Four short links: 7 August 2009

Recovery.gov, Meme tracking, RFID Scans, Open Source Search Engines

1. Defragging the Stimulus -- each [recovery] site has its own silo of data, and no site is complete. What we need is a unified point of access to all sources of information: firsthand reports from Recovery.gov and state portals, commentary from StimulusWatch and MetaCarta, and more. Suggests that Recovery.gov should be the hub for this presently-decentralised pile of recovery data.
2. Memetracker -- site accompanying the research written up by the New York Times as Researchers at Cornell, using powerful computers and clever algorithms, studied the news cycle by looking for repeated phrases and tracking their appearances on 1.6 million mainstream media sites and blogs [...] For the most part, the traditional news outlets lead and the blogs follow, typically by 2.5 hours [...] a relative handful of blog sites are the quickest to pick up on things that later gain wide attention on the Web. Confirming that blogs and traditional media have a symbiotic relationship, not a parasitic one. (via Stats article in NY Times)
3. Feds at DefCon Alarmed After RFIDs Scanned (Wired) -- RFID badges make for convenient security, and for convenient attack. Black hats can read your security cards from 2 or 3 feet away, and few in government are aware of the attack vector. To help prevent surreptitious readers from siphoning RFID data, a company named DIFRWear was doing brisk business at DefCon selling leather Faraday-shielded wallets and passport holders lined with material that prevents readers from sniffing RFID chips in proximity cards.
4. A Comparison of Open Source Search Engines and Indexing Twitter -- Detailed write-up of the open source search options and how they stack up on a pile of Tweets. While researching for the Software section, I was quite surprised by the number of open source vertical search solutions I found: Lucene (Nutch, Solr, Hounder), Sphinx, zettair, Terrier, Galago, Minnion, MG4J, Wumpus, RDBMS (mysql, sqlite), Indri, Xapian, grep … And I was even more surprised by the lack of comparisons between these solutions. Many of these platforms advertise their performance benchmarks, but they are in isolation, use different data sets, and seem to be more focused on speed as opposed to say relevance. (via joshua on Delicious)

Adaptation

In Dale's recent post, "Another War We're Not Winning: Us vs Spam", he asked if the war against spam is winnable, or if email will go the way of Usenet, drowned in abuse of the system. I liked a lot of the answers Dale collected, but I don't think it is possible to lose this war.

Prophecies of Internet doom were so common on Usenet that there was a stock joke to dismiss the doomsayers: "Death of Internet predicted -- film at 11." I always think of that line when I see these conversations. What some of Dale's respondents are saying is that the joke eventually proved true, and email is next. I don't think at all, though, that Usenet simply drowned in spam; I think that Usenet still exists, but now we call newsgroup posts "Blogs." It didn't scale to have one group where all the discussion of politics on the Internet could take place, so instead people use their own blog to post their political views, and you subscribe to the person instead of the topic. The activity is the same even if the form is different. Spam was a big force for this change, but so was the massive growth in the Internet population at large.

(Of course, Usenet literally still exists, too, in the form of Google Groups. The interface and character have both changed a lot, but the niche still supports life.)

I believe the same adaptation will happen to email. I've been testing 37signals' upcoming product, Highrise. One thing I love about it is that it serves as a layer on top of my inbox, and it makes my inbox a lot more manageable and workable for me. Even when I wake up and find a ton of spam in my inbox, there's a way to get work done and respond to the important things by using a tool that extracts what I need from the email morass. You can easily imagine some new form of application emerging to deal with the problem of open email receipt from any source, and Highrise is a good early example of that model.

Maybe the form of email will change; and maybe the form of spam will change with it (like newsgroup spam became blog comment spam). But the idea of writing a message from one person to another is certainly here to stay, and talking about a change in the form of email makes a lot more sense to me than declaring this war lost.

The New Hallucinogens

This millenial "New Age" aspect of what we're now calling Web 2.0 was a big feature of Kevin Kelly's August 2005 Wired article, We Are the Web, which provoked Nicholas Carr's stinging rebuttal, The Amorality of Web 2.0. Roger Magoulas, the director of O'Reilly Research, has another take on the same subject. He wrote in email:

"I've been taking care of a neighbor's cat, and while waiting for the cat to return one night I did something I don't normally have time to do - speed remoting through cable tv channels. My attention was drawn to a VH-1 special called The Drug Years - a four hour documentary about drug use and its consequences over the last four or five decades. I was struck by how often the way pundits and folks interviewed used the same adjectives and metaphors to relate their drug experiences as we often hear to used describe the potential of software and the internet: mind expanding / mind blowing; connecting with everyone; global consciousness; new colors and shapes; combining music, colors and movement (i.e., animation); insiders vs. outsiders; the importance of play; ambivalence towards material wealth; etc.
 

