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.
Vulcan mind-meld gone bad?
Whole herds of my online contacts were sending me "trust requests" via the new people-focused search engine, Spock, and I finally took a few minutes to investigate. I found several articles that were generally positive, suggesting that a vertical search engine that aggregates data about people (not entirely new - think Zoominfo) might be worth checking out. I joined and invited a few of my friends. Two or three asked me about the site, and I responded that it seemed okay to me, though it did seem to be dumping a lot of email (trust requests) into my inbox. I saw a post about it on an email list and, having missed some of the context, asked the poster to say more about his issues. He didn't, but others responded, including my colleague Bill Anderson, who mentioned a Wired article about the site. I had also seen Nancy's post about the site, and followed up with her. She told me she was getting emails from the site reporting activity associated with her data there, even though she had never registered.
She gave me the link to a Wired News article about Spock that I'd seen but hadn't followed, assuming it was just the Wired News blog post about the site that turned up in a Google search, that I had already read. However the longer Wired News story suggests the Spock team might not be thinking through some of their decisions. For instance, Spock created a Facebook app similar to Mad Libs. Via this app, many people "stories about themselves and their friends, filling the blanks with scandalous terms," not realizing that the stories would be indexed and stored as part of Spock's aggregate data.
... they were horrified to discover that Spock used the terms they supplied to build public profiles on them and other Facebook members. (After being contacted by Wired News, Spock erased the tags from many of these profiles, but some were still visible at press time.)
Spock evidently has kinks in interpretive aspects of its algorithms: blogger John Aravosis of Americablog was tagged "pedophile" because he had used the term in writing about Congressman Mark Foley.
I still think Spock has an interesting approach that could be valuable, their stumbling launch has burned a lot of social capital. It might be hard to recover.
(Even if you're avoiding the site, check out Leonard Nimoy's page... it's only right.)
Here's a funny one: the headling reads "Mobile giants plot secret rival to Google" – not much of a secret if it's published in the Telegraph (with a followup at iTWire).
Faced with declining revenues as calls become cheaper, network operators are determined to secure a large slice of the lucrative search advertising market.
AT&T's strategy was going to be to charge the Googles of the world more money "quality of service," an idea that stirred up the net neutrality debate. It shouldn't be too surprising that they want to grab a piece of the $illions poured into advertising over their infrastructure... however it's not enough to build the search, they have to make it more attractive than Google, Yahoo, et al.
The networks may decide to go with an existing search engine and use their combined might to secure a majority slice of the income. Another idea up for discussion is the creation of a white label service, with a single advertising sales house and technical team, to which mobile networks could then apply their own brand.How many Second Lifers can dance on the head of a pixel?
A UK executive at one of the companies involved said: "There is a big play in mobile search that we need to be part of, and we are exploring those options at a very high level."
This is like a joke that starts, "two avatars walk into a bar..." Clay Shirky, who happens to be a human being (though I'm sure his avatar is out there somewhere), exposes funny numbers in media reports on Second Life, a graphical online community that's pretty hot at the moment, or seems to be. If you look at Second Life's web page, you see that it has over two million residents; Clay thinks that figure overestimates the number of actual participants, and he explains why. I've wandered into Second Life several times, and it appears to me, based on the numbers of avatars I see standing around, that there are only handfuls of people logged in, yet that trusty SL home page says there are over 18,000 logged in right now. I suppose that means they're on many different islands... I assume an island is a server, and each server has a limited capacity... we know that graphical virtual realities are constrained, especially when served over networks and carrying a lot of traffic.
A lot of people really like Second Life. I know several people who seem to spend a lot of time there, especially my friend Wagner James Au, who's become the official blogger for the Second Life community. He doesn't get into the funny numbers controversy, though an unofficial SL blog, Second Life Insider, is all over what Tateru Nino calls "a new media firestorm." In fact, I suspect only a very small group of people know that Second Life even exists, and a tinier number still will know about Clay's complaint (which is really more about the press playing fast and loose with numbers, than about Second Life). I only know about the controversy because Xeni blogged it at bOING bOING, which I seldom have time to read, though I read it more often than I read Clay's stuff. (Lamentably, because Clay's always a great read.) So who has time to follow all the various tempests and all the many teapots? And how do 18,000 people (let alone two million) find time to hang out at Second Life? Shouldn't these people be in a lab somewhere, curing cancer?
