Ross Mayfield: Supernova

Digital Polity

Fri, 25 Jul 2003 23:40:43 GMT

Attended a networking luncheon this week where Reed Hundt gave a speech quite different than two weeks prior at Supernova. Perhaps he drank the superjuice -- it was very emergent democratic and second superpowery.

The first speech centered on his proposal to provide Universal Broadband Access to over 90% of US homes by 2013. Americans take the Net for granted more than anyone, while other enlightened countries (Korea being the poster child) make it a mission. This year's Supernova had a greater focus on policy and Reed's was the one specific policy proposal I heared -- invest an amount less than the subsidy to analog TV for digital ($75b) to maintain economic competitiveness. Unless there is a plausible path for ILEC demise, this is the best proposal on the table. Reed also gets open spectrum, so sing a hallelujah and hope something happens.

One thing is for sure. When Dean showed he could raise money on the Net, politics changed forever.

Previously the Net had demonstrated its ability to influence decision makers through individualize pluralism, beginning when Kevin Werbach set up the first citizen feedback email address. Over 2 million emails were sent by citizens on the issue of media ownership, at last count according to Reed. Blogs have also demonstrated the ability of an influential deliberative network to force the media to play their role as the 4th estate, Lott being the poster child.

But now the Net has become a constituency. Decision makers like to say they are accountable even the poorest residents of their districts, but money is the source of their power and the group they serve is the group that elects them with it. Dean has shown the Net as means to money. And now every politician is finally paying attention.

Reed's talk last week was on the digital polity vs. the analog polity. He spoke eloquently about the rising constituency and how its "not just that things reoccur, its that they get better." There are core ideals, parties are means towards those ideals, but are largely ineffective. A new party of a digital polity is emerging that holds certain core beliefs:

We know more than our leaders
We pay nobody to say what we want to hear
Information is percipient and wants to be free
We are build on systems and networks, not organizations
We synthesize the whole instead of constructing barriers and silos
We believe in truth and civil debate

Now I may not have everything word for word (thumbed it into my Palm). He also stated digital polity principles of privacy, representation, honesty and equity. He implies that leaders still have utility and a role to play, but they need to engage the digital constituency and build trust. We don't depend upon the media because we are skeptics and experts, we are global and can engage in collective action without government. That said, digital needs to negotiate with analog. But these are powerful and re-occuring themes.

What is encouraging, if not remarkable, is that Reed is a civil servant, nay, politician, who undertands his new constituency and its reasonable demands.

At the end he did casually remark that we should abolish the US Senate, as they are a distortion of representation, serving only 15% of citizens. The point he is making, though, is that leaders fall behind their citizens (especially in times like these). Perhaps because they are not engaged with their constituents. Perhaps because their interests are conflicted. But the difference is our representatives need to recognize our new found powers to deliberate and represent ourselves at a pace they need to understand.

Which brings me back to Dean. If a candidate and causes can raise money on the Net, they can engage in institutional pluralism. Direct participation within the social network of decision makers. This scares most policy makers, as the game has changed.

Its a grass roots game ripe for changing minds and policy. Valdis forwarded a paper, Encouraging Political Defections: The Role of Personal Discussion Networks in Partisan Desertions to the Opposition Party and Perot Votes by Paul Beck, that I found absolutely stunning. We are bi-polar in our political views by nature, tend to filter out news we can identify is from the opposition and are comfortable in the absence of change. But when an issue is socialized we have a greater chance of changing our minds. When our social network provides new ideas and affirmations, we are more likely to take new positions.

Perhaps that's the power of Dean's use of Meetup. Meetup collapses time and space for deliberative groups to get together. Inevitably, some participants are strong ties for affirmation and weak ties for new ideas. What Dean is doing is opening up discussion at the social level to enact political change. How neofunctional of him. What Dean needs to do, however, is get more of us to debate -- instead of the candidates.

Trade Winds

Tue, 22 Jul 2003 18:51:45 GMT

The community that was fostered at AO2003 is now providing more pensive analysis. This is a great time to reflect on how social software is changing the events business and the "trades" in general.

