Ross Mayfield: Personal Systems

Lazyweb for RFID

Fri, 11 Jul 2003 20:03:27 GMT

I want RFID paper clips and disposable file folders. There has got to be a way to handle paper better than this.

Bloomba

Sun, 06 Jul 2003 18:52:58 GMT

I am about to switch back to a Mac, just as I found the windows email client I was looking for. Bloomba, by Stata Labs, is a simplified email client that contains the power features Outlook is missing.

Namely damn powerful Search. Also RSS support, anti-spam (Consumer Reports just rated their SAproxy component best in class, it also works with other email clients) and grouping tools. Grouping of threads and subscriptions is part of the solution for Occupational Spam.

They made switching easy. Automatically copies emails from old clients to make at least a test drive effortless.

But the main thing is having Google-like search on my email client. Everybody need this.

Oh, and there is a Bloomba blog.

Socialtext Raises Angel Round

Mon, 23 Jun 2003 14:10:56 GMT

Great news. Socialtext closed an Angel round of funding with some really great people, including:

Reid Hoffman, CEO of LinkedIn and former EVP of Paypal
Joi Ito, Venture Capitalist with Neoteny
Mark Pincus, former co-founder, CEO and Chairman of SupportSoft
Erik Josowitz, former VP of Product Strategy of Vignette
Oakstone Ventures
Freedom Technology Ventures

This new funding provides resources to accelerate the development of enterprise social software, improve how we serve our customers, and give customers greater confidence that we will be there for them.

But it's more than that -- it's a network of exceptional people. A little while back, Pete, Adina, Ed and I talked about who we wanted to work with and who we thought "got it." Raising money these days is a challenge, and it says a great deal that were able to do so with the people we wanted. I don't think we could have picked a better group. Here's what Ed Niehaus, general partner of Freedom Technology Ventures LLC said:

"We're proud to back Socialtext's experienced founding team. The company's customers tell us that Socialtext made it simple for them to discover this new flexible communication form, the Wiki, and use it to create, discuss and decide. Such early customer satisfaction is rare for a new business medium, and it makes us confident that the company will have an impact."

Since the end of last year we have accomplished a great deal with relatively few resources. We developed a tremendous advisory board and I must credit Clay, David, Doc, Jerry, Kevin, Mitch, Ward & Zack with keeping us on the wiser track. We now have over 20 enthusiastic customers. Our product is moving beyond being the the first of its kind to one that has had real success advancing teams.

So what's to come? We have a new release of our product soon, but let's not get ahead of ourselves. Mostly its continuing to spend time with customers and focusing on their needs. It sounds a little cliche, but that's what its really all about. Great products develop in social context.

Capitulation & Upgrade

Thu, 19 Jun 2003 16:25:55 GMT

Bought more storage for my Radio Weblog. I am planning to move off of Radio to MT soon, but here's my rationale for continuing to invest in this platform.

Pros:

Sunk costs
Rather give my money to Dave than some convicted monopolist
Switching costs (really a Con, on many levels)

Cons:

Radio Userland stopped innovating and now demands others to do so for it
The aggregator is the reason I bought the product. When we took a look at Many-to-Many's RSS stats it showed that the vast majority of RSS subscribers were Radio users. But if my aggregator had less funk and more jibe it might not fail to subscribe to MT feeds as much. And stand alone aggregators are improving. And then I wouldn't have to deal with the Image Spam problem (posts with large images made by people with large screens that stretch your reader beyond the limits of your screen).
Did I mention I am planning to upgrade?

Communication and Collaboration Convergence

Tue, 17 Jun 2003 20:54:45 GMT

Uh oh, there's that word again. Convergence. The solution to all our problems.

Siemens has released OpenScape, which integrates phone, voice mail, e-mail, text messaging, calendaring, instant messaging, and conferencing services. Its all centered on IM to synchronize use of different modes of communication, with a SIP server (Session Initiation Protocol) for telephony integration. OpenScape 1.0, however, requires Microsoft's forthcoming Windows Server 2003 and Greenwich collaboration server. Its the latest in a long line of communication and collaboration solutions to leverage Outlook as a platform. And its estimated to cost as much as $400 per seat.

This may just be unified messaging redux, but Mike from Techdirt is right that it has potential as a productivity tool if its simple enough for people to use. People use many modes of communication. Optimize only a one or two and you may make communication in its entirety even more sub-optimal.

With the falling cost of more traditional communcations (original videoconference sessions were $100k a pop), putting users in the driver seat is not a bad thing. Problem is this approach of deep integration creates greater costs and risks.

