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NOTE: This 2007 draft blog post is being published in 2022; it may be incomplete and the information is certainly out of date.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

my review of The World is Flat

NOTE: This 2006 draft blog post is being published in 2022; it may be incomplete and the information is certainly out of date.

Despite having a huge stack of books to read, I found myself on vacation without anything to read, so I ended up getting The World is Flat (Updated Edition) mostly by accident.

I had rushed into the mall to get the Globe, which no one was selling, so on a quick scan of the bookstore, I thought, hmm, if I'm going to sling around the term I should probably actually read the book.

At 566 pages, it's no light read, but Thomas Friedman presents a comprehensive framework for understanding the impact of technology on our societies.

I had assumed the book was mostly about outsourcing, but it actually covers a wide range of current developments in work and technology.  Friedman describes our society as experiencing "Globalization 3.0".

I was once again surprised, particularly given that he was even using "3.0" terminology, that there was no mention of Toffler's The Third Wave but other than that, the book is very strong.

It covers technology change with explanations that are both clear and comprehensive.  The last thing I would have expected in a book about globalization would be to get a good discussion of underlying technology change, but lo and behold, I read

"But then," added Microsoft's Mundie, "we said to ourselves, 'Geez, if we really want to automate everything, then we need to make it much easier not just for people to talk to people, but for machines to talk to machines -- for machines to interact with other machines about any subject without any humans involved at all or any a priori relationship between the different companies whose machines are communicating."  This was the next work flow breakthrough.

Technically, what made it possible was the development of a new data description language, called XML (extensible markup language) and its related transport protocol called SOAP (simple object access protocol).  Together, they allow any two computer programs to exchange formatted data or documents that contain any form of information.

(from "The Ten Forces that Flattened the World - #3 - Work Flow Software" - page 82)

Issues

"globalization" is missing from the index.

There is no comprehensive reference list or bibliography.  While he does a great job of citing things within the text, it would be nice to have them all gathered together at the end as well.

Every Blog Its Reader

I did a keynote in 2008 where I said "Every web resource its machine reader", reinterpreting Ranganathan for the computer age.

I want to look back on how we almost built an ecosystem of information for human and machine readers, and then it fell apart.

Below, I will see if I can tell the tale of the decline of the blogosphere and end up with thoughts about the Antikythera Mechanism and scholarly communication.

In 2007, Darren Barefoot wrote in The Tyee about an era that just 9 years later, is totally gone.

It begins:

I subscribe to the RSS feeds for about 175 blogs.

Later down, it says

Technology reporter and uber-geek Tod Maffin runs Inside the CBC. It's kind of an industry blog, in that it covers the world of Canadian public broadcasting...

The Rise and Fall of Inside the CBC

Let's have a look at Inside the CBC now, in 2016

It is definitely not by Tod Maffin, nor does it cover the world of Canadian public broadcasting.  It's more or less what we would call this year fake news.  More specifically, it's a kind of human content written for robots, but not at all in the way I intended.  It's most likely, given the jumble of topics (neopets, skates, weddings in Gatlinburg), a search-keyword-driven tasking of quick content creation.  "Neopets searches are peaking, quick, write something about neopets!"

Which is to say, the ecosystem of interlinking conversations that Barefoot describes in 2007 is quite gone.  It's clear there's some complicated history behind its demise, but for simplicity's sake, here's what we can find from the Internet Archive: by February 1, 2011 the blog has a posting from January 10, 2011 at 8:58 pm.  And that blog post remains, frozen in time at the top of the page until at least January 28, 2013.  By June 21, 2014 the page reads simply "The domain insidethecbc.com is no longer parked by GoDaddy." By December 21, 2014 it has become, rather unexpectedly, a blog in German: "Wir haben ein großes Forschungszentrum mit über 100 Mitarbeitern und Niederlassungen in Übersee und Asien." / "We have a large research center with over 100 employees and branches in overseas and Asia." By September 9, 2016 it has transformed again, writing in (sort-of) English about "The advantage of getting nucific bio x4 coupon codes" and by October 22, 2016 it has settled into its current format.

The long and short of this is firstly, this is a disaster for a "many small pieces, loosely joined" ecosystem, and secondly, without Internet Archive, or even if the current owner of Inside the CBC changed their robots.txt, all of the original site would be gone.

The Other Shoe Drops

The story of Inside the CBC turned out to be more complicated than I thought.  Is it illustrative of the decline of the blogosphere?  Well just seven years after his article in The Tyee, Barefoot is blogging "In 2014, what is my blog for?"

Whither Alexandria?

What has happened?  Well, basically, it turned out that this world of interlinking blogs and feed reading at best fell apart, at worst was deliberately dismantled.

I realise the latter is a more compelling story than the former, but it's a combination of factors.  In the In Our Time episode The Library of Alexandria, we may look to hear again the story of how the library burned, but the conclusion is actually that it really just faded away.  With the rise of the Christian Roman Empire, the old knowledge and the old conversations, the dialogues between the books, just weren't of as much interest any more.

But one of the reasons we still have this discussion about the destruction of the library is because of the reality of so much loss of information.

In Reality Is Not What It Seems (BBC Radio 4 adaptation episode 1, Fiat Lux), Carlo Rovelli tells the history of physics in the conventional way that most western European scientists do, beginning with the Greeks.  In particular, he speaks of Democritus, and of his dismay at the loss of Democritus' original writings.  "We know of his thought only through the quotations and references made by other ancient authors, and by their summaries of his ideas.  I often think that the loss of the works of Democritus in their entirety is the greatest intellectual tragedy to ensue from the collapse of Classical civilization."

SIDEBAR

This formulation of the history of physics is so common that The Big Bang Theory parodies it in episode 3x10, where in order to teach Penny about Leonard's current research, Sheldon will only present the topic by starting with "It is there in Ancient Greece that our story begins..."

The episode is entitled The Gorilla Experiment, it aired in 2009.  It's not to be confused with 7x23 The Gorilla Dissolution which aired in 2014.

ENDSIDEBAR

Consider that while Rovelli is lamenting the loss of writings from 2400 years ago, we are not even doing a good job of maintaining writings from 9 years ago.  In fact, some Internet content is only now available through quotations and references made by other bloggers.

(And its worth noting that when you read this, you probably won't be able to listen to Fiat Lux, because the BBC is only making it available online for another 25 days.  And depending on your local copyright laws, you may not be able to legally view a clip from The Big Bang Theory without having purchased access to the episode.)

Thanks Google and Facebook

It didn't help that Google closed Google Reader.  It's a minor miracle that Google FeedBurner still exists.  The demise of (Facebook-owned) FriendFeed removed a conversation option from the web.  Overall, the ecosystem has shifted to closed commercial services and to search results driving traffic to commercial sites.

Whither Quebec?

If you want an idea of how fragile this ecosystem is, turn to the Elections Quebec page on Electronic Voting.  It used to include four press releases.  These press releases have now been "archived", which in this particular case means removed entirely from the web.  This is what the page looked like September 16, 2016 with the press releases (page from the Internet Archive)

and this is what it looks like now, with no indication the press releases ever were there.

There is nothing insidious about this, this is just standard web procedure - the press releases are from 2006, probably they were rarely accessed, so you run your ROT (Redundant, Outdated, Trivial) analysis and conclude that ten years online was enough, it's time for the press releases to go.

But once they go, they're gone.  Are they in the Library and Archives Canada web archive?  Are they in the BAnQ web archive?  It's hard to know.  Neither provides a public search interface that can uncover the Elections Quebec pages.  Without coverage in the national archive, and in the provincial archive, and in the Internet Archive, content that is removed from the web is just simply gone forever.