David Isenberg's held two conferences called "Freedom to Connect"; the idea first emerged from a private meeting in 2004 which I attended. Several of us were gathering thoughts on a private wiki, where Martin Geddes posted this:
Freedom to Connect is a thinking tool to enable you to think about the role of networks in the future.
It will give you the questions and the words you will need to participate in the discussions and decision-making about how and where networks are built, who has access to them and under what conditions and how we should be able to use them.
Freecon will lay out the reasoning behind enabling universal public access to these broadband communication networks and the benefits that can flow from that kind of access. It will also provide the case against restricting access, limiting publication or broadcast rights and controlling or prioritising the kinds of traffic that flow through those networks.
Armed with these tools you will be able to argue for the best possible communications future, against the constraints that vested interests will want to place on your ability to communicate. ...
We never got real clarify about the "freedom to connect" concept, often addressed since then by the more limited term "net neutrality."
Net neutrality isn't a great label because it doesn't mean anything to most who hear it and to many who say it. It's supposed to suggest a lack of bias in prioritizing data transmission... a small-d democratic Internet, where every packet has the same opportunity to reach its targeted location, so you can expect content you send to get where it's going expeditiously, and you can expect your requests for content to be honored in the same way.
The Internet is build around the end to end principle, which says that the network is relatively "dumb" with "intelligence" - e.g. communications protocols or rules - running at the end points. This "dumb network with smart terminals" that doesn't act on data in transmission any more than is necessary to manage the flow of data and acceptable performance along the routes from end to end. The dumb network is "neutral," it doesn't care what's in the data it's transmitting. It doesn't give priority to, say, streaming video (which is one reason your streaming videos occasionally stop for a few seconds while streaming).
From the perspective of those who operate broadcast or voice networks, the dumb network is a dumb idea. Because they focus on delivery of content that needs sustained flow, they advocate a network that gives priority to some packets over others... for better "quality of service." If you followed their lead to make the Internet more multimedia-friendly, you would change the character of the Internet - and it might be harder to ensure access to, say, Weblogsky with all that video streaming everywhwere. Bad for me, but okay for companies that deliver digital media and voice over IP - especially the former telcos that already dominate the network.
If we had much fatter pipes, more bandwidth, that would also mitigate their delivery problem. Why don't we have more bandwidth? Why is last mile service (to your door) constrained and asymmetrical? In part it's because they don't want a world where anyone and everyone can deliver content and services. A fully two-way symmetrical system threatens distribution systems that are already difficult to control.
I don't pretend to be an expert on networks, but I've learned a lot since I started paying attention. You can learn a lot, too, by joining the discussions at the Freedom to Connect BarCamp tomorrow evening. We've invited experts and hope to hear many sides of the 'neutrality' question. The future of the Internet is clearly a significant public issue, poorly understood by legislators and policy wonks, as well as the general public. There are many calls to action from interest groups coming from different perspectives, and ne telecom legislation that shouldn't be considered or passed until all of us, and especially lawmakers, have a clear understanding of the issues. (At the moment, legislators have a one-sided perspective, because what they hear on the subject comes from telco and cable industry lobbyists).
Tom Brown likes OpenIDTom, Austin Bootstrapper and founder of Stuffopolis, digs OpenID, which is a manifestation of the Identity 2.0 conversation. [Link] (If you're interested in Identity 2.0, a particularly useful link: Kaliya Hamlin's Identity Woman blog).
