The man behind #swineflu and #HowBlackAreYou was the hit at this year’s NYC webfest

Baratunde Thurston. Image: O'Reilly Media

This has nothing in particular to do with Apple (AAPL), but it’s very 2.0.

We spent much of last week at a conference in New York City called Web 2.0 Expo — a celebration of the “next generation Web” where one of the centers of attention was the giant Twitter screen set directly behind the keynote speakers that showed what the audience was tweeting about whomever was onstage.

The speakers included a typical mix of Web celebrities, including O’Reilly Media’s Tim O’Reilly, Digg’s Kevin Rose and Jay Adelson, author Douglas Rushkoff, Flikr co-founder Caterina Fake and White House chief technology officer Beth Noveck.

But the hit of the conference — judging from the laughter, the applause and the tweets — was Baratunde Thurston, Web & Politics editor at The Onion.

His talk was entitled “There’s a #Hashtag for That” and I’ve discovered that it’s a kind of Twitter touchstone. The audience at the Javits Center thought it was knee-slapping hilarious. People who don’t quite get what Twitter is for — like my wife — are even more mystified than they were before they watched it.

The video is posted below the fold. We’d love to hear what you think.

[Follow Philip Elmer-DeWitt on Twitter @philiped]

Thurston tweets as @baratunde. The hashtag for Web 2.0 Expo is #w2e.

Here is a video from the recent Web 2.0 Expo in NYC. In it, Tim O’Reilly talks about his visions of the future of the web.

Caesar Sengupta, Group Product Manager and Matt Papakipos, Engineering Director at Google have posted a short video about the new Google Chrome Operating System.

Chrome OS will be ready for users in a year, and the code has been put into the public domain. The official announcement is on Google’s Blog.

Chrome OS is a light-weight, speedy, and so-called stateless OS based on Linux that is designed to boot in 7 seconds or less. It assumes that both data and programs are stored in the Cloud. All applications are web apps.  Essentially, this means that,

• “If you throw a computer out the window, you should be able to recreate its software, configuration, and user data bit-for-bit identically on a new piece of hardware.
• In any managed deployment from school workstation lab to enterprise server room, single computers should never be modified. Instead, all computers that need the modification should be modified in a single step.”

It follows that a device running Chrome OS will not need a hard drive, users do not have to deal with installing, managing and updating programs.

It also follows from this that the device will only be usable “on-line,” and high-speed Internet access anywhere it’s used is a given.

In announcing Chrome OS, Google said,

[B]ecause all apps live within the browser, there are significant benefits to security. Unlike traditional operating systems, Chrome OS doesn’t trust the applications you run. Each app is contained within a security sandbox making it harder for malware and viruses to infect your computer. Furthermore, Chrome OS barely trusts itself. Every time you restart your computer the operating system verifies the integrity of its code. If your system has been compromised, it is designed to fix itself with a reboot. While no computer can be made completely secure, we’re going to make life much harder (and less profitable) for the bad guys. If you dig security, read the Chrome OS Security Overview or watch the video.

Now no one has said anything, but the GoogleGazer thinks it stands to reason that Google’s other OS effort, Google Anroid, a mobile device platform powered by the Linux kernel, and also in the public domain, will ultimately merge with Chrome OS.

Tim O’Reilly has been writing about light-weight operating systems access the Internet for years (see this example from 2002), and in an earlier post, the GoogleGazer pointed out that Prof. Robert Fano of MIT envisaged such an idea back in 1960, long before either PCs or the Internet became a reality.

Which all goes to prove,  as  Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr wrote in Les Guêpes (January 1849), “plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose (the more things change, the more they stay the same)”.

The addition of case law and patent search functions to Google Scholar, and subsequent comments from Richard Nash, prompted the following thoughts, which are mine alone:

In my view, the U.S. market for high-end computer-assisted legal research (CALR) currently requires at least the following systems features:

• complete and current collections of primary law;
• large collections of quality secondary legal resources;
• retrieval systems that can search across multiple primary and secondary legal resource databases; and
• specialized and current descriptive metadata applied to document segments, especially citator systems and knowledge representation for points of law.

This high-end market appears to be shrinking, for several reasons:

• clients are forcing cost reductions;
• the low-end legal research market (which typically offers only “plain-vanilla” retrieval of primary legal documents containing little if any descriptive metadata) is offering better metadata (currently citators and, probably before long, subject access to whole documents, if not segments); and
• many lawyers and paralegals appear to be learning to live with the features offered by low-end systems, according to recent survey evidence, such as that from the latest ABA Legal Technology Survey Report.

Google’s U.S. CALR strategy so far seems to have been to engage with this sector from the bottom up. Google first developed its presence in the low-end market by indexing the free case law available on the Web. This week, it has advanced “up market” by integrating that primary legal resource retrieval system with the secondary legal resource retrieval systems of Google Scholar and Google Book Search.

I think that, if Google really wants to compete for the high-end market, its next steps would be:

• to fill the holes in the primary legal resource collections that it indexes (perhaps by offering incentives to organizations that publish primary legal resources free of charge on the Web);
• to build an effective, automated legal citator, as Andrew Plumb-Larrick discusses in his fine post today; and
• to develop a good quality, automated knowledge representation system to provide subject access to individual primary legal documents (i.e., individual statutes, cases, and regulations).

