2007 Archives

Chumby in the Sydney Morning Herald

Saul Griffith is at home down under for the holidays, and sent a note that Chumby topped the Sydney Morning Herald's list of Ten Things That Will Change Your Future.

The SMH also called out Twitter, Everyblock, 23andme, kiva, meraki, smart mobs, the World Community Grid, loopt, and the OLPC.

It's an impressive list for a mainstream paper. They get special props for calling out everyblock, kiva, and the World Community Grid, which are hardly at the tip of every tongue. Chumby and Everyblock aren't even publicly available yet.

The SMH also gets props for arguing the Radar thesis, that a series of seemingly unconnected products or releases show something in aggregate that none of them show alone:

What follows is a smorgasbord of websites, services, concepts and gadgets that at first glance seem to have little to do with each other but which taken together give a picture of where our brave new networked world may be heading.

They are absolutely right that no one of these innovations may be significant to their readers, but that collectively they say something about the progress of the internet from the world of alpha geeks into the everyday world of the average reader of the Sydney Morning Herald.

(Disclosure: O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures is an investor in Chumby. Which is of course why Saul sent the article to me and to Bunnie Huang, Chumby's designer.)

More on the Virtual Reality Audio Headset

A few weeks ago, I posted an entry entitled The Future of Cell Phone Headsets. David Battino wrote a few days to let me know that Peter Drescher, the author of the article that sparked that entry, just published a follow-up article describing the potential hardware in his imagined virtual reality headset in more detail. He includes more application scenarios as well. For example David pointed out this one:

Rewind:Since you've got stereo mic input and gigabytes of storage, how about a rolling 5 minute (or 5 hour) audio buffer ... a continuous "court stenographer" that lets you play back anything you've ever heard. Someone tells you a great joke -- voice command "Save buffer" stores it in a date, time, and geo-tagged file for later retrieval (and sharing).

That's an important feature of Gordon Bell's mylifebits envisioned not as a research project but as an everyday feature of the phone. That would create some significant cultural change, eh? That's a feature I always wished for in my younger days, when my wife and I used to fight a lot, and we'd spend hours untangling who said what to set the other off!

Drescher goes on:

Personal Audio Network technology seems to be so mind-bogglingly useful, i suspect the technical and cultural problems will be resolved quickly, ingeniously, and profitably. there will always be old farts who grumble about "the good old days (when you couldn't hear nothin' but the wind)," but those who adopt this new medium (kids and uber-geeks at first) will seem to acquire super-sonic super-powers. they'll be able to hear more and better than mere mortals, communicate faster and more efficiently than their auricularly-unenhanced colleagues, and be interconnected in ways we can't even imagine.

eventually, not wearing earpods will be like not having a phone or a computer - you won't be able to do business without them. you'll simply control your audio environment as if you were in a mobile recording studio, enhancing one track while muting others, mixing and modulating sounds to suit your needs, talking and listening and interacting with wireless voice/data networks all around you.

Most exciting, Drescher notes:

well, this idea has obvious implications for mobile game audio, and so I talked about it at Austin GDC. Not long after that, i expanded on the concept for a presentation at AES NYC ... and was amazed by the number of conference attendees who were already working on parts of the idea.

This is the way the future happens. A bunch of people are working on something, for one purpose or another. Some hacker figures out it's good for more than that. Slowly the pieces assemble, like a picture puzzle taking shape on the table, till you can see the pattern of a possible future unfold. Someone puts in the final piece, and all of a sudden everyone can see that future and embrace it. Awesome.

This is really important news from the future Drescher is talking about. Pay attention.

Fast Forward for December 29th, 2007

• I would buy more music if my iPhone held more music. I wonder how much demand is suppressed only by device capacity.


• I can't believe Leno and company aren't turning to the Internet for jokes. A little Digg-style interface for submitted jokes and an on-air namecheck and away you go. Submit ten jokes that get used on the air and we'll fly you to Hollywood for a job interview. Done.


• Katie Hafner is wrong; it's not personal attention that makes the Apple Stores work. It's making computer users feel smart. There are few enough choices that anyone can reasonably understand them. The people are approachable enough that anyone can talk to them. The aesthetic is open and clean and, above all, simple. None of those words are usually associated with computers. The Apple Stores teach people that even they can use computers, and that expands the market.


