Science Library Pad

review - Out of the Box web services

NOTE: This 2007 draft blog post is being published in 2022; it may be incomplete and the information is certainly out of date.

Out of the Box by John Hagel III

# Hardcover: 240 pages
# Publisher: Harvard Business School Press (October 28, 2002)
# Language: English
# ISBN-10: 1578516803
# ISBN-13: 978-1578516803

The full title is Out of the Box: Strategies for Achieving Profits Today & Growth Tomorrow Through Web Services

The bottom line is that managers needs to develop more flexibility and collaboration capability to deliver continuing rounds of operating cost and asset savings as well as accelerated growth.  They need to escape from the high cost and inflexible infrastructures that make both cost reduction and growth such daunting challenges.

This book discusses how a new generation of IT and related architectures--known generally as Web services technology and distributed services architectures--will provide a significant catalyst in helping management break out of the boxes that confine it today.

The book is mainly targetted at managers, and talks mostly about business transformation challenges.  I liked the emphasis on bringing more flexibility to all aspects of business.  It doesn't talk about Service-Oriented Architecture directly at all, although it does talk sometimes about "Web service architectures".

If you're a manager and looking for ideas about how to transform your business, taking advantage of new technology and new IT processes, this would be a good book to read.

settings for limiting ad tracking in iOS 6

Like Facebook, Apple has taken to obscuring settings it doesn't want you to change.

There are three advertising-related settings buried in iOS 6.

In Settings->General->About-> (scroll down, down...) Advertising-> there is Limit Ad Tracking which you should set to ON

In Settings->Privacy->Location Services-> (scroll down, down...) System Services-> there is Location-based iAds which you should set to OFF (there are also a bunch of other things you may be surprised you're providing location data for).

In magical app (iAdOptOut) you can only activate by visiting a web page from Safari on your iPhone or other iOS 6 device

http://oo.apple.com/

There's "Interest Based iAds" which you should set to OFF.

Or you can just give up, because for-profit Apple, like Facebook and other corporations, really really wants you to have ad tracking turned on, and will keep moving around and changing the settings with every operating system release.

2012 Update on Canadian Digital Economy Strategy

Industry Minister Christian Paradis (@christianparad) has provided an update

we are committed to delivering a Canadian digital economy strategy:

• One that is based on my conversations with you;
• One that challenges our innovators;
• One that drives new technology; and
• One that, through technology, benefits our entire economy.

Addressing the challenges we face with regard to access to capital and a literate workforce as well as adoption and productivity is also part of this strategy's framework.

This is the foundation upon which we will build a clear strategy for the sector and the economy as a whole.

But, later this year, when we put that strategy forward, it will only succeed if industry as well as federal, provincial and territorial governments work together.

Canada 3.0 Digital Media Forum - Speaking Points - April 24, 2012

The government consultations on the Digital Economy Strategy were launched two years ago, May 10, 2010 - Government of Canada Launches National Consultations on a Digital Economy Strategy - and closed in July 2010.

The former consultation site now is "The Digital Economy in Canada" http://digitaleconomy.gc.ca/ with the consultation relocated as a subitem.

Previously

June 1, 2011  open data statement in Canadian Digital Economy Strategy update

See Also

Digital Economy Strategy 2010 Public Consultation

• Consultation Paper
• What Was Said: Idea Forums
• What Was Said: Submissions

Royal Canadian Mint $50k MintChip application challenge

Canada has no central challenge platform like the US Challenge.gov, so I was surprised to see the Canadian Mint announce...

The MintChip Challenge

"The Royal Canadian Mint is challenging software developers to create apps for MintChip, the evolution of currency."

Deadline for submissions is August 1, 2012.

This being the Mint, just for variety the prizes are in gold.  There are $50,000 in prizes overall.  The grand prize is $17k.

Best Overall Application - Grand Prize $17,000

10 oz of GOLD (1 Gold Wafer, .9999 purity), equal to $17,000

MintChip appears to involve hardware tokens: "you will be provided with a software development kit, two microSD MintChips and access to two remote MintChip accounts".

Contest is open to Canada and the US (see contest rules).

welcome to our garden, please provide your personal information

Google+ doesn't seem to be providing an RSS feed of G+ posts on your public profile, it looks like it's providing a feed of your Buzz public posts instead.  In general there seems to be a decline in blogging combined with less use of RSS readers (and less provision of RSS feeds).  I think this is an unfortunate degradation of a distributed content ecosystem that was working well.  Obviously it is in the interests of pretty much all the corporations to centralise content, to have you live "inside" Facebook, Google, Quora, Twitter, LinkedIn, Flickr or whatever particular content garden the corporation provides.

If this continues along the current track, Facebook will know everything about your relationships and the history of their evolution, as well as all of your personal interests, Twitter will know everyone you share work links with and the topics that you discuss and follow, LinkedIn will know your entire work history and all your work connections, and Google will contain mostly everything else related to your professional life as well as (for some people) aspects of your personal life.  This is the inverse of the original content model, in which you produce content on many many different sites that have no direct interconnections (thus necessitating sites like FriendFeed to aggregate it all back together).  Your photo self is separate from your work blogging self is separate from... etc.  Now instead it appears we are being pushed to, on our own time, wrap up our entire selves in a nice incredibly-detailed demographic package for corporations.  How nice of us.

Borders closed to bits: no online Tour de France in Canada

UPDATE 2012-07-07: Situation in 2012 is the same.  Live on the television on RDS and TSN2.  If instead you live in the 21st Century and want to watch on demand on your computer in Canada... unlucky.  ENDUPDATE

"Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution." -- Clay Shirky (The Shirky Principle, cited by Kevin Kelly)

Here's a problem: distributing content.  We used to either transport content (vinyl records, video tapes, CDs, movie film canisters) or transmit content to a geographically-limited audience (over-the-air broadcast television and radio).

And embedded into the model of content distribution that developed are "broadcast rights".  The rights to display content to your particular region.  A US TV show, a stream of bits, may show up on Canadian TV but with Canadian commercials inserted - the Canadian channels insert their commercials because they have the rights to "rebroadcast" the US TV show.  US TV shows show up on Canadian cable, but some channels are simply prohibited.  The satellite dishes and digital feeds at your cable company can receive any TV signal but you are not permitted to choose from the entire global set of offerings, only the licensed channels, the permitted content for your country.  DVDs have multiple "regions", so a DVD from one region "won't play" (is enforced in software not to work) in another region.