An excerpt from Conferenza, which provides a tad more traditional paid research coverage of trade shows, contains this golden nugget of controversy:

Still, there were interesting insights, some intended and some not...

· As a demonstration of the power of interconnection, a panel on Web services featuring Salesforce.com CEO Mark Benioff provoked the most talked-about moment of the conference – at Benioff’s expense. Asserting that the largest e-commerce software supplier is Amazon.com, Benioff pointed toward co-panelists from IBM and Sun Microsystems and said, “None of these companies has any position in [that] market at all. Even Apple’s iTunes music store was built on Amazon,” and asserted that Amazon has 300 people working on its proprietary software.

We thought this was news, until Ross Mayfield, CEO of one of the Web’s leading blogging software providers, Socialtext, led an online chat charge showing that most of this was apparently untrue: Amazon uses standard XML out-of-the-box stuff, and Apple’s iTunes doesn’t use Amazon’s software at all, the chatters charged. As Benioff continued, the audience watched as a group of online contributors disputed fact after fact, input Benioff apparently did not see. “It was sort of like a ‘Saturday Night Live’ skit,” said one attendee. “As Mark spoke, we could see his nose growing longer, like Pinocchio.”

How it played out in the Chat (Archive) was Kevin Marks did the fact checking, which was simultaneously projected on to the big screen:

[11:51] KevinMarks: no he didn't
[11:51] adina: bthey /are/ mentioning public web serivces
[11:51] KevinMarks: he licensed the patent
[11:51] KevinMarks: iTunes backend is not Amazon
[11:51] toughcrowd: this panel is showing lots of promise - but I love that cynical suspicion "lovefest"
[11:51] Ross: Amazon's real smart move was an API for developers
[11:52] adina: tross
[11:52] Ross: but they dont get decentralization. witness http://www.allconsuming.com
[11:52] adina: ross again
[11:52] Ross: Kevin, did he say it was?
[11:52] KevinMarks: Apple had ahuge online store already selling Macs
[11:52] KevinMarks: they built on that for iTunes
[11:53] Ross: real-time fact checking Kevin, I love it
[11:54] DariusD: Do you know that the Apple onnline store was not built on Amazon technology?
[11:54] KevinMarks: It is built on Webobjects

Here's Apple's story of how iTunes was built and how they licensed the one-click form from Amazon. Before we get carried away with the event of a fact check, rather than dynamic itself, its important to understand the context. I doubt Marc had negative intent, he had little to gain if so, and he was just plain conversing.

This parallel channel, a second superpower on a finite scale, first emerged at PC Forum 2002 when Dan Gillmor blogged a fact check on Joe Nacchio. Clay fostered the first experiments with social software as an in-room chat tool. Supernova I was the first to formalize a group weblog. PC Forum 2003 was the first to incorporate a conference wiki. The O'Rielly Emerging Technology conference renewed interest in IRC and Hydra in parallel to the wiki. Supernova II was the first to incorporate chat and wiki. AlwaysOn was the first to add video streaming (Archive), creating a richer remote participation experience.

For some, the choice of modes is overwhelming at first, something we are tuning. But Social Software and its practices for events has a reached a level of maturity where it is solving fundamental tensions of event structure.

Take Bob Frankston's experience with remote participation after in-person attendance the first day:

While it's not the same as being their in person, I was surprised how well the combination of the video and Wiki worked. Over my standard home Internet connection I had very good audio and video quality in looking at the panel.

I don't know how to capture the screen picture that included the video so I simply used my digital camera to take a picture. That's Tony Perkins summing up the conference discussion log is in the lower left. There was a lively discussion with people in the room and others outside such as Joi Itcho in Japan and me at home. Joi mentioned that he was attending in his underwear and people wanted to get a video of him. He obliged though only above the waist...

...I judge events by the attendees more than by the panelists and, by that measure, the event has gotten off to a good start. The concept of being always-on or always connected is a good one though, in my opinion, it is important to distinguish between the transport issues that enable connectivity and the question of what one does with connectivity and the implications. This confusion is reflected in some of the panels.