• Virgin America is great and all, but there's something downright unpleasant about flying an airline with "Beta" software on it. I mean come on. I got Red to crash -- reboot! -- very reliably by switching rapidly between the maps and the media player. The DirecTV thing said "your receiver has not yet been authorized" and then asked if I wanted "immediate upgrade without a call" for a premium channel (certainly!). One of the games (Rocks 'n' Diamonds) told me that my username was root. Really?


• My wife got all rank with the iTunes Music Store for not letting her move music from one of her computers to another. "Try Amazon," I told her, and that was that, no more iTMS for her. The true idiocy of the RIAA is that they've made DRM simple enough for everybody to understand why they don't want it.


• My friends keep joining GoodReads, but my heart still lies with LibraryThing. Come on, peoples!

Trading for their own account

I promised recently to publish more of my reflections on what I've learned from studying the parallels between Web 2.0 and financial markets, one of the real wake-up calls was the way that Wall Street firms moved from being brokers to being active players "trading for their own account." Ever since I heard Bill Janeway point out that over time, Wall Street "firms began to trade against their clients for their own account, such that now, the direct investment activities of a firm like Goldman Sachs dwarf their activities on behalf of outside customers," I thought, whither Google, Yahoo! and Amazon?

And sure enough, there is lots of evidence that this process is already far advanced. These sites, once devoted to distributing attention to others, are increasingly focused on consuming as much of the user attention as possible. What else do you make of Google's recent sally against Wikipedia, the so-called knol. Anil Dash's analysis was spot-on:

Google's announcement of Knol shows that they understand some of their key business drivers very well; With as much as 5% of the search result links for popular terms going to Wikipedia pages, a solution to capturing some of that traffic in an environment that Google can control and display ads on makes good business sense....

[But] Knol shares with Google Book Search the problem of being both indexed by Google and hosted by Google. This presents inherent conflicts in the ranking of content, as well as disincentives for content creators to control the environment in which their content is published. This necessarily disadvantages competing search engines, but more importantly eliminates the ability for content creators to innovate in the area of content presentation or enhancement.

Everyone applauds when Google goes after Microsoft's Office monopoly, seeing it simply as "turnabout's fair play," (and a distant underdog to boot), but when they start to go after web non-profits like Wikipedia, you see where the ineluctable logic leads. As Google's growth slows, as inevitably it will, it will need to consume more and more of the web ecosystem, trading against its former suppliers, rather than distributing attention to them. We already take for granted that common searches, such as for weather or stock prices, are satisfied directly on the search screen. Where does that process stop?

And much as I support what Google is doing with Google Book Search, I am troubled by the fact that they give preference to their own content repository over digital copies provided by publishers or other aggregators. (See my post Book Search Should Work Like Web Search.)

We see the same pattern at Amazon, which is aggressively pursuing authors for direct publishing on the kindle and seeking to displace publishers by making themselves the sole source for books on the device. [Update: And reader GL, in the comments on this post, observed "this year I found it quite interesting that YHOO made such a large effort to become a 'super affiliate'. The amount of product reviews tied to affiliate links was amazing. Would you rather make $2 per click selling PPC ad or make $25 per click (5% of a $500 sale by advertising along side other ppc advertisers? I think the answer is simple. Interestingly, in this scenario YHOO wins on both sides of the trade."]

Ultimately, I think we see this pattern in the economic development of every innovation. When a new technology is introduced, there's a lot of green-field opportunity, and so much value is being created that there's no need to capture it all. But as the technology matures, the winners need to capture more of the total value being created. They gradually crowd out suppliers as well as competitors.

Fortunately, there's another side to Bill Janeway's unorthodox history of Wall Street (as told in the Release 2.0 issue on the subject), and that's the one we're focusing on at the Money:Tech Conference in New York in February. And that is the rise of new opportunities for specialized information and data mining services that go deeper than what's available in search engines. I'll write about that next week.

Scientific Literacy a Qualification for Office?

Brad Feld pointed to a Wall Street Journal op-ed from a couple of weeks ago entitled Science and the Candidates, which suggests the need for a presidential debate focusing on science and technology:

Almost all of the major challenges we will face as a nation in this new century, from the environment, national security and economic competitiveness to energy strategies, have a scientific or technological basis. Can a president who is not comfortable thinking about science hope to lead instead of follow? Earlier Republican debates underscored this problem. In May, when candidates were asked if they believed in the theory of evolution, three candidates said no. In the next debate Mike Huckabee explained that he was running for president of the U.S., not writing the curriculum for an eighth-grade science book, and therefore the issue was unimportant.