Corporate IM is a good center for user management of complexity, but who knows if they have gotten this right. If as advertised, its designed to fit within workflow, it may be on the wrong track. Communication is not a process, its an informal practice whose patterns cannot be pre-defined.

Vonage, Hacks & Arbitrage

Wed, 28 May 2003 16:06:58 GMT

The way Joi and Gen are using Vonage is a new arbitrage method for international long distance. International telephony has always been about arbitrage (risk free profit). Technology driven cost reduction outpacing regulatory regimes that prop up prices. Here's a brief history of international long distance arbitrage and a suggestion for a next stage.

International telephony was originally governed by the ITUs Global Accounting Rate system. A body of national PTTs that would convene and negotiate bilateral settlement rates. For example, the US and German would tally up the traffic imbalance as measured in minutes and agree on a settlement rate. Problem was, country code #1 had significantly greater amount of outbound call volume. With the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN), to this day, calls are paid by the originating carrier to transit and teminating carriers. The US negotiated volume discounts that were significant for its outbound calls.

When the PC came around some smart entreprenuers realized an arbitrage condition existed and the technology to take advantage of it was affordable. They invented Call-Back. An individual customer living abroad calls to a PC in the US, enters the country code of the final destination number (the hub country or another) and then hangs up. The individual is called back by the PC while the PC calls the destination country and recieves a dial tone for the destination country. The settlement fee is paid from the hub country (the lower outbound US rate).

Next came Refile, which turned this arbitrage method from a consumer service to a wholesale operation. Competitive carriers in foreign countries (many were cropping up because deregulation was taking place at the same time, first in the US, then the EU and culminating with the Uraguay round WTO accord that liberalized 90 countries) sent calls in aggregate over International Private Lines to the US. A re-file carrier re-originated calls from the US to foreign countries, initially saving in most cases over 500%.

Calling cards allowed re-file carriers to provide consumers a way circumvent originating carriers and get to their re-file hub.

Next came Internet Telephony. Initially it was used for transit on private lines to take advantage of compression. Then some carriers used the public Internet for transit with some sacrifice for quality. Some new businesses like ITXC leveraged redundancy in transit to increase quality.

Consumer Internet Telephony didn't prosper until now because of the variable quality of transit as well as the interface at the ends. Vonage has changed that with some success (just reached the 25,000 subscriber mark). But its primary focus is domestic long distance. It probably doesnt provide the service internationally both because of the quality of transit, complexity of serving diverse markets and potential regulatory backlash in foreign countries.

What's interesting about Joi & Gen's use, and they aren't the only ones, is they are setting up their own arbitrage method -- originating calls abroad, transiting over the Internet and terminating through Vonage's network (mostly over the Internet) and re-file agreements. Vonage's greatest value is a persistent circumvention of local monopoly carriers (where most of the cost of a call resides because of the above driving efficiency in international markets), but its value for international transit is worth consideration.

It will be interesting to see what Vonage hacks arise. There are a few options created by its bridge feature -- If you're on the phone with party A, you can flash, dial #90, dial party B's number, # and hang up. It then calls party B and the call continues between A and B. A hack that allows you to call to your Vonage box from your wireless phone and have it bridge you to an international destination seems tantilizing.

A hardware hack to make the box more portable would be invaluable (I would rather pay for a dedicated DSL connection from a hotel room and then use Vonage to bypass their telephony toll trolling). Particularly with WiFi support.

When arbitrage conditions exist, as with wireless carrier rates compared to terrestrial or hotel customer capture, the market ultimately converges upon it. Vonage has the potential to be a platform. But if regulators try to stem its diffusion another call delivery method will just take its place.

Paying for Software

Mon, 26 May 2003 15:00:54 GMT

Dave expands upon his rationale for paying for software: "If you pay nothing for software, you probably won't die from it, but you may lose data, you're virtually certain to waste time, and at some point, money."

I had to learn to pay for software. Not the hard way, mind you. Growing up in Palo Alto distorted my propensity to pay. My first exposure to software was when user groups were rampant. 3 1/2 floppies were circulated as the norm at user group meetings. Social networks were the source of service. The hardware was damn expensive and it seemed natural that software sharing was the exercise.

Some of my elementary school friends had parents who were Apple developers. They had the best stuff. We hacked together games in BASIC on Apple IIs, traded in the computer lab at middle school and the worst punishment concievable was a flying eraser from the teacher (Mr. Spinoli's favorite pastime was flinging blackboard erasers at students in good fun and occasional accident).