As I write this I'm still attending remotely. I can view the conference over the Internet with very good audio and video quality. Socialtext is provided a live commenting facility using their Wiki software. This is wonderful for those like me who want to jump up and say "that's stupid" or maybe even be positive. There were problems with 802.11 connectivity the first day so I had only a few opportunities for such commentary though I did make good use of it. Today, from home, it appears to be working better and I've been able to add my own comments on the side.

Participating from afar is interesting. The audio/video works very well but I miss the ability to kibitz with others. A side-chat facility would help. Still, this is my first time trying such remote participation. Having been there for the first day I have some sense of the context and it works very well. Of course this is early stage and I can think of a lot of improvements but it is mundanely useful rather than being a novelty.

David Weinberger recently wrote a great piece in Darwin on the Death of Panels:

...Panelists and audiences do not share the same goals. Audiences want to learn and be entertained. Panelists want to impress and sometimes want to sell. Conversations work against the panelists' natural inclination to manage their speech; conversations develop their own gravitational fields that fling panelists together in ways they can't control.

If you're organizing a conference, as an audience member I implore you to cast aside the spurious safety of panels. If you're a moderator, you'll do everyone a favor if you rearrange the chairs, eliminate the opening statements, confiscate the bulb in the projector and get your participants to just talk. Don't "leave time" for audience participation; open it up from the beginning. Hell, screw the bulb back in and project the online chat where the real life of the conference is probably happening anyway...

Mike from Techdirt yearns for conferences with semi-structured small group interaction.

...An ideal conference, then, would be more like a day full of these lunches - that forced people to think in different ways. Thus, I'd love to see a conference where people are either randomly (or carefully planned by the organizers) split into small groups, and given a task or a challenge. Let them do some scenario planning that forces them to think creatively. Get people thinking, get them involved with the ideas, get them interacting with others and force them to think outside of their own viewpoint. Maybe challenge them. Have different groups "competing" in some way to get people to really pay attention, and really try to get their minds around very difficult issues. ..

Trade Winds

Social Software and Social Networking Models provide the greatest threat and opportunity for the trade industry (trade magazines & shows) -- because they change the notion of audience into participants. The rise of weblogs and participatory media allow domain experts to contribute without making contribution their full time job. Networking models allow people to connect regardless of space or time as is the case with LinkedIn, or in space and time with Meetup. Because these tools work so well in virtuality, it is natural for them to be extended to reality (whatever that means).

Trade shows will fundamentally change their structure to become more participatory -- and the result is more connective, constructive and conversational. Remote and in-room participants will moderate panels, there will be greater use of working groups and communities will persist between events. We used to come to trade shows for the people in the place. As Dr. Weinberger says in Small Pieces Loosely Joined, the web is a set of places itself. Now we have places upon places, where the network is the conversation.

This isn't the place for me to talk about commercial value for event organizers, but let me say this. There is no such thing as a closed system. Bloggers are coming to your conference. You can't throw up Walls. The energy can dissipate or enjoin with the event. Do what Tony did and give out blogger passes. Augment experiences. Create a greater and more open context for your event and the wind will blow at your back.

Supernova Photos

Fri, 11 Jul 2003 21:17:43 GMT

Jason took some great pics at Supernova. Cory took some great notes from my panel.

See you on the other side

Mon, 07 Jul 2003 13:28:28 GMT

On my way to Supernova. See you there and here.

Supernova Context

Mon, 07 Jul 2003 13:18:40 GMT

I created a wiki page for Supernova 2002.

If you attended the first one, and have reflections or posts to share, please do. First time attendees will appreciate the context.

