Celebrities Embrace Twitter (and vice-versa)

When I pondered the future of micro-blogging last June, I wasn't paying much attention to the few celebrities from pop culture and politics using Twitter. Over the last month, the number of celebrities (from pop culture, sports, and politics) who have appeared on the Twitterholic Top 100 jumped from 7% to 46% of users on a given calendar week.

I included users who cover celebrity culture (e.g. @perezhilton) and fake celebrities (e.g. @NotHenryRollins). Given that I quickly perused the list of users, it's possible that the number of celebrities is slightly higher. TV, Music, and Film celebrities alone accounted for 30% of users on the Twitterholic 100 over the past week.

As to the reasons why celebrities are starting to dominate rankings based on number of followers, the one noteworthy event occurred in mid-January when Twitter began suggesting users to newbies. However, the suggested users feature is not the sole reason for the rise of celebrities: not all of the new celebrity users on the Twitterholic Top 100 have appeared on Twitter's list of suggested users. In choosing who to follow, I suspect that name recognition matters more to recent groups of new users.

We pointed out in our Micro-messaging report that number of followers is not the best gauge of a twitterer's influence and we proposed an alternate metric similar to PageRank. But among new users, number of followers is the way they gauge the importance of other twitterers, and by that measure newbies may have the mistaken impression that discussions in Twitter are dominated by famous people. As they soon discover, most celebrities won't be responding to their tweets.

Seesmic Starts Adding Features

Seesmic is a company built specifically to encourage asynchronous video conversations. We spent a few hours recently with Seesmic founder and CEO Loic Le Meur, who kindly gave us an update on the company. Four weeks after opening its service to the public, Seesmic recently announced a product roadmap heavily influenced by users.

After focusing on making sure the service scales, the company is now ready to add features including private groups, the option to block individual users from your Seesmic player, and letting users flag offensive content (e.g. porn). Search is a currently a big problem for them, and according to Loic they plan to address search in several ways: (1) give users the option of adding meta-data to their videos (description, tags, etc.), (2) employ automated audio-to-text software to create transcripts, and (3) since Seesmic videos are already on Google, use Google Video search. With apps for both Facebook and OpenSocial slated to be released in August, Seesmic hopes to draw more teen and college-age users.

One of the problems with following conversations on Seesmic is that unlike text, there isn't a way to skim through video. Some people just take longer to get their point across. Assuming a 2-minute per video average, a conversation involving 60 posts/replies would take two hours to view from start to finish. Board member Pierre Omidyar started a Seesmic thread on the possibility of limiting videos to 30 seconds (a la twitter), but for the moment, there are no plans to limit the length of videos. However, the company plans to provide tools to filter out long videos and to display limited portions for faster viewing.

One month after their public launch, here are some key metrics

• 23,000 unique users from 25 countries (about 50% are from the U.S.)
• 3,000 videos are uploaded each day (total of slightly more than 300K videos)
• average length of a video is 2 minutes
• 30 million page views (doesn't include videos viewed through their API)

The Seesmic community not only provides valuable input for their product team, some users have put together impressive mashups and visualizations. My favorites so far are a Youtube and Seesmic mashup for people conversing in sign language, and a visual of conversations related to the recently released French hostage, Ingrid Betancourt. If you download the PicLens Firefox plugin, a Seesmic user created a fun tool to help you quickly navigate all the videos posted by a particular user: try this sample search ("deepakchopra") and set options to 3D Wall.

As to the inevitable question of business models, Loic is mulling a few possibilities: text ads similar to Google AdSense, premium membership, white labels, and customized players for companies, just to name a few. For now, their recent round of funding gives them the luxury of focusing on growing their user base and improving their service. It remains to be seen whether or not asynchronous video conversations catch on in a massive way. Video may never appeal to the many netizens adept at communicating through text. However, the more time you spend on Seesmic, you start seeing why Loic believes that there will be a market for video conversations. By default, the Seesmic community is defining how that market evolves, and four weeks after launching, they seem to be doing just fine.