Especially the section that focused on the 60's seemed to capture the same utopian euphoria I'm hearing in the current technology environment (and what I heard during the first boom). Besides the use of mind-blowing adjectives, four themes spanned 60's drug taking and the current technology wave: connecting to everyone (in some type of lovefest context); there are people who get it and people who don't; multi-media helps define what's happening; and, that everything will be different now (in an undefined way).

I know John Markoff made a connection between drug use and the original personal computer hackers in What the Dormouse Said: How the 60's Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry, but I think this is different. Maybe the 60's counterculture never ended, it just went underground only to reemerge as a source of memes for the current technology culture.

So, following my logic, Web 2.0, DIY, open source, blogs, data are the new hallucinogens, only now it's all legal.

P.S. Hope the subject text doesn't trigger any extra scrutiny from the feds - evidence of another similarity between 60's drug culture and 21st century technology, justified paranoia."

While it's easy to use the parallels to dismiss Web 2.0, to do so is in fact to miss the enormous transformative power of the sixties counter-culture. Millennial thinking is always over the top, but the human longing for transformation and transcendence is nonetheless a powerful force for change. Culture moves in a spiral, not a circle; history repeats itself dynamically, not statically.

New Yahoo!/O'Reilly Buzz Market Release

The Yahoo!/O'Reilly Buzz Game has had a refresh. We watch what the technology prediction market tells us, and we have added some new markets to answer some new questions: What are the most popular API types? Will Leopard build interest over Vista? We've also refreshed some other markets to find out the latest answer: What's the most popular Rails-esqe Web Framework? Which MMPORG can gain on WoW? The markets will run for the next couple of months and then we will do another refresh. Suggestions for new markets are always welcome.

API Keys for Direct Competitors

In a FlickrCentral discussion thread about Picasa Web Album, Google's new photo hosting service, Stewart Butterfield from Flickr says something very interesting about whether Flickr would, or should, give a direct competitor a Flickr API key for the purpose of moving a Flickr user's data to that competitor's service:

[T]his is something that we've never had any set policy on and this thread has sparked a lot of internal debate on the team: some people felt that it was unreasonable, some people felt like it didn't matter since Flickr should win on the basis of being the best thing out there.

I actually had a change of heart and was convinced by Eric's position that we definitely should approve requests from direct competitors as long as they do the same. That means (a) that they need to have a full and complete API and (b) be willing to give us access.

The reasoning here is partly just that "fair's fair' and more subtly, like a GPL license, it enforces user freedom down the chain. I think we'll take this approach (still discussing it internally).

I love this, and would love to see this idea discussed more and more broadly. The discussion seems to me to overlap directly with this (long but very worthwhile) exchange between Mark Pilgrim and John Gruber: When the bough breaks, And Oranges, and Juggling oranges. Mark and John are talking about desktop applications, and Stewart and his interlocutor, Thomas Hawk, are talking about web applications, but that's where the differences end. In both conversations, they're talking about freedom and ownership of data (a topic on which you should expect to see me write much more, very soon).

There are license lawyers who will jump all over this with a GPL derivative, and given the success of the GPL at promoting its core ideas, there is some place for that. But at start, the discussion of data freedom and ownership should continue. It's important. Eric's API Parity solution is a great one.

Web 2.0 Service Mark Controversy (Tim responding this time)

A lot of people have been waiting for a statement from me (Tim O'Reilly) about the Web 2.0 service mark. I'm back, and here it is. This is a long post, because the issues are complex, and I hope people will read to the end. I'll do my best to set the record straight, and to answer some of the comments and questions that have been flying around. I apologize to Tom for the unnecessary lawyer's letter, and ask that he apologize to me for the way he stirred up the mob. I then explain the back story behind the registration of the Web 2.0 mark, and our current thinking about what to do about it. Because the post is so long, and I don't want to break it in the middle, only this notice about the post appears on the Radar home page. Please click through to read the full posting.

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Tag Tickles: Answers

Here are my guesses about what topics tickle us on the Radar. Tim: collective intelligence, business, and lefty politics. Rael: Rails, Ajax, and ETech. Marc: Food, Startups, and Things Other People Are Doing Wrong. Nat: Machine Learning, the Porn Industry, and History. Our ideal stories are below the fold.

