alternative standards currently compete to do just that – a situation reminiscent of the early days of the Internet, when computers and networks came in multiple incompatibly types.
To eliminate this technological Tower of Babel, the data protocol that is at the heart of the Internet can be adopted to represent information in whatever form it takes: pulsed eclectically, flashed optically, clicked acoustically, broadcast electromagnetically or printed mechanically.
Using this Internet-0 encoding, the original idea of linking computer networks into a seamless whole – the Inter� in "Internet" can be extended to networks of all types of devices, a concept know as interdevice internetworking.
and he places special emphasis on a final point
The seventh and final attribute of I0 is the use of open standards. The desirability of open standards should not need saying, but it does. Many of the competing standards for connecting devices are proprietary. The recurring lesson of the computer industry has been that proprietary businesses should be built on top of, rather than in conflict with, open standards.�

end-to-end argument

the dumb network paradigm

My buddy Ed Ward has written a very good overview of this year's Ars Electronica conference. We should all head over there next year - AE is a huge shiny object on the conference landscape.

Many people claim insight in to Google's business plan, but I think Jason Kottke's nailed it, and it's really more than business. Google is building a kind of operating system, or at least acknowledging Tim O'Reilly's thought that the Internet should be seen, and used, as an operating system, not just a computer network.

Earlier today I received an email from Rob Lemos of cNet News... he'd seen my name and email as a MoveOne adherent - my name was exposed because of a misconfiguration and Google's robust search.

Not a huge deal: anybody who reads Weblogsky knows that MoveOn and jonl are in the same karass. What's funny, though, is that somebody unsubscribed me from MoveOn's emails. Laughable, because Moveon notified me that "I" had unsubscribed, and I was reconnected in a couple of keystrokes... far less effort than it took someone to unsubscribe me. [Link]

"This is extremely disturbing," said one subscriber, when contacted through e-mail. The subscriber asked that his or her name not be used. "I'm not sure if I should be worried or not, but I am," the person said.

Miguel de Icaza sold Ximian to Novell, a company that's betting its future on Open Source as the viable alternative to Microsoft. Says Miguel, quoted in an article published at technologyreview.com,

�There are a lot of motivations in the open-source community, like the freedom to choose software platforms and the chance to innovate,� he says, referring to the global community of programmers who write software that others are free to download and modify. �Now one of my motivations is that I�m being paid to do this, and I have to deliver products.�

Affinity Engines, a company that describes itself as "a technology company that provides a secure infrastructure for private-label online social networks," is suing Google over the technology behind Orkut. The company contends that its co-founder, Orkut Buyukkokten, took proprietary code with him – code that is the basis for Google's Orkut social network system. Wired News tells the tale, according to which Orkut B. had signed a noncomp agreement that should have prevented him from working on social network software for Google. It seems odd, then, that they would call attention to the problem by putting his name on the system.

The last paragraph in the Wired News story notes that "Affinity Engines said in the filing that it hopes for compensatory and punitive damages from Google, as well as royalties for revenue earned by Orkut." Since there doesn't seem to be a revenue model for Orkut anywhere in sight, one wonders what they were thinking.

My friend, the mad genius David Nuñez is sponsoring a robot show in San Antonio, during the First Annual Cam Carnival this Saturday, July 3. The Robot Group from Austin will be there. Lots o' music, too! [Link]

My brother Robert in Oregon sent this link to a Eugene Register-Guard piece about Symbiot Security, Inc., an Austin company where my former FringeWare partner Paco Nathan is Chief Scientist. Symbiot's Intelligent Security Infrastructure Management Systems protects networks against attackers, but what's new is that it can take the offensive, follow the attacker back to his lair and... well, what the product actually does at that point is not quite clear, for obvious reasons. The AP article notes a lot of hand-wringing by skeptics who feel retaliatory technology will just create more hassles, but Paco's smart enough to've assessed and mitigated risks. It'll be interesting to see where this goes... I for one am happy as a clam to see a response to the brain-dead malicious hacks that have become so much a part of cyberspace ecology. Wondering if they've figured out a way to take on spammers... [Link]

strawberry roots

this post

The defining breakthrough of the 2003 primary season may have been the accidental innovation of registering "members" of a campaign. People accustomed to registering at other web sites were happy to register at deanforamerica.com as they do elsewhere. From registration, it's a series of baby steps to Meeting Up, contributing, house partying, and all the rest of the Dean magic. Unfortunately, registering on any web site is a broadly acknowledged impediment to becoming involved. Who knows? For each supporter who signed up, perhaps there were 10 others who never took the trouble.

