My latest article for the Austin Chronicle, in the just-released "green crush" issue, is about sustainability and gaming. The article mostly focused on an interview with Pliny Fisk, who's thinking hard about serious, robust sustainaqbility games and how they might work. [Link]
Fisk has been thinking hard about how to build a green game that's engaging and fun but with serious real-world implications, such as location-specific modeling of the balance that sustainability requires. One kind of game would focus on and simulate real city environments. It would explore models that maximize efficiency and minimize the environmental impact of the built environment. Fisk sees four flows that would be relevant: materiality flow, energy flow, information flow, and monetary flow.Doc on the Glass Roots Revolution
"Any one of those things can work related to the others," he says, "but they can also work independently. One measure of a city, from an information standpoint, is how much of the information network is actually reinforcing that place. How many newsletters and how many organizations and how many information sources are actually supporting and talking about the city, its people, its business?" There are also social information flows. "You could link people based on similar attributes and needs and so on. It's very much a peer-to-peer and can be a place-oriented way of operating." So an eco-game might include a city-centric social network.
Doc Searls has nuts and bolts info that lines up pretty well with my posts at Worldchanging about the DIY home of the future (here and here). Doc asks us to imagine what happens when it's really easy for home-hacking everyday people to run fiber optic cabling throughout the house bridge fibre to ethernet.
Where it goes is the independent hacking together of everything: a convergence of cheap, mobile and hackable. Add to that the half-zillion open source code bases now populate the world of useful tools and building materials, and you have the ingredients -- if not yet the recipe -- for remaking infrastructure from the edges inward.Chris Messina on OpenID
That edging inward is a movement that the phone company does not own, and can not own. And it won't just happen with wiring and wireless. It will happen with devices as well. The consumer electronics business will turn gradually in to the producer electronics business: a new category in which ordinary hackers far outnumber big manufacturers. In time, the few will follow the many, even as the many continue to follow the few.
Meaning that consumer electronics won't go away. It will just become the reciprocal of producer electronics. The two will work together. Because they'll have to. Those things that only large companies can do will continue to be done by those. And those things that can only be done by small companies and individuals will continue to be done by those. The difference is that the latter group will grow. A lot.
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]