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Tag Tickles

One thing I've learned being a parent is that everyone has subjects or behaviours that get a response. Kids are great at finding parents' buttons and pushing them (can't stand repetitive noises? let's repeat "Dora D-D-D-D-Dora" for an hour until your nerves are smouldering ruins). Markets are just as good at revealing hot button topics—economists know that even if nothing has been made explicit, the outputs of a system will reflect the incentives built into it. For example, I often joke that the perfect Slashdot story is about a movie where Natalie Portman uses quantum computing to send Linux to Mars. I'm not the only one to realize this, as this list of Digg-headline words shows. These hot buttons give us our personality, our niche, and our audience. What do you think are the hot buttons of the O'Reilly Radar team? Leave your suggestions in the comments to this post. I've written up what I think are our hot buttons, and the post will go out on Friday. A free copy of your choice of Mind Hacks or Mind Performance Hacks to whoever gets closest to my answers.

Eyeballs: March 20, 2006

More food for thought as I close a bundle of Firefox tabs:

Buried in the Wired profile of Sky Dayton is this great line from SK Telecom's global strategy chief: "The ultrahip crowd and the ultrageek crowd. That's the target SK Telecom was dreaming of. I call it technosexual." I'm ultrageek, but I don't think I'm ultrahip. I guess I don't have to ask which half of "technosexual" that makes me ...

Sky Dayton's new venture in the US is Helio. They're an MVNO, a virtual mobile phone company: they don't actually own the transmitters. They're an end-around some of the grinding slowness and stupidity of the carriers (but not all: how long until I see these types of features on my US mobile phone?). As I see companies like Yahoo! putting all their services out in the form of APIs, I wonder whether they're building the infrastructure to create a new class of companies: VPOs--Virtual Portal Operators. Imagine a world where you have access to Yahoo!'s data and services, but you get to write the code and UIs that filter and shape the portal experience to the needs, technology, interests, and abilities of your users.

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Bionic Software

Boxxet founder You Mon Tsang recently introduced a new meme into my vocabulary: "bionic software." As You Mon defines it, "Bionics is the study of living systems with the intention of applying their principles to the design of engineering systems." But when we spoke a month or so ago, he used a folksier definition, referencing the seventies TV show The Six Million Dollar Man, which featured Lee Majors as an injured astronaut rebuilt with technology that made him faster, stronger, and more capable. Using this image, a bionic system is one that combines the biological and mechanical systems to create an enhanced system that is more powerful than either alone.

It strikes me that this "bionic" aspect is critical to many of the most successful web applications. Back in 2003, I began using an illustration of von Kempelen's Mechanical Turk in my talks, to emphasize the point that one of the things that distinguishes web applications from PC-era applications is the fact that web applications actually have people inside them, working daily as part of the application. Without the programmers running the crawl at Google, filtering out the spam, and tuning the algorithms, the application stops working. Without the users feeding the spiders by continuously linking to new sites, the crawl turns up nothing new. In a profound way, the users are part of the application. This turns out to be true in one form or another for almost every breakthrough web application.

I generalized this idea into one of the key principles of Web 2.0, namely the architecture of participation, the idea that one of the most important principles in internet application design is to architect systems in such a way that they become more powerful the more they are used. But the term "bionic systems" gives a new twist on this concept.

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Eyeballs: Feb 27, 2005

Bradley Horowitz from Yahoo! posts about the ratios of people who create content to those who consume. Despite this great contra-argument, I end up agreeing with Horowitz. It'd be great if everyone produced, but they just don't--most people who visit a blog don't leave comments, let alone run a blog of their own. This meshes in perfectly with my experience in open source: the source might be hanging out there for a million eyeballs to work on, but it can be a hell of a job to get a dozen hands working on your source. Each of those people needs motivation, skills, and time. It's your job as figurehead of an open source project or creator of web app code to align with their motivation (by meeting the emotional and technical needs they have) and hope you can keep the skill-time barrier low enough that you'll get people working on it. The biggest part is the motivation, meeting the emotional needs of developers.

Most open source project leaders have online charisma, an online persona that inspires others to work by being an inspirational leader: someone who is smarter, harder working, better in some way than the drone. Occasionally there are some projects where the ideology is the inspiration, a cause worth sacrificing oneself for (or if not oneself, then one's social life). In a lucky some (e.g., FSF) there are both: an energetic articulate charismatic (online) leader and an inspirational message. Those companies who would launch an open source project by firing sourcecode over the enterprise firewall with a Sourceforge trebuchet need to take heed: finding someone technical, engaging, and inspirational to lead that open source project is just as much a necessary and sufficient condition for open source success as making the source code available.