So this is where we find ourselves.  We have a single main service, the Internet Archive, that depends on private funding and that is attempting to make a backup of itself in Canada.  Coverage from other web archives is unclear and may be nonexistent.  Every day, as websites are reorganised, or content is deliberately removed for various reasons, or websites are simply neglected until the domain expires, our online Library of Alexandria fades.  Not in some blaze of destruction, but more from lost interest, the same as the original.

You might think this is not a problem, because we can get the press releases from the Internet Archive, but it never indexed them.  So for all intents and purposes they are gone now.

SIDEBAR

Because I happened to be paying particular attention to Canadian electronic voting information over the past few months, I was able to recover three of the press releases using a combination of Pinboard, Google and Bing caches.  The search engine caches would have been replaced very quickly, so it's only good fortune that I was able to grab the content before it was lost.

I have also become a bit obsessed about adding manually adding pages to the Archive, which you can do by going to https://web.archive.org/ and pasting the URL into the box under Save Page Now and clicking Save Page.

ENDSIDEBAR

The Loss of the Immune System

Blogging, with its interlinked web of discussions, was a kind of web immune system.  It wasn't perfect, but it was a way to have a conversation, and a way to provide signals to Google about what was and wasn't important, and to some extent, about what was and wasn't true.

It used to be possible to blog about a topic and get discovered through the network of blogs, to get added to feed readers, to become a new information source.

It used to be possible to blog about a topic and get good Google search ranking, to be discovered through search and thus be an important contributor to the conversation.

This is all basically gone.  Many of the blogs are gone, the blog discovery ecosystem is gone, the feed readers are gone, and Google search rank is very hard to get.

The Post- Era

Here's a quote

For some, this past election year was about the slow death of the current political system.

Can you place it in time? It's from... 1997.  Jon Katz wrote enthusiastically in Wired about how online conversations were going to transform political discourse.

On the Net last year, I saw the rebirth of love for liberty in media. I saw a culture crowded with intelligent, educated, politically passionate people who – in jarring contrast to the offline world – line up to express their civic opinions, participate in debates, even fight for their political beliefs.

...

I watched people learn new ways to communicate politically. I watched information travel great distances, then return home bearing imprints of engaged and committed people from all over the world. I saw positions soften and change when people were suddenly able to talk directly to one another, rather than through journalists, politicians, or ideological mercenaries.

I saw the primordial stirrings of a new kind of nation – the Digital Nation – and the formation of a new postpolitical philosophy.

Jon Katz, in 2016, now writes books about dogs.

So how did the hopes for online conversation and engagement go to the dogs?  How did we get from a postpolitical philosophy to post-truth as the word of the year?

Amusing Ourselves to Death in 2016

2007 may have been the tipping point.  The iPhone was announced in January of 2007.

Sitting in front of a desktop, you have a keyboard and a mouse and a screen.  This drives a certain kind of text-based, highlight-and-insert content creation.

Smartphones and tablets, on the other hand, are terrible at long text and inserting content.  They are great for creating photos and videos.  And so now that's the world we have, the photo and video world. 

All of the signals that we needed to rank and sort and link and discover are gone.  Now it's just bam! image, bam! video.  No context, no links, just endless streams of content.  The web now is, in short, television rather than a library.  And the consequences of this are huge.

In MIT Technology Review, Hossein Derakhshan writes

Before I went to prison [in 2008], I blogged frequently on what I now call the open Web: it was decentralized, text-centered, and abundant with hyperlinks to source material and rich background. It nurtured varying opinions. It was related to the world of books.

Then for six years I got disconnected; when I left prison and came back online, I was confronted by a brave new world. Facebook and Twitter had replaced blogging and had made the Internet like TV: centralized and image-centered, with content embedded in pictures, without links.

...

The problem is not that television presents us with entertaining subject matter but that all subject matter is presented as entertaining.” (Emphasis added.) And, Postman argued, when news is constructed as a form of entertainment, it inevitably loses its function for a healthy democracy.

In other words, we used to be able to use the web to have a conversation, and now we are basically using the web to amuse ourselves to death.

The blog ecosystem helped to create a kind of web immune system, an immune system that Google could use to surface healthy information.  With that gone, it's no wonder that false news can spread easily.

Finding the Antikythera Mechanism

Science depends on a web of citations, a web of knowledge.  Without a web of knowledge on the actual web, how can we hope to make discoveries and determine what is of interest.  How can we challenge information when we're in our filter bubbles, Facebooking to one another, off of the public web?

In 2008 (remember my talk from 2008? it's way back at the start of this blog post), I thought we might be able to meld human and machine understandings in order to advance the conversation.  I promoted the idea of better formatting information for machine processing, in order that we could benefit from machine-aided search and discovery.

I deliberately chose not to emphasize automatically-generated information.  Depending on the era, I've heard that the Semantic Web would solve discovery, or that OAI-ORE was going to link everything together, or now that Artificial Intelligence and Big Data will discover all connections automatically.

Would that this were so.

In Searching for Lost Knowledge in the Age of Intelligent Machines, Adrienne LaFrance writes

What if other objects like the Antikythera Mechanism have already been discovered and forgotten? There may well be documented evidence of such finds somewhere in the world, in the vast archives of human research, scholarly and otherwise, but simply no way to search for them. Until now.

This is a compelling vision of knowledge that we don't even know that we have, that could be unearthed if we just digitized and translated everything, and then sent our AIs digging for connections.  Maybe Democritus is out there, in some copy of a copy of an Arabic translation.  Maybe this whole lost world of complex mechanical devices is out there on paper somewhere, just waiting to be found.

But there is a pretty harsh collision between that vision and the reality of the web we've created.

We were on a path that might have enabled this scholarly discovery, although probably with a lot more human intervention than techno-utopians would like.  But now we can't even find things from a few years ago.  We were assembling the book-to-book conversations of a new Library of Alexandria, and now we're scraping down the pages like in the Archimedes Palimpsest

This medieval Byzantine manuscript then traveled to Jerusalem, likely sometime after the Crusader sack of Constantinople in 1204.^[7] There, in 1229, the original Archimedes codex was unbound, scraped and washed, along with at least six other parchment manuscripts, including one with works of Hypereides. The parchment leaves were folded in half and reused for a Christian liturgical text of 177 pages; the older leaves folded so that each became two leaves of the liturgical book.

But we're doing far far worse than writing over thousand-year-old knowledge.  We're erasing completely information from last year, with no xray to recover it.

Which is to say, as much as I love the vision of recovering the lost history of the Antikythera Mechanism, I'm more worried we won't even have a history of last year.

Remaking the Web We Made

This is the web now

The Web of Desperate Popup Intrusion.

That used to be the web of users deciding to subscribe to feeds, instead of being badgered to sign up to email newsletters, or to view ads, or to pay up immediately.