An interesting white paper published earlier this year by Tim O’Reilly & John Battelle may shed light on Google’s next steps. That paper notes Google’s aptitude for developing sophisticated automatic metadata creation systems, such as the one underlying Google Mobile App, that incorporate improvements drawn from the study of large numbers of user searches. This aptitude suggests that Google probably won’t need very long to build a good quality automatic legal citator and subject indexing system, if it has a mind to. If Google takes those further steps, then I think it could take a big share of the high-end CALR market. At the very least, its efforts, coupled with Bloomberg’s, should result in increased competition, lower prices, and more innovation yielding better retrieval tools for users in the U.S. CALR sector. (On the obstacles to innovation in the U.S. CALR sector, see Professor Viktor Mayer-Schönberger’s recent post on VoxPopuLII.)

Google’s ongoing development of its legal research system could also yield additional benefits for the legal community. The O’Reilly-Battelle white paper notes Google’s skill at identifying implicit structures in large data sets. These implicit structures can complement express, formal descriptive metadata, such as, in the legal realm, West’s Key Number System, Lexis’s Headnotes, or Bloomberg’s Points of Law. One great potential benefit for the legal community in Google’s development of its legal research system, is the (automated) discovery of previously unknown, implicit structures in primary and secondary legal information. Some legal scholars are already exploring this area by using techniques developed in connection with the study of complex adaptive systems. I think Google may also have important contributions to make to this area of research, particularly if it chooses to publish its research findings.

There’s a lot going on at this week’s Microsoft Professional Developers Conference (PDC 09); it’s a traditional launchpad for cool new stuff. I thought I’d point out several of the government-relevant announcements and technology roll-outs.

I specifically want to spotlight something called Codename Dallas, and how NASA and others have begun using it. In the keynote this morning Microsoft’s Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie told PDC attendees (and his streaming-video audience) that a landslide of new sensors and observational systems are changing the world by recording “unimaginable volumes of data… But this data does no good unless we turn the potential into the kenetic, unless we unlock it and innovate in the realm of applications and solutions that’s wrapped around that data.”

Here’s how we’re addressing that, with a bit of step-by-step context on the overall cloud-computing platform enabling it.  The steps are: 1. Azure, 2. Pinpoint, and 3. Dallas.

Today is the big public roll-out of the Windows Azure Platform for cloud computing and a full complement of new services for it,  including a Java SDK, REST and open source support and interoperability with MySQL, Tomcat, memcached, and even PHP development with Eclipse. The Windows Azure site is here, or just check out a brief summary of today’s Azure announcement and its array of cloud services. 

As part of the Windows Azure rollout, we’re announcing the new Pinpoint, an online marketplace for Microsoft partners to market and sell their applications.  It includes an “app store,” as well as store-like shopping for experts and professional IT services. Pinpoint is open to everyone, and free to join, and is already at launch the largest directory of qualified IT providers and their software built on Microsoft technologies. The app store alone is cool, as you can try, buy, and download software through direct links to software purchase pages, demos, and trial downloads.

One of the featured sets of services available through Pinpoint is our Codename “Dallas” service, Microsoft’s Information Services business, which developers and information workers can use to find and manage Web services and datasets  – free or paid – to power their apps, on any platform. Dallas is built completely on the Windows Azure cloud platform, which includes a SQL Azure cloud database, so you get the ability to store structured and unstructured data whether from Dallas’s “data-as-a-service” or your own collections, to invoke and examine the data without having to parse it, to use REST services to manipulate and move the data, and to analyze the data using the new PowerPivot high-end analytics for Excel 2010 spreadsheets, for example.

Large-scale datasets already available through Dallas include government, financial, weather, news, corporate, international and reference sets including those from the Associated Press, Citysearch, Data.gov, ESRI, First American Corp., infoUSA.com Inc., NASA, National Geographic TOPO!, NAVTEQ, RiskMetrics Group, the United Nations, WaveMarket Inc. and Weather Central Inc. Starting today, “Dallas” is available as a limited community technology preview (CTP). 

Tech news sites are already reporting the “competitive drive” propelling Dallas, for example The Register puts it this way: 

Microsoft Dallas Muscles Google Data Crusade: Microsoft is hoping to out-Google Google by unlocking the world’s information and slapping a GUI on the front end. Today, the company unveiled Dallas, which chief software architect Ray Ozzie said would deliver “data as a service.” He described it as a “game changing” subsystem of Microsoft’s Windows Azure computing and storage service.

There’s a lot you  can do with a data platform like that. The federal government’s Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra moments ago addressed PDC 09 live via remote video and announced that the U.S. government has been busy building new capabilities using Dallas and the Azure cloud, and he showed a very neat example: the NASA “Be a Martian” site. From the detailed press release:

Now anyone with a Web browser can become a Martian explorer. That’s because NASA is launching a new citizen-science Web site, called “Be a Martian,” that gives people a chance to view hundreds of thousands of images gathered over decades of exploration on the Red Planet.

The site is also designed as a game with a twofold purpose: NASA and Microsoft hope it will spur interest in science and technology among students in the U.S. and around the world. It also is a “crowdsourcing” tool designed to tap visitors’ brains and help the space agency process volumes of Mars images.

“We really need the next generation of explorers,” says Michelle Viotti, director of Mars Public Outreach at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “And we’re also accomplishing something important for NASA. There’s so much data coming back from Mars. Having a wider crowd look at the data, classify it and help understand its meaning is very important.” [emphasis added]

So NASA and Microsoft are combining crowd-sourcing, cloud-computing, and citizen-science, all toward aligning with a web philosophy that Tim O’Reilly calls “small pieces loosely joined.”