This trend of enforcing boundaries through law when they no longer exist as technological constraints is a symptom of trying to preserve the content distribution "problem" when it has been solved.

For example in the US you can watch Jon Stewart's Daily Show on ComedyCentral.com and many websites will highlight particular segments of interest.  All of the links for which don't work in Canada.

ComedyCentral.com will point you to the licensed Canadian channel, TheComedyNetwork.ca - but it won't preserve any of the context in the link it provides, so instead of the specific US clip, you just end up with the main Daily Show landing page in Canada.  To find a clip when you have only a US link, you have to figure out exactly what show it was from, and then manually navigate to that segment on the Canadian site.  It's ridiculous.  It would be very slightly less ridiculous if they would at least take the time to map the US links to the Canadian links.

Effectively this kind of "geofence" breaks the web.  I can say "look, here's a clip that explains my point" and link to the US site... and a Canadian clicking on the link can't see the content, they have to manually try to figure out what was linked to and navigate to it (pretty unlikely except for the very determined).  A link is not a link, a page is not a page.  A link is now artificially country-specific, a legal layer imposed on top of a borderless web.

Not only does this break the web, but in some sense it breaks capitalism.  There is no free market, there is a geographically-enforced market.  You can have the dollars ready to spend, but no one to take your money.  Want to buy the Tour de France iPad app?  Sorry, not in Canada.  Want the NBC "All Access" Tour app?  Sorry, US only.  Want to watch the Versus Tour de France online coverage?  Sorry, US only.  Want to watch the Tour with various enhanced features on the TV2 Sumo website, or the France2 website, or the Eurosport website?  Sorry, those choices are not permitted.

The situation is extra confusing as the Versus online coverage worked fine in Canada last year, it's only with their partnership with NBC that it's become US-only.

Ok, fair enough, want to watch the Tour in video on demand from a licensed Canadian source?  Sorry, one does not exist.  Don't have a TV and want to see the Tour in Canada?  Sorry, no Tour for you.  The only providers in Canada are broadcast television only, TSN2 and Evasion.  Your money is no good here.  (TSN does have streaming apps but they are provider-fenced.  Through legal magic, the open Internet turns into one that is different depending on your service provider.  TSN mobiletv only "exists" if you get the Internet through Bell and Virgin, not if you're on one of Canada's other huge ISPs such as Rogers.)

All of this to say, make sure that in your organisation you're not doing this, that you're not artificially restricting processes, people and content simply because it's the way it used to work (a typical example is content provided only on a departmental intranet when it could be provided to the entire organisation or the world).

Some screenshots to conclude:

conversations: local realtime versus global asynchronous - as applied to FriendFeed

FriendFeed has launched its Twitter-like "real-time" redesign, which has some of us unhappy and thinking about why we're unhappy.

What I think is that there are two different modes of operation you can address: real-time and asynchronous.

Across Realtime

So first, what is the nature of realtime, what characteristics does it have?
It's kind of a strange question in a way - we live in realtime.  It is now, I am typing.
But that nature is its strength and its limitation.
In realtime, a big part of your thoughts are concerned with yourself.  This is Facebook and Twitter.  Twitter's question is: What are you doing? but there's an implied "now" on the end.  What are you doing now?

Not what are you thinking.  Not what ideas have you developed.
What are you doing now?

This is a legitimate mode of interaction.  But it has issues:
* realtime doesn't scale, because you only have a very narrow window of immediate attention

I can talk to one person.  I can have a conversation with two people.
Apocryphal stories of Millenials or whatever gen we're up to now having dozens of chat windows open simultaneously aside, there's only so much time in the now.  In the now you can broadcast to many people.  But converse?  It's not like you can type into chat windows simultaneously.  The "multiple conversations" people have is really: slice of attention, slice of attention, slice of attention, slice of attention, one after the other.  We are not multitaskers.  We are serial taskers.  At some point, that attention gets sliced so thin that all you can say is "yes", "no" and "lol".

Realtime by the nature of the limited slice you have, has to be: I, me, doing, now.

* realtime creates a false sense of urgency.  realtime is the pace of short-term business thinking.  realtime is the tick-tock of self-centred false importance.

Look at the crackberry man, out in the world, but staring at his little screen.  Out in the world, but living in his email.  He sent a message almost 10 seconds ago!  Why has no one replied?  Don't they realise he's important?

Yes, it's a caricature, but it has some truth.  Between your twitter follower alerts and your friendfeed follower alert and your facebook sheep throwing and your spam messages and the 100 other new emails and your tweetdeck and your calendar alarms... where are the cycles to, you know, actually think about anything.

Realtime is the buzz buzz buzz of busy-ness.  Business busy-ness.  But don't confuse activity with productivity.

* realtime is time-zone discrimination.  realtime is local.

Your scope of immediate thought and action is local.  In the now, a fire across the country is interesting, a fire in your building is ALARM ALARM.  Realtime is a great tool for re-connecting with your local community, with the people who are awake when you are, where you are.  But realtime by its very nature excludes the non-local, the timezone outsiders.

* realtime is loss of control

You can't keep up, the thought is gone, the tweet is gone, the friendfeed posting has scrolled... run twice as fast as you can.  Realtime brings not only false urgency, but since no one can keep up with everything, simultaneously, it means a loss of control, over information and over your ability to act.

* realtime is cr*p to monetize, except for search

Realtime is very rapid conversation.  Conversation is inherently hard to monetize.  Conversation is between people, in order to monetize it, you as the advertiser, the stranger, have to step in between the two people talking, and shout.  Imagine how popular that is.

Realtime conversation, scrolling off the screen second by second, is even worse.  Oh, they're talking about cats, I'll put up a cat ad... oh wait, they're talking about dogs... oh wait, they're going to go see Wolverine... oh wait, they're gone.  Oh ya, that's a genius space to try to stick your ads in.  Good luck with that.

You can monetize the search of realtime conversations, but don't confuse search with conversation.

** In Summary **

Realtime has value.  I'm in Ottawa, now.  If GCPEDIA goes down, I tweet that it is down, I see tweets when it comes back up.  I can ask a question of my local community, what's happening tonight?  is Bank Street closed?  where are the buses re-routed?

This is an absolutely useful connection and capability.
But it is only one possible way to interact.