Quote of the Day

Sun, 06 Jul 2003 22:54:34 GMT

From the heckler's page:

You can often rate a conference by the quality of the offsite participation. -- JoiIto

Heckle Me

Sun, 06 Jul 2003 22:49:24 GMT

Off to Supernova 2003. All packed up an ready to go. I'm off to Supernova 2003. Please join me in the #joiito channel on irc.freenode.net at 10am in DC (UTC -0400) if you want to heckle me during our panel. I'll be on IRC. Hopefully, we'll be able to get it up on a projector. ;-) [Joi Ito's Web]

Cool tool and a great opportunity to heckle Joi. Hey, wait a minute, Im on that panel too. This can't be a good thing ;-)

Supernova Wiki

Thu, 26 Jun 2003 17:21:45 GMT

Get wiki with it. The Supernova Wiki is now up and running, courtesy of my friends at Socialtext.

What's a wiki? you ask. (Or at least, some of you ask.) It's like a collaborative Website where each page is editable by users. The wiki is useful for real-time information and collaborative tasks (like figuring out where to meet for dinner) that don't work as well with the linear narrative structure of Weblogs.

The Supernova wiki, like the group blog, is open now for your contributions. [Werblog]

And Joi's Supernova party is set for the 7th.

Chain Reaction

Fri, 30 May 2003 19:32:03 GMT

The second coming of Supernova is upon us.

I am joining Joi Ito and JC Herz on the first panel, entitled Making (Business) Sense of Networks.

The Internet was just the beginning. Digital devices from mobile phones to gaming consoles are tapping increasingly common broadband data connections. Bottom-up communities are doing everything from sharing photos to challenging governments. Scientists and economists alike are recognizing that networks are the basic structure of our increasingly decentralized world. Major opportunities await those who can effectively organize information, people, devices, data, and metadata in the emerging sea of networks.

See you in DC July 8-9th.

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?

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

Decentralizing Again

Fri, 28 Mar 2003 07:12:59 GMT

Boom. Supernova 2003 will be held July 8-9 in the Washington, DC area. If you're reading this blog, you probably caught some of the buzz from Supernova 2002 in December. The 2003 event promises to be even better. Already, our confirmed speaker list includes:

* Reed Hundt (former FCC Chairman)
* Jonathan Schwartz (EVP of Software, Sun Microsystems)
* Joichi Ito (CEO, Neoteny Co. Ltd., Japan)
* Kevin Lynch (Chief Software Architect, Macromedia)
* Bruce Mehlman (Asst. Secretary of Commerce for Tech Policy)
* Craig Donato (CEO, Grand Central Networks)
* Clay Shirky (author and consultant)

We're holding this one in DC, the belly of the beast, to bring together the technology, business, and government communities. Such conversations are increasingly important as legal and policy issues ripple through the tech world.

I hope you can join us in July. Registration materials will be available in the next few weeks. [Werblog]

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.

Bloogle's Annotated Web

Thu, 20 Feb 2003 16:59:47 GMT

Dave thinks Bloogle will be focused on serving enterprises, but implementing weblogs in the enterprise doesn't fit Google's appliance model (yet). Bloogle has been blogged to death in more ways than one, but Im still offering my take -- that they will fulfill the dream of the Annotated Web and corner the market on free micro-content.

The Google acquisition of Pyra -- makers of the most widely-used weblog platform, Blogger -- left those unacquainted with weblogs scratching their heads. When weblogs first appeared a few years ago they seemed like just another method of building vanity websites. But the technology and social norms that have grown out of these simple publishing tools have changed dramatically. Real people are now engaged in building the Web, not just consuming it, creating a larger opportunity for Google than search alone.

A weblog is the simplest way to produce a website -- for publishing, communication and collaboration -- through standards-based structured data exchange in a spam-free medium. These simple tools with simple rules yield complex results. Google is tapping into a new form of social infrastructure, and perhaps returning to its roots.

Google co-founder Larry Page in a recent talk: "It wasn't that we intended to build a search engine. We built a ranking system to deal with annotations. We wanted to annotate the web--build a system so that after you'd viewed a page you could click and see what smart comments other people had about it. But how do you decide who gets to annotate Yahoo? We needed to figure out how to choose which annotations people should look at, which meant that we needed to figure out which other sites contained comments we should classify as authoritative. Hence PageRank...Only later did we realize that PageRank was much more useful for search than for annotation."