Mark Pilgrim of Dive Into Mark has a few choice words about Movable Type's new price structure, which still has a free level but will require people like Mark, who has eleven blogs set up with MT, to pay serious cash if they want to migrate to version 3.0. Some people are dropping MT in favor of WordPress, which is published with the General Public License. I haven't decided what to do with Weblogsky. WordPress does look interesting....

A silly New York Times article contends that IRC chat rooms are evil because they can be used by *anybody* to communicate *anything*. Sorta like the telephone, no?

NYT says: "The pirated copies of music, films, games and other software were generally distributed using a separate Internet file-transfer system, said a Justice Department spokesman, but the actual pirates generally used I.R.C. to communicate and coordinate with one another."

Okay, consider this version:

"The pirated copies of music, films, games and other software were generally distributed using a separate Internet file-transfer system, said a Justice Department spokesman, but the actual pirates generally used the telephone to communicate and coordinate with one another."

Or this...

"The whole idea behind I.R.C. is freedom of speech. There is really no structure on the Internet for policing I.R.C., and there are intentionally no rules. Obviously you're not allowed to hack the Pentagon, but there are no rules like 'You can't say this' or 'You can't do that.' "

Replaced with

"The whole idea behind the telephone is freedom of speech. There is really no structure ... for policing telephones, and there are intentionally no rules. Obviously you're not allowed to hack the Pentagon, but there are no rules like 'You can't say this' or 'You can't do that.' "

The NYT can be pretty lame, and I'm not just saying that because they spelled my name wrong earlier this week.

[Link]

DIY-IT: How Open Source is turning IT into a Do-IT-Yourself marketplace

Nobody owns it.
Everybody can use it.
Anybody can improve it.

this slide,

ubiquity creates infrastructure

how it oughta work,

The Webby Award nominees for 2004 include a bunch that I've never seen, which makes it a juicy list - hope to make time to surf through and make some new friends. In the weird category, I see one of my guilty pleasures, the Fortean Times site, which is where you'll find the news that really matters... weird objects in the sky, traces of monsters, quantum strangeness. Thanks, Pesco! [Link]

The City of Austin has just announced its Grants for Technological Opportunities (GTOPS) for 2004. The grants are awarded to nonprofit organizations for technology projects aimed at reducing the "digital divide". I was a GTOPS judge in both 2003 and 2004, and I was way impressed by the quality of applicants. And big surprise: the City of Austin is actually quite clueful about technology and giving great support for both community technology and the promising technology industries that have become so much a part of Austin's economic present and future.

Here are this year's awards:

BiGAUSTIN : Partial Award of $12,000.00

BiGAUSTIN is a non-profit Community Development Financial Institution whose mission is to help economically disadvantaged people to achieve economic self-sufficiency through microenterprise ownership. GTOPs will support BiGAUSTIN�s Micro-Tech project that provides instruction in technology tools for business planning, marketing and operations management. Micro-tech will utilize GTOPs funding to purchase additional equipment and hire a training coordinator.

Cine Las Americas � CineByte : Full award of $20,000.00

Cine Las Americas provides East Austin youth with structured digital media arts experiences that enhance their math and science skills, strengthen their connections to school, provide positive alternatives to antisocial behavior, and develop digital production skills. GTOPs will support CineByte�s purchase of additional computer and multimedia production equipment and will pay a portion of the salaries for a Program Coordinator and Instructors.

Computers for Learning : Full award of $5,700.00

Computers for Learning is a non-profit program that transforms retired computers into productive tools for AISD students in economically disadvantaged families. GTOPs will support Project Learning Link that provides all students at Mendez Middle School with computers and Internet access at home. GTOPs funding will provide the program with 90 modems and Measured Service Phone Lines for Internet access.

Girlstart : Partial award of $10,000.00

Girlstart is home to the first Central Texas technology center for girls. GTOPs will provide full scholarships to Camp Girlstart for 16 girls who cannot afford tuition to learn to create web pages, commercials, music videos and learn about careers in technology and multimedia.

Greater Austin Hispanic Chamber of Commerce : Partial award of $7,300.00

The Greater Austin Hispanic Chamber of Commerce Partnerships in Technology is a collaborative effort that includes non-profits, corporations and the community to address the digital divide. The project will provide bilingual computer literacy training to Austin youth, residents and businesses in East, South, Southeast and Central Austin. GTOPs will provide the funding for software licenses, curriculum, salary for a full time Lab Instructor, partial salaries for a Volunteer Trainer, and a portion of administrative expenses.