There’s more coming this week that I believe government folks will like, including one of my favorite projects: Thursday’s unveiling of the Microsoft Semantic Engine.  My team back at my old government hangout did a lot of pathbreaking semantic-analysis research and development, and I hope that they will find this very cool stuff indeed. Not allowed to say more yet -  though I see that others in semantic-web circles are eager to hear more. Stay tuned!

Share this post on Twitter

Email this post to a friend

[Buch des Monats November 2009 -(3)]

Wenn man einmal mit dem Bloggen begonnen und Feuer gefangen hat, ist der Schritt zum Twittern nicht mehr weit. Diese Erfahrung haben wohl auch viele der Blogger/innen gemacht, deren Bücher- bzw. Musikblogs ich mehr oder weniger regelmäßig besuche. Nun bin ich also auch dabei. Allerdings haben mir die vielen bei Twitter auftauchenden Kürzel zunächst manches Rätsel aufgegeben, und die ganze Vielfalt der Einsatzmöglichkeiten des Mikroblogging-Dienstes war mir zunächst auch nicht geläufig.

Aber wozu gibt’s denn Bücher, die einen Neuling Schritt für Schritt einführen? Das “Twitter-Buch” von Tim O’Reilly und Sarah Milstein, das ich soeben gelesen habe, ist so eins. Es ist zwar trotz des Schlusskapitels, das der deutschen Twitter-Szene gewidmet ist, ziemlich US-lastig, aber flott und vor allem sehr verständlich geschrieben. Alles nach dem Schema: linke Seite Beispiele (aus der englischsprachigen Twitterer-Welt) zu dem Text, der sich durchgängig auf der rechten Seite befindet. So lernt man Schritt für Schritt, wie man seine Mitteilungen veröffentlicht, Nutzern von Twitter folgt, mit Retweets arbeitet, was das Kürzel DM bedeutet und eine Menge mehr.

Da ich einen kleinen Internetshop betreibe, fand ich das Kapitel “Twitter fürs Business” besonders interessant. Es enthält eine Menge Anregungen, die ich mir nach und nach noch mal ansehen  und soweit möglich umsetzen werde.

Tim O'Reilly, Ray Ozzie

Tim O’Reilly created a bit of a stir last night in the tech world by writing a thoughtful essay entitled “The War for the Web.” He’ll be expanding on his thoughts in his keynote address today at the Web 2.0 Expo in New York. From the essay, here’s the core argument:

“[W]e’ve grown used to a world with one dominant search engine, one dominant online encyclopedia, one dominant online retailer, one dominant auction site, one dominant online classified site, and we’ve been readying ourselves for one dominant social network. But what happens when a company with one of these natural monopolies uses it to gain dominance in other, adjacent areas? I’ve been watching with a mixture of admiration and alarm as Google has taken their dominance in search and used it to take control of other, adjacent data-driven applications.

It could be that everyone will figure out how to play nicely with each other, and we’ll see a continuation of the interoperable web model we’ve enjoyed for the past two decades. But I’m betting that things are going to get ugly. We’re heading into a war for control of the web. And in the end, it’s more than that, it’s a war against the web as an interoperable platform. [emphasis added] Instead, we’re facing the prospect of Facebook as the platform, Apple as the platform, Google as the platform, Amazon as the platform, where big companies slug it out until one is king of the hill.

… P.S. One prediction: Microsoft will emerge as a champion of the open web platform, supporting interoperable web services from many independent players, much as IBM emerged as the leading enterprise backer of Linux.

The coda there, with the Microsoft prediction, is what fascinated me – so much so that I mentioned it on Twitter. Tim immmediately responded, “Thanks. I should write a followup explaining the logic that got me to the PS.”  While we wait for that, though, here’s my prediction – with a bit of inside knowledge – today Microsoft begins to live up to Tim’s expectations with several announcements at our Professional Developers Conference (PDC) 2009 in Los Angeles.

If you want to see the future of Microsoft, and the future of the web and computing as we see it, watch live as Ray Ozzie lays it out in his keynote address, streamed live today at 11:30 eastern time, 8:30 am Pacific, over at http://microsoftpdc.com/.

Oh – and if your Latin is rusty, my title above comes from the phrase ”Si vis pacem, para bellum” – the classic doctrine of maintaining peace & deterring war by being better armed and prepared. It is generally attributed to Publius Flavius Vegetius Renatus, a fourth-century AD Roman military scholar whom I consider the Sun Tzu of the West. I’ve known many fans of his philosophy in the Pentagon.

Now it may turn out that, whether they know it or not, Microsoft techies are building new ways to avoid a war on the open web. As Sun Tzu wrote,  ”To win one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the acme of skill. To subdue an enemy without fighting is the acme of skill.” Watch our PDC this week to see examples of what I consider the modern technological acme of skill.

Share this post on Twitter

Email this post to a friend

Per iniziare la sezione “la parola della settimana” cominciamo di lunedì e con una breve descrizione del sistema che ci ospita: il web 2.0. Insomma, partiamo dalle origini.

Tim Berners Lee inventò il web.

Parecchi anni più tardi, Tim O’Reilly, magnate statunitense, per la prima volta parlò di web 2.0 usando la serializzazione tipica dei software per definire la nuova modalità di fruire della rete.

Se c’è un 2.0, esiste quindi un 1.0.