This vision of an Annotated Web where people make editorial judgments on content has existed in blogspace for some time now. Every blogger develops a link-rich annotated resource. People still outperform technology in qualitative decisions. The problem is people don't scale and not all judgments are equal (Third Voice was an attempt at the Annotated Web, but couldn’t discern which annotations were relevant). Google knows how to scale and already uses weblogs as a source of dynamic link-rich judgment to inform PageRank. Tapping into the natural intelligence of people to enhance the relevancy and meaning of search results is low hanging fruit, but there is more to this opportunity.

What Pyra and weblog platforms (Moveable Type, Radio and others) do really well is make publishing simple and affordable. Creating a post is as simple as using a WYSIWYG editor and clicking a button. Posts are structured in reverse chronological order, easy for readers to comprehend and writers to recall. Each post is also formatted in an XML specification called RSS (Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication), which allows other bloggers to subscribe to posts in a news aggregator that scans in P2P fashion for updates once an hour. This open innovation has spawned others bundled aggregators/editors, Topic Exchange for group forming and Technorati and Daypop.

At Kevin Werbach's Supernova conference on decentralized technologies (including weblogs), Google co-founder Sergey Brin responded to an audience of bloggers by agreeing to work with weblog platforms to accept ping notifications of new posts. The potential to synchronize and syndicate annotation posts to a service like Google News is a timely service and a model for the Web to come. The Google/Blogger combo (Bloogle?) can also distribute annotations, relevancy and AdWords to the Blogger Weblog platform to put each post in context. Bloogle is becoming a platform for the production, marketing and distribution of micro-content.

Predicting what Bloogle evolves into matters less than how weblogs are engaging people in a two-way Web. Google may dominate search and publishing, and others with follow, but weblogs as communication and collaboration platforms still remain open opportunities.

Not all links are created equal. Links between blogs are also conversations within social and creative networks. This social infrastructure, denser and more purposeful communities than newsgroups underpinned by real relationships, is very different from the information infrastructure that is Google and Blogger’s core competency. When people are engaged in the Web beyond being consumers the real opportunities arise.

Google buys Pyra

Sun, 16 Feb 2003 04:29:04 GMT

Google Buys Pyra: Blogging Goes Big-Time
• posted by Dan Gillmor 07:41 PM
• permanent link to this item

NOTE: This is a slightly edited version of a special column running in tomorrow's San Jose Mercury News. We're posting it early to get the story out.

Weblogs are going Googling.

Google, which runs the Web's premier search site, has purchased Pyra Labs, a San Francisco company that created some of the earliest technology for writing weblogs, the increasingly popular personal and opinion journals.

The buyout is a huge boost to an enormously diverse genre of online publishing that has begun to change the equations of online news and information. Weblogs are frequently updated, with items appearing in reverse chronological order (the most recent postings appear first). Typically they include links to other pages on the Internet, and the topics range from technology to politics to just about anything you can name. Many weblogs invite feedback through discussion postings, and weblogs often point to other weblogs in an ecosystem of news, opinions and ideas.

"I couldn't be more excited about this," said Evan Williams, founder of Pyra, a company that has had its share of struggles. He wouldn't discuss terms of the deal, which he said was signed on Thursday, when we spoke Saturday. But he did say it gives Pyra the "resources to build on the vision I've been working on for years."

Part of that vision, shared by other blogging pioneers, has been to help democratize the creation and flow of news in a world where giant companies control so much of what most people see, hear and read. Weblogs are also becoming a valuable communication tool for groups of people, and have begun to infiltrate the corporate, university and government spheres.

Just three and a half years old, Pyra's Blogger software has 1.1 million registered users, Williams said. He estimated that about 200,000 of them are actively running weblogs. Pyra charges for some higher-capability services not available in the base configuration, but most of its registered users don't pay.

Google is known best for its search capabilities, but the Pyra buyout isn't the company's first foray into creating or buying Internet content. Two years ago Google bought Deja.com, a company that had collected and continued to update Usenet "newsgroups," Internet discussion forums. More recently, it created Google News, a site that gauges the collective thoughts of more than 4,000 news sites on the Net.