I still hesitate to purchase packaged software and instead often simply go without. Maybe its all the times I purchased software only to become rapidly obsolete by new generations of hardware that purposely obfuscated backward compatibility. Or when I bought tools that ended up not being suitable for the job. Where I really hesitate is upgrading my operating system; feels like donating bottles of Thunderbird to a wino instead of buying them a happy meal.

But all that changed when I could buy software online. Not because it plays into impulse purchase proclivity. The ability to trial software or have a lite version with an easy upgrade path reduced my risk and led me to greater purchases.

Now I have turned on the spigot. Not because I work in the software industry, like paying for the right for customer support or have some enlightened consumer guilt. Because I can buy software as service. There is a confidence instilled from software that changes over time. Bugs get addressed, demands are met and risk is reduced. I don't care where my data lives, so long as it works for me. Better yet, when the software comes with information services it becomes alive.

I buy software when I know it will get better, rather than worse, over time. Appreciate appreciation. But that's just one consumer's take.

Alert Scope

Tue, 20 May 2003 22:37:29 GMT

Microsoft Research's Scope:

[anil dash's daily links] Gives a whole new expression for what's on your radar.

Self-organized Learning

Wed, 14 May 2003 22:50:38 GMT

Sebastian Fiedler offers another perspective on blogs and learning:

Paper Draft for BlogTalk 2003. I have published my paper draft [Personal Webpublishing as a reflective conversational tool for self-organized learning] for BlogTalk 2003. Comments and feedback are highly appreciated...

...An efficient learning conversation requires that the content and process is controlled but at the same time the individual contributions of the participants cannot be totally specified before the conversational encounter unfolds....

I think it is quite illuminating to conceptualize the emerging networks of personal Webpublishing outlets as a giant, self-actualizing conversational learning environment for self-organized learners...

Personal Webpublishing changes this picture considerably. Suddenly we are not dealing with artifacts alone. Behind every personal Webpublishing outlet is another self-reflective being, another node of personal knowing, often ready to engage in conversational exchanges of various kinds...

Lilia's comments to the paper [via Mathemagenic]

The Other 80%

Wed, 14 May 2003 22:43:26 GMT

Jay Cross has posted a whitepaper on Informal Learning - the other 80%, in support of Friday's eLearning Forum event.

Jay points out that learning is fundamentally social and traditional systems fail to support informal learning.

Informal learning takes place within social networks as an outcome of conversation.

Email Doesn't Self-Organize

Fri, 09 May 2003 21:25:26 GMT

Ward Cunningham (one of Socialtext's advisors) on blogs, email and wikis:

Cunningham also draws many distinctions between wikis and another popular means of Web communication: blogs, or Weblogs. "Blogs and wikis are polar opposites in many ways, though they're seen as similar" he says. "A blog tends to reflect the biases and opinions of an author, while a wiki is more like an open cocktail party. In a wiki you try to speak without a strong voice, seeking consensus to create something permanent, while on a blog you're developing your own voice and it's very much about your voice."

Cunningham also points out that you can go away from a wiki and come back at any time to pick up a conversation without much inconvenience, which isn't the case with e-mail-centric group discussions. "E-mail doesn't self-organize," he emphasizes.

In terms of future trends for wikis, Cunningham says "there's a lot of interest in combining the timelessness of wikis—the fact that you can go away from them and come back—with the attention-grabbing aspect of blogs. Integrating blogs and wikis is a hot item right now."

Post-PC Digital Lifestyle at Work

Fri, 09 May 2003 20:24:55 GMT

Gary Boone:

What happens after PCs are ubiquitous and people are no longer buying technology for more features, speed, or power? We buy lifestyle, according to this analysis from Kevin Werbach's Werblog.

Apple is becoming something much closer to Sony: an integrated digital media company. Sony sells computers, but no one would call Sony a PC company. What it does best is create unique platforms and experiences, then market the hell out of them. That describes the new Apple as well. The heart of the company is the digital lifestyle, not a box.

This perspective raises a question for corporations: What's the digital lifestyle mean at work? Will corporations continue to buy powerful, feature-laden enterprise systems or will we create new, lightweight distributed tools, like blogs and wikis, that help teams and organizations reach strategic goals?