Il passaggio da 1.0 (il web statico in cui i contenuti provenivano dall’alto e la partecipazione degli utenti era limitata) a 2.0 è riassunto nella frase “nell’era del web 2.0 gli utenti aggiungono valore”. Le persone diventano i soggetti principali del web stesso: siamo in presenza di un web fatto in modo da consentire l’alta partecipazione degli utenti e la generazione di contenuti creati da loro stessi (i cosiddetti UGC -user generated content-).

Ecco allora che prendono piede blog, forum, chat, wiki, social network, ecc.
Nel web 2.0 le applicazioni possono essere progettate e distribuite dagli utenti; i dati ed i contenuti sono più importanti della piattaforma che li ospita.

Entrepreneur.com had an article in which Peter Diamandis and Tim O’Reilly talked about innovation.

I agree with Peter Diamandis when he said, “I fear that we have become very risk-averse in our society.” My take: It’s tough to innovate when failure is a kiss of death.

Tim O’Reilly believes too many people erroneously consider themselves innovators. O’Reilly used a lyric from a Buffalo Springfield song: “There’s something happening here. What it is ain’t exactly clear.” I like to use the following Bob Dylan lyric: “And you know something is happening, but you don’t know what it is… Do you Mr. Jones?” My take: Too many self proclaimed innovators are Mr. Jones.

Something to ponder… Innovation as an increasing function of fun?

Tim O’Reilly says, “We find innovation where people are having fun.“

l y tout de même quelques années que je traîne mes Converse Kurt Cobain dans le milieu du livre et que je m’intéresse au livre numérique. J’ai été partant quand Laurent Rabatel m’a proposé l’aventure de RobertNeVeutPAsLire. J’aimais le concept initial de feuilleton, un retour à l’écriture fin XIXe siècle ou aux grands nouvellistes américains, qui correspondait bien, selon nous, au temps découpé que nous vivons. Hélas, à l’époque, les auteurs avaient besoin de leurs écrits pour vivre, dans un modèle bien établi, et livraient les textes avec la régularité d’une Rolex à 10 000 dollars. Aujourd’hui, les distractions sont nombreuses et nos auteurs oublient parfois leurs lecteurs. C’est pourquoi Robert change de cap et publiera désormais des textes complets.
Mais là n’est pas mon propos.
Le livre numérique donc, je m’y intéresse,avec passion, je lis le blogue et les tweets de François Bon, de Clément Laberge et autres gourous de la modernité, je me tape Tim O’Reilly et BookSquare chaque jour. Je vois les éditeurs tenter de reproduire les schémas de distribution existants. Je les vois imaginer des scénarios tous plus compliqués les uns que les autres, DRM à l’os et pas les meilleurs (Adobe, par pitié!), plateformes numériques renvoyant au libraire, support technique plus ou moins efficace.
Je vois aussi les fabricants de e-liseuses, Sony, Amazon(Kindle), Barnes and Nobles(Nook), s’ingénier à compliquer les choses en multipliant les solutions propriétaires. Je vois poindre Apple à l’horizon s’il reste assez de forces à Steve Jobs.

Bref, tout ce beau monde s’agite avec mérite, raison, compétence, sincérité (pour la plupart) pour nous créer le livre de demain. L’objet ultime qui ne vous électrocutera pas quand vous voudrez lire dans votre bain. Et dont les piles ne se déchargeront pas quand vous serez assis depuis une heure sur le bol de toilettes , e-reader en main.
Les journalistes piaffent, twittent, (pléonasme?) , s’agitent, épuisent leurs recherchistes pour ne pas rater le train, ne pas manquer le buzz. Eux le virus, ils le veulent, ils n’iront pas se faire vacciner.

La vapeur monte comme dans un Presto, et ce dernier commence à siffler. C’est bien. Ça alimente les réseaux sociaux et peut-être découvrirons-nous finalement quelque chose qu’on a peine ENCORE à imaginer.

Comme éditeur-réviseur chez RobertNEVeutPasLire, je viens de terminer la révision d’un texte exigeant qui m’a toutefois donné beaucoup de plaisir.
Et une question me vient à l’esprit? Quand, dans tout ce ramdam, parle-t-on de l’auteur? De la matière première de cette “nouvelle industrie”? Quand parle-t-on des textes?
On s’excite sur le contenant, en oubliant que celui-ci n’est pas vide. Le contenu existe aussi. Sans contenu, pas de contenant. Même les éditeurs traditionnels en viennent à oublier cette vérité élémentaire. Nous devons parler des textes, des auteurs, ce sont eux qui feront vendre le support de demain
Beaucoup de bruit pour rien donc.
Car un bon auteur avec un bon texte, publié en livre de poche, en format numérique ou sur du papier de toilettes ultradoux quatre épaisseurs demeurent un bon auteur avec un bon texte.

Attention à Steve Jobs, toutefois…

Jf Chételat

Dimenticatevi gli USA come nazione guida! Tutt’altro! Pare che siano gli italiani ad avere idee molto più chiare sui prossimi sviluppi di Internet.

Era il settembre 2005 quando Tim O’Reilly lanciò la definizione di Web 2.0.
Ma ora siamo alle soglie del 2010, troppa acqua è passata sotto i ponti – quei ponti che vorrei tanto esser popolati dai web marketer in sudici cartoni.
La gente si annoia facilmente e guarda avanti, il mercato ha bisogno di novità sempre più frequenti e sconvolgenti, colpi di scena, sviluppi immaginifici. Un po’ come facevano nell’Ottocento i romanzi di appendice: les coups de théâtre!
Altrimenti, nessuno ti compra il giornale, la conferenza, il servigio, “Web 2.0?? bluah già sentito.. non lo compro”

Eee alloraa
ladieeeees and gentlemeeeeeen
ecco a vooooi
la prospettiva che Nicholas Negroponte non aveva ancora immaginatoo:
il WEB 3.0!!
in salsa italiana (direi al ragù)

Barometro di questo repentino cambiamento di clima culturale è Wikipedia.
Take a look!