But now Google will surge to the forefront of what David Krane, the company's director of corporate communications, called "a global self-publishing phenomenon that connects Internet users with dynamic, diverse points of view while also enabling comment and participation."

"We're thrilled about the many synergies and future opportunities between our two companies," he said in a statement on Saturday. He didn't elaborate further on what those synergies and opportunities might be, but said more details would emerge soon. Users of the Blogger software and hosting service won't see any immediate changes, he added.

For Williams and his five co-workers, now Google employees, the immediate impact will be to put their blog-hosting service, called Blog*Spot, on the vast network of server computers Google operates. This will make the service more reliable and robust.

How Google manages the Blogger software and Pyra's hosting service may present some tricky issues. The search side of Google indexes weblogs from all of the major blogging platforms, including Movable Type and Userland Radio. Any hint of proprietary favoritism would meet harsh criticism.

Blogging was moving mainstream even before this buyout. Several weblogs draw a large readership, and bloggers demonstrated their collective power to keep an issue alive even when the traditional media miss the story, as former U.S. Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott discovered to his dismay late last year.

Major technology companies are seeing the potential. Tripod, the consumer web-publishing unit of Terra Lycos, recently introduced a "Blog Builder" tool. America Online is expected to be on the verge of doing something similar, and no one will be surprised if Yahoo and Microsoft do the same. Are more buyouts of blog toolmakers in the offing?

Developers of blogging software have been finding user-friendly ways to help readers of weblogs and other information find and collect material from a variety of sites. It's in this arena that the Google-Pyra deal may have the most implications.

More than most Web companies, Google has grasped the distributed nature of the online world, and has seen that the real power of cyberspace is in what we create collectively. We are beginning to see that power brought to bear.

De/centralization

Mon, 03 Feb 2003 22:52:20 GMT

Balancing centralization and decentralization. Mitch Kapor: "I must confess to a long-standing personal disposition in favor of decentralization." This comment comes in the course of explaining that potential customers are demanding that Chandler be able to integrate with centralized resources. Mitch is onto something importnat. Decentralization is the general direction of technology-driven industries, and it provides many benefits. But reality is not so pure. The general path toward decentralization will include many cases of centralization, or at least coexistence with centralized systems. [Werblog]

Supernovae

Sun, 22 Dec 2002 05:23:42 GMT

Simulation of the density profile of a 1 solar mass main sequence star (just like the sun) after shock wave passage from a Type Ia supernova (which "went off" above the top of the image). This is a fairly late time picture, perhaps a day or so after the explosion. The blue colors represent the density of the "core" of the main sequence star, green is less dense material from the envelope, yellow is material being stripped from the envelope, red is the background density after the supernova shock has passed.

Observed in nearby galaxies at a rate of more than one per week, these titanic events release immense amounts of energy that can temporarily rival that of their host galaxy. "A supernova releases as much kinetic energy as the sun will radiate over its entire lifetime," said Hoffman. "They are the best bang since the big one."

I created a Supernova category in the left margin, perhaps as justification for posting this picture.

Collaboration Made Simple

Fri, 20 Dec 2002 18:23:28 GMT

Peter Merholz points out a key lesson from the Supernova panel on collaboration: Simplicity.

This made me consider which collaborative digital tools seem to work? What gets people to coordinate, to work together to a common goal? And my answer: dumb simple ones. Email. Instant messaging. Simple bulletin boards like bugzilla. Voice telephone calls. Weblogs. And, when stepping out of the world of business, SMS...

Utility and agency is being pushed to the endpoints, where, with little explicit coordination, people use a suite of simple tools to get things done. One of the things that this discussion made abundantly clear is that the solution to enable collaboration is not really a technical one (much beyond the simple tools). It's a management one.

Couldn't agree more. Simple rules and simple systems yield complex results.