Myspace musicMySpace, evidently hoping to make some Real Money aside from ad revenues, will sell music, songs from 3 million or so unsigned bands that are hanging out on the system. [NY Times Link]
Songs can be sold on the bands' MySpace pages and on fan pages, in non-copyright-protected MP3 digital file format, which works on most digital players including Apple's market-dominating iPod.Gartner's high-impact technologiesThe bands will decide how much to charge per song after including MySpace's distribution fee, said Rusty Rueff, the chief executive of Snocap, which will manage the e-commerce service. Snocap provides digital licensing and copyright management services and was started by Napster founder Shawn Fanning.
Gartner Inc. says some of the technologies that will have the greatest impact on business over the next ten years are in the Web 2.0-social software realm... e.g. social network analysis and collective intelligence (which they define has individuals working together with no central authority to produce intellectual content... which is commons-based peer production, aka open source methodology).
Other high-impact technologies: location-aware applications, event-driven architecture, and semantic web. [Link]
"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 YouTube War"
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.
Ana Marie Cox notes that, while the architects of the Iraq War and their boosters argue that media portrays the war as a downer whereas soldiers on the ground could tell you all the good things that are happening, you can see that's not the case by surfing through the videos they're sharing on sites like YouTube. [Link]
By that logic, putting cameras in the hands of those soldiers on the ground should provide enough celebration for an "Up with Iraq" musical.Free the Bits!
There's music in a lot of the soldiers' videos, but precious little uplift. In "The War Tapes," one soldier/auteur complains frequently about the risks he and his comrades take to protect the property of the Halliburton subsidiary subcontracted to feed the troops: "Why the f--- am I sitting out here guarding a truck full of cheesecake?" he laments. After another guardsman supplies a Bush Administration-approved justification for their presence (freedom and democracy for the Iraqi people, stability in the Middle East), the cameraman asks, "tell me how you really feel." Deadpan, he continues: "After that happens, maybe we can buy everybody in the world a puppy."
Dana Blankenhorn does a great job explaining the real issue behind all the "net neutrality" wrangling. [Link]
There’s a cable silo. There’s a telephone silo. There’s a broadcast silo. There’s a wireless silo. There’s an Internet silo.Henry Jenkins' blog
Each silo has its own rules. Most have their own taxes. Each has its own monopolists.
The time has come to break up the silos.
Bits are bits. Cable sends digital bits that are turned into TV pictures. Broadcasters are going digital to send HDTV. Telephony switched to bits long ago. Wireless bits are all around us, on both licensed and unlicensed frequencies.
So the time has come for the government, and the market, to treat bits as bits. Since everyone is selling bits, all they really need are incentives to sell more. And since there’s no shortage of bits, there is no longer an excuse for content regulation. Put the power to censor at the edge, alongside the power to explore.
I've been looking forward to the publication of Henry Jenkins' book Convergence Culture, having discovered his work while putting together the digital convergence track for SXSW 2006. Today Cory posted a pointer to Jenkins' new blog, Confessions of an Aca/Fan: The Official Weblog of Henry Jenkins, which anticipates the book's release later this summer. (The blog is ordered in forward chronological order, which made me dizzy.) He's posted snippets from the book that'll give you an idea why you'll want to buy and read it:
In a culture which some have described according to information overload, it is impossible for any one of us to hold all of the relevant pieces of information in our heads at the same time. Because there is more information out there on any given topic than we can store in our heads, there is an added incentive for us to talk amongst ourselves about the media we consume. This conversation creates buzz and accelerates the circulation of media content Consumption has become a collective process and that’s what I mean in this book by collective intelligence. None of us can know everything; each of us knows something; we can put the pieces together if we pool our resources and combine our skills.... Collective intelligence can be seen as an alternative source of media power. We are learning how to use that power through our day to day interactions within convergence culture. Right now, we are mostly using collective power through our recreational life, but it has implications at all levels of our culture. In this book, I will explore how the play of collective meaning-making within popular culture is starting to change the ways religion, education, law, politics, advertising, and even the military operate."Enterprise Mashup
Everybody's doing it: now IBM's buzzing about "Web 2.0 in the Enterprise," with Rod Smith, IBM's vice president of emerging Internet technologies, saying
Customers I talk to are abuzz about Web 2.0 and the creation of popular Internet services that seem to quickly appear out of nowhere, becoming instant global phenomena that are enjoyed by the masses, including their employees. They want to apply that new paradigm to make their businesses act faster and grab new opportunities. There's no going back.An account of Smith's speech at the New York PHP conference goes on to say that he "unveiled a new Mashup prototype based on Web 2.0 technologies that applies to industry and business situations." It's called, simply, "Enterprise Mashup." Say what? It "blends external information and Web services (e.g., news feeds, weather reports, maps, traffic conditions and more) with enterprise content and services, instantly "mashing" them together to create a fast, flexible and affordable application for specific business needs. Mashup, derived from the hip-hop practice of mixing song samples, are a website or applications that combine content from more than one source into an integrated user application using open technologies like Ajax, PHP and syndicated feeds (RSS or ATOM)."