Certainly the popularity of Instant Messaging is an example of lifestyle technology that has been brought into the workplace without the consent of the central IT staff. Blogs and wikis are seeing similar uptake for informal collaboration among teams. This trend is what's new: informal, edge, distributed, collaborative tools are creating a lifestyle approach to team work. They contrast with the traditional system approach represented by centralized software installations that impose behavioral and process requirements to fit the workers to the software.

Sounds like a lifestyle I would like to live, wouldn't you?

Simplest Filing That Could Possibly Work

Fri, 09 May 2003 00:08:02 GMT

Rick Klau on the ABC's of personal organization:

Who would have thought that one of the most powerful personal knowledge management tools available to us is the simple alphabet.nbsp For a while now I've been using the ideas of David Allen and his Getting Things Done (GTD) process for organising oneself...

One of the simplest yet most powerful ideas within GTD is the reduction of noise in a personal filing system. How do you file your own reference materials? Two parameters drive the system.

1) It must be easy and fun to file materials otherwise you won't

2) It must be easy and fun to find materials otherwise you won't trust the results of step 1.

Sounds like a wiki pattern language.

Google's Exponential Returns

Wed, 30 Apr 2003 03:18:49 GMT

There is more to Google than useful, simple and powerful products. In the end there will be less Harvard business school cases about its product than its organization. At Etech, first employee Craig Silverstein discussed Google's product development process and the systems that support it. What's different is the use of smaller organizational units (groups of 3 on average) supported by lightweight inter-group communication with a culture of sharing.

The danger of smaller organizational grouping is the potential redundancy or splintering; and the difficulty of realizing economies of scale. The danger and difficulty is overcome through systems, but not the typical enterprise systems that seek to automate processes. The benefit is greater speed and agility (scope).

But in such knowledge intensive work you can't automate what is largely practice. Instead, light weight tools like wikis and weblogs support what people need to get things done and in scale the system yields emergent properties.

Google uses product much like a wiki called Sparrow Web to develop community-shared pages. Originally developed by Xerox PARC it offers lightweight editing without knowing HTML. Its less flexible than a wiki, but works well for functions like submitting great product ideas, launch process forms, reporting and weekly snippets to a common knowledge base. Craig said its "suprisingly good for communication."

It also helps that they acquired the leading blogging software company and they are eating their own dog food. When Pyra's first move when they joined the company was to set up Intranet blogging, "they knew they hired the right people." Blogger serves a relatively older tradition of having people contribute snippets of what they worked on during the past week. But now their software, widely adopted, is giving different people their own voice in the system.

Unlike other organizations they have more people freely communicating about what they are up to and sharing what they learn. Allowing teams to be smaller, yet effective as a whole. And because each communication creates linkages, stays with the organization and builds upon the past -- there are exponential returns to sharing.

What happens when these simple tools are combined with Google's search engine is fairly obvious. The best content and experts emerge.

When an organization scales, its systems and organization are a key component of its competitive advantage. Knowledge intensive companies have struggled to find a mix of both for leverage. Google's greatest innovation may prove to be within and seductively simple.

Without formalized information flows imposed by many enterprise systems, Google has been able to let its employees make their own associations. The right systems and organizational openness fosters social capital within the organization -- which decreases risk and is foundation of intellectual capital.

Social Software Alliance

Thu, 17 Apr 2003 14:50:41 GMT

CALL FOR DISCUSSION: Social Software Alliance

PURPOSE AND SCOPE

We propose a trade group of social software developers and other interested parties who work together to create and promote open standards for the social software community. Social software blends tools and modes for richer online social environments and experiences. Some examples of social software are weblogs, wikis, forums, chat environments, or instant messaging, and related tools and data structures for identity, integration, interchange and analysis.

Social software is a dynamic and constantly evolving environment, rich with possibilities to create better connections between people. With a growing number of active developers, we need a central nexus to help drive the process of coordination and interoperability between different developers' products.

The alliance will:

aid discovery of developers working on synergistic projects and standards
assist in shaping open standards that mesh well with other alliance and Internet standards
help promote each standard to gain wider adoption

The fast-paced nature of the social software space now argues for developing light-weight, easy-to-implement standards, following the Internet tradition of rough consensus and running code, but perhaps moving faster than the larger standards bodies. It is expected that those standards promulgated by the alliance which become widely adopted will be proposed to the appropriate general standards body or bodies: W3C, IETF, ISO, etc.