Understanding Web Operations Culture (Part 1)

“You don’t choose the moment, the moment chooses you. You only choose how prepared you are when it does.” - Fire Chief Mike Burtch

(Note: I became a Firefighter-1 and EMT in 2000. My experiences in the fire service profoundly influence my efforts in technology. Much of my work over the past few years has been translating and distilling my knowledge from these two worlds, teaching others, and finding ways to apply it in the service of both.)

Last week I came upon a truck vs. scooter accident on my way home. I could hear a woman yelling in pain from underneath the truck (a good sign!) and could see a guy in the cab looking panicked and touching his controls. I stopped my car and “surveyed the scene” looking for things that might kill me (traffic, hazmat, downed power lines) or make the situation worse if undetected (additional victims, deflating tires, fires).

It looked like the driver was about to move his truck, which would have definitely made things worse. I used my ‘command voice’ to yell “Put it in park! Stop your engine! Set your brake! Get out and wait!” as I approached the truck.

A city crew came over, and one of them told me “We’ve called 911 and they are on their way.”

I asked them to handle traffic control as I approached my patient. I then introduced myself and asked her if I could help. (I have to obtain consent before assisting an injured person, and a response means I know they have still have their Airway, Breathing, and Circulation intact.)

Her legs were entangled in her scooter which was trapped underneath the truck. While she probably had broken her leg, it didn’t look all that bad. She was still wearing her helmet and it wasn't seriously damaged which meant her head was probably okay too. I did a quick check for bleeding and other serious injuries and did a “mental status check” by asking her name, where she was (“on my way to school”), and what had happened (“I was riding and that a**hole RAN OVER ME!”). This meant she was alert and oriented, which was good.

Now that I was sure there weren’t any other life threatening injuries, I prepared to hold her head for c-spine stabilization. (Once you start holding stabilization, you cannot move again until you are ready to put the patient on a backboard.)

As I positioned myself on the ground and took hold of her head, I explained “I’m going to hold your head now to protect your neck and back. Once the fire department gets here, they are going to get your legs unstuck and then we’ll get you on a backboard. Your job is to keep still and keep talking to us. There will be a lot of commotion and noise around you, and that’s okay. Everyone will be watching out for you and so there is no reason to be scared. We’ve got you.”

(continue reading)

When Micro-blogging Grows Up

Will Twitter and other micro-blogging services start resembling the blogosphere down the road? We are in the early days of micro-blogs and I still remember when Twitter was used mainly for "status" reporting. But more people are using Twitter instead of blogs, following links from trusted sources essentially using Twitter as a highly filtered blog reader. Just like the early days of blogs, the most popular Twitters are heavy on technology and "personal" micro-blogging. On the other hand, given that blogs are perfect for short opinon pieces, politics was and remains popular among bloggers.

The chart is the result of quickly categorizing the Top 100 blogs and Twitter users with the most followers. I used Twitterholic's data from June 7th. Technorati's authority is a social network metric, Twitterholic measures "popularity". The top blogs are heavy on tech, politics and news, with "personal" blogs less popular than their micro-blog counterparts. The more mature blogosphere is definitely dispersed across more categories. A casual glance at the oldest copy of the Technorati Top 100 available online indicates that back in June 2005, technology and politics dominated the list even more. "Personal" blogs were also more common in June 2005. The current top 100 has its share of blogs from traditional media: Wired magazine alone has 5 blogs in the most recent list.

Three categories (technology, tech/personal, personal) accounted for 56% of the total "subscriptions" to the top 100 Twitter users. Compared to the blogosphere, politics is less represented in the Twitterholic Top 100. The top Democratic presidential candidates were it as far as politics. In contrast, more than ten political bloggers made the Technorati Top 100. Of the three, Obama dominated, accounting for 80% of subscribers in the politics category, with Edwards and Clinton splitting the remaining 20%. Looking beyond the top 100, Obama alone has more than nineteen times the combined subscribers to the different John Mccain users. The analogous Democrat/Republican split, using the Technorati authority of the top political blogs, is 2 to 1. In terms of location, over 70% of the Twitterholic 100 are based in the U.S. Blogs are popular worldwide with some of the biggest blogs based in Asia.