Wikipedia Italia ha una voce Web 3.0:

Wikipedia in lingua inglese (USA-centrica) non ha una voce univoca per definire il Web 3.0, ed anzi sottolinea come “Web 3.0 does not yet exist” (Christian Fuchs, 2008)

L’Italia è un nazione di Guru del Web Marketing.
E il Web 3.0 è il loro brand.
Fumo da vendere.
Materassi, materassi a molla.

Found at http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/10/web-20-summit-starts-today.html

by Tim O’Reilly | 20/10/2009

Last year at Web 2.0 Summit, one prominent tech executive responded to our focus on “Web meets World” — the way web technology is being used to attack the world’s problems — by saying “I don’t come to this conference to learn how to do good. I come to learn about trends that are going to affect my business.”

As it turns out, the “Web meets World” theme was in fact exactly on point with the trends that were going to affect his business. What Fred Wilson calls “the golden triangle” of Web meets World trends — mobile, social, and real-time — are at the heart of many of the cutting edge non-profit activities we showed last year, and they are very much at the heart of the for-profit companies following hard on their heels.

I’ve written a much longer paper on this subject – Web Squared: Web 2.0 Five Years On, and I won’t repeat that there. But that’s the theory. The practice is how entrepreneurs are taking advantage of these disruptive trends, how big companies are responding, and what kind of infrastructure changes we’ll need to support the future that is coming at us.

This year at the Web 2.0 Summit, we’ll be hearing how real-time, social, and mobile play out in the strategy of Google, Microsoft, Intel, Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo!, News Corp, AOL, Comcast, Nokia, and even GE, but we’ll also be hearing from entrepreneurs, and yes, even some more innovative hackers who are helping birth the future away from the commercial limelight.

The official sessions are great, but it’s the hallway conversations that can really set your mind off in a new direction. For example, at a pre-Summit event last night, I had a fascinating conversation with Marc Pincus of Zynga last night about his belief that the third great internet business model has arrived. Fortunately, you don’t need to bump into Marc to hear what he thinks: he’s speaking this afternoon at 4:15. He’s put his ideas about social selling into practice, with 129 million users playing Zynga games each month, spending millions of dollars on virtual goods. But what’s most fascinating is how Marc sees the potential to apply social gaming principles to all of e-commerce. His riff on how what’s he’s learned applies to Amazon

Read more at http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/10/web-20-summit-starts-today.html

Don't Feed the Troll

I read an interesting article the other day called The Blogger’s Code of Conduct. The article is based on a proposal by Tim O’Reilly for bloggers to enforce civility on their blogs by being civil themselves and moderating comments on their blog.

The following is a list of seven proposed ideas:

1. Take responsibility not just for your own words, but for the comments you allow on your blog.

2. Label your tolerance level for abusive comments.

3. Consider eliminating anonymous comments.

4. Ignore the trolls.

5. Take the conversation offline, and talk directly, or find an intermediary who can do so.

6. If you know someone who is behaving badly, tell them so.

7. Don’t say anything online that you wouldn’t say in person.

The  code of conduct proposed by Tim O’Reilly, in my opinion, is a very good creed to live by as a blogger. I read several blogs and forums daily – I would be the first to acknowledge that the level of civility in the comments in blogs and forums are at a all-time low.

The proposed code of conduct implies a certain morality or sense of ethics in people. Unfortunately, I realize that some people, and even some sub-cultures or countercultures, are almost completely devoid of any awareness of morality and ethic. Worse yet are those who have claim their own brand of  deplorable conduct is justified by the writings of some ancient text (usually religious). Invariably these beliefs and behavior (morality and ethics) is so completely separated from mainstream society as to be almost unrecognizable in basic human decency.

It is intriguing to observe that even those people and sub-cultures/countercultures that have the best intentions,  guided by a proper perception of morality and ethics, can fail  to live up to their values. This is where the concept of grace comes in. Allowing people the latitude to fail is central to being graceful towards other human beings. A willingness, on our part, to show tolerance, acceptance, encouragement, and patience towards others who have failed is a sign of personal maturity. One day, we too will need the same grace in our time of failure.

Am 15. Oktober war Blog Action Day 2009 – dieses Jahr zum Thema Klimawandel. Die Aktion war ein glatter Erfolg, wie einige Zahlen und Fakten aus einem Mail von Robin Beck, dem Veranstalter des Blog Action Day, belegen:

Mehr als 31.000 Beiträge aus 155 Ländern und 6 Kontinenten beschäftigten sich am 15.10. mit dem Klimawandel. Diese Beiträge stammten aus 13.000 verschiedenen Blogs und erreichten knapp 17,9 Millionen Leser. Blog Action Day 2009 wird damit als die vorläufig wichtigste Aktion angesehen, mit denen sich die modernen Medien (Blogs, Web 2.0-Plattformen, Twitter) bislang beschäftigt haben.

