Enterprise Twisting/Twitting – Chloe O'Brian as a Twitter Client and why that Whale is Priceless!

Like that old lady that had a view of the universe as "Turtles all the way down", I find myself repeatedly condensing information-marketplaces into that reservoir known as Twitter. "It's Twitter all the way down", I say, "especially in the Real-Time Enterprise".

More than 3 years ago, I wrote a post about Twitter and its essential role in the mission-critical, real-time Enterprise. In that post, Chloe O'Brian, from 24, represented what we know today as Twitter, or to be more precise – a Twitter Client. And Bill Buchanan was in the role of the Information Junkie Manager, constantly hooked into that client.


As a manager of a Real-Time Enterprise I care most for the flow of information in two directions: to me and from me. I want to have any piece of information that matters, or that might matter to my decision making processes, being brought to my attention, in Real-Time, and I need my orders to be efficiently distributed across the chain of command, as well as to the rest of the relevant, or might be relevant surroundings, as my survival depends upon that.

From both practical and mission-critical perspectives, I, as a manager, need only "One Ring" of Information, or rather one channel, through which Information is flowing to and from me, in and out. If I should pay attention to several, different channels, I might be losing critical information, like in case one of the channels' down; I might be investing too much time & money in protecting, fortifying, combining, linking, merging and cleansing those channels, in order to create a virtually unified ring of Info that enables a real-time decision making processes to take place.

Alas, within the Enterprise the Information is highly distributed, and is inherently heterogeneous in both structure and semantics, that I, as a manager, can only pray that whatever information I get reflects reality. No information ring for me, the manager, today.

Twitter is a bi-directional information ring. It carries - NOT CONSOLIDATES - information from all the different sources into me, and it passes back my orders, in the form of short urls, back to any relevant subordinate (and see Twiggers: the web's new invocation mechanism (and of the Enterprise too)).

As today we still got FB and Flickr and this and that, there's a need for syndicators that will recreate that one ring of information for us, managers, FF & TweetDeck being a typical example. But from a real-time Enterprise managerial perspective, those syndicators are WRONG. They provide an illusion of a one ring, while masking the nevertheless impossible reality of channels' proliferation and diversity, which still must be protected, fortified, secured, and in case of a channel failure, critical information from that channel becoming unavailable.



I, as a manager, will therefore ALWAYS prefer that happy WHALE of Twitter over multiple, different and independent channels, because that Twitter WHALE will eventually be caught by Captain Ahab, and then I will have the ocean, while different channels, and different seas have their own monsters, dealing with them all being too much effort & distraction for our RT Enterprise manager.

This is the first post in the EIN series

Blog's Dead! Long Live the Blog!

Wired Magazine: Promoting the Fathers

Now, Wired claims that we should stop blogging; that we've been wasting our time with a futile medium; that blogs have created an inflation of useless information nobody's interested in; that the "real" blogs are actually professional magazines, or in other words - ran by professionals, not laymen (not you, not me); that Facebook, Twitter and Flickr should be the only locus of our ever-shortened attention; that micro-blogging - 140 characters - is how we should learn to express ourselves.

Clearly, those who run AdWorld have their goals in persuading us to abandon Blogs and to switch to micro-blogging platforms - and that [i.e. having goals] is ok.
But shameful is their shameless call, their shameless list of cons, and facts and figures, as if, when we've started blogging, we have never had a dream of a different place, clear from their manipulations.

In Prefiguring Cyberculture - a collection of [too academic] essays about cyberspace and us - there's an essay by Margaret Wertheim, titled "Internet Dreaming: A Utopia for All Seasons", in which Wertheim describes two Utopias: Thomas More's "Utopia" (1516) and Francis Bacon's "New Atlantis" (1627). While More's Utopia is completely egalitarian - "communist" if you'd like - with every citizen having an equal share in both knowledge and property - Bacon's New Atlantis is a reactionary blueprint, a utopia ruled by a group of Fathers-Scientists who "know better".

Our society is definitely Baconian; science, power and fathers. Wherever you look, you can see these Fathers, with thousands or [much] more subscribers flocking around them, wandering after them form land to land. Open up Facebook - they are there; switch to Twitter - still there; FriendFeed - there too; and so on. You can't escape your fathers.

Wertheim shows how Internet Dreams had evolved from envisioning a revolutionary egalitarian place, where anybody can finally be somebody (Cluetrain, yeah!), to the usual reactionary place where a small elite group is actually managing things around, feeding us up with what, how, when, and where.

For a brief moment they tried a different tactic, creating YOU, but only to prove that YOU is a degraded breed vis-a-vis the really smart ones, aka the fathers. Wertheim describes Wired Magazine as being the platform for promoting those elite figures, whose dreams are not of a better world for the "people" but of how quickly they can launch their next IPO (or exit or any other kind of monetization).

"While the magazine stressed that every one of us would benefit from the wired 'revolution', the clear message was that people creating it were a rather special lot - more forward thinking, more savvy, more daring than the average Joe".

Living in a culture that reduces space and time to the minimum, that consistently abolishes any ability to digest and observe, that praises the endless accumulation of wealth and strives at the endless acceleration of technology, is the opposite of freedom. We have started with Freedom as in Free Speech and ended up in Freedom as in Free Beer.



So, Blog's Dead.
Hence, Long live the Blog!

Lyotard, a french Philosopher who tried hard to fight the system, considered blogging - i.e. writing a personal account - as the #1 activity of Resistance, of anyone seeking to free his/her mind & soul. He was inspired by both Adorno, another philosopher, who coined the word "Micrologs" decades before blogging started, and by the character of Winston Smith in Orwell's 1984: if you remember, writing a diary was how Winston kept his freedom.

Let that Elite group and their zealous followers switch to the micro-blogging platforms, where "every word is an ad", as some put it. Hopefully, the Blogosphere will become a vast, unpopulated place, full of debris – an ideal place for a new Utopia, suitable for bloggers whose dreams have never been that of monetization, and whose voice has never tuned itself according to Technorati's ranking and the number of feedburner subscribers' count.

Twiggers: the web's new invocation mechanism (and of the Enterprise too)

A trend, or rather a necessity, exists to tunnel all tech discussions into that magnetic field called Twitter. But strange it seems only to those considering Twitter as yet-another-stupid-service-for-the-crowds, which is essentially true – on the surface. Yet beneath the shallow appearance, there's another Twitter: a prototype for, or a component of a globally distributed management infrastructure, the outlines of which I have extensively described across this blog's real-estate over the last couple of years.

Twiggers are perfectly suitable for demonstrating this idea of a global infrastructure. Their power, as I'll try to explain - is a r/evolution.

What's a Twigger? (I'm about to trademark this word)

Twigger's a tweet containing a URL. Each such a tweet is a call for an action, i.e. an invocation mechanism, a trigger. A Twigger.

Currently, Twiggers are the only structured information inside a Tweet (besides Twitter's own backbone directives, such as @, d etc., and besides any private semantics used among closed parties). Structured information is the basis for cost-efficient communication, and consequently for management & operation. Being the only structured part of a Tweet, Twiggers are the locus of management activity inside the Twitterosphere.

Remember - it's not the url that is special! it's the structure that makes a difference, and the url happened to be the only structured piece around.

The power of Twiggers

Actually, it's good to have a structure in the form of a URL, because the URL has evolved to carry pretty useful information over the years. For example, it can tell us that behind the slashes there's an application. We know that, if the URL contains signs such as ? and & - an indication for parameters passed to an API. We also know the location of this application or API, because the prefix of the URL is an address. Under the RESTful paradigm, we can quickly identify Resources, for instance, http://del.icio.us/tags/twigger is a syntax conveying semantics - about a resource named Twigger, of a type named tag. And, of course, in its most natural use, the URL indicates the existence of some other content behind it.

How's all that related to management, operations and a global infrastructure? the answer is evident when you start considering twitter from a pragmatics perspective, i.e. "how to do things with words", or how to do things with Tweets. Twiggers are created in order to achieve something by inducing others to re-act. The Twiterrer who created the twigger wants you, the follower, to click on the url, to change your virtual whereabouts to the specified address, and to read/interact with the content found at that location.

Therefore, at its very basics, every Twigger is an ad.

I wonder: what is the click-rate of Twiggers versus other ads?

And here we touched that area which starts shifting us towards management.
Take Tinyurl, for instance: a service, like many others that pop up every day now [and u'll soon see why], that shortens long urls, a needed optimization for the 140 chars tweets. Any click on a tinyurl goes first to tinyurl' servers, from which the click is redirected to the actual address. Right? Well, it's certainly correct in most cases, but this is not but a good guess, as I'll explain hereafter.

Once we stop considering tinyurl as a dumb router, we can see new opportunities for this broker. Tinyurl can deduct from that click all the following insights:

- what's hot in the virtual from a twitter's perspective (by counting the clicks to the same url, like Twitturly does)
- who's interested in what - both the twiterrer who created the twigger, and his/her followers who clicked on it.
etc.

Even more interesting are those capabilities not yet explored by such a brokerage service. For instance, if the twigger is a request to call an API, the URL being an HTTP/GET kind of a url, or any other agreed upon convention, then tinyurl can be the actual responder to that twigger's call, and actually invoke the API. In other words, one can creates a twigger, and by that invokes any logic, anywhere.

-> Twitter - a concise, natural-language medium (i.e. english vs. php) is capable of requesting the invocation of whatever application, business logic, operations etc.

(Fraud scenario: a twigger can state "a great article by Mike Arrington", but when u click the tinyurl, you've actually launched some obscure application, or reached an obscure territory)

What about notification? anytime someone responds to a twigger, tinyurl can send a mail, or a direct tweet to the twigger's creator, telling her all that is possible to know about the re-actionist. Or to the opposite - given basic listening capabilities to the twitterfeed, if no one responded to a twigger within a given time interval - then a notification is shot to whoever is generally interested in finding out what actions are carried out, when and by whom, i.e. the Manager.

We can also chain twiggers: if tinyurl identifies that someone invoked a specific twigger, it can create another twigger that will continue, let's say, a pending business transaction, or a workflow.

That, by the way, is "Twitter in the Enterprise", and not "can John twit with his external buddies while at the Enterprise", nor "can we use Twitter inside the Enterprise to enhance exchange of information among the employees".

And what's even more fantastic is that tinyurl is an abstraction layer, aligned with the ideas of decoupling and service-orientation, meaning that the real url could be altered behind the scenes, both location-wise and semantic-wise, creating an outcome not predicted by the twigger creator. Any Twigger is like that chaotic butterfly, creating a chain of unpredictable events.


Concluding notes

Twiggers are the new invocation mechanism of the web, the underlying infrastructure of all mesh-to-come. The twigger context achieves - business and management-wise - the same effect that has so far been possible by programming languages only.