Once more stable services and business models emerge, I still think micro-blogs will evolve to share some of the properties of the blogosphere described above. Micro-blogs from traditional media sources will be among the most popular. The liberal vs. conservative split will be less pronounced, with conservatives narrowing the micro-blogging gap. The top micro-blogs won't be as dominated by technology, although I'm not sure the format is really ideal for political topics. OTOH, I'm surprised gossip isn't as big - at least not yet. The top micro-blogs won't include as many "personal" ones. Micro-blogging will be just as popular overseas. We definitely will have several micro-blogging services and not be as dependent on the pioneering folks over at Twitter. More likely, micro-blogging will be just one component of broader platforms like FriendFeed. As always, spammers and phishers will try to ruin everything.

A post that was meant to highlight some of the differences between the two top 100 lists has led to forecasts - definitely not my original goal. What are your predictions?

DisasterTech from Where2.0

I was honored to speak with Mikel Maron at Where2.0 about innovation in Disaster Technology, a topic that is extremely important to me. Here is the video:

This talk covers the ongoing efforts of: World Shelters, the UN Joint Logistics Centre, Humanitarian.info, InSTEDD, and Humanlink.

You can read about the development of SMS GeoChat, the Sahana effort for Burma/Myanmar (Radar post), and the Mesh4x KML sync engine on Eduardo Jezierski's blog and on Jon Thompson's Aid Worker Daily.

Virtual Worlds & the Cognitive Surplus

How much work went into producing all the (language) versions of Wikipedia? The answer: much less than the total number of hours Americans spent watching TV over the last year. Listening to Clay Shirky estimate the amount of untapped cognitive cycles in his Web 2.0 keynote, reminded me of a similar calculation we did early last year. Amidst the flurry of media stories about Second Life, my immediate reaction to the hype surrounding Second Life was to compare it to the benchmark that Clay cited in his talk: hours of TV viewing per capita.

Nevertheless, the media stories combined with signals from a few of our technical indicators (online job postings, book sales, message lists, ...) encouraged us to dig deeper into Virtual Worlds. We spent time in the latter part of 2007 understanding Virtual Worlds and earlier this year we released a Business Guide. This Sunday (10 a.m. PDT), I will be speaking in Second Life as part of the Virtual Business Expo and I plan to briefly discuss some of our most recent findings. The organizers are encouraging people to register in advance and you can do so here. Hope to see you in-world this Sunday.

Fabulous Eulogy for Gary Gygax

Writing in yesterday's New York Times, Wired senior editor Adam Rogers contributed a wonderful meditation on the recent death of Gary Gygax, creator of Dungeons and Dragons, in which he argues that Gygax's contribution to modern culture is far more profound than most people realize:

GARY GYGAX died last week and the universe did not collapse. This surprises me a little bit, because he built it.

I’m not talking about the cosmological, Big Bang part. Everyone who reads blogs knows that a flying spaghetti monster made all that. But Mr. Gygax co-created the game Dungeons & Dragons, and on that foundation of role-playing and polyhedral dice he constructed the social and intellectual structure of our world....

We live in Gary Gygax’s world. The most popular books on earth are fantasy novels about wizards and magic swords. The most popular movies are about characters from superhero comic books. The most popular TV shows look like elaborate role-playing games: intricate, hidden-clue-laden science fiction stories connected to impossibly mathematical games that live both online and in the real world. And you, the viewer, can play only if you’ve sufficiently mastered your home-entertainment command center so that it can download a snippet of audio to your iPhone, process it backward with beluga whale harmonic sequences and then podcast the results to the members of your Yahoo group.

Adam's eulogy also includes insightful comments (and a great chart) on the geek character, as well as the influence of D&D all the way through to Facebook. Well worth a read. [via Tom Christiansen, who knew Gary when he was growing up in Wisconsin.] Update: Be sure to click through to the chart linked above.