Around the World in 80 Postings

The global asynchronous conversation, web pages linking to web pages, which turned into blogs linking to blogs, is another mode of operation.

There is no question hovering above the big empty box of your Blogger posting.  There is just a word: Create.

Not what are you doing, right now.  But what are you thinking, whenever.  Like this blog posting that I write now, but you may read at the appropriate time for you, in hours, days or weeks.

Asynchronous can have a measured pace, can be reflective, can weave in many different threads from many different sources, because you have the luxury of time.

* asynchronous is about the flow of conversation, not about the immediate individual acting

You link to me, I think, then link back.  I connect to your ideas, I don't speak directly in the moment to you.

* asynchronous is global, timezone agnostic

My friendfeed has people from all over the world.  Some are ending their day as mine begins, others haven't yet awoken.  Where's Berci?  Where's Bora?  Well it doesn't exactly matter, because if they post, I see their thoughts at the time of my choosing, and vice versa.

* asynchronous is actually a lot better to monetize

Because we're taking our time to scan and interact with long form ideas, you can figure out what we're talking about, and stick an ad next to that conversation, and we may actually have time to look at it.

** In Summary **

Asynchronous is about the global circulation of ideas.  I don't need to know where you are, or when you are, because I'm interacting with your thoughts at the time and place of my own choosing.

What this means for FriendFeed

Facebook and Twitter are already in the realtime, "what am I doing now" space.
Delicious and StumbleUpon and others are already in the "look what I found" space.

FriendFeed's strength was in the global, asynchronous conversation about the things that we'd found, the ideas that we have.  This is a particular type of conversation support that lends itself very well to scientific discourse, bouncing ideas back and forth around the globe, day after day.  The scientific discourse is a global asynchronous conversation, by its very nature.

Realtime mode is a nice feature for supporting conferences, when there really is immediate "this is happening now" to report on.  But it's a mode mismatch for long-form conversation about ideas.

As I have suggested on FriendFeed, it may be that in the end, with the divergence of the founder's goals from some of the users, we may have to write user requirements for the global asynchronous conversation, and if FriendFeed can no longer support them, then move elsewhere, or have a replacement site built.

What FriendFeed will lose is people who, at the time and place of their choosing, spend a lot of time on the site.  Time is attention.  Attention is eyeball you can put ads in front of.  FriendFeed will lose the people who were paying the most attention.

I was inspired to write this by Cameron Neylon's thoughtful posting Science in the open » “Real Time”: The next big thing or a pointer to a much more interesting problem?

In a way, this posting is part of my conversation with Cameron, despite the fact I have only the vaguest sense of where (in the UK?) and when he is.

We have taken different approaches to the issue of realtime, and in particular I want to raise a very important, indeed critical point that Cameron makes: filtering takes time.  One of the other incredibly powerful aspects of FriendFeed in asynchronous mode is that it bubbles up items of interest, through the collective action, the filtering that results from my friends liking and commenting on items.  When I open async FF in the morning, what I see is not the latest ideas, what I see is the most important ideas, based on the filtering of a community I trust.  Realtime, by its nature, has no time for filtering.  No time for filtering turns a curated stream of useful information into a firehose of content, the little specks of gold that dance in the stream lost because they are mixed in with the flood of useless noise.

Previously:
April 6, 2009  why I don't like FriendFeed beta

in which I realise Twitter can make money

(I was going to say something about "monetization" but that term is getting a bit old.  Can I make it through the entire post with out using it?  Let's see...)

Ok, social networks are hard places to make money.  Sure you know a lot about the users, but they're busy flirting with one another or posting pictures of their cats or digging up embarassing images of people passed out last night.  They're not searching for information, they're interacting with people.  Trying to wedge commerce into friendship, as Facebook is trying to do, trying to make money from social interactions - just doesn't work well.  Wrong mode.  See previous posting the difficulty of (making money from) Web 2.0 eyeballs.

So I thought Twitter was probably hopeless in terms of a business.
But then I realized that Twitter is also real-time search.
And search we do know how to make money on.  Boy howdy do we.  To the tune of billions of dollars.

So Twitter actually has it easy.

1. Do the usual adsense matching ads to keywords thing on search.twitter.com
2. When you can't parse the keywords well (as may be the case with hashtags, e.g. #lotf09), build a metadata directory to figure out what the hashtag maps to and then match the ads to that - in which case, ideas like tagalus are going to be worth lots of money - you heard it here first

So Twitter should be fine.  Should be big dollars fine, in fact, as real-time search grows in popularity.

This is also a very simple lesson to all you Twitter-wannabes out there (are you listening, Facebook and FriendFeed?) : you want to make money from the real-time web dynamic whatever - fine, just do it in a separate search interface, not in your main user interface.  When they're in separate search, you know they have intentionality.  Intentionality, you can make money from.  When people are expressing a desire, you can use ads to meet that desire.  That's like, probably the whole underlying concept of ads (yeah, I watch Mad Men).

Whereas ads while people are socially sharing links, pictures, and whatever, not so much intentional seeking, not so much any opportunity to make money.

UPDATE 2009-04-07: I should also mention a current approach that Twitter is experimenting with

3. Subject-specific portals

Since Twitter provides aggregated real-time conversations, you can try to find various ways to slice the conversations up by topic or other  attribute.  The two approaches I am aware of so far are:

* to slice by "authority" or identity - ExecTweets is a portal to "executive" Tweeters (which I think is a bit nonsense, in an age in which authority emanates from your ideas, not your position) - the portal is sponsored by Microsoft - there are other portals that slice out particular celebrity twits etc.

* to slice by content - MarchTweetness/TitleTweets is a portal around the US March Madness basketball thing, sponsored by AT&T - one can imagine a similar soccer-oriented site for the international audience

So one can imagine e.g. a site built around the launch of the SF series Caprica, that captures all the #caprica tweets and attempts to target people interested in science fiction, selling BSG merchandise etc.

I personally think this idea is pretty weak overall, because subject-specific portals generally fail.  Google beat Yahoo.  People jump from topic to topic as they explore the web, as the impulse strikes them.  No matter how much info your portal pulls in, there's always going to be some rival portal on the same topic that people want to check as well.  You cannot hold people on a specific website.  Also, unless you do this in an automated fashion for all topics (in which case it will look generic), it is a lot of work to do a custom siloed portal for each and every particular topic you want to make money from.