So let's try to unwind some of our mistakes.  Rather than some AI utopia that will unearth lost connections from millenia past, let's deliberately build a human reality of intentional reconnection.  Some suggestions:

• more slow, less fast
• more longform, less shortform
• more blogging, less Twitter
• open your feedreader, not your email
• less reaction to images, more thought about text
• get more sleep
• read more books
• put the smartphone down
• more services that let us pay for them, less ad-supported data-mining intrusion
• more public broadcaster support
• systematic public investment in web archiving
• less closed conversation, more open public conversation
• a more realistic blend of human-created metadata and machine analysis

I will readily admit that I got pulled away into the quick rewards of Twitter from the slow work of blogging.  And it's become a self-reinforcing system.  As blogging and feedreading faded, blog hits and links and comments faded.  Blog rank in Google faded.  Wearing another hat, I wrote 595 blog posts about online voting from 2004 to 2016.  All that work, and (for the particular Google results I see today on this computer), the blog shows up once on page 5 of results for "online voting" canada.  It's hard to maintain one's enthusiasm for 5th page ranking.  It's hard to maintain one's blogging for two web hits a day.

But then I remember I originally started blogging just for myself.  I didn't anticipate my blog would grow and connect in the way that it did for a while.  So I am going to try to get back to blogging, because everywhere I go now, even for the few seconds of an elevator ride, I see people lost in their smartphone screens.  I don't see how we can continue on losing ourselves in those little personalized screens.

consumer IT and corporate IT

What was probably a kidney stone occasioned hanging out for a while with some paramedics at Emergency receiving.  A man was brought in who spoke only Italian.  One of the paramedics was wishing he could tell him to sit down, and another one told him to use Google Translate.  A minute later Translate was installed and spoken English was translated into spoken Italian using the iPhone.  Really impressive to see it used in a critical situation.  The recommending paramedic said he had used it in Chinatown to communicate with a unilingual Chinese speaker who had fallen on the bus, getting Yes/No answers to questions that Translate presented in Chinese.

Further discussion with the paramedic who had made the suggestion revealed:

* their laptop workstations have no wifi and can't do email

* they have to fight to get upgrades on their laptops, for example to get the latest mapping software (which is pretty important when you need to respond to calls at newly built housing)

* there is no support for iPhones or other devices provided by their corporate IT, so they have to buy them themselves and using them is ad hoc, as witness one of them with Translate installed and another without.

* he wished that the iPhone was supported by his corporate and came with "a standard package" of software like Translate that would be relevant for paramedics

* he speculated that his corporate IT simply wasn't set up to support new devices

This is a real example of an ongoing issue, where corporate IT (his expensive IT-provided laptop full of expensive custom software) is being outstripped by consumer technology.  Corporate IT needs to find ways to adapt to this, as it is clearly in some cases becoming a life or death issue.

On the plus side, the Ottawa Hospital in general is doing a big push to go paperless, and has bought 1800 iPads.  (I gather iPads for doctors doesn't mean iPhones for paramedics unfortunately.)

visualising city transit layers

There are many layers to the city.  There's the city seen through its people, the city seen through its food, the city seen through its landmarks, and the city seen through its transit, amongst many others.

Our understanding of transit has been pretty static, access points connected by lines.  Go to this dot, be transported along this line, change at this dot...  Here's a section of Manhattan from Google Maps with the Transit layer enabled.

Map data ©2011 Google

(To get additional layers in Google Maps, click beneath the Map icon in the upper right.  Options include Traffic, Transit & Bicycling - some of the options require you to click "more" in order to see them.)

Or here's the complete MTA New York Subway map.

But computer power and storage, combined with new (ideally real-time) data, and new ways of visualising can give a very different view of the transit layer.

One of my favourites is TripTropNYC, which gives a "heat map" showing subway times to a given location.

For example, for Elsevier headquarters at 360 Park Avenue South you can see in an instant that there is a band of short travel times up and down along the east side, and blocks of short transit times even across the East River near subway stations (there are probably short routes from across the Hudson too, but TripTrop only shows subways and the subway doesn't go to New Jersey).

Map data ©2011 Google

(I don't remember how I originally found TripTrop, but there's a kottke article about it from May 2009.)

On June 5, 2011 The Economist wrote about another time-based transit visualisation

@TheEconomist The Economist

A new application shows you the places in your city that you can reach in a given amount of time using public transit http://econ.st/iN9Zpc

http://twitter.com/TheEconomist/status/77417110925606915

STEFAN WEHRMEYER, a 23-year-old German programmer, has developed a Google Maps application called Mapnificent (harhar). It's pretty cool: it shows you the places in your city that you can reach in a given amount of time using public transit.

Mapnificent: A time-based transit map - Economist Gulliver Business Travel blog - June 5, 2011

Here is Mapnificent's view of the same 360 Park Avenue South problem space, showing a 15 minute transit time window (the light coloured bubbles over the map)

Map data ©2011 Google

I have to wonder if it includes the Roosevelt Island Tramway though.  One of the challenges in urban transit is capturing ALL the different possible modes.

With Settings->Show color map checked, you get a TripTrop-like view.  With a live (if rather finicky) slider so you can see how the bubbles expand and contract as you increase and decrease transit time.

Map data ©2011 Google

Stefan Wehrmeyer's blog post about how it all works, A Mapnificent World, tells a key part of this story, which is open transit data... and licensing problems.

Data

Google specified the GTFS format in order to be able to use public transport information in Google Maps. The public transport providers publish a file with all necessary information inside and the magnificent GTFS Data Exchange collects these files and keeps them up-to-date in one place. So getting the data for the cities is easy. The hard part was that I have to read and adhere to the license agreement of every single provider. Some providers like New York’s MTA do it right by not having any complicated license text at all, some like San Francisco require me to put a text of 98(!) words on the site. I don’t know what they hope to accomplish, but I can work with that. However, I have a problem at the moment with the Terms of Use of Los Angeles Metro and San Diego Metro where they say that I’m only authorized to reproduce the data  in the form provided by them. What? Shall I show users the raw GTFS files? I guess not, but Mapnificent aggregates and converts data and I’m unsure if this is covered by the license. I have tried to contact Metro LA on two different channels, but did not get a response (their sites also make it extremely difficult to contact them by email). If you can change anything about that, please feel free to do it.

Ottawa provides GTFS. The local transit agency, OC Transpo, doesn't say much about it

Every service change (4 times per year), Scheduling and bus stop data is provided in zipped format to certain developers, including Google.

from http://www.octranspo1.com/about-octranspo/reports

Other than saying "certain developers" (while the file is open for anyone to download), it's not clear what license agreement applies, presumably the site-wide Terms of Use.  But Ottawa also has an open data site

http://ottawa.ca/opendata

Which includes more information and a pointer to the same file

http://ottawa.ca/online_services/opendata/info/transit_schedule_en.html

and with more generous Ottawa Open Data Terms of Use.

I mention this mainly for two reasons: 1) licensing is a big inconsident mess 2) open data sites are helping to fix this.

Here's a map.  NOTE: To switch to Mapnificent Ottawa, you actually have to click on the Mapnificent Ottawa icon, otherwise it will say "your point is out of the covered area".

Here's the 15 minute transit window to get to World of Maps at 1235 Wellington (Wellington and Holland).

Map data ©2011 Google

But again we see the river is a barrier - across the river is Gatineau in Quebec - which has a completely different bus service, the STO.  Some of the STO routes cross into Ottawa.  But while STO provides its routes in a PDF they are not available as GTFS as far as I can tell.

And the actual situation of urban mobility is much, much more complex than this.

Typical urban options include:

• walking
• cycling
• surface transit
• underground transit
• taxis
• car share services (Vrtucar in Ottawa)
• bike share services (Capital Bixi in Ottawa and Gatineau)
• car pooling including "just in time" matching of passengers to cars going near their destination
• traditional car rental and bike rental services
• helicopters, funiculars, aerial tramways, The Monorail and many more
• (sadly no dirigibles that I know of, although there really should be dirigible transit)

And there are all kinds of levels of complexity, where cycling encompasses everything from high-speed commuter cyclists who ride in traffic to more leisurely local cycling, and transit is a mix of commuter services with surface and underground stations (e.g. the RER trains in Paris and the coming Ottawa Light Rail) and local services (local bus routes and surface trams).