Neuroscience and Epistemology at ETech

At ETech, I had a fascinating conversation with Marie Bjerede, VP and General Manager of Qualcomm's Portland Design Center. She was telling me how the threads we'd brought together at ETech had validated her own thinking and helped her bring together her private passions and her professional life. I asked her to write up our conversation, and she agreed. Here's what Marie wrote (links are mine):

For years, I’ve been secretly (almost shamefully) allowing my hobby to seep into my work. I’m a high-tech executive for a living. I get paid to be rational, logical, objective, and analytical. And I get paid to produce results. But, being blessed with a team with the relentless habit of constantly producing results, I’ve had the luxury of tinkering. Not the metrics-driven six-sigma efficiency-oriented tinkering that a hard-headed technical leader can point to with pride. No, my tinkering is based in my hobby: epistemology (the branch of philosophy that asks the question, “What is knowledge?” “How do we know?”)

Over the past decade, an increasing number of popular books have been published that address classic questions in epistemology by drawing on recent research in neuroscience and results based on brain imaging. From Daniel Goleman’s work in emotional and social intelligence leading to his writings on research with the Dalai Lama and the Mind and Life Institute, to Gerald Edelman’s mind-blowing denunciation of mind-body duality via neural darwinism, to Antonio Damasio’s explication of the physical origins and building blocks of feeling and emotion, a picture has begun to emerge. A picture of minds that are entailed by their biology: brains that can act either as massively parallel processors that identify patterns and signal the pattern-matching results with emotions or as serial processors where any given set of inputs will lead, through inductive and deductive reasoning, to logical conclusions. Intuition and gut feelings come from one kind of thought, reason from another. Together, they balance each other and fill in each other’s blind spots.

So how does the balance of intuitive and logical thinkers affect a team’s results? Does it affect the balance between creativity and efficiency? What about individual and collective emotional and social intelligence? Are there brain states that enhance or degrade effectiveness, and if so, can they be learned (or unlearned)? How do beings with 4 billion of years of evolutionary selection for multi-modal communication fare in a digital, pure-verbal environment? How do physical spaces affect team results? These are the kinds of questions that have driven my compulsive tinkering. I’ve taken to referring to it as “applied epistemology” and considering myself a lay practitioner. One whose predilections, of necessity, are not discussed in tough-minded company.

Then, this Tuesday I was blown away. First, I got to see Elizabeth Churchill’s surprising and insightful presentation on socially oriented experience. Not only did she use Damasio’s work to lay a foundation for her explanations, she began with Descartes and worked her way there! Shortly thereafter I was fortunate enough to see Nicole Lazzaro’s very thoughtful treatment of the emotions and mental states that drive satisfying gaming experiences - again, including Damasio in the foundation as well as a shout-out to Paul Ekman’s work on universal emotions. That evening, I had the opportunity to hear first hand from John McCarthy himself how philosophy was foundational to his work in Artificial Intelligence, a theme which he elaborated on in his challenging Wednesday morning keynote (liberally referencing John Searle’s speech act theory.) Finally, there was Kathy Sierra’s delightfully provocative treatise on what neuroscience has to tell us about expertise, focus, and practice. Such a diverse set of insights that, to me, all look like varied applications of modern epistemology!!

So. Much gratitude for the useful brain states this emergent pattern has evoked. Epistemology is coming out of the closet for me!

Marie's comments were music to my ears. A lot of what we try to do at ETech (as well as at other conferences and gatherings) is to bring together people who are connected in ways that are not obvious. We see an idea bubbling up, and try to build a program that helps other people to see the same trends that we do.

In the case of the connections between neuroscience, epistemology and computers, we've been noodling on this for a while. The success of Mind Hacks in 2004 showed us just how much people are fascinated with neuroscience; Kathy Sierra's Creating Passionate Users helped us to see how it impacts product design and professional learning; we started seeing how game designers are the new rock stars of the computer industry, because they understand the role of emotion in application design.

Even further out, through our foo camp process (which could be summarized as "interesting people will lead you to interesting topics"), we found ourselves surprised by the number of people who are interested in "hacking their own brains." (See Ed Boyden and Ramez Naam for two examples.) But this idea is hitting the mainstream. Timo Hannay pointed us to a recent poll in Nature about the legitimacy of using drugs to boost brain power.