Unter den Verfassern der Artikel vom 15.10. sind auch zahlreiche prominente und einflussreiche Adressen. Neben dem Beitrag des englischen Premiers Gordon Brown, den wir hier bereits auszugsweise wiedergegeben haben, finden sich auch Aufrufe aus dem britischen Außenministerium, aus dem Weißen Haus, von Google, Mashable, Unofficial Apple Blog, Huffington Post, Change.org, Global Voices, Tim O’Reilly, Treehugger, Tcktcktck, Greenpeace, WWF, Oxfam, 1Sky, Mother Jones und vielen, vielen anderen.

Hoffen wir, dass in Kopenhagen wirksame Beschlüsse zum Klimaschutz gefasst werden. Wie das geht, zeigen uns die Kleinen aus dem neuen und sehr bewegenden Video von Tcktcktck:

Hoy en día, continuamente vemos referencias a la Web 2.0 y al “apellido” 2.0: empresa 2.0, sociedad 2.0, educación 2.0, gobierno 2.0… Pero ¿a qué nos referimos cuando hablamos de 2.0? Como explica la Wikipedia, el término Web 2.0 fue acuñado por Tim O’Reilly en el año 2004 y hace referencia a la nueva era de Internet (que sigue a la inicial, que sería la 1.0).

¿Qué cambios supone esta nueva etapa? El principal: un cambio de rol, porque los usuarios, hasta ahora meros receptores, pueden convertirse en receptores si así lo desean. La Web 2.0 es la web social y participativa, que a través de aplicaciones de uso sencillo, como redes sociales, blogs o wikis, permiten que cualquier persona pueda crear contenidos y compartirlos a través de la Red sin necesidad de grandes conocimientos informáticos.

Por ejemplo, crear un blog es tan sencillo como abrirse una cuenta de correo electrónico y ofrece la posibilidad de publicar contenidos que podrán leerse en cualquier parte del mundo. ¿No es ciertamente mágico?

Si queréis saber más sobre Web 2.0, os recomiendo el libro Web 2.0, de la Fundación Orange, de Antonio Fumero y Genís Roca, que podéis descargar de forma gratuita en pdf. El mapa conceptual que ilustra este post forma parte de esta obra.

The term Web 2.0 is about five years old now. It was coined by Tim O’Reilly at a conference and was intended to indicate the second coming of the web; that it wasn’t dead following the bursting of the “dotcom bubble”. But it has taken on this kind of folklore meaning, with many seeing it as an incremental version roll-out as with a software update. And Tim says he has been continually asked what the next big thing will be.

Is it:

• The Semantic Web,
• Virtual reality,
• The social web,
• the mobile web?

And what’s it called, Web 3.0?

The short answer from Tim seems to be that it’s all those things listed, and more; and it’s not Web 3.0.

The next phase of web development is Web meets World and to achieve this doesn’t need an incremental step, but an exponential one.

Hence, the term we can expect to see moving into folklore following next week’s Web 2.0 Summit 2009 Conference is Web Squared or Web².

Back on June 25, Tim O’Reilly and John Battelle presented a webinar setting out their view of Web².

I’ve Tubechopped the initial 17min section of the video and a 1min15sec answer to questions about the impact on Higher Education. Please note: this was recorded from a webinar over a phone line so the audio isn’t great quality.

They also produced a special report on the topic; available as a pdf.

The remainder or this post is concerned with what I think is most pertinent from this report and my comments.

The fundamental premiss of Web 2.0 is that the Web is becoming an application platform reliant on data subsystems that get better the more people use them, rather than just an information platform.

The question that then arises is, “Is the web getting smarter?“

Looking at the current generation of apps is where we see the web getting smarter. An example Tim gives is Google Mobile Application for the iPhone. The speech recognition in the cloud is aligned with the search in the cloud, so Google knows what you’re likely to say – Pizza rather than Pisa – then the location information from the phone indicates that you want to know where the nearest three pizza places are located, rather than a Wikipedia entry on the history and origins of pizza. That seems to be much smarter. Speech recognition, search and location information all working seamlessly together.

And boiling down the essence of good web apps is that they harness collective intelligence. Collective intelligence is a collective working that acts more intelligently and leads to greater value than can be achieved by the individual components, be they people, groups or computers.

Key takeaway: A key competency of the Web 2.0 era is discovering implied metadata, and then building a database to capture that metadata and/or foster an ecosystem around it.

Web²  Special Report, p.4

Examples of what appear at first to be unstructured data that have subsequently been identified and utilized include Facebook where online relationships with friends are used to form a social graph, Bit.ly where a URL shortening service realised the potential of realtime analytics, the fact that every web link is a vote and every link from a person deemed to have greater standing in a group (as measured by their contributions to that group) has a greater weighting.

The report considers the influences that moving sensory and input devices away from the fixed keyboard and into our hands will have. These devices (e.g. smart phones) have eyes (cameras), ears (mics), position and direction locators. All of this will enable increasing amounts of metadata and tags to be automatically and more accurately assigned to vast amounts of data stored in cloud databases. And, interestingly, when the amount of data reaches a critical point, the addition of extra data actually reduces the size of the database because the linkages become stronger and the need for explicit metadata reduces.

This will give rise to a number of new applications, leveraging these affordances. Already we are seeing interesting augmented reality applications, including Layar on Android phones;

and the potential use of location specific images with Adobe’s Infinite Images to create 3D experiences of real and imaginary worlds (video filmed at conference).

An article appeared a couple of days ago in computing.co.uk entitled Moving beyond Web 2.0. It too was looking at Tim O’Reilly’s Web Squared concept. I’d like to highlight some points from this article, because it not only talks about the advances in technology and the concepts that encapsulates, but it also focusses on the (for me) important philosophies underpinning Web 2.0.