Onto this add the realtime layer: Where is the bus? Is it on time?  Is it faster to walk?  Is the path chosen for walking pleasant?  Safe?  Are there bikes at the nearest bikeshare station?  Are there empty slots at the destination bikeshare station?  What's the probability there will still be an empty slot by the time I get there? Is it likely to rain?  Does it pass through a location where many pedestrians or cyclists are killed by car & driver?

Here's a visualisation of Capital Bixi usage (which is only 100 bikes at 10 stations) - you can see stations fill and empty.

http://bikes.oobrien.com/?city=ottawa

Click Animation and Start Animation to see the bikes at stations change over time.

(You can use the pulldown menu to see other cities, e.g. Washington DC.)

Just to round out the story, remember that people may not have good time-based mental maps of their cities.  When London posted simple walking maps for Tube stations (with concentric circles showing the destinations you can reach with 15 minutes & 30 minutes of walking) some people discovered it was faster to walk to their destination than to take the Tube (here's King's Cross Station).

And remember that this requires not only transit data (ideally realtime) but layers upon layers of map data (also ideally realtime).  What are the walking routes?  Which are high-speed pathways for cyclists?  Which are recreational paths?  Is there road maintenance?  Has the sidewalk been plowed?  Is the road closed to cars to allow Sunday cycling?

Cities have so many different types of paths, like the Manhattan Waterfront Greenway, the Manhattan High Line Park, the Ottawa Capital Pathway - ideally all of these get combined together computationally into an integrated route planning picture.  That's a lot of data, usually provided only as PDFs generated from internal systems, from many different organisations, to try to somehow get into machine-readable frequently-updated integrated formats.

And layers of policy details: Can you put your bike on the bus? On the train?  On the subway? 

And layers of computation and user feedback.  Does the fast transit route put you on the opposite side of a busy highway from your destination, while a slower one drops you right at the door of the building?  Is this sidewalk covered with slush and ice?

And even a social layer - are there friends nearby or friends along the way to your destination?

We have fairly elaborate systems to track and react to car traffic flows, but basically zero to help pedestrians and cyclists flow around the city as conditions change minute to minute and day to day.  Ottawa's Traffic Operations Control Centre looks like something you would use to monitor the launch of the Space Shuttle.  But I suspect none of those screens display anything about pedestrians or cyclists moving around the city.

The ideal system would give lots of different options, incorporating all the different mobility scenarios - walk to a bike rental station, then ride to a transit node, take the bike on the train, the ride to a drop off station and walk the rest of the way - you need a lot of data working together to be able to construct these kinds of routes computationally.

Some elements to take away from this:

• having a data standard (GTFS) with downloadable files is already enabling innovation
• innovation is being stifled by incomprehensible licensing
• open data sites can help to centralise the discovery of files and provide a single clear license
• visualisations can help people understand time and movement through their city in ways that static transit maps can't
• multi-mode transportation requires surfacing the different durations and aspects of all the different ways to move around the city
• realtime data can add even more benefits
• we need better maps (OpenStreetMap can help here)
• we need better ways of feeding updates and opinions into the system (things like FixMyStreet.ca and OttawaBikingProblems.ca can help - if they feed into city 311 systems and are acted upon)
• we need mobility operations centres, not traffic operations centres
• we can benefit from this data in many different roles: as citizens, as tourists, as city planners, as reporters
• there may be great partnerships possible, for example cycling map open data from the city, transformed by cyclists/citizens/hackers to be the most relevant and usable for their real cycling experiences
• UPDATE 2011-06-07: while people can move easily across administrative boundaries, data does not; we need to make data integrate across boundaries ENDUPDATE

Two groups in Ottawa who look at these issues from a data perspective are @opendataottawa and @hackshackersott  To the extent that we get better at cracking this problem we will improve the urban experience for everyone - including local businesses and local technology entrepreneurs.

Google and the web of structured data

Google has announced it will be using (some) microformats and RDFa to enrich search results.  They call this Rich Snippets.

To display Rich Snippets, Google looks for markup formats (microformats and RDFa) that you can easily add to your own web pages. In most cases, it's as quick as wrapping the existing data on your web pages with some additional tags.

Official Google Webmaster Blog - Introducing Rich Snippets - May 12, 2009

O'Reilly Radar says

Moving toward the Semantic Web will allow our searching technologies to become more intelligent and will set the stage for the next revolution in which computing systems can become more aware of the "meaningfulness of data".

We've already seen a shift toward "semantic search": Google has already been augmenting search results with Google Maps, limited catalog searches, and more recent entries into the search market such as Amazon's A9 and the yet to be released Wolfram Alpha differentiate themselves by the structured data and content that can be extracted from a search result. We have yet to a see a compelling reason for web masters to place RDFa or microformats into a site to enable this semantic data to be mined until today, until Google provided a social incentive for site designers.

O'Reilly Radar - Google Announces Support for Microformats and RDFa - May 12, 2009

Google has a help file to get you started: Marking up structured data.

Incidentally, if you're thinking, "why didn't someone tell me this structured data thing was coming?" I should mention that actually I did try to tell people, whether it was in my presentation to Allen Press in 2007 (where I talked about the need for microformats and semantic enrichment) or in my keynote to NISO Discovery last year (where I talked specifically about Yahoo SearchMonkey using semantic information).

Previously:
September 8, 2008  semantic search thoughts

Wolfram Alpha and the web of structured data

The good news is, WolframAlpha can understand a query like "unemployment in Ottawa".

The bad news is, as you can see in the Result, that while it knows what data it needs to compute the answer, "(data not available)".

This is as clear an example of why we need open data as I can think of.  If you want your computers to start providing you with smarter answers, you have to give them better information to work with.

WolframAlpha provides two channels to try to address this problem: Contribute Structured Data and Suggest Data Sources.  You can also contribute individual facts, but that won't scale very well.

CLA preconferences: Democracy and Emerging Technology

Just highlighting a couple of the many Canadian Library Association preconferences, before the main event in Montreal.

* Democracy & Technology (DemTech) - May 29, 2009 - Off-site: J.A. de Seve Cinema, J. W. McConnell Library Building, Concordia University (note this is NOT at the main event site)

DemTech 2009 will showcase cutting edge projects that use information technology to encourage citizen access and foster democratic participation. DemTech is a pre-conference of the 2009 Annual Conference and Trade Show of the Canadian Library Association, sponsored by Apathy is Boring, VisibleGovernment.ca and members of the CivicAccess.ca community.

You can see the DemTech.ca site, as well as some information on the CLA site.
I have been gathering some information related to this topic in my FriendFeed Open Government Canada room, and there will also be a local event, ChangeCamp Ottawa, on May 16, 2009.

* Emerging Technologies Interest Group (ETIG) Library Camp - May 29, 2009 - Palais des congrès

The morning sessions will include presentations by John Fink (McMaster University), Jason Hammond (Regina Public Library), and Jessamyn West (yes THE Jessamyn West of librarian.net) The afternoon will be an "unconference", where participants will share and learn on a variety of topics pre-determined by the group. (Note: this is not a "sage on the stage" afternoon – come armed with a curious nature and a will to participate.)

There is a FriendFeed room, a wiki, and a blog in addition to the CLA site.