Things found while figuring out what to put on stage at Where 2.0: Web 2.0 map, Yahoo! Research ZoneTag, Ten Best Flickr Mashups. My favourite: Captionr.

This interesting recording by Nate Harrison in Winter 2004 on The Amen Break, a heavily reused piece of music. Hearing Nate recount the history of the break, its commercialization and the subsequent lock-down on sampling, gave new depth to Creative Commons and the current business boom around open source.

Phil Windley's notes on Alan Kay's keynote are inspirational reading. "Cathedrals have 1 millionth the mass of pyramids. The difference was the arch. Architecture demands arches." It's just full of quotable chunks. My favourite: "Making computing into a science means that we have to understand what to do about our beliefs. When we talk, we do nothing but tell stories that people will find interesting. There's danger in that because stories can create resonance without being scientific".

Some programming links: Bran's Kernel Development tutorial, an amazing breakdown of the structure of the Prototype Javascript library, Jemplate is Ingy's Javascript template solution--all the power of Perl's Template Toolkit but in Javascript. Related to open source: Simon Phipps's post about the developers and the deployers as two sides of the open source coin, and this commercial software for managing legislation as it's written and amended is made possibly only through the Open Document Format.

And finally, some candy: Flu Wiki for all your avian flu needs; animated engines, and things that 18 year old kids have always known (my favourite: Bill Gates has always had $1B).

Eyeballs: Feb 22, 2006

Another week of Firefox tabs to close:

At last, someone's trying to drag the travel industry into 1998. The primitive booking systems we have at the moment drive me nuts--yes, there's a lot of complexity hidden beneath the surface but the user interfaces and feature sets are appalling. I liked kayak and the other similar "find the best price for a specific date and trip" systems, but it's about time someone offered a "find the cheapest dates for this destination" service. The system I use to price my international travel, by the way, is Expert Flyer, recommended by master traveller Artur Bergman. It's powerful but frightfully complex--Flyspy is wise to be building a very simple interface to that power.

Since I moved back to New Zealand (flown on flights found on Expert Flyer!) I've been BitTorrenting some shows to stay plugged into American culture. Veronica Mars is my current favourite, and I was chuffed to find this Wayfaring map of Veronica Mars locations. I may make a pilgrimage when I'm in San Diego for ETech. I won't visit the Jack Bauer 24 map of "Day 5" locations. These came via the great Google Maps Mania blog, and it's interesting to see both made via Wayfaring. EBay Motors/Google Maps makes for a nice combination (written by the head technical evangelist for EBay and author of Upgrading to PHP 5). See ProgrammbleWeb for a very long list of Google Maps mashups.

I've been catching up on the Google Map hacking as part of my work preparing for this year's Where 2.0 (registration now open!). I've been struggling with what to do with the mobile phone LBS industry at the conference--the pace of adoption and change in that industry is so slow. However, Russell Beattie's blog note about MashupCamp caught my eye--he pulls together some isolated projects I'd been watching, like Socialight and BonesInMotion, into a nice picture of the life in the mobile local space.

"EvokeTV is focused on multi-tasking tv watchers - the growing population of users that have broadband internet connectivity while watching TV. Whether you are a passive viewer or actively engaged with the programming you watch, we strive to give you a better user experience, by creating a new community based online dimension to your television programming." Interesting to see some of the first steps at this coming. TV shows are starting to realize that people in their prime demographic multitask with IM and cellphones, so laptops just make sense as a continuation of that. I remember watching the Simpsons in my apartment in 1994, sprawled on the couch with my laptop, IRCing with my friends who were watching the same show. Great times, until the RSI blew out my wrists for several months.

I've been thinking a lot lately about the benefits of a computer science education--the framework for thinking about computational problems and the toolset it gives you for attacking them are both valuable. I know there's a lot of talk about how impractical a CS degree is, how it doesn't prepare you for the real world, etc., but I think they have a lot to offer conceptually and pragmatically. For me, the CS degree gave me a cosmology, a world view of computing and a history of research in the area. When I meet a problem now, I can say "aha, that looks like virtual memory paging" and I know the relevant algorithms and data structures, the right books to read, and what hidden traps lurk beneath the surface of a seemingly obvious problem. The danger of programming without this context is that you'll waste time reinventing the wheel, and you may not be smart enough to reinvent the round wheel. This thought brought to you upon reading Alan Perlis' aphorisms.