As Twitter is the backbone, there will be an infinite number of brokers that will sniff, trap, process and react to twiggers - each having a different "agenda", serving different affinity-or-any-other-kind-of groups, interpreting and processing the same twigger differently.

Twiggers also mark a bizarre proximity between men and machines, for suddenly both species use the same protocol in order to communicate, the differences getting more and more blurred.

This, coupled with the ability to invoke any operation and business logic, is Enterprise2.0, is Twitter in the Enterprise, is what will change the landscape of getting/setting information by both men and machines, is what will break the barriers between Enterprisey walled-gardens and opened ones.

Finally, we've had URLs for years now, so what's the fuss about a URL? the fuss, again, is not about the URL per-se, but about Twitter being the Galactic Information Pot - one place to rule them all - and within that pot shines a tiny url - the only commonly understood, user-generated structure.

Tweet Sixteen (Batch#: 1; Topic: Twitter; #Tweets: 16; #Comments: 6)

Twitter(1): "Anything goes" into Twitter->Go to 'tweet scan' and search for what u want->Subscribe to RSS on that filter/results 10:35 AM June 02, 2008 from web

Twitter(2): No [longer] need to pick Feeds from the Blogoshpere. Each "Blogject" to log itself directly into Twitter, and then see Twitter(1) 10:37 AM June 02, 2008 from web

Twitter(3): The problem: two kinds of info for the same Topic: conscious and unconscious blahblah tweets. That's y we need tags on tweets 10:40 AM June 02, 2008 from web

Twitter(4): These tags will be "Meta-Data" tags, indicating that the Tweet is an update of a reflection and !only of a projection 10:41 AM June 02, 2008 from web

- Wrong! Actually, we don't need tags. The length limit of a Tweet makes it inherently structured for meta-data – it's nothing but a series of keywords connected by coord. Conjunctions. No content, just pointers.


Twitter(5):Given that Blogjects are tweeting too (objects becoming part of the "conversation"), "consciousness of humanity" no longer holds 08:32 AM June 04, 2008 from web

- Here I'm "wronging out" my article. Twtr will not be the consciousness of Humanity, simply bcs Machines r alrdy part of the convrstion

Twitter(6): Unless, of course, Humanity is to be understood as a mixture of man and machine. We're already blended into each other. 08:34 AM June 04, 2008 from web

- 2 kinds of theoreticians on this interesting subject of man/machine familiarity: Machines, being the creations of Man are to be seen as his natural siblings; others, like Guattari, who see Man as a container, a meta-data, a tag, a pointer: Man can be an animal, can be a machine, can be an ephemeral moment, or an eternal word.

Twitter(7): As for History vs. Real-Time (i.e. can Twitter reflects the History of mankind or just its current, real-time snapshot) 08:44 AM June 04, 2008 from web

- If Twitter is meta-data, can it point to things that happen in the past too or is it more oriented towards Present consciousness?

Twitter(8): We say History & Real-Time "exist". Existence is conversation. Any conversation goes through the mind - a thought's product. 08:49 AM June 04, 2008 from web

Twitter(9): In any givn time, parts of Humanity reflect on its Past, others deal with Present, others thinking Future. Twtr will have it all 08:51 AM June 04, 2008 from web

Twitter(10): Making sure History is part of tweet scan: Plato, Inquisition, Descartes, Hiroshima, Churchill, Holocaust, les frères Lumière 09:26 AM June 04, 2008 from web

Twitter(11): Steve Gillmor is feeling in his guts the "Track" necessity, and I'm certain (QED style) that he's right: (cont. @Twitter12) 10:19 AM June 06, 2008 from web

Twitter(12): 1. "Track" must be restored. 2. It MUST have the min possible delay: Real-time pub/sub 3. It must allow any combination of words 10:20 AM June 06, 2008 from web


Twitter(13):These may !be the unanimous reqs for 0608, still they're the absolute necessities 4 vry near future. So we'd better get ready 10:20 AM June 06, 2008 from web

- We tend to underestimate the mission-criticality of technology. The man in the elevator becomes instantaneously hysteric when electricity breaks. Same thing with Twtr: someone, somewhere, is entirely life/biz-dependent on a RT response.

Twitter(14): Enterprise Tweeting is not about brdcsting one's presence; it's about tweeting '@Enterprise customr 233' & getting a real-time rply 06:53 PM June 08, 2008 from twhirl

Twitter(15): and it's about 'tracking' critical info, from whatever device, location etc. 06:54 PM June 08, 2008 from twhirl

Twitter(16): "Twitter [and alike] set the standard. Now a direct & fierce competition comes into play", Le Corbusier, 1923 09:28 AM June 10, 2008 from twhirl

- Already now, there are dozens of Twttr clones; it made me reckon, once and 4 all, that no one, nothing, will ever rule the entire World. I feel much better towards Google ephemeral dominance now.

http://www.twitter.com/mulikoppel

RebooT/witter: Links are dead and Google will no longer organize the Information of the World

Links are dead

It took me a while to grasp the essence of what this creation called Twitter had turned into – certainly not a service, more likely the virtual consciousness of the entire mankind.

Who'd have thought that in 3 years or so, the RSS Information River would be taken over by "Twitter" - a Galactic Information Pot that has fundamentally changed the infrastructure of producing and consuming Information, just like RSS did at the time.

The Galactic Information Pot and the "Problem of RSS"

"Anything Goes" into the Galactic Pot, a centralized, global Information reservoir – where each bit of information has an ID-tag, thus traceable to its inceptor. The "problem with RSS" (in retrospective, of course) was that random injection of Information all along the river-bands had become too chaotic to manage, distribution-wise. Each individual had to cherry-pick his/her favorite feeds from across the Blogosphere. That's the main changing point now: the entire production of information is no longer to happen by the river sides; from now on, anything we're about to publish should first arrive at the Galactic Pot, and only from there it may recirculate through and into the river.

1. Publish everything and anything to the Twitter Galactic Pot (both man and machines!).
2. Go to Tweet Scan and filter-search for the Information that interests you
3. Subscribe to the filter(s) that you've created

Tweeting Blogject

The physical problem of Google, Technorati and other feed aggregators

In his book Linked: The New Science of Networks, Albert-laszlo Barabasi explains something fundamental about the physical nature of the Internet, which is at the heart of the problem of feed aggregation (again - easy said when contemplating backwards). The Internet, explains Barabasi, is made of physically isolated islands. Yes, there are huge Islands, some of them so huge that they are built of sub-huge hubs and spokes, and yet, it's isolated islands all over the place.

The physically isolated islands are beyond the reach of the indexing robots! The robots are following links and so unless there's a link from one island to another, it is impossible for the Robot to get to the isolated content. It turns out, that ~90% of the internet is unmapped (un-googled!), meaning that the lack of links between the physical network territories is unbridgeable...

To overcome this physical limitation, the information hunters are yearning to have "inside information", i.e. URLs from (or Links to) the isolated areas, so that their Robots would be able to make their way into the Information zone. "add your URL to Google","Ping Us" and other pleadings of that kind are the outcome of this inherently fragmented and isolated nature of the net.

Conclusion 1: If you can't reach them, why not bringing them all in, now that a galactic information pot exists?
Conclusion 2: If this post is played backwards you'll hear Links are dead! (Chapeau, as always, to Steve Gillmor, who's equipped with one of the best pair of glasses around)

The information hunters will lurk wherever there's more possibility to get fresh meat, and fresh meat is rapidly shifting into the Galactic Information Pot. The need for links to get to Information had thus faded away.

Organizing the Information of the World? What for?

After all, we got SEARCH. We no longer need the Information organized. And, ironically, it's none other than Google who showed the world how pointless is it to organize mails (i.e. Information) once they are all residing within a single Pot (like Gmail) equipped with an efficient search engine...

Condensed Civilization/One Spot Shop

It is easy to envisage a parallel mass-migration (to that of Information) of virtual persona from the endless prairies of the Blogosphere into the shrunk, condensed and urbanized area of the Galactic Pot, which is well-equipped with APIs for production/consumption of information, an Aladin-type of an object whose Jini will generate whatever Information we ask for in just a split of a second.

Twitter is or soon will be the shortest way to get to any other point [that's you and me] over the virtual cortex, and in the operational, cost-effective reality we're living in, it will make any other mean of spontaneous information exchange (or marketplace) economically redundant.

Don't cry for Google, though: Organizing the Information of the world has never been their business. It's too passive, don't you think?

The Future of Ideas
The Galactic Information Pot, containing the living consciousness of mankind, can only do with short, thought-length info-pieces. You can't think a whole book, nor can you think a blog post (as pathetically lengthy as this one) – at least you cannot coherently think those lengthy information pieces without the aid of Time. And yet Time is still ranked among all those virtual mediums as Public Enemy#1 and so Twittered coherency will only be achieved by those who will have the Time and passion to trick and tweak the medium.


In the meantime, the fight against any timely obstacle between producers and consumers of Information will continue. Twitter is already ubiquitous and soon enough our thoughts will be encoded and transmitted into the Galactic Pot via some implanted nano-devices. And it is then that Twitter will truly and objectively become the reflection of the entire past, present and future of humanity. Because all the ideas, memories & dreams of what's been so far called mankind will lay there, encoded.


p.s. It's good to be back. Thanks for sticking around.

Neo Everywhere (We Thank You For Your Business)

Jean Baudrillard

Several months ago, I read an essay by David Brin, the Sci-Fi author, titled The Matrix: Tomorrow May Be Different, its main argument being that Neo is far from being the only One: millions of us, maintains Brin, have experienced this eerie sensation about the [hidden] System, and have been patiently waiting ever since for their computer to ask them to follow the white rabbit.

Super heroes or super critics - for Brin both are severely overestimating their uniqueness.

I allow myself some improvisation here, as Brin is not talking about Neo; rather he refers to anyone challenging the rationality and the rightfulness of the System. Any rebel, maintains Brin, is just like any other rebel that has been, that is, that will be - so why rebel? Moreover, the "hidden truth" revealed to the rebel is actually known to everybody (I'll explain why further on), the rebel thus becoming nothing but a sad cliché. And so to avoid such a pathetic state of things, Brin recommends that we'll "turn with confidence and wary optimism toward the future", never looking back.

So where were we wrong? (by "we" I refer to all those lonely riders, freedom fighters, corruption busters individuals, who thought they were alone in their cause). Brin raises the following thesis: in the Western Lands people are continuously going through a certain type of indoctrination, whose mediums are TV series, Hollywood movies, bestsellers novels and other mass-production narratives. Surprisingly, the major part of those narratives have the same set up, with a lonely rider, freedom fighter, corruption buster individual at the heart of their plot.