Knowbility, Inc. : Partial award of $15,000.00

Knowbility is a non-profit organization whose mission is to increase the independence of people with disabilities through technology. GTOPs will fund the Project Coordinator position for Knowbility�s Accessibility Internet Rally (a.k.a. AIR.) AIR improves access to technology for people with disabilities through a series of training and networking activities culminating in a one-day web-raising competition that provides accessible websites and hosting for dozens of non-profit groups at no charge.

River City Youth Foundation : Full award of $20,000.00

Based in Southeast Austin, the River City Youth Foundation provides cost-free educational, technological and life enhancement programs for �at-promise� youth ages 6-18 and their families. River City Youth Foundation will use its award to purchase computer equipment for its Computer Lab/Centro de Technologia and a portion of staff salaries.

I've spent most of the last year working with IC² Institute here in Austin on a project called Wireless Future. We recently published a well-received report on Austin's Wireless Future, and we're following that up with a national conference March 12-16. I urge you to register for the conference now if you're coming, because the price escalates from $195 to $225 on February 1st. Kevin Werbach delivers the opening presentation, Howard Rheingold is the keynote, and we have other great people including Cory Dcotorow, David Weinberger, David Isenberg, Col. Dave Hughes, and hopefully you! [Link]

As one of the "commons crowd" he refers to, I'm blown away by Adam Thierer's stunning cluelessness in his TechKnowledge Newsletter piece about "Howard Dean's Plan for the Internet." He complains that, by suggesting that the Internet be kept free and open for all to use, we're guilty of "collectivist" thinking that opposes free markets and property rights. He also notes that we're guilty of the worst possible sin - advocating democratic rule. He feels that radio spectrum should not be open to all, but should be regulated as a "market," and Larry Lessig notes the fallacy here:

Cato apparently believes it is a loss if the FCC doesn't get the chance to establish and regulate a "market" in spectrum; they like the idea of more middlemen, and hence more overhead, for innovators and technologists to negotiate over before they bring their products to market. Or at least, Cato's supporters (like Murdoch) like that picture best -- because with such a powerful and successful lobby throughout Washington, they'll be in a good position to "guide" this market best.

But test your own views: Think about the market for newspapers. In principle, we could imagine creating a property right called "the right to publish a newspaper" which the government would auction off in a particular market. Then people who wanted to publish a newspaper would not only have to compete in the market of newspapers, but also in the market for the right to publish a newspaper. I can understand the theory that says that such a "market" might improve efficiency. But I don't believe that theory is correct. I think one market -- the market in newspapers -- is quite enough. Nothing would be gained by adding another on top.

Isn't that different, you ask? Wouldn't a "property right" to publish a newspaper violate the First Amendment. Indeed it would -- and so too does much of spectrum regulation, as Benkler and I argued (subscription required) half a decade ago.

Following my nose here:

Nate Wilcox sent me a link to a a Daily KOS post mentioning an editorial Dave Winer wrote. Winer was responding to the Dean and Clark campaigns' adoption of Open Source software, as reported in a Wired News article about the Clark campaign's Open Source strategy. The KOS piece also points to a response to Winer blogged by Jim Moore of the Dean Campaign.

I was surprised at Winer's anti-Open Source rant:

One of the reasons American programmers aren't competing here (in America) is that users expect to get software for free, and in that environment little new stuff gets created, and we have to keep creating to justify the greater amount of money we make (over Indians). But if all we make are commodities, then Indians working for low pay beat Americans working for free. (People who work for free have no incentive to please users, or even create usable software.)

How sad to see two leading Democrats fall for, even feed the lie that they can create user-oriented software for free. Shame on both Dean and Clark. They went after the little guy. Who wants a president who does that. Not me. Still looking for someone worth supporting.

Besides which, Open Source isn't "free software." Even free software is, as Richard Stallman says over and over, "free as in freedom, not free as in beer."

As for commoditization, Winer would do well to think about these comments from Tim O'Reilly:

O'Reilly: ....Open source is a contributor to the commoditization of software, but it's not the only contributor. Open standards lead to commoditization. The Web browser is proprietary, but it's a commodity.

Basically, we're really seeing the development of something that's analogous to hardware with the IBM (Corp.) PC. If you look at what happened to the hardware business, there was a transitional period where everybody tried to play by the old rules. It wasn't until Dell (Computer Corp.) figured out that, no, the rules really are different, and the business levers are different, that we saw somebody figure out how to really leverage commodity hardware.

Ian Murdock, the guy who started Debian, and now runs a company called Progeny (Linux Systems Inc.) is right on track with this. Instead of seeing Linux as a product, he sees Linux as a set of commodity software components he can put together for different purposes.

slide show presentation

extremely