But hey, if you read Steve Levy's profile of me in Wired a few years ago, or John Markoff's What the Dormouse Said, you'd realize that these connections between the science of mind and computer science are deeply rooted. As we pursue the idea of collective intelligence (which as I've often noted is the very heart of Web 2.0), we also go deeper into the question of just what intelligence is. We're all closet epistemologists at O'Reilly... :-)

(I can't resist a plug for Steve Talbott's two books, The Future Does Not Compute, which I published in 1995, and Devices of the Soul, which I published last year. Steve asks what parts of our humanity we are leaving out in our pursuit of technology -- are we creating machines like us, or are we making ourselves more like them? Unlike Steve, I believe in the possibilities of machine intelligence, and but he provides an insightful and necessary challenge to assumptions about the benefits of technology.)

Teaching design to businesspeople

The "D" in TED stands for "design," and it's become a truism that design is a crucial element of business success. Ask Apple. But the conventional wisdom still maintains that design is a "soft" art, not worthy of attention by serious businesspeople. It's for the designers, the marketing people. And when top executives insert themselves into the design process, the results are often unintentionally hilarious. I remember a decade ago, when I made my living in part by building websites for large media companies, one meeting in which a client CFO rejected an iteration of a site because he didn't like the shade of mauve in the background. (Philip Greenspun joked about these sort of people -- go to this page and search for "mauve" -- but it really happened.)

There's a growing literature detailing how businesspeople can build and sell better products if they think like a designer. Jane Fulton Suri's Thoughtless Acts?: Observations on Intuitive Design is a tiny classic that does nothing less than teach businesspeople a new way of looking at everything. And this month O'Reilly is publishing Subject To Change: Creating Great Products & Services for an Uncertain World, in which the Adaptive Path team shows how important design is, in terms businesspeople can understand.

And now these ideas are filtering into education. In one high-profile example, the Stanford "d.school" is doing much to connect business and design. Andy Oram, in an internal O'Reilly list, pointed us to a fascinating article by Terry (Bringing Design to Software) Winograd of Stanford in the recent Interactions called "Design education for business and engineering management students: a new approach." Winograd reports on the insights that have come to Donald Norman as he has sought new ways to infect nondesigners with design smarts. The author of The Design of Everyday Things and Emotional Design has developed a "design track" in the Master of Manufacturing and Management program at Northwestern. It's still early on, and Winograd's perspective in the article is prospective, but it's another data point that the next generation of businesspeople may be able to think at a deeper level than shades of mauve.

BarCampBank in San Francisco & New England

BarCampBanks are a series of unconference events dedicated to "fostering innovation and the creation of new business models in banking and finance".

Ben Black and I organized the first BarCampBank in the US last year, and it was an incredible experience. (See: BarCampBankSeattle recaps from NetBanker, CurrencyMarketing, Gene Blishen, William Azaroff, and many others.)

I'm excited to see two BarCampBank events happening in the next few weeks:

BarCampBank San Francisco
Saturday, March 29, 2008
UC Berkeley campus - Soda Hall in the Wozniak Lounge
RSVP @ EventBrite ($25)

BarCampBank New England
Saturday, April 5th, 2008
America's Credit Union Museum, Manchester, NH

I highly recommend attending if you have the opportunity.

Updated: BarCampBank Dallas was just announced "sometime in June" too!

YPulse College Mashup

Foo-camper Anastasia Goodstein of YPulse wrote in to let me know about their YPulse College Mashup, happening Feb 1 (with a kickoff in the evening of Jan 31st) in Santa Monica. The agenda looks interesting: how college-age kids use IM, campus activism, and the necessary panel of college kids talking about how they use technology. If you're in the area and want to know how your future employees think, or want to reach the college-age audience via technology, be sure to swing by!

Mainstream acceptance of Twitter for disaster communication...

I'm stuck at San Francisco Airport due to delays from the big storm yesterday. A few minutes ago a plane was struck by lightning at the gate which caused quite a bit of excitement. Planes are designed to take a lightning strike and apparently it happens all the time. They took off after a quick check by the pilot and ground crew. (I hope the rest of their flight is otherwise uneventful!)