"In fact, the most persistent and inarguably incessant propaganda campaign, appearing in countless movies, novels, myths and TV shows is suspicion of authority -- often accompanied by its sidekick/partner: tolerance.

Rebels are always the heroes. Conformity is portrayed as worse than death".

And as we've all grown up on those narratives, it is unlikely that You! are the only one to see that the System is corrupted, abusive and merciless. No, we're all sharing this knowledge, and so whenever you cry that the king is naked, you're making a fool of yourself; everybody knows that fact, so shut the fuck up.

I was puzzled... maybe I should really shut up... but

What Brin doesn't really explain is why? Why do all those films, TV shows, novels etc. evolve around this main theme of suspicion of authority?

Jean Baudrillard, the late French philosopher that greatly influenced the creators of the Matrix, provided a very interesting explanation in an interview titled The Matrix Decoded :

Nouvel Observateur: It is rather shocking to see that, henceforth, all American marketing successes, from The Matrix to Madonna’s new album, are presented as critiques of the system which massively promotes them.

Baudrillard: That is exactly what makes our times so oppressive. The system produces negativity in trompe-l’oeil, which is integrated into products of the spectacle just as obsolescence is built into industrial products. It is the most efficient way of incorporating all genuine alternatives. There are no longer external Omega points or any antagonistic means available in order to analyze the world; there is nothing more than a fascinated adhesion.

Imagine Lord Voldemort going around, telling everybody how evil he is; how he broke down his soul into several lovely horcruxes and how those can be found - it would have sucked all the fun out! Harry Potter would have been dead long ago!

"One must understand, however, that the more a system nears perfection, the more it approaches the total accident".

The System produces negativity... integrated into the products... most efficient way of incorporating all genuine alternatives... to avoid total accident.

And to avoid total accidents, the Architect had to reprogram the Matrix:

The pseudo-Freud who speaks at the film’s conclusion puts it well: at a certain moment, we reprogrammed the matrix in order to integrate anomalies into the equation. And you, the resistors, comprise a part of it.

Yes, Neo, you are part of the System, which - like our body - engenders toxins and antidotes, so it could constantly adapt itself and reshape its limits. Criticism is a crucial toxin for the System' survival. All the anti-doctrines are engendered by the ruling doctrine, thus becoming tainted, depleted, Systematized.

It's sad. Brin's right: if you think you're special – you're not; and if you'd like to have a small rebellion, please do! – we thank you for your business.

Smile! You've just been CrowdSourced

If you want a clear-cut demonstration of what's Crowdsourcing and where it can lead us all, then I suggest that you watch Human Computation by Luis von Ahn, a hosted session by Google TechTalks. You will learn [from the 6th minute on] that people of Earth are spending & wasting 9 billion human-processing-hours on playing Solitaire, an outrageously unproductive activity, and that if tricked into playing some other games, such as those created by New Flatland's engineers, von Ahn being one of their most distinguished members, the crowds' idle time could then be harnessed and turned into pure gold, obviously not to the great advantage of the players, but certainly to the benefit of the creators of those alchemy games, which turn human idle time into a rain of golden coins.

Luis von Ahn, an impressive and charismatic lecturer, is behind several of such games. While watching him, I had a growing feeling of uneasiness: the more my awe to this man grew, the more I felt my guts turning inside out. After all, nobody likes feeling that he's nothing but a puppet in a game. What Luis von Ahn provides us with is an astounding example of how money enslaves science, which in its turn, enslaves human beings to satisfy its master.

What von Ahn reveals in his lecture is New Flatland's lack of any sentiment to that being which is human, placing that being on the same level as any other silicon chip, judging that being based on one and only one measure: cost-effectiveness. Von Ahn is continuously amused by his inventions, and by the efficiency of his creations, and for a good reason - they are perfect. And yet, this perfection is a grim example of how New Flatland can [ab]use humans as CPU, taking advantage of both the human weaknesses and the always-on reality in order to harness the crowds into its production lines.

After watching the video, some 9 months ago, I visited von Ahn' site. In the start page there was this picture [thanks to archive.org], which perfectly tells my feelings at the time:


Since then, von Ahn changed disguise, and changed the picture.


But don't get confused by the warm colors and the removal of cynicism, because the machines von Ahn and alike are building (Google is a good example: and see The DNA of the Web(an example of a long tail perfection)) provide us with nothing but an illusion that we're free in our choices, free as in freedom (and in Google's case we should also add free as in free beer). So next time you're out playing in New Flatland, watch your back and remember that you might think that you're doing one thing, while in fact you've been unknowingly crowdsourced into doing several other things to the great advantage of them all.

Smile!

p.s.

I started discussing the dark side of CrowdSourcing just for rating purposes. But there's also a bright side to it, such as Amazon and many other startups, which are providing fair CrowdSourcing services, i.e. no tricks nor hidden goals, and in most cases those who have voluntarily engaged themselves in a CrowdSourcing task are getting paid for their work. My next post, therefore, will be dedicated to the brighter side of CrowdSourcing.

This is the 4th post in the Crowds' series: The birth of a crowds nation, New Flatland, Participate (please!) and Share (please!), Smile! You've just been CrowdSourced

Participate (please!) and Share (please!)

Online Crowds are the elementary components, the infrastructure of New Flatland's business processes. Without the Crowds being online the world remains pretty much round; the short tail remains dominant; marketing has to go through traditional, cumbersome, not-fast-enough channels. It is, therefore, in the deepest interest of all global business2.0 companies that we all become Digital Sobjects, always-on virtual entities that can participate in the business processes of the participation economy.

The concept of Crowds, as demonstrated in The birth of a crowds nation, refers to a collection of unrelated, unbiased, pressure-free individuals. Therefore, the very basic services offered by New Flatland's Corporations are Crowd Creation Services [cc services], which are all having YOU! – the lonely rider, the free-thinking individual – as their target. You! must get converted into the Virtual first, if New Flatland's business processes are about to suck you! into their intestines.

Each one of those Crowds Creation services trade a certain portion of your Identity for a Web2.0 service (have a look at my post The Desert of the Real (Digital Sobjects, part II) for a great map of cc Services by Fred Cavazza). You might be familiar already with the latest hot Crowds Creation service by the name Twitter, used by its subscribers to tell their friends (and the entire world) about their current whereabouts, current deeds etc. It's always fun to see how those who are fighting for their physical-world privacy are willingly and eagerly disclosing any personal fa{c|r}t whenever it comes to the virtual-world, as if the later is not real.

Having said all that, it is not difficult to see how Dave Winer's "Participate", originally a call for involvement by us, pressure-free individuals, in hope to change things around, has been confiscated by New Flatland and became the slogan drawing more and more individuals into New Flatland's ecosystem. Under this perspective, the Time's "You!" [You! Being the man/woman of the year] is nothing but a bait.

You can tell it's a bait, because almost all web2.0 Crowds Creation services are pleading that you'd make one more step, one more "residual" action besides joining their services, and that is to share your data.

Participate (please!) and Share! (please!)

Click to see full size image

There's nothing wrong with sharing your data with friends or the public. Actually, it's almost genetically impossible not to do so once the possibility exists. Nevertheless, it should be understood that Sharing is what transforms an individual into a group-member, a pressure-full component, a formidable and almost helpless recipient of sales pitches and marketing ideas that work mostly on our subconsciousness.

No land in New Flatland should remain private! MySpace? why not! but only as long as it's shared with friends. Real private estates stop the circulation of marketing viruses; they maintain an environment where pressure-free individuals can exist – and that's certainly not helpful for New Flatland's revenue stream.

All New Flatland's Global Corporates benefit, even if indirectly, from Crowds Creation services as they allow for better reputation, better personalization, better higher-level services which are dependent on us being online. In a way, the long tail of web2.0 startups is being [ab]used here for this purpose of building New Flatland's infrastructure, i.e. bringing the crowds online. Those endless web2.0 startups get the dimes of Google's advertising network and a share in the dream of eternal wealth, but for all practical purposes they are nothing but workers in the service of the Hive Queens.

In the next post I'll discuss higher-level business models, such as Crowd Brokerage and Crowd Sourcing. Stay tuned, if you wish.

p.s.

Nothing in what I say should imply that what we see is deliberately constructed so by certain companies or individuals. No company nor individual can bring forth such an amazing matrix. I do feel, though, that there's something in the essence of "doing business" - be it the Capital itself, or any other substance - that creates and evolves this network and assigns certain roles to providers and consumers alike. No company is deliberately evil.

This is the 3rd post in the Crowds' series: The birth of a crowds nation, New Flatland, Participate (please!) and Share (please!), Smile! You've just been CrowdSourced

New Flatland

(This is a sequel to The Birth of a Crowds Nation)

The Crowds are threatening traditional businesses. That's interesting, but not as much as the fact that the crowds exist - online!
The Memes, for their part, are extremely happy with this new situation: humans are coming to them now; the hassle of expanding around the globe in order to locate more human containers is no longer needed. I suspect that Capital, being architecturally if not essentially similar to Memes, has its big time now just the same. Online crowds are good for Businesses, just as they are good for the Memes, and the following three journalists are well known for properly nailing it down.


First is Tom Friedman, the conceptualizer of New Flatland, a flat world of zeros and ones, where space is no longer a factor. Friedman follows the history of those Business Processes that have been migrated into New Flatland, and realizes that they all have become extremely optimizeable, each step within a Business Process lending itself to a never ending improvement, by replacing its internal components with always better, faster, cheaper ones. The nice thing here is that in New Flatland, the cost-effectiveness is no longer categoric or rather dichotomic; it's no longer cheaper manpower for manwork and cheaper machinepower for machine work. Also, it is no longer machine replacing man to gain a better operational bottom line. No, in New Flatland men and machines not only become interchangeable, but in many cases harnessing human beings into the Flatland Business Processes is much more cost-effective (i.e. realistic & rational) than harnessing silicon chips. In New Flatland, than, we're all productive components, judged by our productive capabilities. New Flatland is an operational reality.

Next is Chris Anderson's Longtail. If you think right about crowds you think Big Dime. The Longtail is a unifying concept: there are Longtail customers, Longtail products, and Longtail money (i.e. dimes). But if you can make Longtail people, i.e. Crowds, to work for you, then you really are on the top of the business Ant-Hill. "Humans are not ants", said Surowiecki, but this doesn't imply that they cannot be harnessed into an ant-like processing chain, where they become, voluntarily, the most faithful workers.