Apparently many Americans agreed with him, according to polls taken shortly after the debate. But lack of interest in the scientific literacy of our next president does not mean that the issue is irrelevant. Popular ambivalence may rather reflect the fact that most Americans are scientifically illiterate. A 2006 National Science Foundation survey found that 25% of Americans did not know the earth goes around the sun.

Our president will thus have to act in part as an "educator in chief" as well as commander in chief. Someone who is not scientifically literate will find it difficult to fill this role....

This coming week another group I am a part of, ScienceDebate2008, is issuing a public call for a U.S. presidential debate devoted to science and technology. Eight Nobel Laureates, the heads of several major scientific societies, several university presidents, the chairman emeritus of Lockheed Martin and several congresspeople have already signed on to call for the debate, which would cover three broad categories: the environment, health and medicine, and science and technology policy.

Even if the American public is not currently focused on these concerns, decisions made by the next U.S. president on issues such as climate change, energy research, stem cells and nuclear proliferation will have a global impact. We owe it to the next generation to take ownership of these issues now.

If you agree, there's a Science Debate 2008 signup page where you can show your support for such a debate.

It's hard to believe that 25% of the American public doesn't know the earth goes around the sun, but if that figure is true, it explains a lot.... As Brad pointed out in his post on the subject, it's probably not right to require a scientific literacy test to allow people to vote, but it certainly seems a reasonable test for holding the office of the president. (For that matter, it would be a nice bar to set for both houses of Congress as well!)

Privacy 2007: Hiding in the Crowd

Each year I pick out a pressing topic in Internet policy and write a year-end article summarizing trends in that area for an online newspaper called the American Reporter. It has just published my article "Privacy 2007: Hiding in the Crowd," which may interest Radar readers although it was aimed at more of a lay audience. I also gave the article a more permanent URL.

Use InternetSAR To Find Ron Boychuk and Others

Ron Boychuk disappeared on October 23, 2007 while flying to Vancouver. His family is still searching for him and his plane to find out what happened. Digital Globe (an imagery company and frequent Where 2.0 participant) has donated imagery to the cause (Radar post). A new site, InternetSAR (internet Search and Rescue), is being used to conduct the search.

It was formed as a result of Steve Fossett's disappearance (the fourth large-scale hunt in the past year). As the group states about themselves:

InternetSAR was founded in November 2007, as a result of the collaborative Google Earth/Amazon MTurk Internet imagery search for Steve Fossett, who went missing on September 3, 2007 while flying over southern Nevada. After the Internet search was called off, a group of committed volunteers worked to continue the Internet search effort for Steve Fossett. With some sleuthing, one member of this group figured out how to write the Google Earth KML imagery overlays of available imagery and designed an overlay generator which allowed the Internet search effort to continue.

Using these overlays is a bit clunky, but fairly straightforward. I registered and joined the search for Ron. I downloaded a KML file with the next image overlay in the queue. Once the image was in Google Earth I followed the directions:

Use a systematic pattern to scan the downloaded images at an "eye alt" of about 500 feet. If you see anything that looks like it could be a possible plane crash site (or the searched for object), you will need to check to see if the suspicious object was there previous to the plane's or object's disappearance.

If you find something you can then report it for further review. There are 8600 overlays that have been made available in the most likely areas -- plenty of content for volunteers to wade through.

InternetSAR is a useful and noble effort. There were five of these hunts that came to my attention in the past year. Each one (prior to Ron's) had to have an ad hoc system set-up and rely on commercial resources for the search. As the idea that technology can potentially save loved ones or at least answer some questions permeates society there will be more of these online search campaigns.

Visualization of names and words used by Presidential candidates

The New York Times has a really interesting Circos/Clusterball style visualization of the names used by US presidential candidates to refer to opponents in the debates preceding the Iowa caucuses. (Link)

A graph of common words used by candidates in the debates is available as well:

Link (via information aesthetics & visualmethods.blogspot.com)

The future is almost here, but the demo has been here for a while now

Forbes and others are reporting that Apple has applied for a patent for "a wireless system that would allow customers to place an order at a store using a wireless device such as a media player, a wireless personal digital assistant or a cellphone. The system could go far beyond the program that Apple announced with Starbucks in September, which allows iPhone users to press a button and wirelessly download the song playing in the background as they sip their soy lattes." (I couldn't find the patent application on the USPTO website, but I did find at least one prior art opposition.) I'll let commenters argue whether this will improve the Starbucks experience or be as relaxing as commercial air flights after mobile phone calls are allowed.