I can imagine though they will continue the TitleTweets trend of searching for the "big eyeball" sweet spots like the SuperBowl for custom Twitter portals.

Kindle 2 burns on the horizon

Front page news on Amazon.com and being promoted to Amazon Associates, the Kindle 2 has arrived.
Personally, I don't see why you would buy books you can only license, never own.  Books on a device that's available only in the United States.  Isn't technology amazing?  It can create arbitrary barriers that never existed before in the physical world.

But if you want one, here you go.  It's US$359 and will be released February 24, 2009.

pre-order Kindle 2 from Amazon.com

 

I do have to admire Amazon for understanding a deep truth of the digital world - in the end, you can only monetize physical things.  Apple understood this by making their money on the iPod, not the music.

UPDATE: Also the note at Amazon that "original Kindle owners are first in line to receive Kindle 2 [if they order one]" reminds me that this is new technology.  That means unlike paper, which is rather well-established, the Kindle will become obsolete.  Rapidly.  Those books that have been sitting on your bookshelf for 20 years - no problem, reach over and open them up.  In 20 years, how many generations of book-reading technology do you think you will have to go through, between upgrades and failures?  At hundreds of dollars for every replacement.  For content that you don't even own in any meaningful way.  I don't think that's progress.  ENDUPDATE

Personally I think a more interesting development is Google Book Search Mobile.  As well, the New York Times reports that Amazon is also working on delivering "Kindle books" to cellphones, presumably with the same DRM.  There is no sign of that being available from Amazon today (and I don't see what their incentive would be, since it breaks the "you only make money from physical things" model).

Full disclosure: The above are Amazon Affiliate links (price and everything are identical, I just get a percentage of your purchase).

South Park on Internet monetization

I forgot to include this with my recent monetization post

while the Internet is new and exciting for creative people, it hasn’t matured as a distribution mechanism to the extent that one should trade real and immediate opportunities for income for the promise of future online revenue.

South Park - Canada on Strike - via Will Video for Food

I would link to the clip, but thanks to geofencing, I can't actually see the clip in Canada, I can only watch full episodes.  (This is very common in Canada, where we get some parts of show content rehosted on a Canadian site, but not all the web extras that are available on the US site.)

the difficulty of monetizing Web 2.0 eyeballs

I've written in the past that you can monetize attention

Attention is transformed primarily into money through ads and other affiliate linking arrangements.  The more attention, the more clicks, the more clicks, the more money.  I'm not sure whether attention can be exchanged for anything else.

But it's a little more subtle than that.  You can monetize attention, if the intention was information gathering about something that is related to a purchasable item (i.e. e.g. you can monetize searching about hybrid cars, but not searching for a particular individual).

This nuance is part of the difference between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0

Web 1.0 looked a bit like traditional media - you visit a web page to get some information or entertainment, in the same way that you read a magazine or watch a TV show.  You accept advertisements alongside or intermixed with the content.  You may even be reading your computer magazine and get value from the ads, "oh cool, Protovision".

Or if I'm searching for cool LED clocks and you show me a neat Thinkgeek ad, maybe I click (assuming you haven't hit my adblock and flashblock filters).

But Web 2.0 is about connecting with other people.  Web 2.0 is like the telephone.  So imagine this scenario: you're talking on your telephone with your friend about how tired you are from the new baby and your phone goes BEEP and a voice says "The following is a paid advertisement: Diapers from BabyCorp, $9.99  This ad has been provided by VoiceMatch Algorithmics International".  I don't know about you, but I would be inclined to throw my phone in the river.

The point being, when you're making social connections with your friends, you have a completely different intentionality.  Not only are you not looking to buy anything, commercial interruptions are unwelcome.

So this is a huge problem.  You can monetize a Web page on a particular topic, or a Web log (err, blog) on a particular topic, as long as it has any commercialisable aspect.  But Gmail? Twitter? Facebook?  Not only are people not in purchase mode, they may be actively annoyed by any ads they actually notice.  The counter-argument is you can "target people by their characteristics and interests" but this, in my opinion, doesn't work.  People don't want to be targetted in a social environment.

Technology Review has a good issue on the Web 2.0 bubble (registration required, plus ads... which are easily adblocked/flashblocked).

Social Networking Is Not a Business* (July/August 2008). 

Goldstein should know, since his company, Social Media, sells advertising linked to the applications developed for Facebook and MySpace--products like Scrabulous and Compare People, which are hugely popular among the sites' users. "The trouble," says Goldstein, "is we're putting ads up in front of users, where they can ignore them. We've got to get them between users."

Goldstein's comment had the air of a slightly worn sound bite, but it did acknowledge a problem that outside observers describe more bluntly. "It's a really bad place to advertise," Jason ­Calacanis, founder of Webblogs and Mahalo.com, says of social-­networking sites. As he wrote in an e-mail, members of social networks "are busy in conversations and don't want marketing messages."

If you take this out of the virtual space, "getting ads between users" is clearly mad, as in the telephone example I gave above, or think of it like this: you and a friend are at a party talking about last week's skiing outing and some stranger steps IN BETWEEN YOU and offers to sell you ski equipment.

For this reason, I'm not entirely convinced that Twitter, FriendFeed and other similar social services are going to survive beyond their VC funding.  They're valuable communications infrastructure, but who is going to pay for them?

context and location awareness

A lot of buzz about the next generation of technology providing better information and services by being aware of the context in which the device is being used and the location.

Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, president and CEO of Nokia, came to the Mobile World Congress... to declare that Nokia will "reshape the Internet."

Nokia believes it, not Google, can deliver operator-independent, cross-platform phones through new software and services. How does Nokia presume that it can reshape an Internet so firmly established already? Nokia's answer lies in Maps 2.0, which the company claimed enables a "context-aware Internet" that combines multimedia features, Internet and Assisted- GPS, "We can bring more relevant and powerful context" to users browsing on the Internet, claimed Kallasvuo.

Niklas Savander, Nokia's executive vice president of services and software, added: "By adding context--such as time, place and people--to the Internet, the Web will become something very different from the one you have today."

EETimes - Nokia, not Google, sees itself reshaping the Internet - February 11, 2008

Some of those in the thick of battle are resigned to having a lot of company. “If there weren’t competitors, there wouldn’t be a market,” said Dan Harple, founder and chief executive of GyPSii, a mobile social network based in Amsterdam that is a contender. “Maybe there are 30 or more now — in three years, there will be 5 that matter.”