But to achieve this you'd better read parts of Malcolm Gladwell's book, The Tipping Point. It explains how certain people are [implicitly] fulfilling key roles in the Capital/Memetic architecture (mavens, connectors, salesmen etc.) which aspires at creating as much Crowds as possible, but only so it could break it down into endless pieces of pressure-groups, each erasing part of the free-will of its members, aligning them with the overt goals of the group. Groups are marketing paradise: they turn individual, pressure-free members of Crowds into herds at the gates of malls.


So what do we have here2.0?

Never-ending cost-effectiveness of global, business processes; Big Dimes and ex-crowds that work for you with or without getting paid, and a formidable - probably the best ever created - viral marketing machinery, functioning at near light-speed, PLUS your customers come to you. All these mean one thing: strange, indeed, are the ways of the Capital.

In the next post I'll discuss three business models that have emerged in New Flatland: Crowd Creation [cc] Services, Crowd Brokerage and CrowdSourcing. Stay tuned, if you will.

This is the 2nd post in the Crowds' series: The birth of a crowds nation, New Flatland, Participate (please!) and Share (please!), Smile! You've just been CrowdSourced

The Birth of a Crowds Nation

In The Wisdom of Crowds, one of those formula books that populate our Zeitgeist, Surowiecki suggests that agents Mulder and Scully were actually right: the truth is, indeed, out there. Moreover, there's a way, although long and cumbersome, to get to that truth, using You! and You! and You! and You! and…You! In other words, the truth is out there, and the out there is no other than - the Crowds.

Through a series of examples, Surowiecki clarifies the concept of Crowds - a large number of uncoordinated individuals expressing their beliefs and/or performing their acts in a pressure-free context. Crowds are not to be mistaken with Groups: while the former conceptually preserves the independence of the individual, the latter destructs and erases any traces of individuality, in favor of a unified group synthesis. Therefore, the outcome of a Group cannot be predetermined; some groups yield excellent results, while many others bring catastrophes, as Surowiecki nicely demonstrates. Crowds, on the other hand, being an unbiased assemblage of independent individuals, will more often than not succeed in understanding reality and in producing successful outcomes - the absolute opposite of what the word crowd usually connotes.

In the Web2.0 era, the internet has become crowded, the Blogosphere being the place where the crowds are hanging around. Individual and uncoordinated blogs, images, videos and podcasts have emerged, seriously challenging the traditional mediums, the traditional media.

“And their attitudes towards newspapers are especially alarming. Only 9 percent describe us as trustworthy, a scant 8 percent find us useful, and only 4 percent of respondents think we’re entertaining. Among major news sources, our beloved newspaper is the least likely to be the preferred choice for local, national or international news going forward. What is happening is, in short, a revolution…”, Rupert Murdoch (before acquiring MySpace).

Wikipedia and Linux are two more flagrant examples of a fantastic uncoordinated achievement that have become a pain in the neck of their traditional counterpart (such as Britannica and proprietary O/Ses). And even the so far protected territories of the heavy lords, i.e. the banking industry, have seen the crowds adopting creative ways to circulate money from an individual to an individual without having the banks as go-betweens, Grameen Bank and Zopa being two examples for such Crowds Banking.

"Grameen Bank has reversed conventional banking practice by removing the need for collateral and created a banking system based on mutual trust, accountability, participation and creativity"

Trust, participation and creativity: the web2.0 equivalent for Liberty, equality, fraternity. Should the old monarchs rest in peace or do something about those Crowds?


(Click the play button twice)

Clearly, businesses can no longer pretend that all is well, and if you read the Cluetrain Manifesto (each revolution should have its manifesto), you'd see that at least from the Crowds' perspective it's the End of Business as Usual. The 95 thesis that open the Manifesto, communicate simple and unequivocal messages, such as:

1. People in networked markets have figured out that they get far better information and support from one another than from vendors.

2. There are no secrets. The networked market knows more than companies do about their own products.

3. In just a few more years, the current homogenized "voice" of business—the sound of mission statements and brochures—will seem as contrived and artificial as the language of the 18th century French court [I am loudly protesting here: "with all due respect", 18th century French court language is better than the "voice" of business in any possible aspect! this article should be rewritten in future editions]

4. Companies that assume online markets are the same markets that used to watch their ads on television are kidding themselves.

In simple words: it's the end of the marketing bullshit, and the end of FUD (Theoretically. In practice, both IBM and Oracle, for example, are still using insulting marketing brochures and even more insulting FUD campaigns. But let's not ruin the good spirit we were getting at...).
It's the beginning of a new era where we have succeeded to emerge as a wise crowd to which the vendors, the corporates, the government - all the controllers - must listen.

The following piece of audio shows how the language has changed to reflect this paradigm shift. It's an excerpt from a Q&A session between Dave Winer and the participants of the BloggerCon IV unconference (unconference is a deconstructed term made up by Winer [probably], indicating "a conference which is not a conference", like Alice's un-birthday. It is the minimal form / format / structure required in order to gather a bunch of uncoordinated, pressure-free individuals: there's no agenda, only a general topic, the agenda being set-up by volunteers on the day of the event. Vendor's reps (i.e. Group's representatives) are naturally banned out (unless, of course, they are willing to become pressure-free individuals again).


Attendee – it's too passive, hence participant, the active individual, daring to know, daring to take part in what had turned to be The Participation Age.

In the next post(s) I'll describe how the Crowds' bone has been removed from the Corporates' throat, to the great satisfaction of everybody involved.

This is the 1st post in the Crowds' series: The birth of a crowds nation, New Flatland, Participate (please!) and Share (please!), Smile! You've just been CrowdSourced

The DNA of the Web (an example of a long tail perfection)

Not long ago I have published a post about the soul of the Internet, where I depicted the Web as a living organism. Now that the digital sphere contains not only objects but also sObjects, the living organism is becoming less of a metaphor and more of a reality. And so it occurred to me that every newborn in this virtual world, i.e. every new web page, could well have some sort of genetic information embedded into it, and that’s how the question of what is the DNA of the Web came up.


I think it is not risky to claim that most of the Web’s newborns (excluding, probably, Virtual China) would soon own a genetic code made by Google. More precisely, it is Mother Google that will give them birth, and so each one of them will necessarily contain the Google DNA – a spirally entangled code that grows adSensors and interactionDetectors, enabling the newborn to speak the adLanguage while reporting to mom about any of its encounters.

Well, I assume that these are no news for most of you. Nevertheless, I do see value in telling an old story that can demonstrate how easily digital sobjects are manipulated, or rather instrumentalized. For Google succeeded in creating a perfect long tail machine where each dot on the tail serves as a surrogate mother for a Google child. These dots are certainly me, who uses most of Google services, and most probably you too.

So how this long tail perfection evolved?

Step 1: A single page

In step 1 all that existed was the Google.com page with a search box. No monetization.

Step 2: Adding some ads

Ads were added to the same single search page. Monetization began.

Step 3: Long Tail#1: Distributed Search

At this stage, ads were presented only at Google.com search page and so Google’ strategy was to drive more and more traffic into the Google.com page.
Long Tail#1 was to convince other sites to include some Google code that generated a Google search box on their pages. Searches in that box were routed to Google.com, and so more ads were presented and clicked. Who did the traffic routing for Google? We did.

Step 3: Long Tail#2: Distributed Ads

A single page – as successful and attractive as it may be – is still a single page. It’s 1 out of an infinite number of web pages that are waiting to be converted into the Google adWorld. It is a limited adSpace vs. an infinite adSpace.
Only this infinite adSpace was owned by us, not by Google, and so Google created a compensation model, an incentive for us to embed Google’s genetic adCode on our site.
Now that’s the second manifestation of a devilish brilliance from Google’s part: if Google wants to expose 1 million ads in a certain day they have two options: exposing all million ads in a single high-traffic site, or one ad at a time across one million niche sites. In the first option Google has to pay the high-traffic site; in the 2nd option, the niche site will see money from Google in a thousand years.
And thus, by selling a dream to the millions of us, Google converted many web pages into the Google DNA.

Step 4: Long Tail#3: Surrogate Mothers

If we take all the web pages on the Internet and embed a Google DNA inside their guts – they will generate roughly the same amount of money month after month. This is impossible for a growth-oriented company, and so the Internet (i.e. adSpace), like the Universe, must expand ad infinitum. Here again Google perfected the long tail principle. They created a reality in which the burden of expanding the Web falls on us, digital sobjects, whereas the entire expansion enterprise is tightly governed by Mother Google, who guarantees that any new web page will carry its DNA from cradle to grave.

Gmail makes part of that Google’s Reality. Gmail is nothing but a nickname for any Google service that generates, out of our utilization, new web pages that carry the Google DNA; only this time there’s no way out.

All Google services are aimed at the infinite expansion of the Web, at the creation of endless poppy fields from which commercial quantities of adSpace are produced. Mother Google succeeded where nobody else did: we have become the farmers, the producers, the pushers and the consumers of our own _____, a damn happy particles in a Google adWorld.

Reality, as told by the Machine (Digital SObjects, part III)

“All media work us over completely”, said Marshall McLuhan, meaning that whenever a new media, a new medium, takes over, the function human= f(medium) returns a different value. Currently, f(medium) defines human as a SObject, a limbo creature, half here in the physical, half there in the virtual.

In the previous Digital SObjects posts I have described an old spec, the memex, interpreted by some top corporations (Microsoft and IBM) as a reason to launch a project with the objective of creating the first, real-time, digi-replicated SObject. I then described how those projects have become, for all practical purposes, obsolete, when the web2.0 social-something turned the digi-replication of the Self into a prominent trait of the participation economy, providing whatever web2.0 store-and-share services that are required for real-time, virtual cloning.

Jamais Cascio, a futurist, takes the memex one step further. So far, we have been discussing the memex from a subjective point of view, i.e. what I see, what I hear, what I produce and so forth. Cascio takes the recording device that each "I" is wearing and redirects it to the outside world. Suddenly, what I see is You. Not only am I digi-replicating myself, but I'm digi-replicating the others too (even those rebels, refusing to wear the memex, will be recorded). I'm digi-replicating the environment in its entirety: every single, tiny, insignificant detail is captured, transferred and stored for good.

Cascio defines this situation with a lovely analogy, saying that this would be a world controlled not by one Big Brother, but rather by millions of little brothers and little sisters… each pointing their recorder on... YOU.

How reality will look like when every object, subject, event or context would have so many real-time copies coming from different recording devices? Cascio affirms what is inevitable: telling lies will become harder; forgetting will become extinct.

But Cascio seems to ignore or to reject the potentially disastrous outcomes of this reality:

With multiple, real-time, digi-replicated sources of the same thing the statistical reliability of the story told by the Machine will be practically irrefutable. Unlike Minority Report, where the machine was based upon an esoteric mutation, the new machine is based on us - "millions of us". Hence, its higher reliability.