Registration deadline for both these events is Friday, April 17, 2009.  You can register by faxing in the form, or by signing up on the CLA site and submitting your info online.

I will be attending DemTech.

Brady Gilchrist - presentation notes - Social Media Breakfast Ottawa

Social Media Breakfast Ottawa #7
Brady Gilchrist

Summary of Presentation

I would say his message was: instead of marketing TO your customers, market WITH your customers.
In other words, instead of just repeating "Cos-tanza" over and over again, you'll have to actually be interesting and engaged (which is much harder).  Be a real person, not a faceless "brand".

My Thoughts

Brady is a very good speaker and I thought he made a compelling case for the transformation that is sweeping over the media landscape - and he understood that this has been coming for over a decade, and that it's about engagement, not particular technologies.  Also he gets bonus points for mentioning Battlestar Galactica and showing the Star Trek: The Next Generation PADDs as precursors to our modern mobile devices (I made this same point myself - using the same image - on slides 4-5 of the Trendspotting presentation I gave two years ago).

You can see the power of customer engagement just by following the #lost and #bsg hashtags as the shows are airing on old-fashioned television (and of course before and after as well) or by seeing all of the work that has gone into the Wikipedia Battlestar Galactica pages and the entire dedicated Battlestar Galactica wiki.  This is all work that consumers do for free, because they are engaged with the product.  They're not doing this because it's some obscure thing that geeks do, they're doing it because people will share what they're interested about.  That could be your thing they're talking about and creating content around and (implicitly) promoting - if your thing is interesting enough.

There were some good (thoughtful) questions from the audience.

On the Interweb

You can follow Social Media Breakfast Ottawa discussions using hashtag #smbottawa , they also have a blog.  Brady said the best way to connect with him is through his Twitter (bradygilchrist), he also has a website.

Raw Notes

he's talking - good speaker

* talking about challenge of getting people to understand the technology
* talking ab0ut Kurzweil - rate of change - things changing so quickly we need open minds

* blogger in 1999 accidentally
* digital life - wired sailboat
* Starship Millenium - "most expensive blog ever done"
* ISDN-B Inmarsat channel
* (lots of talk about) rate of change
* more voices and more knowledge
* Tim Berners-Lee (not recognized - photo)
* business models are based on scarcity - but we live in an age of abundance
* everything is coming out of its containers
- music
- starting to happen with books

World we live in
* Near Web (desktop)
* Mobile Web
- "there isn't anything that isn't connected"
- "digital snacks" - low price
- fundamental shifts - "unboxing of newspapers"
- newspapers are made more interesting by social media
- the community joins the media
* Far Web (broadcast + Internet) - (ed comment: more like video on demand web)
- (paraphrase) has anyone noticed that the people with money aren't watching commercials
- what do people talk about: Lost, BSG...
- Eee PC-in-a-keyboard
- social media are great tools for creating a revolution (ed comment: maybe)
- could have very rapid adoption curves, e.g. Twitter
* Not so new.  1991. - Third Wave - ubiquitous computing - ubicomp - Mark Weiser - "The Computer for the 21st Century"
- (paraphase) we are now surrounded by computer chips / computer technology

*** Star Trek PADDS
- in science fiction technology doesn't really matter for technology's sake
* William Gibson
- "The future has already arrived.  It's just not evenly distributed yet."

* when creating a business: work in the space between early adopters and early majority - GET OUT EARLY before it becomes commoditized

* discussion about whether lurking has negative impact - it's ok to be a watcher -
1. You need to pay attention to what's going on
2. even if there's a small amount of interaction it's still good
* Black Swan - changes all the rules

* (paraphrase) if you're a business you'll never see it coming - you're out of your mind if you're waiting for it to hit the mainstream media
* social media as early warning medium for business

* "social media makes people smarter" - "deeper connectors on subjects"

* Rome burns and few react
- no one is paying attention to PVRs
- just "digital" doesn't solve anything - "Understand how to create abundance, knowledge, trust and connection is (the solution)."
- The One Computer Theory - the Internet as one big computer
- don't silo yourself

- "all roads must lead to dialog" - Age of Connection - lateral connections

New Rules

1. Be Present
2. Connect to others
3. Participate in ways that enhance social capital (ed comment: "don't be a marketer, be a market")

* master ubiquity and engagement

* "Many decision makers have no clue"
- the idea of the media buy (or he's maybe saying media pie) (old thinking)

* (advertising) money is being spent in places where people aren't looking

* "Motivation is the new segmentation"
- (I think he said) by participating in the conversation you can help shape the motivation

END PRESENTATION

Q: What do you tell broadcasters, newspapers to do?
A: Understand your audience / Ask your audience - create a platform for dialog

Q: Is social media just the vocal majority
A: (paraphrase) well, mass media is all lurkers - so social media is "truer"

Q: Is what's working well companies creating their own social networks?
   e.g. some companies go awry on Facebook
A: What is participation - add value to existing dialog, or spark a new one

"semantic web for marketers" - (ed comment: ???)

Q: some industries are starting to adapt
how do we compete as a country if a lot of new technologies are not available here
(Kindle etc.)
A: (paraphase) CanCon is killing CanCon

... consumers find a way... (geoproxy)
"the more you deny it, the more bittorrents..."

Canada as a digital ghetto?

Q: how does the Globe continue to create... they have extraordinary content that makes their platform worthwhile... now what do they do in terms of costs and sustainability?

A: no one knows - engage with audience/... "I don't have the answer"

Comment on music industry - they tried to fight with DRM and are now giving up...
A: "information wants to be free" - but everyone spends money on things they find interesting

"DRM sucks!"

END QUESTIONS

People Promote Their Events

* (didn't catch name of event) Mark Evans April 2
"brandividual" ????

* cupcakecamp.ca
March 29

podcastersacrossborders - Kingston, Ontario - June 19-21

The usual sidebar about wifi

I was (as usual) the only person I saw with a laptop (my little Asus 7" Eee PC 4G) - this did make it easy to camp the power outlet.  Also the only person to ask about wifi (AFAIK) - result:
* tried to get online but no luck - user/pass doesn't work
"The User Name and Password combination you have entered is invalid. Please try again."

Sometimes I feel like I'm back at Internet Librarian 2004 all over again (where I was in a giant room full of people, and almost the only one have a laptop, open it up and start typing).

I think I probably annoyed people with my aggressive typing, I'm sorry (but welcome to the 21st Century).  In a way I feel on the outside as usual - I'm not in the "writing on paper about how technology is transforming our lives" crowd (which I could never understand - writing URLs and notes on paper?  so then to share it, you have to transcribe it to digital?  what?) - and I'm not in the 3G-erati, the iPhone crew who never have to worry about Wifi access.  (I refuse to pay for the iPhone which doesn't meet my needs, just so I can get 3G, and I'm not getting a 3G stick for the small amount of usage it would get - what I'd like is pay-as-you-go 3G - there's a market opportunity for you.)

I think they're going to work on getting wifi access for future events.

too much information? our unprecendented ability to gather data about everything

In Boing Boing I found this interesting article

Over at Kevin Kelly and Gary Wolf's Quantified Self blog ("Tools for knowing your own mind and body") guest blogger Alexandra Carmichael explains how she keeps a record of 40 different things in her life every day, and what she's learned about herself from studying the data.