The prize, as these start-ups see it, is the 3.3 billion cellphone subscribers, a number that far surpasses the total of Internet users. The advantage over computer-based communities, they believe, is the ability to know where a cellphone is, thanks to global positioning satellites and related technologies.

...

Most mobile social networks seek to capitalize on location information. The SpaceMe service from GyPSii, for instance, will show users where friends and other members are in real time.

New York Times - Social Networking Moves to the Cellphone - March 6, 2008

Well established as the business mobile device of choice, the BlackBerry may soon become a much more social smartphone, says the co-CEO of creator Research In Motion Ltd.

Jim Balsillie says RIM wants the BlackBerry positioned to tap into the growing trend of Internet social networking sites such as FaceBook.com that allow consumers to share information about their lives, and access multimedia content, particularly music, on their mobile devices.

"Architecturally, music and the social networking are going to merge," Balsillie said ahead of a Thursday speech to the Canadian Music Week festival in Toronto.

CP - RIM looks to make social networking part of BlackBerry's strategy - March 6, 2008

Although the above is about mobile, Google is already "location aware", to the extent that each country version of Google ranks results in a different order, presumably based on language and click tracking, amongst other things.  So e.g. Google Canada will list hits in a different order (for the same search) than Google France.

It gets pretty complex to try to make meaningful context decisions though.  If it knows you're in a coffeeshop, should it return higher ranking results for "java" as it relates to coffee?  What if you do all your computer programming in coffeeshops?

This applies beyond mobile devices, to context awareness for any app being used on any platform anywhere, whether at work, at home, or on the go.

Of course, there is an extent to which the computer either implicitly or explicitly knowing more about the context and location of your activities is very privacy intrusive (e.g. hypothetical location-aware shopping application "I see you're passing a drug store on the way to your girlfriend's apartment, perhaps you should purchase some prophylactics?")

To rephrase something I wrote in my Twitter, I find my online and mobile walled gardens either have too many walls, or no walls whatsoever.  I would like to have a lot more control over the barriers and translucency of those barriers.  If my friends want to know my exact location down to the metre, that's fine, but as my circle of acquaintances expands outward, I want the the precision of my location to decrease, so that maybe people I know less well are shown what city I'm in, and people I don't know at all only get to see that I am currently somewhere in the vicinity of planet earth.

In a way, this is old news anyway.  The next thing that was supposed to follow on from the e-commerce bubble in 2000 was "m-commerce".  The cellphone companies conceived this as the m-commerce "value chain", by which they meant, extracting value FROM you, FOR them, all the way along the chain.  So they wanted not only to charge Amazon for placement on their wireless portal, they thought they should get a cut of everything you bought from Amazon.

I thought this was ridiculous when they were talking about it in 2000...

"E-Commerce value chain has many more steps and players than standard"

Notes on Wireless Internet for E-Commerce seminar - April 28, 2000

and when Tod Maffin talked about "CRM M-Commerce" in 2001, my general feeling was that the day a coupon pops up on my phone screen when I pass a store is the day I throw my cellphone into the river.

Accordingly, given people's widely varying expectations of privacy and "value", we are going to need much more granular and much more interoperable tools in order to achieve workable context awareness (including location).

Yahoo`s Fire Eagle is an infrastructure piece, an architecture for sharing location information between applications.

Plus which, this is all very nice in theory, but given that in Canada our mobile providers near-total control over their nextworks, and have data plans that are expensive and/or limited, mostly incomprehensible, and don't cover roaming outside Canada anyway, I think it will be a while before most Canadians are willing to use any sort of advanced mobile applications.

I actually think the carriers are setting themselves up for a fall, because Canada is concentrated in a few cities with lots of WiFi, so as soon as more phones have WiFi, people will use that to the exclusion of wireless data, and may even try to do a lot more VoIP over WiFi as well.

Related:
February 15, 2008  CNet reviews Nokia 6210 Navigator GPS phone [including Maps 2.0]
February 05, 2008   Nokia Location Tagger: in-phone photo geocoding

Elsevier Patient Research beta

Elsevier has launched a beta pilot that supports patients and their family members looking for medical information; providing access to individual full text journal articles from selected Elsevier publications. The articles are delivered via email for a minimal handling fee of $4.95.

http://patient-research.elsevier.com/patientresearch/about

Permitted Uses

You may access in a given twenty-four hour period a reasonable number of Content items, and you may download and print such Content after it has been delivered to your e-mail address. Such access and use is for your own personal use, although you may also share and discuss such Content with family members and medical professionals involved in your medical care or the care of a family member. You can make further copies for such family members and medical professionals.

Prohibited Uses

Personal use does not include the use by researchers, instructors or students for research purposes or educational use.

http://patient-research.elsevier.com/patientresearch/terms

You can see the list of journals covered at http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/authorsview.authors/patientresearch

There is a Facebook App, that provides a search box and also lists "popular articles".

It's not clear to me how you search without using the Facebook App.  There are some hits on various articles visible in Google.  The terms of service says

After ordering the article and confirmation of payment, we will e-mail the document to you typically within 2 hours, but no longer than 24 hours.

Facebook App seen via Carol Serroul.

audiobook DRM on the way out

Some of the largest book publishers in the world are stripping away the anticopying software on digital downloads of audio books.

...

Random House was the first to announce it was backing away from D.R.M., or digital rights management software, the protective wrapping placed around digital files to make them difficult to copy. In a letter sent to its industry partners last month, Random House, the world’s largest publisher, announced it would offer all of its audio books as unprotected MP3 files beginning this month, unless retail partners or authors specified otherwise.

Penguin Group, the second-largest publisher in the United States behind Random House, now appears set to follow suit. Dick Heffernan, publisher of Penguin Audio, said the company would make all of its audio book titles available for download in the MP3 format on eMusic, the Web’s second-largest digital music service after iTunes.

...

Mr. Heffernan said the company changed its mind partly after watching the major music labels, like Warner Brothers and Sony BMG, abandon D.R.M. on the digital music they sell on Amazon.com. “I’m looking at this as a test,” he said. “But I do believe the audio book market without D.R.M. is going to be the future.”

New York Times - Publishers Phase Out [AntiCopying] - March 3, 2008

(The actual NYT headline "publishers phase out piracy protection", while alliterative, is stupid.  Copying is not piracy.)