Does Apple's proposal seem familiar? During Boom 1.0, it seemed like almost every wireless demo I witnessed used Starbucks as its example. I remember one mobile marketing company's pitch: “Let’s say you’re walking past a Starbucks. Your Handspring Visor (or Palm VII or whatever was the wireless device of the moment) would receive a message saying to come into Starbucks and get $1 off a latte.” Maybe this Apple news means that something like this will finally happen. Or does it mean that it takes a decade for fake demos to turn into actual services? Have you seen any fake demos for products we should look for in 2017?

Nominate Someone for the EFF Pioneer Awards

Every year since 1992 the EFF has awarded people who fight for liberty online or create associated technology. These people are known as Pioneers. Past honorees include Cory Doctorow, Bruce Schneier, Craigslist, Anita Borg, and "Librarians Everywhere".

The awards will be given out at a ceremony on March 4th at ETech. Michael Robertson, founder of MP3.com, SIPphone.com, Linspire, and MP3Tunes.com, will be keynoting that evening. I've offered him a pass via the EFF and I hope that he hangs out at the conference.

The nomination process for the Pioneer Awards is open until January 15th. Instructions for nominating are after the jump.

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So when will the job of a technical editor be abolished?

The following fanciful predict-let was penned in 1966:

...it is said that the job of a technical editor may one day be abolished altogether: in an era in which consoles may soon be found in every bedroom, technical journals and their editors may be replaced by a system of universal, personalized dissemination of information...

I'm sure that upon reading this, your head snapped back in admiration for the writer who anticipated the rich cultural plasma of commentary and information sharing that is just beginning to coalesce now, forty years later. I find several pearls of wisdom in this passage by Gerard Salton, written as he took the prestigious post of Editor-In-Chief of Communications of the ACM in January 1966. (The passage was quoted in the January 2008 issue as part of their 50th Anniversary celebration.

(continue reading)

Neil Gaiman on Cory Doctorow's "Little Brother"

Cory Doctorow just sent out the following note:

Neil Gaiman gave me an unexpected Christmas present this year -- a stellar review of my forthcoming novel Little Brother (a YA novel that pits hacker kids in San Francisco against the DHS in a bid to restore the Bill of Rights to America) on his blog. He has a few quibbles with some of the plot elements, but closes with this:

"I'd recommend Little Brother over pretty much any book I've read this year, and I'd want to get it into the hands of as many smart 13 year olds, male and female, as I can."

"Because I think it'll change lives. Because some kids, maybe just a few, won't be the same after they've read it. Maybe they'll change politically, maybe technologically. Maybe it'll just be the first book they loved or that spoke to their inner geek. Maybe they'll want to argue about it and disagree with it. Maybe they'll want to open their computer and see what's in there. I don't know. It made me want to be 13 again right now and reading it for the first time, and then go out and make the world better or stranger or odder. It's a wonderful, important book, in a way that renders its flaws pretty much meaningless.

I agree. I read a draft of Little Brother earlier this year and loved it. The title, in case it's not obvious, is a takeoff on George Orwell's "Big Brother" from 1984. The novel highlights the dangers of the surveillance society we're now living in when it is kicked into high gear by threats of terrorism. It's a lovely book, a good story, but also profoundly educational.

When I read this book, I couldn't help but think of a now mostly-forgotten Victorian novelist, Captain Marryat, a former British Navy officer during the Napoleonic wars. (He made captain just as peace broke out.) Marryat wrote a number of young adult novels. One of these, Masterman Ready, could be characterized as the complete moral and practical guide to surviving a shipwreck. As much a tutorial as a novel, it gives practical advice on how to build shelters and a fish pond, as well as how to take adversity in stride.

Like young victorians preparing for an imagined shipwreck under the tutelage of Masterman Ready, Little Brother provides all the practical advice you'd need if you were a hacker teen faced with one of your buddies being hauled off to jail by over-zealous homeland security. Maybe it won't actually happen that way, but learning how to think your way through the problem in an imagined crisis is a fabulous way to learn. Even if you're not a young adult.

As Neil Gaiman also wrote in his review:

Cory is one of the Explainers. The people who see what's going on, or what they perceive to be going on, and then turn around and tell everyone else, and once you've heard it their way you can't ever see it the old way again.

Read this book. You'll learn a great deal about computer security, surveillance and how to counter it, and the risk of trading off freedom for "security." And you'll have fun doing it.