There is, however, more to Web Squared than new types of application that will process the immense data shadows soon to be cast by the emerging internet of things. More broadly, Web Squared is also about recognising that Web 2.0 has been as concerned with embracing new philosophies as new technologies. And in championing Web Squared, O’Reilly is signalling that the Web 2.0 ideologies of openness, transparency and rapid, collaborative value creation may have significant value well beyond the internet.

…

A big idea of Web Squared is that this may be achieved by applying the philosophies of Web 2.0 to mainstream politics and business thinking.

…

The CIOs who are embracing the cloud and not trying to build barricades around their datacentres are the ones who understand the philosophies as well as the technologies of Web 2.0, and who will also very much grasp Web Squared.

Some time ago I expressed my take on the importance of the philosophy of web 2.0 rather than just the software, services and mechanics in a presentation I gave (full text available).

The relevant specific audio section about the philosophy is reproduced here:

My Diigo links for Web Squared.

What is Web 2.0? Where did it come from? Well it all started back in 1999 when the internet started to change. A woman by the name of Darcy DiNucci was the first to recognize these changes, and wrote in an article titled “Fragmented Futures,”

“The first glimmerings of Web 2.0 are now beginning to appear, and we can start to see just how that embryo might develop. The first stages of mitosis have begun, and the cells of the organism have begun to differentiate. Now we can see that the defining thing about the Web won’t be any visible characteristic at all. The Web will be identified only by its underlying DNA structure—TCP/IP (the protocol that controls how files are transported across the Internet), HTTP (the protocol that rules the communication between computers on the Web), and URLs (a method for identifying files).”

While Darcy seems to be the first to publicly acknowledge the changing environment on the internet, the term ‘Web 2.0′ didn’t really become widely used until 2004 when Tim O’Reilly held the first Web 2.0 conference.

In an article by Tim O’Reilly himself, he states that Web 2.0 “The concept of “Web 2.0″ began with a conference brainstorming session between O’Reilly and MediaLive International.” After reading through the article, you learn that Web 2.0 isn’t a platform or a type of software, as you might think, but rather a concept. One, I might add, that very few seem to be able to agree upon.

There is a core structure to Web 2.0, which O’Reilly was graceful enough to include within their original article. However, this chart might be a little confusing for the average user to read. The basic concepts of Web 2.0 seem to circle around putting more power and control in the user’s hands as opposed to Web 1.0 where the user’s control was very limited. In Web 2.0, you have a lot more control over your own data. When you think of this concept, think of things like Facebook and Myspace, where you are free to customize your user interface, your webpage, and your social network.

In Web 1.0, you would be given very specific tools, packaged and bundled without much freedom to deviate from it’s original intended purpose. In Web 2.0 companies tend to focus more on providing a service to users, and allowing users to fill in the content and gaps. A great example of this is Wikipedia. Without the users supporting and adding content to the site, Wikipedia would be rather empty and bland. There is a lot more that can be accomplished with this method, I mean can you honestly imagine putting together Wikipedia all by yourself? Or even with a small staff?

While there is a lot of good that can come from the freedom and the ability to share information between users so seemlessly, there is a lot of bad that can come from it as well. As Information Week points out, there are some security issues that can be a concern. For example, we all know how bad an e-virus can be. When someone sends out a spam email with a worm attached and it goes through several million people before it gets cleaned up.

Imagine, if you will, someone putting a virus like that into a social networking site, and then everyone that hits that site becomes infected. It trolls through their friends and network, and before you know it you have millions infected by this security breach, and likely a majority of them wouldn’t even know until it’s too late. One thing a lot of people think of when they hear “infected” and “Virus” is that it will simply destroy your computer. While this is one option, it’s not the only concern. What about all your personal information, bank numbers, credit cards, passwords, social security information? These are all put at risk as well depending on the type of infection.

Another concern isn’t simply personal information being shared, but companies exploiting you the user. A conern that is very well put in an article by Michael Zimmer, who states,

“But Web 2.0 also embodies a set of unintended consequences, including the increased flow of personal information across networks, the diffusion of one’s identity across fractured spaces, the emergence of powerful tools for peer surveillance, the exploitation of free labor for commercial gain, and the fear of increased corporatization of online social and collaborative spaces and outputs.”

A concern that has already come to fruit in some ways, with the government now monitoring such social sites as Myspace, Facebook, and Youtube. An article written by Laura Rich states,

“According to a report on Foxnews.com, the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI have been using the social networking sites along with Wikipedia, YouTube and Google searches to help gather information about people they’re investigating.”

What else are they gathering, you might wonder? Who knows, whatever you put on the internet, they can likely find. A scary thought, and makes you want to think twice about what you share about your personal life over these open lines. Of course, the average citizen has nothing to fear about sharing information over the internet, especially from the government, but we all have that sense of privacy and it tends to leave an unpleasant feeling of violation knowing that strangers can come in and learn everything there is to know about your personal life without you ever being the wiser.

I personally think the concept of Web 2.0 is a great idea, and while most of the fears over its abuse are valid, the issues aren’t nearly as widespread as some try to make it out to be. I feel like there would be a lot of fear from a government standpoint, as we all know a -lot- of governments, not simply USA, run their country by controling the flow of information to the citizens. Having Web 2.0 punches all sorts of holes in that control because they have no direct way of influencing or censoring what gets said in these online social environments.