Cascio claims that the multiple, different sources of the thing are just like in Rashomon – where anyone tells his/her version and there's a judge to decide from the different alternatives. I disagree. All those sources of digital reality are created and produced by devices, extensions of the Machine, which are accurate, objective and… standardized, the opposite of human memory – that limited, flawed container of ours.

With the correlation of real-time recordings coming form that many standardized, accurate and objective sensors, the machine can filter out anomalies (i.e. stories which are not aligned with the official version, the statistically probable version), thus making Reality nothing but a statistical phenomena.

Reality has gained its probability.

Actually, Kurosawa's Rashomon is the exact antipode of this Reality, with every man/witness having his own flawed memory, creating his own version of reality, confronting the others with his own alternative. Reality maintains its secrets so humans can create their own stories. In the real-time, multi-sources, digi-replicated world, there's no place for human creation; there are no more faults or lies; memory losses are obsolete; forgetting is an unknown word. But a society that cannot forget is a society that cannot remember! It's a total memory loss, and "Memory", says Kurosawa, "is the basis for everything; to create is to remember". (see clip)

The interpretation of the two parts of the memex (Desk, Recorder) is now revealed in its hideous aspects: the memex desk serving as a mean for eradicating human memory by extending it mechanically ad infinitum (extending is a politically correct term; replacing is a more accurate one), while the memex recording device is feeding the desk with real-time, simultaneously parallel recordings, creating a statistical Reality of which the Machine is the sole narrator.

For the time being The Machine is us – but just for as long as the machine needs us to carry around its Reality recorders. One day those recorders will become autonomous enough, capable of moving around, flying up high, going deep into the oceans; the big digital narrator will no longer need its faithful carriers and we will be, so they say, disconnected.

Brains in a Vat; Ghost in the Shell; The Matrix - it's all the same story

This is the 3rd post in the Digital SObjects' series: The Memex Reloaded, The Desert of the Real, Reality, as told by the Machine

Notes:

1. A short analysis of Jamais Cascio's lecture The Participatory Panopticon can be found here. In the comments attached to that post there's a dialogue between Jamais and myself about the nature of this future world.

2. Jamais Cascio's lecture, The Participatory Panopticon, can be downloaded from here.

The Desert of the Real (Digital Sobjects, part II)

In The Memex Reloaded, I have discussed a certain spec (The Memex) and mentioned several of its implementations (such as MyLifeBits) that bring into existence a new kind of human – a Sobject – which is a real-time digi-replication/reflection/representation of a real human. Whatever we sense, whatever we do, whatever we produce, as well as whatever we think is being digi-replicated into a virtual container, labeled with our name.

As for that last activity – thinking – I think that as long as all our actions, senses and productions are digi-replicated in real-time, it doesn’t really matter what "we may think" (as is the title of Bush' spec), because no one gives a ___ about what “I” thinks, as long as “I” behaves, obeys or, using the web2.0 lingua franca, participates accordingly.

Surprisingly, though, we do care about what we think and we do feel like sharing our thoughts with others. We are willingly opening up our thoughts to the world through blogging, podcasting, videocasting etc., subjecting ourselves to the social pressure of becoming transparent. In other words, we are digi-replicating our thoughts, by ourselves, in order to become…

Real. We’re doing it because everything which is real happens now over there in the virtual-o-sphere. If I ain’t digi-replicated then, soon enough, I won’t be able to participate, and consequently I’d be left alone, an insignificant individual in the desert of the real, as Baudrillard once said and Morpheus echoed afterwards (see notes).

Which is why we’re not waiting for Micosoft’s MyLifeBits project to come to an end: we’re using whatever means available to us already today in order to digi-replicate any possible aspect of our Self, using digital devices to record our activities and digital services to store-then-share the produced artifacts.

Here’s a map by Fred Cavazza, a very good web2.0 mediator, where we can see all those web2.0 services into which we divide, classify then digi-replicate our “Self”.



Let’s stop here, by this point where the common sense tells us that this digi-replication of ourselves into SObjects is an inevitable process; that it is cool – it allows us to participate; that there’s nothing wrong with it – we’re doing it for ourselves, by ourselves. Let’s stop here and take a break.

A short commercial and we’re back.


This is the 2nd post in the Digital SObjects' series: The Memex Reloaded, The Desert of the Real, Reality, as told by the Machine


Notes:

1. Jean Baudrillard is known for his theory of the hyperreality, and more recently that of the Integral Reality. He maintains that the apocalypse is not a future event, but rather our present; “it is happening now!”.
2. I don’t pretend to understand Baudrillard, or to know his theory – I’m just borrowing his metaphors. Baudrillard has produced some great such quoteables, “the Desert of the Real” being one that is extensively reused, including in the Matrix, which is full of Baudrillardism, where Morpheus is showing Neo to the “real” world, that which remained after “The Bomb”: “Welcome to desert of the real” Morpheus thus spoke.
3. Baudrillard is also known for maintaining that marketing has replaced philosophy, and that ads are not representing goods but rather themselves. He envisioned a day where ads would compete one against each other, and this is indeed happening now in Google’s ad placement bidding process.
4. In another post of mine, “Organizing the Information of the World”, I quote Dan Farber who said in a podcast of the Gillmor Gang that Google, along with the other moguls, wants to turn us into a Google Person, a molecule, I'd say, in the genetics of an ad/World.

The Memex Reloaded (Digital SObjects part I)

What will happen when our digitization process will come to an absolute perfection, with our virtual representation capable of providing a real-time information about what we see, hear, feel, think, read, write, say, do, receive, give, and take; our blood pressure, heart beat, actually any biometric info, plus our exact geo location, the simulation of our movements and anything else you may think of? What will happen when this information will be stored for good, never deleted, always accessible?

You might instinctively react to these questions by bringing up “privacy concerns”, but then you’d be missing the whole point, because the issue here is neither privacy, nor government control; rather it’s our future as human beings which is at stake. But before going deeper and trying to answer those questions – some background is necessary.

(The following is not a description of the Memex)

In 1945 a SPECer named Dr. Vannevar Bush published a blueprint for our future in two different magazines The Atlantic and Life. A minor text, probably, certainly not a lengthy one, and still its impact, when considered in retrospect, has been impressive.

It’s easy to show how “As We May Think” - that’s the name Bush gave to his spec - influenced the creation of the Personal Computer, the World Wide Web, Speech-to-Text technologies, Web2.0 social networks, Wikipedia, the Semantic Web and even… del.icio.us. You can see most of it mentioned in the Wikipedia entry dedicated to the spec.

Dr. Bush assessed that science is not progressing fast enough because scientists were lacking the tools to process, share and accumulate that impossible quantity of information. He concluded that the imperfect human memory could do with the aid of an extra Intelligent Memory that would help it out with those tasks of processing, storing, and sharing the ever increasing amount of information.

Bush called his solution Memex – which stands for Memory Extension (considering its impact, Meme Xplosion would do just fine). It consists of a Desk (#1) and a Personal Recorder (#2). The Desk contains all possible pieces of information linked one to another, as well as the required mechanism to retrieve it in a brain-like fashion (here Bush describes what I interpret as a del.icio.us style of information tagging for the purpose of fast, associative retrieval).


And so the Memex Desk turned into a PC, then into the Hypertext Web, but not before turning into an Apple concept movie – the Knowledge Navigator (see the clip hereafter) – which inspired the early MAC designs, which inspired Neal Stephenson to create the virtual world of Snow Crash (as stated in the book’s appendix), which inspired the Linden Labs guys to create Second Life, which inspired many current scientists to work on “real” avatars and “real” in-world representations, i.e. avatars that look exactly like human beings and a world that looks exactly like a real world – living in a movie (GA is expected within 5 years), and that inspired DARPA and other agencies to develop special glasses that transmits, in real-time, biometric information from the physical body to the avatar over there, so that the avatar will look happy or sad, stressed or relaxed, reflecting the same movements his operator is doing here, on Earth (already available from Q). And even if all the above is plain junk, bear with me still for a little more of this great stuff.


Apple Knowledge Navigator (Late 80s')

Because now that the Desk part of the Memex turned into a World Wide Web, proving itself to be an attractive and successful spec, we should rather pay close attention to the other part – that of the Memex Recorder. Who knows what this device holds for our future?

The Memex Recorder is a personal device, attached to the human head, capable of recording what the eyes see, and if pushed just a bit further – well, we can imagine the Memex Recorder taking records of anything we speak or hear.

Today’s Memex Recorder is, undoubtedly, the multi-modal mobile device. But how will it look like in the future? Will it remain in its current mobile case? I hope you’re not naïve enough to think so. Clearly, we should expect to have it implanted in our body in the near future and if you don’t believe – well – that’s why visual meme trackers exist.


The first meme tracker is the cult French film, La Jetée (1967), a photo-roman by Chris Marker. In the film, which deals with time-travel, people from the future are having a Memex Recorder encrusted into their front.
The Matrix, both a meme tracker and a SPEC in its own right, presents again the Memex Recorder as a device encrusted into the human skull. Finally, have a look at Anina – the Mobile Queen – and see where she wants her mobile to be implanted :-).

Let’s conclude with some serious stuff: Microsoft and IBM. In the late 90s’ Microsoft’s Research Labs have launched a project called “MyLifeBits", with a charter that explicitly stated the following:

"MyLifeBits is a project to fulfill the Memex vision first posited by Vannevar Bush in 1945. It is a system for storing all of one’s digital media, including documents, images, sounds, and videos".

Next Microsoft added “Telephone calls, more video, all web pages visited, usage logging, radio, TV…”
Next they added sensory data (2003); next they added IBM’s Almaden Research Center (2005).

That’s for now. In my next post I’ll go back to those questions presented in the beginning of this post. Yet as a teaser, here's an image taken from Microsoft's presentation of their MyLifeBits project: it tells everything.



This is the 1st post in the Digital SObjects' series: The Memex Reloaded, The Desert of the Real, Reality, as told by the Machine

SPECers (or how Second Life was created)

"The past is never dead. It's not even past.", Faulkner

When my daughter asked me how Second Life has been created in the first place, I instinctively had those neurons of Philip Rosedale, Linden Lab and Startup firing up, a sketch of a story being already under construction. But then some uninvited images burst into the scene, depicting some strange submarines, black-and-white spaceships, illustrated helicopters and the face of a known children books' author, and so I ended up telling my daughter a completely different story.

"Do you remember those Jules Verne's books you've read?" I asked her. She hesitated a bit, then said "Five weeks in a balloon? Captain Nemo?"
"Exactly", I said. "Now, you know that when Jules Verne wrote about Nemo, balloons and spaceships to the moon none of that actually existed. But when his books got published thousands of children from all around the world read them, enjoyed the stories and retained their images. Some of them grew up and became scientists, probably just because they had an implicit desire to realize those childhood's memories of a submarine, a spaceship or a balloon".