I think it's a shame that more libraries didn't push back harder on publishers about DRM, but it appears that it is dying a well-deserved death anyway.

The Web Revolution - May 2008 - Toronto - not free

Chris Anderson will present his new book, FREE.

The conference, not so much free: $590 if you register before April 15, $790 after.

Interactive Marketing Conference: The web revolution
Date:     Thursday May 15, 2008
Location:     Metro Toronto Convention Centre
(255 Front Street West, Toronto) *Limited seating

08:30 to 3PM, Chris' closing keynote is at 1:30 PM.

If you prefer your free stuff to be, err, actually free, you can see video of him at Nokia World, listen to him at IT Conversations, or wait for his audiobook version, which is supposed to be given away free.

IT Conversations link via David Flanders twitter.

when recommendations go bad

Seems like a "related category" filter might be in order...

"Would you like some pepper with that wifi, sir?"

Previously:
January 07, 2007  things you won't see on the WebOPAC

carbon labelling

If Loblaws follows other retailers in green labelling, shoppers could get the chance to literally calculate their exact carbon footprint from a new pair of boots or even a box of chocolates.

Loblaw Cos. Ltd. is thinking of adding carbon labels to its private label products to show consumers how much carbon dioxide was emitted in producing the goods.

Following in the footsteps of shoe specialist Timberland Co. and grocer Tesco PLC, the Canadian supermarket retailer's potential initiative could capitalize on consumers' growing concern about climate change and greenhouse gases.

Globe and Mail - carbon footprint - January 18, 2008

If this is done properly, it should help people to relocalise their commerce, since transportation is a big component of the carbon footprint.

Jon Udell has been writing about this, the idea of tracking carbon through the production chain.
Having information on product labels is nice, but this information should also be available for any online transaction as well.

See e.g. The transparent supply chain.

There is also some positive news coming out of conferences (I hope conferences will start banning bottled water as well).

The first place SLA expects to see a significant chance to make an environmental impact is the SLA Annual Conference & INFO-EXPO in Seattle in June 2008. Seattle is well-known as a pioneer in green initiatives and has been recognized for its citywide environmental efforts. In addition to what the city offers, such as public transport and green hotels, there are a number of ways for attendees to make their own conference experience a greener one. SLA will be working with INFO-EXPO exhibitors and conference sponsors as well as attendees on how they can participate in this initiative by offering options such as providing the opportunity for them to purchase their own carbon offsets, and supplying free wireless Internet access throughout the conference center, allowing attendees to access hand-outs electronically and eliminating the need to print thousands of paper copies.

Special Libraries Association Announces Green Initiative - January 11, 2008

Previously:
December 3, 2006  airlines and everything with built-in carbon offset

the currencies of the digital realm

I have been thinking about how the digital environment behaves.  What kinds of properties does it have?  How does it differ from the physical world?

One major aspect of the physical world is the economy.  You make a thing, you sell it, you get money.

In the digital realm, you imagine a thing, you share it, and you get attention.

Attention is the first currency of the digital realm.

In practice, you expend a certain amount of your attention to e.g. craft a blog posting, and get small slices of attention from others in return.  (In the case of a technology review, this may be 4 to 6 hours of my time, for a minute of every visitor's time.)

Attention over time becomes reputation.

Reputation is the second currency of the digital realm.

Both attention and reputation can be converted into various rewards, both monetary and non-monetary.

Attention is transformed primarily into money through ads and other affiliate linking arrangements.  The more attention, the more clicks, the more clicks, the more money.  I'm not sure whether attention can be exchanged for anything else.

Reputation, at least in the library blogging context, converts mainly into opportunities: it might be a job offer, or an invitation to speak, or a request to write an article.

And of course, money is still a currency of the realm, but I would consider it the third currency.

Upon discussing this at lunch with Steve, I realised that this analysis should be quite understandable to the scientific community, as it is almost directly analogous.

If I write in Nature, I may get a lot of reputation, convertable into grant funding, employment offers, conference invitations, Research Assessment success.  But I may not necessarily get much of a fraction of the general public's attention.

If I write a newspaper column on science, I may get a good chunk of attention, but not as much reputation.

And of course, as many people have discussed elsewhere, the reputation-weighted network of scientific citations has much in common with the reputation-weighted network of web links.

In a way, Google can be considered as a reputation ranking engine, and make no mistake, it does everything in its power to measure attention (through ads, Google Reader, FeedBurner, and much more) to ensure that attention is being appropriately converted into reputation.

To me this means that in the digital realm, you have to stop thinking that you're in the XYZ business (the information business, the document delivery business etc.) and start thinking that you're in the attention and reputation business.  The number of sites that can use a traditional physical world model of converting things into money is tiny.  The rest of us (assuming we want to make money) have to use the primary digital currencies of attention and reputation, and convert them into money.

So you need to ask yourself, how big is your organisation's attention surface?  How much digital stuff (blog postings, search results, images, whatever) does it have to attract attention?  How is it using its reputation?

Some of these thoughts were inspired by reflecting on Chris Anderson's presentation at Nokia World (video), talking about his upcoming book on the topic of Free.

Amazon Kindle: books you can never share

Ah yes, progress.  Now for only $10 you can buy a book and read it.

ONLY you can read it and ONLY on Amazon's $400 Kindle e-book reader.

Want to give it to a friend?  Sell it?  Pass it on to your children?  Donate it to a library?  Sorry, too bad, it's "licensed digital content", don't you know.

Use of Digital Content. Upon your payment of the applicable fees set by Amazon, Amazon grants you the non-exclusive right to keep a permanent copy of the applicable Digital Content and to view, use, and display such Digital Content an unlimited number of times, solely on the Device or as authorized by Amazon as part of the Service and solely for your personal, non-commercial use. Digital Content will be deemed licensed to you by Amazon under this Agreement unless otherwise expressly provided by Amazon.

Restrictions. You may not sell, rent, lease, distribute, broadcast, sublicense or otherwise assign any rights to the Digital Content or any portion of it to any third party, and you may not remove any proprietary notices or labels on the Digital Content. In addition, you may not, and you will not encourage, assist or authorize any other person to, bypass, modify, defeat or circumvent security features that protect the Digital Content.

(Some emphasis above mine.)  I find it interesting that in all the Engadget hoopla, and on the entire snazzy Kindle page, this is never mentioned.  You have to go to Kindle Support, and find the last item on the page (Amazon Kindle Terms of Use and Policies), and then you get another list of pages where you have to select "License Agreement and Terms of Use", and then find the Digital Content section within that item.