I wanted to pass on a few disaster preparedness tips from fellow Emergency Manager W. David Stephenson (earlier Radar post). David is working to educate the mainstream public about using services like Twitter during disasters with a series of YouTube videos like this one:

I have many thoughts about this, but they just started boarding my flight (24 hours late!)... more to come.

Why the iPhone Will Beat the Blackberry

I was chatting the other day with Brad Burnham, with whom I'm on the board of Wesabe. He saw my iPhone, and asked if I'd ever had a Blackberry. No, I haven't. Brad said that he'd tried an iPhone, but soon switched back. "Everyone who's never had a Blackberry loves the iPhone," he said, "but if they've used the Blackberry, they're just like me. They try it, and then go back."

A strong endorsement for the Blackberry. Right?

Wrong. What it brought up in me was a powerful sense of deja vu, and the response of die-hard Lotus 1-2-3 users to the new graphical spreadsheet, Excel. Man, if you were used to the powerful "slash" menus of 1-2-3, that let you fire off any command as a short string of remembered keystrokes, the clunky point and click interface of Excel was a real step backwards. Personally, I'd still use 1-2-3 by preference. But that doesn't mean that most users would.

Ditto for every other class of application. I still use vi for much of my writing, and still prefer it to any point-and-click writing application ever created. But the world doesn't agree with me.

Get over it: power users are a minority, and while they point the way to the future, they tend to be disappointed when the rest of the market catches up with an inferior product that has a lower barrier to new users.

So, my prediction: the Blackberry will become more like the iPhone, or the iPhone and its imitators will eventually eat its lunch, relegating it to a niche player. The iPhone is now the communications device to beat.

Biodiesel @ Burning Man and beyond...

As Brady mentioned last week, Biodiesel use skyrocketed at Burning Man this year by both the organization and individual participants. Groups like the Green Tortoise and the Burn Green Express even partnered with Bently Biofuels to provide on-site refueling for their vehicles and others (including mine).

Most diesel-engined cars and trucks can run on biodiesel without any modifications other than changing the fuel filter. I've been driving a biodiesel truck for over a year, and tell people that the only “conversion” it required was a sticker and a sense of moral superiority. I find fuel stations using NearBio, and if I need to I can always fill up with regular dino-diesel.

from the EPA Renewable Fuel Standard Program:
Biodiesel is a renewable fuel produced from agricultural resources such as vegetable oils. In the United States, most biodiesel is made from soybean oil; however canola oil, sunflower oil, recycled cooking oils, and animal fats are also used.

How It's Made
To make biodiesel, the base oil is put through a process called "esterificiation." This refining method uses an industrial alcohol (ethanol or methanol) and a catalyst (substance that enables a chemical reaction) to convert the oil into a fatty-acid methyl-ester fuel (biodiesel).

Biodiesel in its pure form is known as "neat biodiesel" or B100, but it can also be blended with conventional diesel, most commonly as B5 (5 percent biodiesel and 95 percent diesel) and B20 (20 percent biodiesel and 80 percent diesel). Biodiesel is registered with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and is legal for use at any blend level in both highway and nonroad diesel vehicles.

Most diesel engines can run on biodiesel without needing any special equipment. If you are interested in using biodiesel in your vehicle or equipment, check with the manufacturer for any recommendations and information regarding engine warranties. In addition, once you have determined the proper blend for your vehicle, make sure to purchase your fuel from a reputable dealer selling commercial grade biodiesel.

For more information see www.biodiesel.org, the excellent World Changing post on the Green Man and previous efforts, Inside:GreenTech, and the Official Burning Man Environment Blog. (any others I should be reading?)

YPulse Mashup

Anastasia Goodstein runs the YPulse blog that tracks teen and youth culture for those who are interested (often marketers and business people trying to get a handle on a potentially lucrative demographic). Her first event happens next month (July 16-17) in San Francisco at the Hotel Nikko: the YPulse Mashup. She's got a great lineup of speakers from Mozes, MySpace, Big Champagne, MIT, Nike, MTV, Second Life, .... I love her blog, and can't wait to see what the conference is like.