“And?” asked my daughter.
“And… they built those submarines and spaceships! Yet here's what I want you to see – they've built those machines exactly in the spirit of their fictional designer, as if once Jules Verne described a submarine, no one could come out and say Hey – I've just finished building a submarine, unless it had the look and feel of what Verne had described".

“I still don't see how all that is related to Second Life?” she said.
"I’m coming to that. But even before – do you know how do we call those people today? Jules Verne, Leonardo da Vinci and all those authors and artists who’ve described artifacts that didn’t exist at their time?"
“No”, she said, “How?”
“We call them prophets. We say that they predicted the creation of those things. But I think it’s a wrong description of their capabilities. They were much more than passive visionaries; they were actively designing our future, providing us with a specification and a blueprint. And because those blueprints were so fascinating, vivid and exciting, some people decided to realize them, and in exactly the same spirit suggested by the blueprint's designer”

“Dad”, she said, “I lost you long ago. If you don't get to the point now - then... forget about my question".
"But that's it - we're there. You see, just like Verne, there is an author named Neal Stephenson who wrote a novel by the name of Snow Crash - first novel I'll give you once your English is good enough. And in this book, Stephenson is actually providing a spec, a blueprint for Second Life describing not just the platform, but also how people interact with it through their avatars and some other spacial equipment; the way cool/nerd avatars look, their clothing, their movements; the social classes that get developed around in-world programming skills - and so forth. And this book, which was published in the early 90's was probably read by some guys and girls who decided to make it real, to realize the spec. And that's, I believe, how Second Life was created in the first place".

My daughter liked it. She was probably thinking about her future as a spec implementer, fantasizing the re-engineering of Willy Wonka's chocolate factory, having a dream-world in black, brown and white just for herself (and probably also for some of her secret best friends).

And just to make sure that she got the idea, I also showed her:

1. The Catalog of Nautilus Desgins - which is a historical collection of Nautilus models made by designers who have re-engineered Verne's specification. Our modern submarine looks familiar...
2. Phillip Torrone's Flickr set presenting a Gargoyle's design (In Snow Crash, Gargoyles are always-on humans, wearing special information processing clothes, goggles etc.)
3. The Matrix – one of the specs of our future. But that would already be my next post.


Q: This is a deterministic description of reality, of evolution: a SPECer designs and future generations implement. Where’s the free will? Where’s randomness?
A: Not all designs are implemented. Each design is a potential and only few get realized. Why certain designs are picked by a certain generation – is it the free will of individuals, the free will of a society or sheer randomness - I don’t know.

Q: What is our role in the story?
A: I think we have two critical roles:
1. Picking and implementing the right designs
2. Designing for the future

Q: What’s a “Right” design?
A: I don’t know.

Why the Web2.0 Revolution has failed (and how to identify other failed revolutions)

My thesis, as presented herewith, is that the web2.0 revolution has failed; that we’re currently living, not the revolution, but the counter-revolution; that unlike what we've been constantly told, no essential power has been transmitted to the people, but rather old forms of power have reshaped and refurbished themselves.

Back in 2005, when I first placed my legs on the itinerary2.0 I had an immediate intuition about the dangers lurking on the sideways, feeling the power by which socially-generated consent was capable of altering my perceptions, my ego, dragging me into a discourse and actions which were not mine.

Two years later, I think that I’m capable of formulating this initially blurred intuition, having collected some more perspectives and few other metaphors.

My thesis will have the following structure: I’ll start by describing the current beliefs and why I think they can be qualified as false consciousness. I will then present the idea that a revolution fails once it has been the subject of a nomenclatural process, i.e. that it has been given a name; I’ll continue by describing the counter-revolution process which is based on "trivialization through commercialization" and finally I'll give three demonstrative examples: Free Software, Punk and Second Life.

A warning, though: This is a blog post! Hence, it will be short, unproven, and deliberately shallow: it is a teaser and nothing more. Also, this is literature - not science!



You are aware, of course, of the revolutionary spirit, that "power to the people", which is the logo, I'd say, of the entire Web2.0 revolution. The destruction of the old institutions – the old media, the old businesses, the old academia, the old everything – and the construction of the “User-generated content (media), the Long Tail (business), the Wikipedia (Academia/Knowledge) and so forth, briefly, the recreation of a virtual spatio-temporal system which belongs to us, people, and where WE crown our “top popular” kings, we – and not some suited oligarchs of the old regimes.

Thing is, that’s too good of a story. We live as if the revolution succeeded, as if we’re in control, as if the old monarchs have been indeed decapitated; but that’s an illusion. Old monarchs never die. And the institutions – they will never ever get voluntarily out of the way. No one is renouncing power, unless forced to, and if necessity demands adaptation, then old monarchs adapt.

I don’t deny that the web2.0 revolution did happen; that the Cluetrain Manifesto has changed some perspectives; that Steve Gillmor has slaughtered many sacred cows; that Richard Stallman changed the world of software and so forth – the list of great people is long. My only take is that the revolution didn’t succeed.

When did it fail?

The web2.0 revolution failed on that same day when Tim O’Reilly publicly baptized it as “Web2.0”.

On the day that Tim O’Reilly gave the name Web2.0 to what has been till then an undefined yet concrete uprising; on the day when the nomenclatural process took place and Web2.0 as a public concept was born, on that same day the revolution has been institutionalized, has been confiscated by the old regimes, the rebels hideout being fully discovered, then destroyed.

You might wonder how the heck the simple naming of things makes them die out. The explanation is simple: rebels need a hideout, and ideological rebels have to have their ideological hideouts just the same. The institutions are constantly scanning their territories in search for unknown ideologies. When they discover such, they map it by giving it a name. That’s the nomenclatural process. The next thing is to eradicate this newly identified, classified, tagged, named ideology. The way democratic institutions do that, is not by using force, but rather by turning this ideology into a depeche mode, i.e. a trend. They commercialize the ideology, and by that they neutralize its explosive potential.

Rebels, once identified, are moving on to another yet unmapped territory. I assume that an alternative to web2.0 is currently under construction, somewhere, someplace.
Also, rebels don’t seek to properly and accurately label themselves. Therefore, those new buzzwords we’re exposed to with every passing day - Web3.0, SOA2.0, and so forth – are nothing but the continuous efforts of the institutions to capture the elusive essence of those revolutionary alternatives, so that they will be able to quickly tame them for their needs. In other words, there’s an alternative CTU working constantly against ideological trouble-makers using the following process: identify through naming; trivialize through commercialization.

An example of this name-then-commercialize process is the Free Software Foundation – a revolutionary movement that promoted Free Society through Free Software. The institutionalization of their uneconomical/unpleasant ideas was by naming it Open Source, and then identifying it with a way to “increase productivity” (and see more details in Trust, in a world built in code). Today we even got the concept of commercial open source – which is, if you’d ask Stallman, a great example for what an Oxymoron is. As you might know, Richard Stallman, who’s been named the father of open source by those institutions (thus sterilizing his detonative power) is a great opponent to the Open Source movement and its commercial, productive, bourgeois credo.

Another example I am quite fond of is that of Punk.

The first Punks were not Punks – they were rebels. They revolted against their current regime by going against its conventional aesthetics, that which is identified with the Right and the Beautiful. Mohawks, tattoos, piercing, vomit, sex and drugs and Rock’n’Roll: it’s all a blow in the regime’s life-style aesthetics.
But then they were labeled Punk. And next thing you know, any teenager was shaving his/her head, piercing his/her nipple and having a conventional tattoo, preferably a small butterfly on the shoulder or just above the buttock. This has become “Très à la mode”, the revolutionary essence being flashed down.

Second Life is my third case. Originally used as an unknown, uncontrolled territory, a paradise for outsiders, Second Life has been identified, classified, tagged, blogged about, mapped (with Google maps) and then commercialized. It’s an amazing example of the trivialization process previously described, with the old institutions confiscating this country to their own commercial purposes. If you play this game now, you’re playing their game. I can only assume that the original citizens of Second Life have long packed their virtual luggage, and left this country in the search for a yet unmapped zone.

Wrap-Up

Tim O'Reilly has told the story of how the name "web2.0" was coined in a brainstorming that tried to capture the essence of the different, apparently unrelated web phenomena that existed at that time. They finally came out with something and gave it the name of Web2.0. This is a description of a trivial process that happens anywhere, anytime.
And still, one cannot deny the effect this simple naming had on the entire tech industry, and consequently on us all. This simple naming changed our reality. And what happened next? next came the web2.0 gold rush.
Imagine neither Tim O'Reilly nor anyone else would have come out with a name for those disparate phenomena. Would the world be different? I'd like to think that probably we could really have had our own revolution.

What kind of business? (The Google-Y.T. spectrum)

While speaking to one of my friendly customers I had this image of Google and Y.T. We were talking about FSTR and the acceleration of just about everything, about Real-Time and about how many are left behind, incapable of keeping up with this ever increasing speed. As my friendly customer put it, only few can drive a 300 km/h racing car. It’s true for both people and businesses.

Google’s definitely keeping up with that speed. Microsoft got the resources to keep up for a while longer. But you and me, the ungoogles of the virtual world – how can we keep up to that speed? Can we become the next Google? Should we become the next Google? And at that point in our conversation Y.T. burst in.

Y.T. [yours truly], Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash heroine, is a 15 years old girl, who can make it to every point on earth at the speed of light. And she’s doing it with her skateboard, ultra sophisticated, state-of-the art skateboard, and yet – it’s a skateboard, not a Ferrari.

Y.T.’s a wave-catcher. While on the road on top of her skateboard she poons (Stephenson’s word) the back of the fastest car going her direction, and if a faster one comes by, she re-poons herself onto that one (think of Spiderman firing his sticky webs at a passing car). So Y.T.’s keeping up the speed at a very, very low cost by reusing the high velocity and the energy of the others.











Y.T.'s definitely agile; no sacred cows (nor cars) – as long as you’re going her way. Yet this agility requires an excellent playing skills. You must be the best in almost everything: the best in the reconstruction of psychological and physical environment; the best in market analysis; the best in far-seeing and in the identification of the best poonable mogul on the road; the best equipped with life-saving apparatus; finally, having the best nervous system and the best sense & respond instincts around.

You must have all of that or otherwise it’s a “total face retread”.

My Name is Klein, Yves Klein (International Klein Bond)

On Wednesday morning, while at Fnac, a small book caught my attention. I picked it up. It said "Yves Klein, L'aventure monochrome". On the cover, a suited man was walking straight ahead, his eyes staring at me. Behind the man there was a white and empty background. His walking triggered a vague and undefined association, as if I knew him from somewhere. I went through the first pages – it looked interesting – but then I left the book and moved on.