How many people do you think are going to do that?

I also like this language "you may not, and you will not".  Um, ok I can see how you can forbid it, but "you will not"?  What is this, like a contractual limitation on reality?

one search, multiple publishers, articles on your desktop: CISTI PPA

<marketing-mode>

CISTI offers a Can$12 flat-base-fee^*, credit card payment, electronic article delivery service: Pay Per Article (yes, it sounds like "paper article"; I didn't choose the name).

There is a single search box, it does a search across many CISTI holdings available for immediate or 24 hour delivery, including a little publisher you may have heard of called Elsevier.

http://ppa-ac.cisti-icist.nrc-cnrc.gc.ca/payperview/jsp/find.jsp?lang=en

http://ppa-ac.cisti-icist.nrc-cnrc.gc.ca/payperview/jsp/faq.jsp

As always, if you have questions about this or any other CISTI service, don't contact me.
Contact CISTI Help Desk, your CISTI client service person, or CISTI Communications, as appropriate.

^* C$12 plus taxes and publisher fee.

</marketing-mode>

web design enabled... tissue?

Kleenex, beloved product of the weepy, the sneezy, and teenage boys, has gone all prosumer:

http://www.mykleenextissue.com/

But where's the Kleenex API?  I demand an API!

Chris Anderson's tail in Canada

Another Canada 2020 presentation

On March 28 [2007], Chris Anderson the Editor in Chief of  Wired magazine and author of  "The Long Tail"  discussed how our economy and culture is shifting from mass markets to millions of niches.

http://www.cpac.ca/asx/show_pr_can2020Anderson_mar28-07_eng.asx

If you want to skip the politicians, Anderson starts speaking at 12:20 in.

Previously:
August 03, 2006  my review of The Long Tail

DRM and legal music in Canada

I haven't been tracking this issue much lately, I'm afraid I'm such an early adopter that my interest started in 2001

http://web.archive.org/web/20010607052414/http://www.chebucto.ns.ca/~rakerman/digimusic.html

and that after Apple (finally) launched iTunes in December 2004, I stopped paying much attention to the issue of the availability of legal, Mac-friendly, and ideally non-DRMed music in Canada.

There has been a lot of buzz about the topic of music DRM lately though, plus my new Sony phone plays MP3s but not, of course, the protected AACs from the iTunes store.

Steve Jobs has been under pressure in Europe to open up iTunes, his response was to examine a number of options, ending with what some read as a call for the elimination of DRM.

With cellphones gaining more features each year, it's becoming obvious to me that the phone is the logical place to have your music, rather than juggling two devices.  Other figures in the electronics industry see a strong benefit from removing DRM, in order (one assumes) to open up more content for use on their phones.  The Globe reports today on RIM speaking out in favour of non-DRMed music.

"I think [DRM is] just going to break down with the normal proliferation of the Internet," Mr. Balsillie told analysts and investors at an RBC Dominion Securities Inc. conference in Toronto. "It's going to be tough. I think [content providers] are going to have to shift their business models. But they will go down swinging."

As well, out yesterday was Cassandra Szklarski's CP story Music labels flirt with looser DRM rules.  The big news is that PureTracks, a Canadian service, is selling unencumbered MP3s for a small set of artists now, in addition to its tradition WMA Windows Media DRMed songs.  However, if you're on a Mac, you're still greeted with

A polite message that would, nevertheless, in another context be called a "PFO".  Basically, thanks for visiting, only Windows is supported, have a nice day.

For Nettwork at least (BNL, Sarah McLachlan and others) you can buy directly from their Nettwerk Werkshop store (formerly Nettmusic).  Works great on a Mac.  I bought The Perishers - Sway EP from there a long time ago, still one of my favourite sets of tracks.

Rogers has also been promoting something called the Rogers MusicStore

http://rogers.com/musicstore

It has three basic features:
1. An application called Rogers MediaPlayer that is Windows 2000+ only.

2. The ability to have "unlimited" downloads to a PC or PC and mobile phone.  These downloads are DRMed, I think they will only play in Rogers Mobile MediaPlayer on selected cellphones.  And if you stop your subscription to the unlimited download service?  Poof, no access to any of that music any more.

Rogers FAQ: What happens to the songs I’ve downloaded to my PC or mobile phone when I cancel my Unlimited subscription?

If you cancel your Rogers MusicStore Unlimited Music Subscription, you won’t be able to play the songs you have downloaded to your PC or mobile phone.

3. Pay per download.  Still DRMed.

Rogers FAQ - What are Rogers MusicStore pricing options?
What is pay per download Music?

Pay per download Music refers to purchasing tracks a la carte, one at a time. Each downloaded track will appear as a unique charge on your wireless bill. Pay per downlaod songs also are encoded with DRM, but these tracks are owned by the customer indefinitely. The songs can be played an unlimited number of times, at any time the customer wants. These songs can also be burned to CD.

Pay per download pricing is, err, a bit outrageous

You can browse, preview and download songs to your PC for $1.25 per song or download songs to both your PC and your mobile phone for $1.99, plus a $1 mobile download fee.

To download music from the MusicStore on your phone you must have a supported phone because you must use the aforementioned Mobile MusicPlayer (624KB download).  Featuring a big glowing red EULA you must agree to before starting the software.

Attempting to buy ABBA's "Money, Money, Money" through my cellphone brought up yet another set of terms and conditions, in which I appeared to be agreeing to a monthly MusicStore subscription, so I cancelled the purchase.

Ridiculous.

But the Sony phone is no better in a way - it has a proprietary interface, the "Fast Port", rather than a regular headphone jack, which means that in order to use any normal headphone I have to buy a special FastPort-headphone jack adapter.

Basically the underlying problem with any proprietary technology, whether it's DRM or an interface, is it makes hugely unreasonable assumptions in an age of technological change, along the lines of:

• everyone uses a Windows PC or device that supports Windows DRM or
• everyone uses an iPod
• hard drives (or any other forms of storage) never fail
• authentication services (needed to verify and play DRMed songs) will never fail, and will be available forever
• you never need to move content from one platform to another

What I also find frustrating, and part of what motivated me to create my page on digital music 6 years ago, is that even if you want to obey the law, the music (and movie etc.) industry puts barriers in your way.  In 2001 the main problem was I couldn't buy many songs online legally in Canada at all.  Now there is a lot more content available, but still not all.  Want to get the UK TV series Hex on DVD in Canada?  Sorry, region 2 DVDs only.  Want to buy "Glass Vase Cello Case" by Tattletale from the iTunes Music Store Canada?  Sorry, not available.  Want to buy any TV show of any kind from iTunes Canada?  Sorry, no TV shows available.  How bizarre is it that I have no way to legally acquire desired digital content?  Talk about your marketplace gaps.