Web 2.0 now in continuing education at Oxford

We get lots of over-the-transom submissions to Radar, most of which we don't cover. (Just like an open source project, we generally take our news from experienced "committers" who've worked their way up from commenter to lead source to guest blogger to full time participant. We generally don't take news from PR agencies or people just looking for coverage.) But sometimes, an unsolicited submission is news not for what is submitted but for who submits it. I was tickled to receive this email from Peter Holland of the Department of Continuing Education at Oxford University:

Please consider the following University of Oxford events for inclusion in your events listing page:

Mobile Social Networking - the Financial Saviour of the Mobile Sector (3 July 2007, University of Oxford, UK)
The smart guys working in 3G now accept that the one-to-many broadcast of mobile content is a broken business model. So what now? The passion of connected people to socialise words, voice, media and digital possessions around their personal networks never went away - it just went mobile. Mobile Social Networking. It's time is right now. MobSocNet

User Generated Content and Web 2.0 - A Strategic Viewpoint for Decision Makers (5 July 2007, University of Oxford, UK)
Designed for decision makers, this intensive one-day course offers an opportunity to learn more about the threats and opportunities arising from user generated content.

Mobile Web 2.0 and IMS : User Generated Content (from a telecoms / infrastructure perspective) (6 July 2007, University of Oxford, UK)
This intensive one-day course will have a dual perspective. It will approach Web 2.0 from the user perspective and also from the IMS standpoint. It will cover the basics of IMS and will then discuss how IMS would apply in a user generated content / Web 2.0 world.

The fact that Web 2.0 is now the subject of continuing education courses is a sure sign that the meme has hit the mainstream. That the first of these courses I've heard about are at Oxford is a nice grace note to that mainstream acceptance, because of the university's history, dating back to the middle ages, and its status as one of the most prestigious universities in the world.

According to Wikipedia, the first literary mention of Oxford comes in The Canterbury Tales, which referred to a "Clerk [student] of Oxenford": "For him was levere have at his beddes heed/ Twenty bookes, clad in blak or reed,/ of Aristotle and his philosophie/ Than robes riche, or fithele, or gay sautrie". Now we can say: "For him was levere have at his beddes heed/ Twenty bookes and a deli.cio.us feed/ of Web 2.0 philosophie/ Than windows riche or filthie, or gray SOA."

John Edwards is Using Twitter

Sarah Milstein writes in email to the Radar backchannel:

John Edwards is using twitter.

Looks like he signed up a while ago but just started using it regularly.
Smart move. Texting is an intimate medium, and anyone following him on
Twitter is likely to feel pretty connected.

I agree. This is a smart move, and reaches out to a good demographic for Edwards.

Chicago Tribune Notices Make:

Most of our readers are no doubt familiar with Make:, but it's nice to see it getting noticed by mainstream media. The Chicago Tribune just ran an enthusiastic article. But more importantly, they got it right:

Aimed at legions of passionate tinkerers, the surprisingly successful magazine teaches hobbyists how to do cool things with, well, things.

The real significance of Make:, at least from a Radar point of view, is not just that it is bringing the hacker ethic to a wider audience, but that it signals a new malleability in the physical world, a world that is increasingly infused with computing. While Make: draws inspiration from earlier generations of hands-on magazines (like Popular Mechanics in the 30s, 40s and 50s, when it was still more about things to do rather than things to buy), it is also deeply rooted in the computer industry.

Software and stuff (or bits and atoms as Neil Gershenfeld prefers to say) are becoming entangled along several dimensions, creating the perfect storm that has set the stage for Make:

1. So many devices that were formerly mechanical are now electronic, and controlled by software. This software is, of course, hackable.

2. Consumer electronic devices have become so cheap (and so quickly obsolete) that there is a huge surplus of materials that can be experimented on with little or no cost.

3. There's a new generation of freely available tools for not just software development but also fabrication. CAD/CAM software used to be expensive. Now you can get tools like sketchup for free.