It isn't easy being big. You try to avoid offending one group and suddenly you're attacked for not trying to avoid offending every group. Given that there's a group who'll be offended that you tried to avoid offending anyone, you can't win. Now, if only they'd try a little harder to offend the Chinese government's censorship bureau.

Web Apps: Single Point of Subpoena

Reading Dion Hinchcliffe's blog, I found this interesting nugget buried away: [W]ith attention scarcer and scarcer, people are also less willing to spend time installing, upgrading, and patching all the instances of the productivity software, e-mail clients, and PIMs they use. I'd never seen the appeal of web apps in the attention light before, but it makes perfect sense. The dark side to this is that we have to hope that the web app provider is doing backups and is appropriately subpoena-proof.

Only it turns out there's no such thing as subpoena-proof. As the EFF pointed out when Google announced a version of Google Toolbar that would upload your documents to the Google servers "to enable searching from any of the user's computers", your data held by ISPs is subject to different laws than your data on your computers. Data on your PC needs a search warrant to be accessed, and so can't be roped into civil cases. Data on your ISP needs only a subpoena (a lower barrier), which civil cases may be able to get. And what is a web app but an ISP in the eyes of the law?

I like the EFF's approach: we web developers should be campaigning for a correction of the laws. The more data we put online in the hands of web apps, the more important this lag between law and tech becomes and the more public our private data becomes. David Brin may get his Transparent Society in an unexpected way!

Eyeballs: Feb 13, 2006

One of the interesting aspects of the rise of Mac OS X is the fall from favour of the Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines, the bible for desktop applications developers looking to create applications that looked and felt Mac. In the old days (pre-OS X), any deviation from these norms were severely frowned upon. And while we still encounter apps that just don't feel right (Azureus, for example, whose UI feels like a tree of function calls), there's a huge variation in behaviour and consistency across Final Cut Pro, Microsoft Word, and the built-in Apple apps. Apple themselves have enjoyed experimenting: brushed metal was a new look and Apple didn't consistently apply its own guidelines on when to use it (don't miss these hilarious parodies). Now there's yet more deviation in the new round of iLife (Rogue Amoeba's amusingly titled screenshot caught my eye) and it's interesting to consider what role HIGs play, whether they create or codify convention, and whether there's a time to do away with them. I know that I'd like to see some HIGs for Ajax interfaces--on the one hand, making the web behave like the desktop is great, but on the other hand there are some absolutely shitlicious desktop apps swilling around out there. It seems to me that a collection of best practices, along the line of Designing Interfaces (a book I'm proud to have recruited for O'Reilly), would go a long way to taking away the Frankenapp feel of a lot of the current Ajax apps.

The DAEDALUS Project collects sociological information about MMORPG users. For example, MMORPG users spend nearly 3x as many hours in-game as watching TV; older male characters are more likely to gender-bend in-game; and female players are 3x more likely to get married online than male but most players (whether male or female) felt that getting married online was silly. (Side note: I got married on short notice (side-side note: Mexican INS can kiss my married ass) in 1996 on a talk.bizarre mud with an IRC gateway for my New Zealand non-talk.bizarre friends and family, and I still think it's silly) Increasingly we have the option to live online, and these games give great insights into how people would love to behave if the technology, laws, and mores would let them.

Zillow is a fantastic web app for viewing comparitive property prices. It flashes images in such a way that I begin to hope I don't have latest epilepsy, but eventually it settled down and showed me just how much those rich buggers across the road from us in Fort Collins got when they sold their prairie palace. It uses Navteq data and GlobeXplorer imagery along with a database of prices of property transactions.

Via Rachel Cunliffe's blog entry, I found this interesting interview with Imogen Heap. My wife's been exposing me to new music lately ("please, something without a banjo, Nat!") and this came by as Jenine was playing Frou Frou and the song Imogen Heap did for the Narnia soundtrack. Heap posted to her blog with a list of possible topics for a song she was having trouble finding lyrics for, the readers picked one, and she went with that. When she wanted a photo for the album of her on her bike, cycling to the studio, she found a guy on Flickr whose shots of London she liked and asked him to take the picture. Of her blog readers, she says "they’ve kind of become my A&R men".