UPDATE: You can also buy music legally in Canada from Sony Connect

http://www.sonyconnect.ca/

Windows only, you have to download their SonicStage app or access a different site that only supports Windows Internet Explorer.  The test songs I bought were all downloaded as OpenMG DRMed ATRAC files.  Brilliant, take a format no one uses (ATRAC, "the 8 track of digital music formats", yet another bit of proprietary Sony brilliance) and then put extra DRM on top of it.

ENDUPDATE

EMusic remains my fave store so far, although I haven't bought from them since their long-ago days of unlimited legal MP3 downloads for a fixed monthly fee.

You can find more (somewhat dated) info at

http://www.akerman.ca/digimusic.html

PS I took a picture of the music store purchase agreement when I tried to buy the ABBA song but--I am not making this up--my camera's hard drive crashed.  Which is a good reminder that the probability of a hard drive failing is 100%.  On the plus side, it had lasted something like 7 years--it was an IBM/Hitachi 340MB Microdrive.

Amapedia - Amazon Product Wiki next generation

I'm not sure this effort is going anywhere, but what I find interesting is the amount of content that Amazon is able to get customers to contribute for free.

http://amapedia.amazon.com/

via Ten Thousand Year Blog

Previously:
November 26, 2005  Behold the power of Wikizon: Amazon adds ProductWiki

my review of Wikinomics

Summary

Wikinomics is a good book for managers who want to understand the latest trends in technology and society.  Toffler's The Third Wave (1980, ISBN-13: 978-0553246988) and Friedman's The World is Flat (2005, ISBN-13: 978-0374292799) are better books, with deeper insights and more thoughtful analysis, but they are also a bit more theoretical and much longer.

Details

I was initially quite sceptical about this book, the articles in the Globe were interesting but a bit short on caveats.  The tone of the book is extremely positive, to the point of sometimes excessive technology evangelism hyperbole.  However, I found that as you get farther along in the book, they do provide more balance and perspective.  If you separate out some of their marketingspeak, there is content of value.

I am a bit concerned about the approach of using a small number of "business case" exemplars, as I don't believe in the business case idea - I think most businesses successes are a result of a unique confluence of events, that wouldn't work if you tried to duplicate them.

For me, the most interesting chapters were #4, about marketplaces for ideas and innovation ("ideagoras"), #6, about shared and collaborative science, and #7, about creating technology platforms that enable innovation and expansion.

The first three chapters are ok, a basic overview of the current technology and social environment.  This will be nothing new for those of you who have been tracking these changes in your RSS feed readers, but may provide a useful capsule of information for managers and others wishing to understand these new ideas and activities.

I myself am always interested most in information that is new to me, and the chapter on idea marketplaces was an eye-opener.  As in all chapters, they pick a few specific business examples, with InnoCentive being singled out for particularly lengthy discussion.  InnoCentive describes itself as a

web-based community matching top scientists to relevant R&D challenges facing leading companies from around the globe

I think that's an interesting idea - just as eBay has been able to match buyers with sellers, InnoCentive aims to match problems with solutions.  Can you make the world your R&D department?  I think it is profoundly challenging to outsource anything, but nevertheless, it's worth experimenting with.

Chapter 5 is about Prosumers, which is Toffler's idea, The Third Wave does at least get a citation at the back of the book, although I would have liked to have seen more prominent exposure in the actual text (for that matter, why not interview Toffler, if possible).  Prosumer is basically the idea of anyone being able to both produce (with potentially global distribution) and consume media and information.  They have some good examples, but are a bit behind the times in criticizing the mainstream media, "Why is this happening on digg and not CNN..."?  Err, actually, it is happening at CNN, they call it CNN i-Reports.

I was particularly interested to read about "Sharing for Science and the Science of Sharing" in chapter 6.  There is lots of good information about how the web is an enabler for science collaboration, and many ideas for how your organization can take advantage of open science.  They do, in my opinion, rather oversimplify the issues of peer review, implying that you could replace it with the Wisdom of Crowds, an idea I have already disagreed with at length.

The next chapter covers "platforms for participation", and this is a set of ideas that I already praised when they had an article in the Globe.  This chapter should be required reading for anyone who wants to understand the huge advantages of building networks of APIs (perhaps implemented as Web Services).  They talk about the activities of Google, Amazon and the like, and explain how they benefit from providing their services for use at this machine-to-machine level.  They also provide some much-welcomed caveats about business models built around platforms.

Chapter 8 is about the "Global Plant Floor", which I don't really care about since I'm not much interested in manufacturing (or similar very complex collaborative design efforts).  In fact I think that this idea of globally sourcing designs and parts is in for a big challenge if the full carbon pollution costs of vast distribution networks start to be accounted for.

Chapter 8 does end with some guidance on "harnessing the global plant floor" which I think is applicable to any type of "harnessing the new web".  Here are the subheadings:

• Focus on the critical value drivers
• Add value through orchestration
• Instill rapid, iterative design processes
• Harness modular architectures
• Create a transparent and egalitarian ecosystem
• Share the costs and risks
• Keep a keen futures watch

If reading this book leads to people and organizations embracing even a few of the above activities, it will be of great benefit.

The final two chapters deal with how your can try to bring collaborative, dynamic work patterns into your organization, and harness the power of open collaboration.  Some good guidance is provided about when these patterns may and may not be useful.

Overall I thought it was a useful book.  I learned some new things and I also got some ideas about how to present some of the complex technology topics I deal with, including numerous concrete business examples.

In the spirit of open collaboration, their book's final chapter 11 is a blank wiki online, for the readers to create.

Product details from Amazon.com

# Hardcover: 320 pages
# Publisher: Portfolio Hardcover (December 28, 2006)
# Language: English
# ISBN-10: 1591841380
# ISBN-13: 978-1591841388

Previously:
November 24, 2006  the Wikinomic Generation