New business model: hip-hop for the Enterprise!
In financial services, the Enterprise Mashup can provide a unique Web "radar" that enable users to create a dashboard based on the interests of friends, relatives or coworkers from their computer's address book. For example, a stockbroker can drop a list of client names into the wiki-based Mashup maker and get dashboard view of their interest areas with links to topical blogs, wikis and relevant news feeds from all over the Web. The dashboard shows which client interests overlap with other contacts in your address book. With this view, you can easily get up to speed on areas most relevant to your client's portfolios, read current news stories and find new resources on investment tips you can share. The view also shows how your contacts relate to one another in areas of interests (or investing), so you, or your clients, can make new business connections and expand your corporate network.The future will be streamed to the personal device of your choice
Smith credited early pioneers for their innovations in social networking technologies for driving this new capability, and suggested, "there is pent up demand for a new category of applications that until now have been unaffordable for businesses to build. We feel the Enterprise Mashup project begins to address this demand and will help evolve the way business collaboration is conducted in the future."
Which products, used by few today, will be essential in five years? – posted at Yahoo! questions, and answered at length by Leonard Lin. First he considers what's changed since 2001:
- No iPod/ITMS
- No Cameraphone
- No Satellite Radio
- Blogging not mainstream
- Very little social media (Flickr, YouTube)
- No social networking sites
- No Wikipedia
- MMORPGs just taking off
So what's hot in five years? Leonard has a good list (here with my own comments):
- Software as a service becomes more standard. This has actually been a long time coming – consider the experimentation with the ASP (application service provider model) in the 90s. One question: to what extent will we trust the SAAS operators to hold critical data. I already find myself depending on Google and 37 Signals quite a bit, and I know other early adopters who are beginning to build their information environment with external services rather than local software and databases.
- Global identity framework, referred to by some as "Identity 2.0." This is a standard way to manage your identity and personal data online, precursors of which were W3C's Platform for Privacy Preferences and Microsoft's Passport. There's a bunch of people working on this.
- Digital Media – more and more of it, some cheap and some free, carried on many gadgets of many sizes, with wireless access to sync and stream effortlessly.
- Smart phones. Leonard says that phones will be the primary convergence devices in five years, though you might say that the primary convergence devices will includes voice communication of some kind, and increasingly advance positioning systems.
- RFID and spimes or network objects. These should take off once people get over the privacy paranoia... like it's threatening for the FBI to know where you've put your socks.
- Self monitoring or self instrumentation. Nike Plus is a good example: "tune your run." This is very cyborg, and we saw it coming in the early 90s (e.g. Menstat).
- Personal aggregators, or what Marc Canter calls Digital Lifestyle Aggregation. Marc notes that Apple and Microsoft are already moving on the concept.
- Shared everything... or online environments that promote sharing. I would add that the "consumer" is dead, replaced by the more active customer-as-collaborator.