Death of Abundance

Thu, 19 Dec 2002 16:20:42 GMT

As I mentioned, Glenn Fleishman and Bob Frankston are having an interesting discussion on QoS. Let me lob in a perspective:

The capital markets will never accept a solution of abundance for QoS. Regardless of how one might explain that excess capacity is necessary to achieve quality of service, any carrier that portends excess will be smacked for creating a bandwidth glut. Abundance is risk.
There can be numerous tiers of service. One of the common criticisms of QoS is that there are wide variants of quality and translating these into service level agreements would result in an impractical diversity of contract structures. But other commodities, after standardizing other contractual terms have diverse tiers of quality. West Texas Intermediate Crude (WTI), the most liquid natural gas contract, has over 100 grades of quality.
Defining and agreeing to quality pays. Beyond customers paying a premium for quality, QoS and SLAs determine fungible goods and enable risk management. If David Isenberg is right, that carriers must move to become commodity providers of utility service, I would suggest that the value they can create is in:
- Reducing the operational risk of their customers through SLAs
- Reducing the market risk of their customers through contracts
- Standardizing inter-carrier SLAs and transactions
- Enhancing their systems to compete on their ability to rapidly provision for diverse edge requirements at a high volume
- Providing as much control to the customer as possible

This is less of a technologist than a marketeer's perspective, but I believe what's missing is the practicality of what carriers will adopt and be valued for.

Abundance vs. Prioritization

Tue, 17 Dec 2002 19:45:38 GMT

Glenn Fleishman and Bob Frankston are having an interesting discussion on QoS. Its the age-old debate of IP Traffic Engineering: do you concentrate on achiving QoS by building an abundance of bandwidth or by prioritizing traffic?

I had a similar discussion with Bob after David Isenberg's talk. I would like to add to this discussion, but I have to run and catch a plane.

Post-Supernova Adoptions

Mon, 16 Dec 2002 19:59:06 GMT

Supernova was a conference full of more than visionaries, but early adopters. The conference continues through the personal adoption and use of many of the tools discussed. Many recently started new Weblogs, like Gary Boone. Never before has the word of mouth for weblogs been as powerful as what was in that room.

I was pursuaded by Moses Ma to demo Groove, and a portion of the conversation continues there. I've created a Groove Space to collaboratively demo the product, so let me know if you are new to it as well. Can't wait for these two products to converge.

Atomization

Sat, 14 Dec 2002 21:13:58 GMT

Charles Cooper writes on the platform wars and Web Services. The article richly describes previous platform battles, but draws distinction for the one we are in the middle of...

..."Any time there is an area of technology that attracts attention so that the biggest players are trying to stake out their position early, it generally means we're about to see a lot of time, a lot of mind share and a lot of money spent developing all the supporting infrastructure," says VeriSign CEO, Stratton Sclavos.

...But the struggle to define the future of this technology is going to be a lot different from prior platform wars. That's because the industry has already reached general agreement on standards, such as SOAP and the accompanying security standards.

I'm not ready to pull a Francis Fukuyama and declare the end of (computer) history--there are just too many prima donnas inhabiting the industry. Unless there's a big surprise out there, though, this is going to be more a question of building the best integrated platform with the best toolset than inventing the coolest way to do an XML message.

Sclavos believes Web services has reached the point where it is in need of technology integration, not more technology innovation. He just may be right.

Cooper is right to point out how early definition of open standards provides a different competitive playing field for the larger players. These companies will seek to own the larger development environment and platform opportunities.

But as we learned at Supernova, centralized standards decentralize architectures. Some view this as a democratizing force that enables smaller companies to play a role as arms merchants for the edge. And this, in turn, sparks specialized innovation. Large companies will sieze larger opportunities to provide tools to develop applications and services for small companies, but the bulk of the market will be these small companies.

In other words, decentralized technologies create atomized industry structures.

Scott Rosenberg on Supernova

Fri, 13 Dec 2002 22:40:19 GMT

Great column on Supernova by Scott Rosenberg of Salon:

The danger here is that the dynamo of the Silicon Valley boom-bust cycle, in its hunger for Next Big Thing fuel, will seize upon Wi-Fi, blogs and Web services and then spit them out, chewed-up and spent -- before they've ever had a chance to mature and show off their potential...