Eyeballs: Feb 8, 2006

I have a full Firefox tab set, so it's time to unload:

• The Tyranny of Structurelessness: Danah sent this link to the geowanking list. While written about the 60s feminism movement, it resonates strongly with my experiences in open source and non-profits.
• The Prejudice Map: search Google for "Germans are known for", repeat for many other nationalities, and chart the results. Fascinating glimpse into publicly-expressed stereotypes.
• X-GOOGLE-TOKEN: how to use Google as a Single Sign On authenticator. "You can authenticate yourself with your one single Google Account without ever having to give a third party your password". Clever piece of hackery, and the parallels between this and Microsoft Passport will be interesting to track. Microsoft got beaten to pieces because, well, they're Microsoft--everyone "knows" they're evil, so everything they do (no matter how well-intentioned) is viewed through that lens of "how evil are they being?" But Google's still mostly untarnished there. People still look at Google initiatives as "what free candy are we being given today?!" The tipping point will have been reached the first time a Google initiative is stalled because people don't trust the brand any more. We're not there yet, but it's bound to arrive one day.
• Love Perl: not a dating service (thankfully!) but a documentation site that adopts the metaphor of dating. "Find the module that's right for you!". The site will launch on Valentine's Day.
• Point and Search: new system in Japan where you can get info by pointing your phone at a real world object. The phone has a compass built in. I had a great call with Debby Debi from MobileJones today about Where 2.0 and mobile location technology. She also turned me on to Rabble ("MySpace for mobile").
• Limbo: another from Debby Debi. This is a brilliant auction site: the auctions are conducted by SMS message and the lowest unique price wins. The company takes a slice of the SMS revenue.

The Web 2.0 Wave vs. LoanBack

Over on VentureBlog this morning, David Hornik has an impressive list of Web 2.0 startups presenting at the "Under The Radar" event next month (at which our own Rael is speaking -- he's the Radar this event is under, of course :). There are a lot of cool companies in David's list, doing a bunch of cool things. Some of them are really impressive.

I wanted to call attention to another recent startup, though: LoanBack. Jeremy Zawodny introduced me to the founder of LoanBack, Hill Ferguson, last year; and my friend Sam just mentioned to me that his friend Michael Kovacs had joined Hill in launching the company. Their idea is to make it much easier to arrange informal loans -- the kind friends or family might give to each other, for instance.

What's notable about LoanBack, and is so often missing from the many, many, many Web 2.0 startups I see, is that LoanBack started with a need and then found the best technology to meet that need, rather than the other way around. Hill had taken a personal loan from his father, and saw how that whole process could have gone much better for both sides with a little bit of help. Now he's providing that help to others. I've fallen victim to inverting the need => tech reasoning myself, in the past, and I would say from experience that it doesn't end well. If you are inspired by Web 2.0 and you're off to start a startup as a result, that's great; but take a lesson from Hill and Michael, and find an application people really need before you start learning Rails and Ajax. You'll likely get further and do better, as I hope to see LoanBack do.

Links: Dec 31, 2005

What caught my eye in the last weeks of the year:

• Google opens up Google Talk--libjingle is the library behind it. A lot of work to be done to make it an easily reused component, but it's already underway. Lots of possibilities.
• Google Feed Reader API To Be Released--now I know why the reader application was so underwhelming. It was proof-of-concept for the API.
• The Blogosphere Would Be A Lousy VC FIrm--"A half-billion dollar buyout might go unremarked upon, but a consumer-facing Web 2.0 company sold to Yahoo! or Google at a $20M - $40M valuation will set the blog world on fire."
• Yeald--the Interactive Investor Journal. What if Digg readers wrote detailed stories instead of just pointing to them?
• Research Note - TV 2.0: How To Think Strategically About the Future of TV--"edge platforms and edge competencies". I like the idea of an edge competency, being good at riding consumer demand rather than attempting to manufacture it through narrow channels.
• The Economics of Coffee Shops--"Make your rent in four days to be profitable, a week to break even. If you haven't hit the latter mark in a month, close."

Links: Dec 2, 2005

I had about thirty-five Firefox links saved, then upgraded to Firefox 1.5 (go fighting ... foxes) only to find that the SessionSaver extension didn't work in 1.5. So with a clear conscience I now resolve to post fewer links at a time, but hopefully post more often as a result.