PROPOSED SCHEDULE

First CFD published: April 16, 2003
SSA Happening (voice/online meeting): April 18, 2003 (time TBD based on participants' time zones)
BoF at Etech conference: April 22-25, 2003
SSA Happening (voice/online meeting): May 2, 2003 (time TBD based on participants' time zones)
Alliance announced with founding members: May 15, 2003

DISCUSSION

There is an email list and a wiki set up for the purpose of discussing the formation of an alliance.

list subscribe: blank email to social-subscribe@lists.polycot.com
unsubscribe: see List-Unsubscribe header in any list email
help with list server: social-help@lists.polycot.com
digest: social-digest-subscribe@lists.polycot.com
archive: http://lists.polycot.com/cgi-bin/ezmlm-cgi/2/

wiki: http://www.socialtext.net/ssa/
registration for editing: http://www.socialtext.net/ssa-registration/

It is expected that similar and/or additional discussion and collaboration tools will be migrated to the alliance's web presence, once it is created.

FOUNDING MEMBERS

Danny Ayers
Ideagraph

Stewart Butterfield
President, Ludicorp Research & Development Ltd.

Marc Canter
Chairman, CEO Broadband Mechanics Inc.

Ward Cunningham
Cunningham & Cunningham, Inc.

Greg Elin

Noah Glass
Listenlab, LLC

Mark Graham
VP of Technology, iVillage

Meg Hourihan
Co-founder & Director, The Lafayette Project

Peter Kaminski
CTO, Socialtext Inc.

Elizabeth Lawley
Asst. Professor, Rochester Institute of Technology

Jon Lebkowsky
CEO, Polycot Consulting

Kevin Marks
Instigator, mediAgora

Ross Mayfield
CEO, Socialtext Inc.

Matt Mower
Novissio Ltd.

Mitch Ratcliffe
President, Internet/Media Strategies Inc.

Clay Shirky

Benjamin Trott
Co-Founder & CTO, Six Apart Ltd.

Mena Trott
Co-Founder & CEO, Six Apart Ltd.

Paolo Valdemarin
Evectors Software

David Weinberger
Writer

Nancy White
Online facilitator, Full Circle Associates

Utility Maxima

Thu, 17 Apr 2003 07:01:51 GMT

Tim Oren provides some constructive feedback on the latest Ecosystem of Networks post:

First issue: This version of the diagram is centered on the individual. Fair enough, that's the unit of action. However, the 'network value' schemes are all more or less at the level of the entire system. The issue of the 'commons failure' is notorious in all forms of collaboration, and particularly in groupware. Commons failure results when individuals optimizing their own utility does not result in overall systematic optimization of utility (handwaving the small matter of freedom). Since this framework doesn't provide a way to compare the two, it's got a ways to go.

Good point. I put the Me in the center to contextualize, but I didn't adequately address "...the bipolarity opposition between the Net and the Self." Note to self, need another framework to explain how self-serving utility pursuits result in emergent value. Note to Net, feel free to chime in.

Second issue: All of the value functions are positive. That can't be right. If it were so, then networks in each of the categories would grow continually. That not only invalidates the classification scheme, but flies in the face of everyone's experience that serious problems arise when trying to scale up. The lack of a model for individual utility certainly plays a role here. But there are costs at the whole group level, i.e., coordination and rule making, that are unaddressed. Considering that this particular post is within a context of designing network and software systems to reduce such individual and group costs, coming up with a conceptual framework for the downside is as essential as for the benefits.

Great point. A big problem from what I know of social network analysis is that it assumes all links are positive (read: need for Opinion Tags). Also, there is a matter of total system costs. But my spreadsheet time is being put to better use for now.

Third issue: Competition. No network or individual exists in a vacuum, particularly in these media saturated days. It's a zero sum game over individual's time, and in some cases money. IIRC from my CompuServe days, we found that the average forum (syn. bulletin board, newsgroup) user participated in two and a fraction groups. To poke at another received wisdom, Sarnoff's Law doesn't explain the competition among 'political' networks, and why some smaller size, niche audiences support higher revenue and margin per user. Metcalfe's Law arguably has no proven relationship to overall value, but is simply a rubric that explains why some platforms or networks will 'run away'' from others in a competitive situation.

What I have described so far has yet to introduce the dimension of time or constant of change. First I have identified constraints, differences in modes and scaling and value measurements that could apply to a snapshot of a whole system. No such thing as a static system or a closed system, however.

People have limits. Only so many active working relationships, social transactions one can take part in and things to subscribe to. Recognize this scarcity underpins an economy of attention and participation energy.