Daily tracking of 40 things about yourself - Boing Boing - December 15, 2008

Following the comments (I think) led me to a Wall Street Journal article, The New Examined Life (December 8, 2008)

In the first week of January, New York graphic designer Nicholas Felton will boil down everything he did in 2008 into charts, graphs, maps and lists. The 2007 edition of his yearly retrospective notes that he received 13 postcards, lost six games of pool and read 4,736 book pages. He tracked every New York street he walked and sorted the 632 beers he consumed by country of origin.

Apparently he got so much interest in his professionally-presented yearly results that

they have become so popular that he recently launched a Web site with his friend Ryan Case called Daytum, which helps fellow chroniclers track the details of their own experiences.

(Daytum is currently in request-an-account beta.)

This is just part of a much larger trend, I see it with my friends who mountain bike, they use their cycling computers to gather incredible amounts of data which they then chart in various ways and use as part of their training plans to quite literally do data-based tuning of their own bodies.  Another example of this is the NikePlus site that supports the iPod+Nike running data system.

"Citizen data" also has huge implications for everything from science, through to mapping (for example, the Open Street Map project), and beyond.

I wonder what it may mean for medicine, science, sports, and other fields if we eventually have hundreds of millions of people gathering and sharing detailed information about themselves and their environment.

Singapore 2025 science - and novel presentation

This showed up in my FriendFeed

a map of predictions about global science and innovation created at a recent IFTF workshop in Singapore (the interface is a novel service for online presentation called ZuiPrezi

Future of Science on the (ZuiPrezi) map - Freelancing science - September 30, 2008

You can see the presentation, or "prezi" at

http://zuiprezi.com/prezi/297/view/

(It's Flash-based, and may take a while to load fully.)

This is doubly interesting because not only are the ideas themselves useful for thinking about the future of science, but the presentation allows you to move around the ideas like moving around a map.

I've always felt we are very limited by PowerPoint, everything ends up as bullet slides - or at most we try to fight that by having photo slides.  We're on computers that can run video, play audio, show screencasts, and with the Internet, can do anything from (the always risky) live demos to live video.  And yet it's usually

• bullet point
• other bullet point

Zuiprezi is showing some of what is possible when you think outside the PowerPoint box.

If the interface isn't clear, you can click to zoom in, drag around, or use the controls in the lower right to follow the presentation trail and zoom in and out.

don't predict the future, create it

Give me a lever and the place to stand, and I shall move the earth.
- Archimedes

See Wikiquote - Archimedes for the Greek and the actual phrase.

In trying to plan for the future, to perform the strategic planning that is a core activity of Enterprise Architecture, you must stand in the right place.

Specifically, you must stand in the future, in the envisioned target state, and look back, to determine the plan.

If you stand in the mire of the current state, and you try to look forward, your boots will never get unstuck.

Hindsight, as they say, is 20/20.

If you stand in the present, and look forward, it's like looking into mirrored one-way glass.  Looking forward from the present, you see only the current state reflected back at you.  Start from your current set of running projects, and all the many many details of your organisation's resources, and tasks and operations, and you will never stride out of that minutiae to reach the future.

But when you stand instead in the future, and look back, you can see right through the one-way glass, you can see all the steps you needed to take to get there.  You have to, therefore, plan by first creating the future, envisioning it in target statements, mockups, use cases, whatever is a meaningful description to you of what your organisation does, in 2012, or 2015, or whenever.

Then look back... in 2015, we're providing semantic search for chemistry, so how did we get there, well we must have created an index of chemistry terms out of the literature, and we must have gotten some semantic search tools to extract and unify this terminology, and a nice user interface so chemists could enter queries... so that means we must have been holding full-text articles and had the rights to index them... and we must have developed a basic search capability... and on back in time until you reach 2008.

This can be done.

The alternative is to stand around in 2008, and say "we're doing a bunch of stuff, and then... um technology changes somehow and... then the entire competitive environment shifts and... then we do a bunch more stuff... and then err, a miracle occurs and then we have semantic search in 2015".  You can't get there from here.  You can't get to the future by speculating forward from the present.

Don't predict the future, create it.^*

* Alan Kay said "The best way to predict the future is to invent it."

the reality miners

Much in the news these days about using sensors in various ways to track and connect people.

Northeastern did a study on the movements of cellphone users.

So Barabási and his colleagues teamed up with a mobile-phone company (unidentified to protect customers' privacy), who provided them with anonymized data on which transmitter towers had handled the calls and texts for 100,000 individuals over the course of 6 months.

Mobile phones demystify commuter rat race - Nature News - 4 June 2008 | doi:10.1038/news.2008.874

The accompanying Nature editorial lauds the possibility for better data for social scientists

The mobile-phone technique is simply the latest example of how modern information technologies are giving social scientists the power to make measurements that are often as precise as those in the 'hard' sciences. By analysing e-mail transmissions, for example, or doing automated searches of publication databases, social scientists can collect detailed information on the network structure of scientific collaborations and other social interactions.

A flood of hard data - Nature 453, 698 (5 June 2008) | doi:10.1038/453698a; Published online 4 June 2008

Wired reports on tracking the interactions of students.

If you have enough data about commonplace conversations, you can even predict when those conversations are going to take place. Working with Pentland, Nathan Eagle tracked the physical interactions of 100 MIT students over an academic year, using their cell phones. After a few months, Eagle could deduce likely future meetings with impressive accuracy. "So if we know that," he says, "why not design our calendars to sync up?"

Clive Thompson on Real-World Social Networks vs. Facebook 'Friends' - Wired Magazine 16.08 (August 2008)

Thompson's article ends on a prescient note:

The scary part of reality mining, as everyone involved readily admits, is that it's a potential privacy nightmare. ...

Eagle is currently analyzing 12 billion anonymized calls placed during one month in the UK.

Prescient because a story popped up in the news in which people were very unhappy to find that, in a different study, movements were being tracked based on Bluetooth signals.

Bluetooth mobile phone technology is being used to monitor the movement of tens of thousands of people, without their consent.

A research project has installed Bluetooth scanners in offices, cafes, shops, and pubs to monitor how people move around cities. But the residents of Bath, who are at the centre of this research, are unaware that their mobile phones and laptops are communicating with the scanners.

The team behind the project, Cityware, stresses that the scanners are not able to personally identify individuals, but privacy groups have expressed concerns about the scheme. The Information Commissioners' Office, which deals with data protection and privacy legislation, said it was "monitoring" the experiment.    

Bluetooth used to track people's movements - Telegraph.co.uk - Last Updated: 12:01am BST 21/07/2008

Meanwhile, Boing Boing reports on hackers (of all people) having the opportunity to wear RFID tags to map and discover each other.

This weekend, the Attendee Meta-Data (AMD) project at the Last HOPE (Hackers on Planet Earth) in NYC will introduce a new location-aware social networking system to track and bring together hackers based on a huge array of matching interests. Conference goers will be given unprecedented ability to connect with new people, find the talks they're most interested in attending, see what's happening and where in real time, and experience and talk about the way RFID technology is changing the world.

RFID badges at HOPE hackercon form automatic social nets and irony - Boing Boing - July 16, 2008

Our ability to gather data on every aspect of everyone's daily life is becoming incredibly powerful.  Powerful technologies require great wisdom to wield for good and not ill.  I am concerned we (and in particular the leadership we chose) lack that wisdom.

David Brin has explored these topics at length.  They are an aspect of his book Earth (1990), and he expanded greatly upon those ideas in The Transparent Society (1998). 

You can read a Discover interview with Brin from last year.