• Hear From Your MP: I'm just grooving on the great work that the mySociety folks are doing. I moved back home and feel the urge to rark up our political system like this.
• Gaze: a gazetteer web service from mySociety. Very cool! I love the new population extensions. It's interesting to compare the population density (people per square kilometer) of my New Zealand town vs that of my former American town.
• More Over Here: dig for more information on the topic of a page. Built out of Y! Term Extraction API, Flickr, Technorati, Y! News, Delicious, etc. Currently it only has a one-term idea of what the page is about, so doesn't work too well with multitopic sites, etc. The author posted an explanation of how it can be used.
• Silk: open source collaboration framework, like Microsoft SharePoint. Built by Akiva, whose CEO I spoke to at great length today about their open source strategy. I'm really impressed with their thinking and the way they went about preparing, deciding, and implementing their open source move.
• GPL v3 Process Definition: the long road to GPL v3 is underway. Expect it to be a topic at OSCON.
• Glitches Galore in VoIP: Business Week article on service problems with VoIP. "On average, VoIP call quality is worse than cellular, according to research by Internet performance consultancy Keynote. Audio delay (the time between when you speak and the listener can hear you) is often unacceptably long, leading to overlapping conversations. Keynote also found that about 3.1% of all VoIP calls made don't go through at all." Fodder for ETel, whose Early Registration period ends Monday 4 December.
• Early Geek Radio: pre-podcasting Internet-offered interviews and radio shows. Features Tim and Dale c. 1994, as well as a pre-Internet Archive Brewster Kahle and Tim Berners-Lee before he was Sir Tim Berners-Lee. Anyone want to volunteer to work with them and write some Perl+LAME so they can offer MP3s as well as wave files and Real Audio?
• Oregon City Builds A Reputation as a Hub For Software Revolution: want to guess which city? Hint: we have OSCON there. Need another hint? "Portland - a city where T-shirts on college campuses are more likely to sport Firefox than Che - is now seeing venture capitalists descending upon it, proof that all the heavyweight open-source talent here may indeed power the local economy."
• MapServer Foundation: open source product partners with AutoDesk (I believe it's mandatory for me to add "makers of AutoCAD" at this point) to start a non-profit governance organization. AutoDesk open sourced one of their products (now branded "MapServer Enterprise") while the original open source MapServer is now branded "MapServer Cheetah". They're still in the early days of building the non-profit. Background: Tyler Mitchell's blog, the press release, the open letter to the community, and upbeat Directions magazine coverage.
• NEXT 2005: awesome Danish conference I just missed. Would love to get there next year. They had, among other things: digital rocking horses, DJ robots, a programmable climbing wall, edible interfaces, 10x10 helium balloons functioning as pixels and the EyeD Concept car directly from Nike’s TechLab.
• GTalkr: Flash-based client for Google Talk, so you can voice chat from any Flash-capable computer. Brilliant!
• Jookster enters Beta: no longer requires a toolbar install. Thumbs-up sites, find the sites your friends like, use friends to filter classifieds, etc. delicious + orkut. I like the tip of the hat to the teens: "Easy to find and share cool bands and music with friends".
• Skype Videophone Coming: it'll be interesting to see whether I can use it from NZ. I think my DSL provider must have crappy upstream bandwidth because I can't videochat from my house using iChat. Skype's codec is good for voice, I wonder whether they've worked similar magic for video?
• WiPro Creates Linux-Based Phone Platform: lots of activity in this area. See OSDL Mobile Linux Initiative and TrollTech's VoIP Framework.
• Why Linux on X-Box 360 Will Be Hard: there's nothing like a challenge. Glad to see Microsoft is intent on making it fun for people to hack their boxes.

Links: Nov 25, 2005

More quick pointers to things that crossed our transom:

• Microsoft acquires Net calling start-up--another piece of their voice strategy snaps into place. Microsoft want telephony as tightly integrated into your computer experience as images have become now (remember back when multimedia was a very forced concept--who had the expensive scanner to put images onto computers?!). This is definitely fodder for ETel.
• TransTraffic--a real-time link sharing system ("people reading this blog have also read ..."). Not just useful for answering the question "who reads this crap?!", it might also help you find related items. I wonder how long it is before Google comes out with something like this: the knowledge of who's reading what is valuable.
• Insurer Launches $10MM Open Source Policy--another. This must mean there's no real risk :-)
• Duelling Simplicities--deeply thoughtful post from Jon Udell comparing Google Base with Microsoft's Simple Sharing Extensions to RSS ("two fascinatingly different approaches to building out the data web"). I'm particularly intrigued by SSE, the baby of Ray Ozzie. Jon again: "You couldn't pick a better Microsoft CTO to own this problem. Who else would tackle it using Creative Commons-licensed extensions to a grassroots XML standard?". Jon sees them as complementary: Google Base creates a standard way for web apps to behave like databases, and SSE creates a standard way for the data in the databases to propagate.
• Alfresco CMS--heavyweight player entering the overcrowded open source CMS space. Claim to fame: co-founder of Documentum.
• SDSI Professor Mapping Fires--interesting article, but the professor ends by talking about his upbeat vision for the future: "Think about it: you walk down the street, and maybe your cell phone will have a pop-up advertisement saying there's a coffee bar down the street from where you are, and offer a coupon." This sounds great until you actually listen to the words and picture the product: great! Another device bugging the shit out of me to sell me crap. Marketers always say, "it isn't spam if it's useful," but ultimately these kinds of intrusive applications are doomed. People just don't want to be pestered--they want shit to happen without being bugged. If technology is to help, it must be serendipitous rather than strident.
• Yahoo! Map Skins--I just love the pirate parchment. This is the value of getting Flash designers involved in your mapping application: they know from beautiful.