On that same evening, I visited Centre Georges Pompidou. Surprisingly, the current exposition was of no other than Yves, Le Monochrome.This was one of the best expositions I've seen in years; probably - the best I have ever seen.

Klein is a master of the Medium, of the Form: Monochrome (Colors), Monotone (Sounds), Writing: Preface without a Text (=pure form), Still Images, Moving Images etc. As such, he speaks directly to our Zeitgeist, that which is obsessed with the (plat)Form, with the Plat(o)form.

But when I asked my friend Iphigenia, who's a curator, "why now?", she said that my question was off-place: Klein succeeded so well in creating his myth (I assume that his unexpected death from heart attack at the age of 34 was helpful too) that he has never stopped being relevant. In other words, Klein always speaks directly to the current Zeitgeist.

Klein: “The painter has only to create one masterpiece, himself, constantly”.

Back to my initial, unclear, vague, undefined sensation of familiarity with this man: after visiting the exhibition and seeing the paintings, the pictures, the texts and the many films that Klein directed, where he is seen working in his studio with his models - well, after seeing all that I understood why I thought I've met him before.

Yves Klein is Sean Connery, is James Bond; James Bond is Yves Klein. I don't know much about this juxtaposition; the details I currently have are only that Dr. No, the first in the Bond series, was released on the same year that Klein died, 1962, and that Goldfinger (1964) is full of Kleinicisme.

So without further ado - "International Klein Bond", an annotated collage-homage to Klein, Yves Klein.

(To see high resolution pictures, click on each picture, then click again on the "All Sizes" icon which is located just above the picture)

International Klein Bond

IKB05 is a juxtaposition of three Klein's Monochromes - the Gold, the Blue and the Rose, which are the fundamental colors in Klein’s theory of matter. Whatever changes is fire, and the fire consists of three distinguished colors: Gold, Blue and Rose.
The poster of Dr. No (1962), the first Bond film, shows Bond and his women, all in monochromes, and not just any monochromes but Klein’s Gold, Blue and Rose.


Klein was always surrounded by women – "the model that loved me". He used his models as a human paint brush. They loved him to the point that one model said that she would die knowing that a part of her would remain in one of Klein’s paintings.


Gold, Fire, Goldfinger. Klein created his fire paintings using a huge gas gun. He first positioned a model in front of a large canvas. He water-sprayed her body and its surrounding, and then shoot the fire gun until the contours of the model’s body became apparent. In IKB09 we can see Klein's Gold and the traces of the model's body, in juxtaposition with the poster of Goldfinger (1964).


In IKB75 we see Klein in action. As mentioned earlier, Klein was actively creating his own myth, filming himself working in his studio, always extremely well dressed, with a black suit and everything.
Here Klein is painting/shooting with fire using a magnum gas gun. In Goldfinger, the symbol of the magnum gun is omnipresent in the form of a huge, vicious laser gun.


This is Klein’s autograph - his famous picture. Jumping from the balcony of his apartment to the void beneath. On the right, a picture of a James Bond' stunt performing the jump into the void.


In IKB93 Klein's Anthropometry is presented, i.e. the usage of the body as a living, organic paint brush. In many of his films Klein is seen spreading paint and water over the bodies of his models. Anthropometry is also one of Goldfinger's prominent symbols, with Jill Masterson's dead body painted in gold.


"Since Dr. No, each film has begun with what is known as the James Bond gun barrel sequence, which introduces Agent 007. Appearing to be filmed through a rifled gun barrel, as if from a bullet's perspective, the scene is a side-on view of Bond walking, then quickly turning and shooting.", James Bond, Wikipedia


In IKB119 another great coincidence. While searching for Sean Connery's pictures, a strange result appeared: a Klein’s Blue with the title: Sir Sean Connery.



I can go on with it, but I rather stop now. I'm not sure that Paris is well worth a Mass, but I'm convinced that Yves Klein is worth the visit.

Aristotle and the Soul of the Internet

I remember my fascination while reading Barabasi's Linked: The New Science of Networks and learning that the physical architecture of the Internet (scale-free networks) is similar to that of an organic system. I bring this up because with every passing day the distinctions between the man and the machine, the organic and the mechanic, are getting blurred, to the point that some are asking when will the Internet wake up.

Being a layman, I am not equipped with the scientific tools to seriously answer this question, but on the other hand, being a layman allows me to share with you some unserious thoughts about Aristotle and the Soul of the Internet. I think that Aristotle gives us some definitions that can help us understand why we have this eerie sensation that the Internet is live and kicking.

Aristotle, a GrEEK Philosopher

Aristotle determines what an organic living object is using the following criteria:

a. Growth, nutrition, (reproduction)
b. Autonomous Locomotion (i.e. auto-generated movement in space)
c. Perception
d. Intellect (= thought)

Using these four criteria, Aristotle creates a hierarchy of souls, as follow:

a. Nutritive soul (plants), which complies only with A above, i.e. Nutrition
b. Sensitive soul (all animals), which complies with A, B and C above
c. Rational soul (human beings), which complies with all of the above.

Pretty straight forward, I would say.

Now, what I'd like to show is that these Aristotelian criteria reinforce and probably explain the feelings we're having about the Internet, Asimov's Robot and other cyborgs. I will do so by referring to that system's architecture known as scale-out.

Scale-Out Architecture

Scale-out is an architecture used more and more in those cases where computer systems are required to scale ad-infinitum in order to sustain an unknown yet massive amount of online users. Amazon, eBay, Google etc. are all companies specializing in both the deployment and the optimization of scale-out architecture. Many large enterprises are employing this kind of architecture as well, and a whole new field, known as Utility Computing, has been created in order to formalize and productize the scale-out principles.

The following conceptual components and processes make part of the scale-out architecture:

The Brain (or mind, or manager, or controller)

The Brain constantly senses (or monitors) the system's environment: how many users are currently on-line? What is the overall CPU consumption of the system? What is the status of each of the hardware/software components that make the system? and so on. This function of the brain adheres to Aristotle's criterion C: perception.

The Brain performs real-time compilation of all this sensual data and meditates about the current state of things. In case a faulty situation is either identified or anticipated, the Brain reacts by self-adapting itself to the newly created situation. To better visualize this adaptation process, I will use the following scenario:

A given system consists of 4 servers, an application that runs on them etc. The Brain identifies a dangerous increase in users' load – something that can be solved by adding a fifth server. The brain then launches some dynamic, self-healing/self-nutrition processes that take a bare metal – a hardware-only box – attache it to storage and network devices, install the required operating system and applications and finally make the server fully operational.

We have just witnessed two Aristotelian criteria in motion:

Criterion A: Nutrition, Self-feeding and reproduction

The system just "ate" an external bare metal, digested it and turned it into an integral part of its organs. In many cases, what the system is actually doing is cloning itself into the new server – clearly, a reproduction process.

Criterion B: Autonomous locomotion - movement in space

The system now occupies five servers. It occupies more physical space than it has occupied a minute before. In that sense it demonstrated movement in physical space.
Needless to say, all these operations occur without any human intervention. They are completely autonomous. Hence, we can say that the system has performed all these actions voluntarily, autonomously.

We have successfully :-) demonstrated Criterion A, B, C. I would argue that the Brain and the algorithms inside it could well be seen as thought, i.e. Criterion D. But regardless of this last criterion, I think we can agree that Aristotle could live with the statement that The Internet has a soul.

Q.E.D.

Even Agent Smith Gets The Blues
Copyright ©2005, Eugene Donohoe

Fanedited By Marcel Duchamp

"A fan edit is a version of a film modified by a viewer, that removes, reorders, or adds material in order to create a new interpretation of the film. This includes the removal of scenes or dialog, replacement of audio and/or visual elements, and adding material from sources such as deleted scenes or even other films", from Fanedited.org

Choosing Your Goggles: Ruby or Perl, Python or Rails

Choosing Your Goggles

Matz (Ruby), Larry Wall (Perl) , Guido van Rossum (Python) , DHH (Rails)

While listening to Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto, the creator of Ruby, I realized that the process of selecting a programming language has a brand new and highly important step, more important even than downloading the tutorials and experiencing with some sporadic scripting. This essential step is listening to the language's creator talking about his creation.

And why is that so important?

Because languages are far more than just tools; they are the operating systems of our thoughts, with each language forcing a different view of the world and allowing different thought processes to take place. While "language=reality" is an "old" idea in the natural languages realm it still got only loose associations to artificial and synthetic languages. But as our current era formidably proves (see notes), artificial languages, standards, and even tags, can and should be seen as Goggles that force a certain perception of reality.

Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto asserts in his talk that "language influences human thoughts more than you think. The important question is - do programming languages influence human thoughts as well?"

Assuming they do, it should be evident that listening to the programming language's creator, before opting in and using his/her language, is a necessity. Any language creator should be rightly viewed as a sociologist or as a philosopher, aspiring at the creation of a different world to live in. As potential residents of this new world, we must be aware of its credo.

So I listened to four language creators - Matz (Ruby), Larry Wall (Perl), Guido van Rossum (Python) and David Heinemeier Hansson, aka DHH (Rails) - in an attempt to figure out what do these creators actually want; how do they see their world and, more importantly, what role do they envision for their residents, i.e. the programmers: what are their rights and what are their duties; what is the degree of freedom and so forth.

The following is a summary of my personal impressions, whose value to others is questionable. Nevertheless, I think that the process described hereafter is meaningful and highly important.

Ruby

Matz has a lovely personality. It's not that common, so this is a huge plus already. On the theoretical level, Matz is emphasizing what I call Simplexity: doing complex things the simple way.

Simplexity is, imho, an extremely important trait, as it acknowledges the existence of complexity rather than sweeping it under the carpet. Google is a great example of simplexity (and not of simplicity), providing a simple access to the complex information of the world. SOA is another great example for Simplexity, but this you already know.

I enjoyed getting to know the spirit of Ruby through Matz and his "Ruby Design Principles" talk. I feel that the Ruby world is human, realistic, cautious, helpful and... with a sense of humor. I'm in.

Perl

Larry Wall is a challenging intellectual. His talk, titled "Perl A to Z", works simultaneously on three parallel layers: the linguistic layer, where pragmatics (a linguistic theory) plays a major part; the philosophical layer, where post-modernism is used to explain different human, social and Perl-related behaviors; and lastly, the Perl language itself, which is used as a use case layer for the other two tracks. It's a challenging but fascinating talk.