But, as their creators readily admit, those are not the kinds of enterprises to make venture capitalists salivate. By any rational view, the decentralized technology world Supernova envisioned is one in which small operators can make a living, but nobody is going to make a killing.

[Scott Rosenberg's Links & Comment]

Scott seizes upon the culture of the Supernova conference, that of technologists building things as much for themselves or innovation sake, as opposed to engineering for customers. He also raises the debate that was missing from the conference on how these technologies relate to business models.

We are at the beginning of a bell curve here, for a few potentially large markets -- and they very well may be markets of arms merchants. Although there may be no center, there will certainly be hubs. Being a large arms merchant in a large market is good business to be in. Being a modest and independent arms merchant is a fantastic lifestyle business. There will be room for all kinds.

Sure investors aren't foaming at the mouth. There is no center to fixate upon. That coupled with the general economic malaise is creating a rare opportunity for these technologies to mature openly. The timing of these parallel diffusions is further strengthed by weblogs to provide feedback loop -- these revolutions will be bloggerized. By the time they are adapted for mainstream markets they will be more robust than any created with more speculative investment during the boom.

What will be really interesting is if decentralized market structures challenge VC convention that there are only 3 winners in each market and one big one. Much of that theory of competition is based upon models with larger transaction costs for each market participant.

Stupid Networks & Smart Business

Thu, 12 Dec 2002 23:40:52 GMT

Meeting and seeing David Isenberg presentation at Supernova gave me a different level of respect for his views. I subscribe to his newsletter and have been a believer in Stupid Networks. The difference is seeing how over time businesses are adopting his simple and elegant vision.

However, the problem I have always had with the Stupid Network paper and resulting world view is how it fails to define a role for network operators. The strongest arguement for Stupid Networks is that you can't centrally scale service and services (this is why SG&A is the highest of any industry, at 25% of sales), and if you push service and services to the edge of the network you have greater scale as well as innovation. The role left for network operators is to operate a dumb network. The problem is:

As Adina pointed out, centralized forces (network operators) seek to retain power,
There are many network equipment and software vendors seeking to enable network-based value-added services,
Without any alternative profitable business model, telecom will go with what it knows, the old way of doing business

This is not to say that David is wrong, its just that there is a hole in his arguement and he needs to plug it. Unless he can define a business model for existing players, the theory isnt pragmatic.

So here's my suggestion. Network operators are utilities. Adopt a utility business model that focuses on lean operations, efficient infrastructure, consolidated billing and commodity management.

Take advantage of the existing asset redistribution period, liquidate any network element that cannot be managed through SMTP. Throw away as much legacy OSS as you can. Develop self-service customer interfaces that are integrated with flow-through provisioning systems. Innovate in billing to provide it as a service both to your customers and trading partners. This is different from aggregating partner services, its suppporting their billing through an efficient web service. Price volatility for commodity bandwidth will increase over time. Manage that risk for your customers and they will pay you for it.

Being a Network Utility Operator would be a great business. The first to truely embrace this model will not only be more competitive, but supported by the innovations at the edge.

On the Road Again

Wed, 11 Dec 2002 04:59:49 GMT

Last minute business travel has struck again. Off to Honolulu tomorrow AM. Feel sorry for me.

For those following Supernova, also check out transcriptions by the Supernova Weblog, Doc and Mitch Ratcliffe. Definately caught the quotes I missed, as well as the expert commentary. There is even a photolog, a tool I hope to begin using. Otherwise the discussion continues on the via the Group Weblog.

While I missed real-time participation in the parallel universe of those blogging in the room at the time, it may of let me get my own notes down, and even have some time to think.

Im hoping the plane time will let me process what I have just experienced. Many who weren't there, and some who were, derided the mere existance of an optimistic technology conference. Some had problems with the term decentralization. Seperately, Anida Levin raised real issues of how centralized power is an indominable force. This is the great thing about such an open conference is all this feedback and debate.

I came away without answers I was looking for on the De/centralization balance, how social software fits in all this, key questions on grid computing, and, most importantly, business models. Many of these things would have had immeadiate practicality. But the conversation continues.