There are many different aspects to this, from illegal monitoring of people's activities in cyberspace, to quasi-legal tracking online, to people simply giving their information up on various social networks.  But the above items are more about reality mining, which is the new ability to track individual movements in great detail in the physical world.  Cellphones are an obvious technology platform for this, as are standalone GPS loggers and RFID.  Individuals now have the capacity to conduct surveillance, sometimes called in this case sousveillance.  Beyond that surveillance possibilities include CCTV cameras, large surveillance drones at various altitudes, and even tiny mobile or flying cameras, reminiscent of the bug in Danny Dunn, Invisible Boy (1974).

One of the unfortunate things about science fiction is that while it raises issues decades in advance of them becoming technologically feasible, it is often little heeded, and when the foreseen changes actually do come, people either don't pay attention to them, or make remarkably bad decisions about how to use and control their new abilities.

tagcloud on your cellphone

All About Symbian showing the new tag cloud in the Photos app on the Nokia N96.

Facebook Mini-Feed wants to be your Life-Feed

Facebook launched some "lifestream" integration features on April 15, 2008

The option to import stories from other sites can be found via the small "Import" link at the top of your Mini-Feed. Only a few sites—Flickr, Yelp, Picasa, and del.icio.us [and now Digg]—are available for importing at the moment

Facebook Blog - A new way to share with friends

Sidebar: Facebook also seems to have silently taken away the feature where you could X stuff out of your News Feed, which was supposed to teach it to only show friends items that interested you, over time.

Yahoo - the SearchMonkey cometh

Well, as long as it isn't a flying monkey, ok.

Enter the Yahoo Open Strategy (YOS). ...

There’s a massive, latent social network within Yahoo, and we’re going to bring it to the surface. We’re making Yahoo more social, but we’re not building yet another social network. We already have an incredible social network… we just need to unlock it.

...

A first taste of our strategy is SearchMonkey, which will let developers mash up helpful data with our search engine results.  ... launch party May 15 [2008]

http://ycorpblog.com/2008/04/24/developer-welcome-mat/
(Exclamations removed because I refuse to put exclamations all over the place, including inside of acronyms.)

SearchMonkey is what I previously described as "semantically-enriched search results".

General story of Yahoo Open Strategy very widely reported, e.g. Globe - Associated Press - Yahoo plans social makeover.  SearchMonkey bit via Search Engine Watch blog.

Globe on Lifestreaming

Today's Globe and Mail has a good article on lifestreaming, the article is a reasonable combination of skepticism and information.

For every bon mot you leave [online], a breathless news release documents the leaving of the bon mot. Assemble all those press releases together, and you've got a lifestream.

...

A lifestream is just a [Facebook] mini-feed writ large, covering not just the cloistered confines of one site, but stretching across the entire Web, pulling in data from every site that is willing to share it.

Globe and Mail - Billy blogged! Sarah e-mailed! Tell everyone! - April 24, 2008

There is also accompanying audio (presented in a video window, I guess so they can show you an ad first).  I like when he describes his worry that full lifestreams will be mostly full of "random detritus" of your web wanderings.

FriendFeed is kind of the canonical application in this space, but to some extent, anything that can aggregate RSS feeds can do a basic job of serving as a lifestream.

the social shotgun: blasting your updates everywhere

In the library world we would probably call this something like "federated updating".
With the proliferation of different targets, particularly different social presence sites, people are trying to do one-to-many updates.

We see an example of some infrastructure for this in Yahoo's FireEagle, for collecting and redistributing location updates.

There was also a nice example at the CRIG Repository Challenge, called FileBlast, which allows you to upload a paper (an article) and then send automatic notices with the link to the paper to multiple sources, such as Twitter and your blog.  It is build on the FeedForward infrastructure, and you can read more about it (as well as find a link to the code) in the FeedForward blog.

Today, via the Outsell Headlines feed, I find news that TypePad has a new Facebook app called Blog It, which  can send a single update to many sources of your choosing, including various blogging platforms (TypePad, Blogger, LJ, Vox, WordPress) and various "statusy" services, including Tumblr, Twitter, and Facebook status itself.

UPDATE: The article Outsell pointed me to, Six Apart Gives Facebook Bloggers Blastability, uses the term "lifestreaming".  I wonder if this is where we're headed, from the blog to the lifeblast.  ENDUPDATE

I think there's always this tension between decentralisation and centralisation, and these kind of notification federations may be one way that we manage this.

In particular, "article blast" to multiple repositories using SWORD may be a very compelling solution to a lot of ingest and content recruitment issues.  (And feel free to contact me if you're interested in SWORD ingest across platforms.)  Julie Allinson did a great job of introducing SWORD in her Open Repositories 2008 presentation.

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

The Agenda on Microhoo and the Compute Cloud

The Agenda had their somewhat-usual technology suspects on talking about the Microsoft-Yahoo merger, with a majority of the show devoted to the idea of the "compute cloud" future for computing.  It's quite impressive that they took this fairly technical topic on, and they did a good job of covering it from various angles.

The Debate: The Coming Cloud (switch to the Mark Evans tab for the other discussion) - video is linked from these pages, just click on "Watch video" there

also available as iTunes audio and video - I'm npt seeing it in iTunes yet though

Overall I liked the show, but I would have liked to have seen a cloud computing user, rather than just a panel of pundits.  Show me someone who has moved their enterprise over to Amazon EC2/S3 or other cloud services.  (For example, Internet Archive has been experimenting with this... and I see I'm the top hit for this information: "Science Library Pad: Internet Archive 20th Century Search".  Also SmugMug photos uses Amazon S3 storage.)

I think the future splits into multiple models of computer use.  Gamers, for near-term, need local graphics engines and local storage (holding the multi-gigabyte virtual environments they use).  The intensive computer users like me probably still have their whole elaborate local network and local storage and local computing... well, basically entire personal data centre.  We're probably the only ones left with a lot of non-cloud data and computing.

The digital dividers (old people, poor people, the technically unsavvy) will have very simple devices, something very akin to thin clients - probably in many different form factors - built in to televisions, set-top boxes, things like OLPCs and Eee PCs, "intelligent LCD displays".  The highly mobile will have quite sophisticated but completely mobile devices.  All of the data for both groups lives in the cloud.

This being said, there is a very, very long history predicting the demise of the PC and its replacement with set-tops and thin clients, and it has yet to materialize.  People use a bunch of devices (cell, camera, PDA, laptop) AND their home computers, not instead of their computers.

SIDEBAR: Jesse Hirsh had quite the slag on for the Preventers of Information Services in IT Departments.
First he says home users can't be trusted with personal computers, and then he says work users must be trusted with unlimited use of Internet applications.

It is true that some of the Dr. No aspect of IT is arbitrary, but some of it is either out of their control (layers of regulations imposed from on high), and some of it is related to user support.  IT is about user productivity.  Computer secure, applications running smoothly = happy IT.  If this could be guaranteed through the magic of trusted cloud computing, that would be fine.  But the reality is, users download a bunch of cr*p and access a bunch of cr*p websites, and then IT has to come in and try to clean it up.  That's why IT tries to lockdown.  Lockdown is about being able to guarantee a stable computer, network, and sustainable support experience.

If you want to see what happens in an uncontrolled environment, just let a bunch of consultants into your organisation and let them "manage themselves" and see how well that works...

LimeWire led to data breach: N.L. justice minister

an outside consultant had installed LimeWire, a popular program used to swap music for free, on a laptop computer that was being used to work with data for the Workplace Health, Safety and Compensation Commission.