The new abundancy is decreased transaction costs for shifting attention and participation energy. This in and of itself increases competition of groups and ideas; Says Law drives the market to arbitrage abundance, yielding diversity through Ricardian specialization. Value is created not by new ways to scale -- but to speed, scale and scope.

I find this an interesting discussion and thought experiment, just because we are now able for the first time build an approximate instrumentation and modeling framework, given that blogs, e-mail, IM, and so forth amount to taking reasonably large chunks of human interaction and sticking them into a virtual test tube. (Google, blogger, and Terry Winograd take note.) My suspicion is that we will find once again that it's the people that are the scale determining factor, and it's no accident at all that the local utility maxima for group size are about those of a tribe, and family or working group. [Due Diligence]

Organizations realize utility functions not just how they define hierarchy and process to scale activities. I am not in pursuit of expanding the size of the tribe or group. I do believe there is tremendous value to be achieved when people are part of complex adaptive systems. Sharing, social filtering and opinion tagging drives attention across spaces. Attention and memory drives and underpins edge logic for participation energy. Economies are created through dynamic decisions of what to focus the organization upon -- at a lower cost to process actvities (speed), sequence them (span) or change them (span).

Slices of Social Software

Wed, 02 Apr 2003 22:36:22 GMT

Matt Webb offers some slices of consideration for Social Software. A good ramble.

...There's no single defining feature of social software, no common thread. But some attributes which may or may not be shared: software which uses as data social relationships/properties; software which acts as an intermediary in social activity (conversation, decision making, wearing the same band's tshirt, clapping); software which uses human nature in the design process; software that has moved from providing an environment to providing an environment and tools, or more...

Ratings in Social Software

Tue, 01 Apr 2003 05:30:41 GMT

Brit Blaser on the role of ratings in Social Software:

...I can't imagine software more social than Xpertweb which, though its purpose is unabashedly commercial, intends to socialize its users by the character of user ratings it tracks and publishes. You might say that Xpertweb is a set of values expressed through users' valuations. As Einstein is quoted, "Everything that can be counted does not necessarily count; everything that counts cannot necessarily be counted."

Social software then, at a minimum, should at least make sure that things that matter are easier to count than they are without the software. Any other attributes may make the software elegant or compelling or easy to use, but the social part seems to be the trick of newly exposing communal activities or opinions that were not previously visible.

So that sets the bar for social software. We recognize it because it lets us start to count things we care about, but the designer has to figure out what those things are. Presumably they're not obvious yet, or we'd already be counting them. What characteristic, theme perhaps, might indicate something needs new counting tools?

Harkening back to the days of yore, in the medevil bazzar, some crazy guy was probably going around trying to get everyone to agree on the concept of coinage. Initially people resisted. A cow is a cow and a sheep is a sheep and never the twain shall meet. If I think gold is worth one thing and you think its something else and lordy know what it will be tomorrow, how can one commodify? But, low and behold, you can carry a coin in your pocket and a cow only with great difficulty.

People are in constant pursuit of the commoditzation of everything. Not just goods, mind you. We abstract concepts in commonly digestible forms. We archetype and then debate over value. Things must be simplified to be social or we end up talking about different things.

A rating is a price. We define a good and deliberate over its value through signals. Sometimes we express price not for transaction but to communicate value in its simplest form (a guy at Stanford won a Nobel Prize on this). A price is the simplest method of communicating value.
A rating is a mode of communication. What I value when. When I send a smiley to someone, its a rating.
A rating is a signal of trust. Whom I value when. Trust is credit and credit is priced.

If there is a theme that indicates we need new counting tools its when things become too complex and when we need to simplify through the language of a rating.

Where Worlds Collide

Sun, 30 Mar 2003 16:22:00 GMT

Means to Ends.

Jamie Lewis: Ends and Means: Identity in Two Worlds.

Jamie is President of The Burton Group (which he founded with Craig Burton) and one of the world's leading authorities on enterprises, networks and related matters. [The Doc Searls Weblog]

The Net must accommodate more than one form of digital identity. Identity is contextual. It has many aspects. Customer-centrism is only one aspect of the digital identity infrastructure we need. So, it stands to reason that the identity infrastructure will be polycentric: flexible, dynamic and capable of pivoting and changing according to the context...

These different forms of identity: customer-centric, government-issued, and enterprise-managed, will develop in parallel, more or less...

Both the World of Ends and World of Means are right and inevitable. The gray area is where worlds collide, what Doc calls Our Identity, where means and ends will continually negotiate. The resulting friction and absence of trust may call for intermediaries that provide proxy value and a balance of control.