4. Even sophisticated computer-controlled manufacturing tools like laser-etchers, water-jet cutters, CNC milling machines, and 3D printers are coming down in cost -- to about the cost of typesetters just before desktop publishing took off.

5. A new culture of popular fabricated art, perhaps best exemplified by Burning Man, has taken hold.

I believe that we're on the front-end of an explosion of new technologies and business opportunities -- personal fabrication, smart objects, file sharing for stuff not just songs, sensor networks that feed Web 2.0 applications without any conscious human intervention, 3D virtual worlds that overlap increasingly with the "real" world -- that can already be seen in the explorations of the alpha geeks whose exploits are chronicled in the pages of Make: (and many of whom you can meet in person at the Maker Faire coming up in May.)

Of course, don't think that Make: is just about electronics or software-related hardware hacking projects. The compass that guides Make: is interesting people having fun with technology, and the joy they have in learning and sharing. And it mines a century of great how-to projects from the mechanical age as well as the electronics age. What other technology magazine would teach you how to make a trebuchet AND how to hack an old VCR into a programmable cat feeder?

The other nice thing about the Chicago Tribune article was the ink that it gave to Dale Dougherty, the founder and publisher of Make:. Dale has been a quiet force in so many technology revolutions -- O'Reilly's original book publishing program, the commercialization of the web, XML, Web 2.0, and now the Maker revolution. He hasn't gotten a fraction of the credit he deserves. I was thinking of this recently when I read another article in the popular press, this one from the NY Times about consumer advocacy blogs. It gave a nice write up to Gina Trapani's LifeHacker, but traced the term "life hacking" only back as far as Danny O'Brien. Of course, Dale was the one who started the popular rehabilitation of the term "hacks" with the Hacks series that he started four years ago for O'Reilly (and has now taken over publishing responsibility for once again, along with the new hackszine blog.)

Apple Tv or Mac Mini

Last week Apple didn't just release the iPhone. They also released Apple TV, a single use appliance that allows you to play music, watch movies and view your pictures from your home PCs or Macs. When I saw it my first thought was how this would stack up compared to the Mac Mini as a multimedia device. Both are small, both have iTunes -- what are the exact trade-offs? Luckily, the Apple Blog has written up a great side-by-side comparison of the Mac Mini and the Apple TV.

The stack-up is what I expected. Apple TV is cheaper (by $300), simpler, but also more restricting. It has a made for TV welcome screen, but I can't surf the web or play Rhapsody through it. The Mac Mini has all the freedoms and configuration issues of... well... a computer. Sure I could use it, but could a friend of mine? Not so sure. Still it will allow me greater freedom with my media, still look very slick, and can be repurposed elsewhere when something shinier comes along. Of course, I wouldn't make my choice just between these two devices. Microsoft's Media Center or Ubuntu on a Shuttle PC would have to be considered as well.

Army Games

It's not news that the US military is using games for recruiting, but it is interesting that they are purposefully making it harder for recruits players to lose. From the Wired article:

The new PC title, Future Force Company Commander, or F2C2, is a nifty God-game that puts players in the driver's seat of 18 systems at the heart of the military's new net-centric warfare approach. The Army added the game to its recruiting tool kit last month as a high-tech follow-up to its successful America's Army shooter.

It's an impressive game, simulating weaponry the military is actually using or building, gamers say. But the gameplay is designed so it's hard to lose: The equipment holds up awfully well and the enemy doesn't learn from experience.

"They didn't ask for hole punchers," says Mark Long, co-CEO of Zombie, where the game was built under contract. "High tech has all kinds of low-tech vulnerabilities and they didn't want the vulnerabilities programmed in."

Defense contractor Science Applications International commissioned the game for $1.5 million. So far, more than 24,000 copies have been handed out on disk or downloaded from the websites of the Army and game builder Zombie.

The military has been having issues recruiting and I think that using games to recruit is a smart, good way for them to connect to their desired audience. Although I don't like the idea of them purposefully making the game easier to manipulate people it doesn't seem like it will do them much good. An easy game is less fun than a challenging one. I'll bet it gets played more in the waiting rooms at recruiting stations than in homes.