As a result, information — including names, addresses, dates of birth and medical and work histories — related to 153 individuals was exposed

END SIDEBAR

SIDEBAR 2: A minor quibble with terminology used during the show, Amazon's S3 is cloud storage only, their compute cloud service is EC2.  END SIDEBAR

Deloitte & NMC Tech Horizons

Deloitte has released their Technology, Media & Telecommunications (TMT) Trends: Predictions 2008 (also available via URL www.deloitte.co.uk/predictions )

The full PDFs for each of the three sections are free online (with copying of text disabled), along with about 10 minutes of audio for each section.

In the Media report, they assert something that I have been saying for a long time, which is that e-Books have limited use, but e-Reference (e-Textbooks, medical reference, etc.) makes a lot more sense.

Also they discuss the carbon footprint... of your living room.

Deloitte via Google News.  If you want to see all the bullet points in one place, see an article in the Exchange Morning Post.

The 2008 NMC/EDUCAUSE Horizon report is also out, you can get it from the wiki

http://horizon.nmc.org/wiki/Main_Page

It seems to be mostly about the mobile and the social, with "Collaboration Webs", "Mobile Broadband", "Collective Intelligence" and "Social Operating Systems" as major topics.  They also discuss "Data Mashups", mostly in the context of map mashups.

The power of mashups for education lies in the way
they help us reach new conclusions or discern new
relationships by uniting large amounts of data in a
manageable way. Web-based tools for manipulating
data are easy to use, usually free, and widely available.
Research can be displayed on interactive graphs,
charts, or maps that make the concepts clear.

Previously:
February 15, 2007  Tech to Watch in 2007 Horizon Report

inexpensive laptop may be appropriate for many uses

In an interesting article, Road-testing the $100 laptop's 'appropriate technology', Ryan Bigge talks about the implications of inexpensive laptops

In creating a cheap laptop, the XO has also started a fresh debate about affordable technology. Affordable and appropriate interrelate quite closely, and the XO hints at the added costs of proprietary operating systems offered by Mac and Apple, along with the price to be paid for the Intel brand. In this way, appropriate technologies such as the XO serve as an implicit critique of the marketplace.

Plus which, any article that includes the TRS-80 Model 100 deserves a mention.
(I saw, but never used the Model 100.  I used to go to RadioShack and play Hammurabi on their regular TRS-80s.)

You can see video of him demoing the XO.

The inexpensive laptop trend was noted as part of ALA LITA Top Trends 2008

• Hearing a lot lately about lightweight road computers
• Could be appropriate for loaners, not as big of a deal if beat up, most of work on network anyway.
• A discussion of solid state hard drives & sealed keyboards… more durable
• Relying more on the Internet for applications and data means we can have a much smaller laptop

conference notes from Lauren Pressley
via Michael Ireland

I hadn't realised but there is already a small laptop (the Asus Eee) with solid-state storage out in Canada for C$300, it sells through The Source (formerly Radio Shack)

see e.g.

ASUS EEE 2GB SURF MOBILE INTERNET DEVICE, GREEN

You can see others in the Mobile Internet category

http://www.thesourcecc.com/estore/category.aspx?language=en-CA&catalog=Online&category=Mobile_Internet

In the US, you can get them through Amazon (below is an affiliate link), for US$300

with that kind of price and availability, the barrier to mobile computing is very low.

If I understand correctly, you can buy an SDHC card to add more storage.

They have some new models planned as well

The Register - Hardware - Second-gen Eee PC

I wouldn't put the MacBook Air in this same space, as it is much more expensive.

The Air is more like the ultimate Road Warrior laptop, you pay a heavy price in terms of limited expandability.  Since I use my laptop mostly as a home desktop replacement, I'm continuing to look at the regular MacBook as my next computer (I have a PowerBook G4 right now).

SIDEBAR: Dear Radio Shack, do you really need an "MSCSProfile" of

287001FD2674671CC1C6E1B8FD422E0877FC152AF8DD5EA4F64CC488CD9F9EBB8663805103CFB74
01041BEB7B395895C25D0D2FA5E2CFCD5D4F58390B0377D79966CED87AC19D769C2D0DC51FEBF8
7913B4E23159DD17CBAC78B9FDB32CF03ECF2F50753794A30EF0E5A558850D5AD85500469650F624
FBD9F19AA4A6BE0B24BC8ADCEC1815BED94

in your URL?  What are you trying to do, describe every atom in my body?

END SIDEBAR

ACRL 2007 Environmental Scan is out

The Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) has released their 2007 Environmental Scan (PDF), dated January 2008.

Issues around intellectual property, data management, and skillsets (and associated new information technologies) are some main themes.

via User Education Resources for Librarians

provide your input to OECD participative web conference

There will be an event "OECD-Canada Technology Foresight Forum on the Participative Web: Strategies and Policies for the Future" on October 3, 2007 in Ottawa, Canada, so in slightly under three weeks from now.  You still have time to submit your comments as well as to suggest blog links and feeds

---> Participate online <---

There will be 2 official event bloggers who will blog about the event during the meeting. One will be a representative from civil society (ICANN) and one will be from Canada.

Err, the latter would be me.  I think the blogging will be on an official OECD site rather than here.

UPDATE 2007-09-30: The blog has gone live. ENDUPDATE

The event will be webcast live as well as archived with transcripts.

There are already some videos submitted by participants, rather confusingly listed under "podcasts", which they are not.

There is an E-Science session in the programme (PDF)

Session 2 STREAM B
Research 2.0: e-Science and new ways of interaction in the science community
Chair: Walter Stewart, Walter Stewart & Associates Inc.
- Andrew Herbert, Managing Director, Microsoft Research, Cambridge, UK
- Bill St. Arnaud, Senior Director Advanced Networks, CANARIE Inc.
- Daniel Atkins, Director, Office of Cyberinfrastructure, National Science Foundation
- Ulf Dahlsten, Director for "Emerging Technologies and Infrastructures", Information Society and Media Directorate-General, European Commission

Check out

http://www.oecd.org/futureinternet/participativeweb

for more information.

I also created an Upcoming event and Google calendar entry and am suggesting the tag oecdwebforum2007

Bill St. Arnaud also provided a pointer a while back to the OECD report on this topic

OECD, 12-April-2007, Working Party on the Information Economy - PARTICIPATIVE WEB: USER-CREATED CONTENT (PDF, 888KB)

UPDATE 2007-09-14: I have made a Google Earth KMZ for the conference venue and hotels where the organisers have arranged room availability.  You can also view it in Google Maps.  I have indicated the location of Canada's Parliament as well.  It may be the only Parliament in the world where you can sometimes see people playing frisbee on the front lawn.  Note: Don't confuse the Government Conference Centre venue (the old Ottawa Union Station) with the Ottawa Congress Centre, located a block away.  Also note in some cases Google is not showing proper street names for downtown Ottawa at the moment.

Download OECD-ParticipativeWebForum.kmz

View Larger Map

Alvin Toffler interviewed by Allen Gregg

ALVIN TOFFLER
Future Shock. The Third Wave. Two classics that revolutionized the way we think about our rapidly changing world. They established Alvin Toffler as one of the world's most influential futurists. In his new book, Toffler once again takes us back to the future. It's called Revolutionary Wealth: How it will be Created and How it will Change our Lives.

Web Exclusive Preview: Allan Gregg in Conversation with Alvin Toffler

Allen Gregg in Conversation (on TVO) - August 31, 2007

Note: a lot of the links on the TVO site won't work if you have cookies turned off.

Previously:
October 1, 2006  Alvin Toffler on Big Ideas