Eric Norlin is right that organic growth may prevail, particularly in the area of Our Identity. Identity is a competition of networks. Clay Shirky recently suggested the strength of the organic network growth of Earlynets over Permanets for physical wireless networks, which I believe applies to logical networks as well.

Fotonotes

Wed, 26 Mar 2003 17:34:33 GMT

Fotonotes: Every Picture Can Tell a Story. An amazing tool for adding metadata to media in an easy to use way...

Greg Elin has been working for a while on a new kind of photo-related application. At PC Forum he showed me the latest beta, and I'm ready to say that this is one very cool piece of work.

It's called Fotonotes. Basically, it's a tool for annotating JPEG pictures inside the pictures themselves. Here's an example.

I took the above picture at last month's Demo conference. Left to right are Dan Bricklin, Les Vadasz and Mitch Kapor.

Now, here's a view of the picture after editing it in Fotonotes and rolling my mouse pointer over Dan's face:

I created the same "meta-content" with Vadasz and Kapor, and could have annotated other parts of the photo. Although I only put their names in the picture (the text is stored literally as part of the JPEG), I could have written long passages about each of them, information that would pop up.

Now, this doesn't work inside all browsers yet, as it obviously should. Elin says some browsers do support it, and he's working on others.

He adds, in an e-mail, that the screen shots I posted are using "the cross-platform, downloadable Java application. The web-based version allows all browsers to view stories online, but adding of new stories via the browser is not yet supported by all browsers."

This expands possibilities for user-generated Web content. Weblogs have been about text, with pictures added. What if someone posts a picture of this kind, where various parts of the picture can tell a variety of stories? Or what if we can link, transparently, an audio stream? This could get interesting, fast. [Dan Gillmor's eJournal]

World of Ends

Fri, 07 Mar 2003 05:41:48 GMT

Dr. Weinberger and I decided to sum up a whole bunch of stuff in one big site: World of Ends: What the Internet Is and How to stop Mistaking It for Something Else. Dr. W. explains more here.[The Doc Searls Weblog]

The Nutshell

1. The Internet isn't complicated
2. The Internet isn't a thing. It's an agreement.
3. The Internet is stupid.
4. Adding value to the Internet lowers its value.
5. All the Internet's value grows on its edges.
6. Money moves to the suburbs.
7. The end of the world? Nah, the world of ends.
8. The Internet’s three virtues:
a. No one owns it
b. Everyone can use it
c. Anyone can improve it
9. If the Internet is so simple, why have so many been so boneheaded about it?
10. Some mistakes we can stop making already

It all begins with Simplicity, turns out bandwidth is a commodity, and let's be stupid and not screw it up.

Three Degrees

Tue, 18 Feb 2003 15:39:25 GMT

Three Degrees from Microsoft. Microsoft is targeting the Internet generation with a new product called Three Degrees.... The product is a powerful extension of instant messaging with the ability to create ad-hoc personal communities. Once you establish these groups, there are a variety of tasks that can be shared including pictures, listening to shared playlists and the ability to send animated “winks” to other users. Newsweek has the story. [Michael Gartenberg]

..."We really wanted to have a different set of skills that would allow them to meet new people online in a way I, for instance, cannot," said group manager Tammy Savage. "They have a way of vouching for each other as friends, figuring out who to trust and not trust."...

..."If you look at Threedegrees closely, there are broader implications for this product for Microsoft, (such as) driving IM use for corporate purposes," Gartenberg said on Tuesday. "Take the Threedegrees functionality and apply it to corporate work groups and you have the extension from communication to collaboration that goes beyond IM. If you look at the shared-picture feature and imagine that was a PowerPoint file, you get the idea of where Microsoft could go with this." [C-net]

Microsoft's first relationship product should be taken seriously. By initially targeting the younger IM set, they don't have to hold back on multi-modal features. Their proprietary FOAF functionality enables community building similar to that of Live Journal. It could also host a trust/reputation system. And as a platform for other applications and gateway for P2P file sharing it is comparable to Groove. That and it bypasses blogging. The question is if we want our kids growing up hooked on monopoly.

Collapse of Inconvenience

Mon, 03 Feb 2003 22:48:40 GMT

Boston Globe Magazine: A Nation of Voyuers (cover story), How the Internet search engine Google is changing what we can find out about one another - and raising questions about whether we should. [Google Weblog]

"It's the collapse of inconvenience," says Siva Vaidhyanathan, assistant professor of culture and communication at New York University. "It turns out inconvenience was a really important part of our lives, and we didn't realize it."