From Information Aesthetics blog: "a set of aesthetic lighting displays on top of 9 buildings that visually samples the real-time activity levels from the inside of the buildings. the installation measures the movement & energy within buildings & makes them ambiently visible outside, so as people walk around the South Main gallery district of Memphis, they are able to see each building node & it's activity before they enter them." [Link]
The business of Second Life
Business Week this week features a set of articles on Second Life, the avatar-based virtual community operated by Linden Lab. I started to say created by, but online communities are co-created by their members, the folks who make the platform are like any city's infrastructure – they serve the community, but it's inherently beyond their control. What's great about Linden Labs is that they totally understand that, and they're all about creativity in building an infrastructure that brings out the best in the community – perhaps I should say the various communities – that they serve. Business week notes that "it's not all fun and games," there are business applications for Second Life (and potentially for other graphically-realized virtual worlds that might follow).
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.
YouTubeYouTube's success as an online aggregator of video snippets suggests that digital convergence is the wave of the present. However the system still faces challenges, [Link]
Others see potentially troublesome similarities between YouTube and the original Napster file-sharing service, which made it easy to download free music, often illegally. It was sued and eventually shut down for rampant copyright violations.Darknets, MPAA, and SXSW: irritation, perhaps; flame, perhaps not
Like Napster, YouTube is totally free. It is also filled with video cribbed from TV shows and movies - clips that violate copyrights.
YouTube "has a strong position right now, but we'll have to see how much staying power it really has," said Mary Hodder, chief executive of Dabble.com, a startup offering a way to track all the video cropping up on the web. "You can't help but wonder whether YouTube will eventually lose its audience the way Napster did."
Derek Powazek and Cory Doctorow post about the Darknet panel I asked J.D. Lasica to put together for the Digital Convergence Initiative's track at SXSW Interactive this year, and they seem to imply that the session was an angry shouting match between audience members and the MPAA's PR person Kori Bernards, who gamely fielded questions and complaints about the MPAA's technology-breaking restrictions. In fact everyone was civil. It's worthwhile to listen to the mp3 that SXSW posted – the session went very well though it was more about piracy, copyright and new technologies than about darknets per se. Kori said that the MPAA's antipiracy work is threefold... 1) working with law enforcement and governments around the world to stop Internet piracy, 2) attempting to educate consumers about copyright, and what you can and can't do, and 3) working to harness new technologies in ways that consumers will dig. She says they're trying to protect artists and prevent the abuse of new technology to steal copyright material. I.e. she said what you would expect, the MPAA party line, without reference to constraints that break technology and prevent fair use.
Kevin Smokler mentioned Paco Underhill's theory that, if retail spaces are used in unintended ways by consumers, it could be there's a problem in the way the public space is presented. He extends that to say that, if large numbers of people are downloading movies and infringing copyrights, that may not suggest that the public is looking to stick it to the man and break the law. Rather, the way we currently distribute content is not working. If the MPAA and its members can't do it fast enough, that's not necessarily the moviegoers' problem. Instead of saying those who download movies are criminals who want to violate copyright, perhaps the MPAA should provide a way to download movies and do so quickly, and legally. Kori: "I think that Hollywood hears your point. I think it's clear that you're the consumer of the future... everybody gets that people want what they want when they want. We also have to protect copyrights..." then she goes on to note that it's an exciting time in Hollywood ("may you live in exciting times"), that Hollywood wants to be accommodating. Hmmm.
Then David Thomas brought up mashups ("an entire industry to be made from people who want to do mashups"). People will pay for the right to create new works from samples. Ian Clarke: how do you determine who gets what revenue from a mashup?
Polycot's Maida Barbour noted that the MPAA (and RIAA) are not necessarily protecting artists. The very basis of representation has to change. Artists have to understand that their rights are not necessarily being protected in the way the machine is working right now. They have to understand what the ramifications are when they sell their works to the status quo vs having control over where their rights and permissions go. How can we better present the reality to artists, disseminate that information so that they will understand just what their rights are...
Oh, hey, I didn't mean to write a whole transcription... my point was that this was a civil exchange, rumors of flame and dangnation are hype-o-fied.
SXSW Interactive 2006
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!"The party just kept getting bigger!