People in general tend to fear the unknown, and one thing rings true about Web 2.0. It definitely has a lot of unknown potential, both good and bad. Though, that’s how it is in life, and one thing a lot of people tend to forget or take for granted. There is balance in all things, both good and bad, but if all we do is let fear rule us and focus on the negative, we will never see the full potential of the good that can come from Web 2.0.

References:

Wikipedia

Darcy DiNucci’s ”Fragmented Futures”

O’Reilly Media

Information Week

Michael Zimmer

Laura Rich

Nel mondo delle comunicazioni, in continua evoluzione, un “compleanno” può essere l’occasione adatta per iniziare a recitare il “de profundis” del festeggiato e dare calorosamente il benvenuto a chi lo sostituirà, senza rimpianti.

E’ quanto è successo al Web 2.0, fortunata definizione coniata da Tim O’Reilly per indicare tutti i diversi servizi che hanno cambiato il web nel senso dell’intelligenza collettiva e della partecipazione, che proprio il 5 Ottobre 2004 aveva un suo primo riconoscimento ufficiale con l’avvio dei lavori del “Web 2.0 Summit” a San Francisco, California.
Cinque anni dopo, O’Reilly, sempre pronto a recepire i cambiamenti nella rete, è ancora una volta il primo a riconoscerne e formalizzare il passo successivo, il Web Squared.
Il punto di svolta è rappresentato dalle applicazioni degli smartphone basate sui sensori intelligenti, che consentono alla rete di entrare in diretto contatto con la realtà, e proprio questi saranno i temi dell’edizione 2009 del Web 2.0 Summit che si svolgerà dal 20 al 22 Ottobre.

Condividere adesso non implica soltanto scrivere sulla tastiera del computer, ma è sempre più spesso legato a ciò che i nostri smartphone vedono, sentono, percepiscono e quindi mettono in comune, spesso senza neanche un nostro diretto intervento, grazie a microfoni, camere, sensori di movimento e posizione di cui sono dotati.
E così sono in grado di dirci cosa stiamo vedendo (e.g. Wikitude) e cosa non stiamo vedendo (e.g. Darkslide), cosa stiamo sentendo (e.g. CDDB) e cosa non stiamo sentendo (e.g. Tweeter, Facebook, Myspace etc.), e cosa i nostri amici pensano di quello che stiamo vedendo e facendo, o dove si trovano rispetto a noi in quel momento (e.g. aka-aki)!
Quasi tutto esiste simultaneamente nel mondo fisico e in quello virtuale, si hanno cioè ombre di informazione, grazie alle quali è possibile implementare servizi di Augmented Reality (e.g. MIT’s SixthSense Project, PhonePoint Pen, etc.) che le rendono visibili.
Tutto questo, in tempo reale.

I risvolti del Web Squared sono però molteplici, come già l’intelligenza collettiva di prima generazione. Le smart grid consentono di ottimizzare la distribuzione dell’energia, ma possono essere sfruttate anche per indagini di mercato. E si possono arrivare a ipotizzare cartelloni pubblicitari che, riconoscendoci, ci mostreranno “offerte” e “consigli” personalizzati, come già siamo abituati in rete con i software di advertising.

Mentre il web si evolve verso un’interazione più potente e globale, restano quindi le sue questioni insolute: la privacy e la gestione dei dati personali.

Secondo AdMob, la società che offre pubblicità in internet per i dispositivi mobile, ad agosto 2009, i 30 milioni di iPhone in circolazione sono bastati per usufruire del 40% del totale delle pubblicità. Il periodo da febbraio ad agosto 2009 ha visto l’iPhone diventare il telefono cellulare maggiormente sfruttato per navigare in internet, in grado da solo di battere un colosso come Nokia che ha distribuito migliaia di telefoni.

E’ molto probabile che all’iPhone non basti la leadership tra i cellulari che vanno su Internet e conquistano la pubblicità. C’è infatti chi già prevede che entro il 2013 Apple sorpasserà Nokia diventando il primo produttore mondiale di smartphone.

Ed è forse anche merito dell’iPhone e delle sue innovative applicazioni se Tim O’Reilly ha potuto teorizzare il “web²” (ovvero web 2.0 + prossimità, movimento, tempo reale, vita reale). Lo “squared web” è l’internet frutto delle interazioni intelligenti consentite dai sensori di posizione e di movimenti, dalle videocamere dei cellulari, dai satelliti, dalle informazioni relative ai luoghi che ci circondano.  In fondo, è già qui:

Tim O’Reilly, the driving force behind the concept of Web 2.0 and a genuine social media thought leader, details why Twitter is becoming the leading social network in today’s social media world. The interview is conducted by FORAtv.com President & CEO Blaise Zerega. Asked to compare social networks to human “senses” and to name the most important social network, O’Reilly nails it with these ideas:

• Unexpected impact: “I don’t know if there is a single new thing, right now, or if we will notice it right away. People didn’t know how big Google would be in 1998.  .  . if there is anything in that category today I would say it’s Twitter.”
• Twitter’s Impact: “The thing that has impressed me the most about Twitter is it’s brought real time to a peak on the web”
• Trend: Twitter’s impact on how we expect  real time information is “making the web more sensory like. . . “
• What Does it mean?: “It means you start to build systems for stimulus and response.”
• Humans & Computers: “There is a whole part in what we’re building here, is this new hybrid human computer machine”
• Constant Factor: We are moving toward a “Collective Intelligence” which will cause a “Revolution in Business.”