Augmented Moblogging

Tue, 28 Jan 2003 18:58:02 GMT

Augmented Reality and Moblogging are going to converge, the question is when. This might border on science fiction, but here goes...

AR TODAY: FOR THE TOURIST
Columbia University researchers have developed two augmented reality tours: one of nearby restaurants and one of the university campus. As you scan for a place to snack (top left), the system labels the eateries within view. Click on Tom's Restaurant with a wireless mouse, and a new window (top right) informs you that this was the facade used for the diner in "Seinfeld." In front of Low Library (bottom left), click on the central flag to learn about the 1968 student takeover of the building. Select the flag at left and up pops a 3-D model of Bloomingdale Asylum (bottom right), which once stood on that spot.

Photo courtesy of Columbia University

Augmented Reality overlays information within an environment to enhance a person or group's capabilities to act in an environment. Data, text, images, sound & video.

I had an opportunity to demo an military AR system at a conference recently. The Land Warrior project is perhaps the most advanced AR system and is in field deployment today.

The information was as simple as a top down view of an urban battlefield, with dots marking friendly and unfriendly combatants. Seeing what's around the corner and where your friends are changes the landscape.

But the problem with augmented reality is the same as virtual reality: hardware and content development costs

VR systems are largely stationary systems. Initial applications focused on teaching people how to use mechanical interfaces (flight simulators, tank simulators). Systems were custom developed on proprietary hardware and software, bundled with the machine itself (planes, tanks).

But then a commercial revolution happened, Moore's Law was applied, and within less than five years almost all simulation was based on PC hardware. Today in VR the same process of leveraging commercial R&D is beginning -- gaming technology is improving the price/performance of simulation software. Taken together, military markets are recieving drastic reductions in system costs, but what remains is content.

Historically 70% of VR costs are from systems and 30% are from content. Now that trend is reversing itself. System cost reductions are freeing development funds for content.

AR TOMORROW: RECOGNIZING FACES
Ever forget a face? Aug-mented reality will help you recover seamlessly when you bump into some-one and can't remember whether she's a college acquaintance or your accountant's ex-wife. Your AR system will automati-cally search a personalized face-recognition database, then provide text that tells you not only the name of the person you're looking at, but some key personal details as well.

Photo by: Andrew Brusso


	NEXT GENERATION: This Xybernaut wearable computer suggests the future of augmented reality -- a time when daily life will be annotated by virtual Post-It Notes

Augmented Reality will likely follow a similar path. It benefits from Moore's Law in processing, but also the commercial R&D efforts towards saving power and miniaturization (is there a Moore's Law for miniaturization?). The largest cost barrier will remain quality head mounted displays, but there is a display revolution going on as well.

InfoTrends Research Group has found that Japan accounts for almost all (98 percent) of the wireless imaging market that is forecast to grow from 6.6 million in 2002 to over 160 million by 2007, representing a compound annual growth rate of 93 percent. Outside Japan, camera phone costs are still prohibitive, and the market is growing in fits and starts.

Moblogging's current humble beginnings is based on the increasing adoption of wireless imaging. And this cateogry of commercial hardware R&D will grow to include GPS and other functions.

But its also based upon the formation of groups. Early Mobloggers are explicit about their identities and do not shy away from sharing their presence and experiences with the world. When Moblogging, and indeed blogging, begin to offer authentication and permissioning it will appeal to a wider set of users. People who want to communicate in groups with strong ties. This is where Reed's Law of group formation takes hold. A base of strong tie groupings of content will extend to other groups and to those with weaker ties on a post-by-post basis. The result will be a large base of levergable content -- and the content gains context with GeoURLs.

Of course, to realize the AR dreams in the images above, much needs to happen in the core software system for managing and displaying the content (recognition, recognition, recognition) and we have to wait for hardware costs to fall. But as Adina pointed out, there are simpler versions of augmented reality being developed under the rubric of social software. I don't need a $20k head mounted display to tell me where my friends are and what's around the corner.

Conversation Button

Tue, 28 Jan 2003 00:53:06 GMT

What do others think about this? I find Technorati even more useful given this handy bookmarklet I found on Teledyn. Here's how it works. Bookmark this link (In Internet Explorer 6, just drag and drop it on your "links" bar). Then click the new bookmark while reading some page to get a pop-up window of what other blogs are saying about the site you're viewing. [Seb]

I have been using this for a couple of days now...really useful for discovering and tracking conversations.