Next Tuesday, March 14, the Digital Convergence Initiative of the Texas Technology Corridor (DCI) will host an event that's been in development now for almost six months. Originally the plan was to create a Digital Convergence track of programming for the SXSW Interactive Festival as well as a convergence showcase on the floor of the trade show, but we had ambitions for the showcase that would have been hard to realize without more time and funds, so we decided instead to hold a terrific party instead.
As we talked about it, the party turned out to be almost as ambitious as the showcase. We hired an events coordinator (the great Red Velvet Events) and pulled together a group of motivated, excited, and very creative volunteers. We also realized that we could leverage the first DCI workshop and testbed, on Adaptive Web Services, to create a prototype high definition feed between Austin and San Antonio. A terrific idea, but this also meant that we would have to host not one, but two parties, one in each city.
The great thing about the DCI crew, mostly volunteers, is that they didn't flinch when we suggested two parties and a network link of the highest quality (which is definitely a convergence item, and something that hasn't been done quite this way before). The project was conceived by Andrew Donoho of IBM, and we're getting help from AVW Telav, among others. We'll have performers in Austin and San Antonio, and they'll all be performing for both cities. We'll also have other multimedia jazz, the results of the Mobile Content Festival, and Brian Park's Flogiston chair experience.
If you want to join us and you won't have a SXSW Interactive badge, go to http://dcitexas.org/rsvp to sign up. You can also note your intention to attend at upcoming.org.
Everyware
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.Interactiving
Already intense SXSW Interactive prep is gathering more steam as we hit the last week before a four day explosion of activity that culminates in a couple of parties we've been working on, the EFF + Creative Commons Party on March 13 and the DCI C3 Party on March 14. Both great parties, and the DCI party will be a little more, an event that actually demonstrates convergent technologies - it's actually two parties in Austin and San Antonio with a high definition link so they can share content. That party also has a digital triptych, the world-famous Flogiston chair, and live music by Aaron Hamre and Darin Murphy. A bit of an AV challenge.
I've been so focused on party prep and coordination of a convergence track that I hadn't paid attention to the rest of the Interactive program, but the Austin Chronicle has several backgrounders in this week's issue.
Hope to make time to track non-DCI panels and presentations that relate to my more usual areas of focus - online community and social networking, strategic web, emerging technologies, etc. Suggestions welcome!
Community Wireless legislation: good news, for a changeSascha 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)
Convergence killed the video star?MTV is catching onto convergence, and CEO Judy McGrath wants to deliver services across many devices. The real question is not so much how well MTV keeps up with the technology, it seems to me, but whether MTV, now an established company, has its finger on the pulse of its audience. My sense of that aligns pretty well with Lewis Black's. However Business Week is less cynical:
...if MTV is to stay a trendsetter, she'll have to maintain the same kind of anything-is-possible spirit she has encouraged since MTV's inception. The key, she says, is creating a space where people feel safe and unafraid to fail: "Falling flat on your face is a great motivator. So is accident." Her mantra: "The smartest thing we can do when confronted by something truly creative is to get out of the way." That's pretty much what happened when two young producers came to McGrath in the early 1990s with a new idea for a dramatic series that didn't require hiring actors or writers. McGrath was intrigued. The idea was to film seven people living in a New York City loft over several months, following the soap opera of their daily lives and dropping a soundtrack of new tunes behind it. MTV's The Real World debuted in 1992, and reality TV was born. Its 17th season is shooting now in Key West.It hadn't really hit me that MTV was responsible for "reality" shows... that doesn't inspire confidence. I'm not holding much hope for MTV convergence. Robin Good's New Media Picks
Energetic Robin Good offers yet another, er, Goody: Sharewood Picnic, his new media picks of the week. A Good way to find cool tools. [Link]
SXSW 2006SXSW is just over a month away, and I've had my nose in projects for the Interactive conference for several months now, both related to pro bono work I've been doing – for the Digital Convergence Initiative of the Texas Technology Corridor (DCI), where I'm a board member, and for EFF-Austin, where I'm president. My Polycot partners and I figure this is important work relevant to our business. DCI is an economic development project without which the Central Texas region may fall even farther behind the rest of the (flat) world, and EFF-Austin is focused on technology policy that favors open systems and net neutrality, which are relevant to broad innovation in a world of creatively disruptive technologies and practices, and accelerating change.