Links: Nov 24, 2005

A week of Firefox tabs, a pile of No-Doz tabs, and an open bar tab ... it must be time for another collection of things that caught my eye this week.

• Forbes Piece On Open Source--full of fascinating tidbits: 50% of JBoss deployments are on Windows boxes, Salesforce.com has competition through hosted SugarCRM offerings, Pfizer found LAMP cut development costs over J2EE, ....
• GOffice--less smooth a user experience than Writely, but they're expanding rapidly into other areas of the office space.
• Open Web Design--finally, CSS and HTML it's okay to copy!
• New Zimbra for Mac OS X--as soon as the Mac beside me finishes upgrading to Tiger, I'll install it.
• Digital Cities and Regional Broadband Conference--I was sorely tempted by this. I couldn't justify the $500 last-minute round-trip ticket to Wellington, though. I am hoping that the technology invented to network developing nations will also be applicable here in New Zealand.
• Test Run--QA on the web, assembled from open source components by one of the SixApart team. What I love about SixApart is that employees' projects done outside work time are their own.
• Swivel--integrate data from various web apps to spot trends. Found via this intriguing review [update: fixed the incorrect link--sorry!].
• ACM K-12 Model Curriculum for CS--interesting how it builds up to actual programming by first teaching analytical thought and problem decomposition. Now I remember all the computer studies classes where I had to write an algorithm for toothbrushing.
• Why Governments Really Choose Open Source--great piece from ZDNet UK about government adoption of open source around the world. A lot of FOOs in there (Rishab, James Governor, etc.). Interesting to see how often "anti-Americanism" comes up. From being in New Zealand just a week, I'm not sure it's so much anti-Americanism as simply being against seeing money go overseas for no good reason when it could be supporting local economies.
• Covalent Plug--on ZDNet. Interesting to see their uptake: 267 of Fortune 500, 71 of Fortune 100 companies have a relationship with Covalent. What are the numbers for MySQL and Red Hat, I wonder?
• Silk--open source collaboration framework, once proprietary now reborn as open source. Found through this fascinating account of how Akiva turned themselves from a proprietary shop into an open source shop because their customers wanted it.
• Swicki--not my favourite name, but one of a number of a new class of products: custom search engines. Rather than searching just your site or all of the web, you can build web subsets to search and the actions of users of the search improve the results. See O'Reilly Radar Swicki for an example.
• Matt McAlister's slides on Web 2.0--making Web 2.0 explainable to a non-in-crowd audience. Very nice (though copyedit before you reuse his slides :-). I'd like to see a few more powerful arguments for why you should encourage mashups other than "if you don't, they'll do it anyway".
• That's Linux on the Line--BusinessWeek article about Linux in mobile phones. Nothing about Surj's work, though.
• City of Paris Accelerates Move to Open Source--we'll see more of this. How are businesses taking advantage of it? Who's selling into this new environment, rather than fighting it?
• State of the Startups--interesting piece about the financial movements behind the startup industry. "Stagnant equity markets will continue to drive capital toward start-ups while the current marketplace has too many dollars and too few quality managers, according to respondents of a national survey conducted by law firm Foley & Lardner LLP. "
• Survey of Open Source Developers--"94% of Linux developers' systems have never been infected by a virus". What are comparable figures for Windows developers? I'd be surprised if the claimed bug-fix times and claimed infection rates weren't similar.
• Open Source at the World Summit on the Information Society--when will a US president say positive things about open source?
• Convergence Oceania 05--where I'll be on Friday.
• Can Open Source Defeat Microsoft?--leaving aside the pointlessly confrontational title, there's this great line inside: "open-source products have replaced Microsoft as the lowest common denominator in computing". Let the climb up the value chain begin!
• Google Paranoia--if the ten reasons why Google is evil gets you down, read today's prophecy of Google's downfall to cheer you back up.
• Web 2.0 Checklist--check! check! check! ... damn, I need a yellow fade ... check! check! ...
• Build a Skype-VoIP phone adapter--or buy the uConnect VoIP converter.