But I digress (and potentially rant)... back to the original subject, SXSW Interactive. Working with a volunteers, I've been coordinating a digital convergence track that addresses the impact of the remixification of the world on creatives and developers as well as entrepreneurs and businesspeeps. The changes brewing are immense, and those of us who're early adopters are watching other parts of the world catch on faster while the U.S. slides, potentially into oblivion if we don't take steps, the first of which is to acknowledge that something's happening, and it's something that requires us to think hard, establish new neural paths, and not incidentally do a better job of teaching. It's not really accurat that no child's left behind when every child's left behind, though relative perception might make it seem that way. We need engineers, innovators, and smart policy in the USA, and DCI is one incubator for that sort of change, focused on the region along IH35 from San Antonio to Waco (but talking to many folks from many regions during SXSW Interactive).
Along with the track of sessions DCI's coordinated, there's a major event in the works, a party where we'll demonstrate convergent technologies while we're hanging out and having phun. The party's March 14 at Austin Ballet Theatre downtown (maybe we'll dance, too.) A very interesting team of forward-looking volunteers, including artists, technologists, and creative thought leaders have been brewing this party (or should I be lowering your expectations?)
The night before, March 13, EFF-Austin will throw its annual soireé with national EFF and Creative Commons. Not sure of the venue yet, but (as in the past) entertainment will include sets by Mr. Fang, Gift Culture, Kilowatts, and David Demaris. More about this party when we have the venue nailed.
"Bubble 2.0 Is a Bubble in Media"Digital Convergence creates confusion about the future of media; many smart people are trying to grasp what's changed, and what those changes mean. Scott Karp at Publishing 2.0 aggregates the thinking of several "2.x" usual suspects, and finds some of the best insights in Umair Haque's theory of media economics (link to PowerPoint).
The idea that were living in an attention economy is nothing new. But unless the media/technology industry starts listening to Umair and focuses on creating new ways to help people efficiently allocate their attention in a world of infinite options, the bubble will pop. And it wont be pretty.A "better Internet" is a complicated proposition
So lets focus on the user. What the user needs is help allocating a finite amount of attention. And the solution needs to be personal perfectly tailored to each users needs. The user needs a personal killer app.
What I like about this piece by Scott Canon at KansasCity.Com is that he addresses the the real complexity of "fixing" the Internet.
Theres 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 Presidents Information Technology Advisory Committee. We have to change as we go. The problems arent 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. Its not fun. Its expensive. Its pretty bad out there now. But its 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."
As the world turns...Wow, here's a clear sign of mainstreaming: CBS is podcasting soap operas!
DCI Mobile Content Festival
The Digital Convergence Initiative of the Texas Technology Corridor is holding a mobile content festival March 14, at a humdinger of a party we're putting together – I say we because I'm part of the DCI team, working on the party and a convergence track. The festival's awards will be presented at the party, which will also include music, convergent art/media/technology, and a lively bunch of technophiliacs. [Link to requirements for festival submissions.]
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.
Who needs film?Nikon is doing away with most of its film cameras, which means that my old Nikon F will become a real museum piece. (I no longer use the Nikon or my Canon EOS, favoring the very portable digital Nikon Coolpix 3100 – I'm on my second one, in fact, having worn the first out by carrying it everywhere in my pocket. Why would anyone use film when digital is cheaper, generally easier, and immediate? The only down side I see with the 3100 is lag, but I've factored that into my thinking by now – and I can always upgrade to a higher-end digital SLR where the lag is barely noticeable. [Link]
"Webcaster's Right"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.[Link] WFMU's Greed Watch
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....
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]
Darknet excerptsJD Lasica has created a torrent file that combines all the excerpts from his fine book Darknet: Hollywood's War on the Digital Generation that he's published online. [Link]
Year-end #1: Web 2.0The 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^)