As a true post-modernist, Wall believes not only in the paradoxical co-existence of usually contradicting forces (such as early and late binding), but also in the fragility and ephemeral essence of the entire "Perl world", when confronted with other language worlds, or point of views. From this inherent, post-modern fragility, comes a very interesting approach to future development of the Perl language. New versions of Perl do not seek to solve new technological challenges; rather their aim is to make Perl... survive. "I'm just trying to make Perl survive the next asteroid or plague", says Wall, in what I believe to be an existential position, rather than an opportunistic one.

It was only natural to re-encounter the concept of simplexity in Wall's talk, because Complexity, just like any other unclear, blurred, error prone and imperfect idea, should have its own legitimate space in the world. And if you keep on reading, you'll see that there are others who reject this approach.

As it turned out, I have been using Perl for more than a decade now so it would be just fair to suppose that… I'm in.

Python

I wanted to learn Python since a friend of mine, who's a brilliant programmer, praised its clean, aesthetic, and robust features. He simply adores Python. I also know that Google is using Python quite extensively, and that Joel Spolsky thinks that Python has crossed the chasm. Briefly - high expectations.

But, the higher are the expectations, the greater is the disappointment. In his talk "Building an Open Source Project and Community", Guido van Rossum sounds like a crafted toolsmith that happened to have created an optimized version of other language worlds. OK, so? The only design-related information is heard in the beginning of the 2nd hour (!) and it is related to a Python's fans t-shirt that says on its back "There's only one way to do it", a contra to Perl's "There's more than one way to do it". Geeks' humor, I suppose.

As I couldn't figure out why Python has been created, I decided to leave it aside, until it would become clearer. So in the meantime, I'm out.

Rails

After listening to David Heinemeier Hansson's "Happy Programming and Sustainable Productivity with Ruby on Rails" I decided to never pursue any relations with Rails, because as crazy as this may sounds, I feel that there is a dark and totalitarian ideology behind and around this language (this might even be too much of a credit, as I suspect the whole Rails thing is nothing but a marketing scheme). Here's why:

The common sense and experience show us that every society develops a set of practices to cope with different aspects of life. As life goes on, these practices evolve, get modified, get fortified. This is true to societies as well as to programming language communities. Best practices evolve in every community to solve the problems at stake.

Now often these best practices are wrapped and packaged into ready-made memes, laws, processes, or libraries. This packaging is a common practice as well. There's nothing special here (to echo DHH's motto).

Rails sounds to me like another best practice, aimed at optimizing the development of web applications. There's nothing special here, and yet for one reason or another, Rails wants to be special. And for that reason, I think, an ideology and a system of beliefs have been established, exalting the pre-packaged best practice to the status of a Platonic ideal, or as DHH puts it: Rails is the Angel; it is Right, Beautiful, Clean, and Pure.

When these words are constantly, repeatedly and insistently used, there's clearly no place for the imperfect, for the one with the flaws. DHH explicitly identifies those fallen from grace with the devil, thus explicitly labeling any "other" world as evil, wrong, ugly, dirty and impure. I dare say that this is a linguistic racism.
If you think that these are "cool", harmless wordings, or that I'm seriously lacking a sense of humor, then you lack a sense of history and you are dangerously underestimating the power of words.

And then there's this sentence that sends back the entire talk, on direct rails, to the past: after killing flexibility (i.e. freedom) asserting that it is overrated, DHH says that conventions are constraints and that constraints are liberating.

Probably I'm over-sensitive here, so I'll just say, "no thanks; not my cup of tea".

The Shows:

1. Matz: Ruby Design Principles
2. Larry Wall: Perl A to Z
3. Guido van Rossum: Building an Open Source Project and Community, part 1, Building an Open Source Project and Community, part 2
4. David Heinemeier Hansson: Happy Programming and Sustainable Productivity with Ruby on Rails

Notes:

1. On Tags as Goggles: you can listen to Clay Shirky's talk titled Ontology is Overrated, and read my commentary to have a better overview of the existential power of tags.
2. On standards and Goggles: the standards (conventions...) of the past have been deconstructed and reconstructed as small group and sometimes individual artifacts, that represent a viewpoint on reality. The best case to demonstrate this take is Dave Winer's RSS. A one-man, against the grain, unconventional wisdom, that changed our world.

The SOA Horror Picture Show

Quote:

CIO Today, October 24th, 2006:

"In its second service-oriented architecture blitz of the year, IBM has detailed a range of products and services aimed at helping companies (mk) extend their service-oriented architecture deployments.

Six months ago, IBM released 11 new SOA products, 20 product upgrades and eight new service offerings. This time around, IBM delivered four new products, 23 product upgrades and 11 new service offerings".

End Quote.

When I first read these paragraphs my brain panicked. I suspected it was a modern mutation of the decade old "Snow Crash" virus, this time aimed at damaging the already distorted brain of SOA architects. But a colleague of mine thought it was nothing but a harmless, hilarious joke, better than The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Spinal Tap combined!

25 years of absolute pleasure

To bypass this disagreement, where one is convinced that the announcement is a virus and another thinks it's a joke, we agreed to undress the message from its wordings and to stick to the naked figures:

IBM SOA Portfolio, Q1-2006:

No. of existing SOA Products: 20
No. of new SOA Products: 11

Total SOA products, Q1 2006 : 31

No. of existing SOA service offerings: unknown
No. of new SOA service offerings: 8

IBM SOA Portfolio additions, Q4-2006:

No. of new SOA products: 4
No. of new SOA service offerings: 11

Totals:

SOA products by IBM: 31 (Q1'06) + 4 (Q4'06) = 35
SOA service offerings by IBM = 8 (+?, Q1'06) +11 (Q4'06) = 19

Conclusion:

It's a viral joke. '25 years of absolute pleasure' guaranteed.

Desktop Regions: The Real My Space

Desktop Regions, by Dibau Naum H, is a thematic flickr set that caught my attention a while ago, but it's only recently that I figured out what does it mean for me. It's a human-centric, multi-layered work that captures three different worlds and two competing desires. I think of it as a Web2.0 Schizophrenia.

The following is my personal interpretation of this interesting work.

Iceland Region 10

Desktop Regions is a personal, private and introverted version of a metaverse. It's a world that exists only inside a single, personal computer desktop (i.e. there's one and only one instance of this world, inside one and only one personal computer – Dibau's computer).

The Desktop world is divided into regions. Each region is numbered - region 19, region 32,… - and labeled with a known location name, such as Greece, Japan and Eiffel. Same region can hosts different physical locations, but only in different timestamps. Each photo in the flickr set is a representation of a single region at one point in time.

Desktop Region is a tripod, a converging place for three worlds: the physical, the virtual and the personal. The physical world is represented by landscape & people images; the virtual world - by images of gadgets, widgets, and desktop application's parts. The personal world is represented by both the location of the metaverse – inside a personal computer's desktop - and by private desktop icons



Champs Elysées Region 11

Eiffel Region 9

This artwork is extreme. It goes against the browser's metaphor, i.e. the social, impersonal, public space and public place. In the Desktop World there are no shared notes on public white boards, no friends, no buddies, just me.

And yet, representations of this private, walled garden space have been published in Flickr. That's the schizophrenic nature of our time: being anxious about our privacy, and being desperately in need for a private space, while at the same time voluntarily and eagerly disclosing any aspect of our Identity and inviting anybody into our private spaces.

We are all struggling these days in understanding and re-establishing our place in the confluence of physical, virtual and personal worlds. This is why Desktop Regions is such a contemporary work of art.

Kyoto Region 1

On Facts and Dragons: From Google's Blog Search to Reuters' Second Life

Around this time last year, when blog posts were still legitimate citizens of Google's Great Master Index, I happened to read a bunch of articles that were discussing the frustration of innocent users who have fallen prey to a horrible mischief, namely 'Blog noise'. Although they were googling for "facts", the returned result sets contained an awful lot of non factual, personal opinions from the blogosphere. "These weblogs are not facts" exclaimed one of the interviewees, "and they should be banned out of the main index". Another article went even further in its expressed hostility, with a subtitle of "Pollution Control" followed by a rhetoric question: "Sick of blog noise polluting the Google search results?"

"What a crap", I thought. "This has nothing to do with 'facts'; Do they really believe that "official" information is more factual than blog posts?"

Shortly afterwards, though, Google introduced Blog Search (Sep. '05), and since then "facts" are returned from the main index, while non factual, "personal opinions" are to be looked for under the subordinated, blog search index.

Can this categorization of knowledge keep up for a long time? I suspect it can't, and Second Life is a great catalyst for the removal of this artificial distinction between factual and non-factual, as can be seen from the latest Reuters-SL announcement.

Last week Reuters, a century-old company renowned for its real-time delivery of world facts, announced that Second Life is from now on an official news region, along with the other 196 regions that Reuters covers in RL (real life). From now on, ladies and gentlemen, you'll get ubiquitous, real-time information from both Nasdaq and the SL Currency Exchange; you'll get breaking news from both the middle-east and the middle-earth.

I assume that some Reuters' customers will rant about this new blend of real-world facts and metaverse' nonsense. "This is not serious", they'd say, or "It's nothing but a gimmick". But for the new generation of kids and teenagers, this news mashup will be the most logical and natural thing (and see the amazing story of Udi Bauman about his 3 years old son trying to drink a chocolate straight from the metaverse: "When he said he was thirsty, I offered to bring him his bottle, but saw that he wasn’t referring to the real world, rather just wanted to buy a glass of cocoa from one of the vending machines").

***

"I met a man the other day who did not believe in fairy tales", tells G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936) in the opening of his witty, anecdotal and amazingly relevant story, "The Dragon's Grandmother".

Here's a short excerpt:

I broke out beyond control. "Man," I said, "who are you that you should not believe in fairy tales?" ...
Look at these plain, homely, practical words: 'The Dragon's Grandmother,' that is all right; that is rational almost to the verge of rationalism. If there was a dragon, he had a grandmother. But you--you had no grandmother! If you had known one, she would have taught you to love fairy tales.

Well, I hope this will leave you with a taste for more: G.K Chesterton, "The Dragon's Grandmother"

The Shoe as a Platform ( The End of Shoes as Usual )

On our way home, my daughter told me that I must see the new collection of Crocs' boots. She then took my hand and pulled me over to the local store, where the display windows have been completely redecorated with piles on piles of unbelievably bulky, ugly and tasteless Crocs' boots.

georgie, by Crocs

A couple of hours later, as if by pure coincidence, I stumbled upon the following newsbit:

CROCS, INC. ENTERS INTO DEFINITIVE AGREEMENT TO ACQUIRE JIBBITZ, LLC.

The article gave some more details about Jibbitz, a family owned business based in Boulder, Colorado, that had the idea of manufacturing decorative add-ons that can be plugged onto the Crocs' moon-like surface. The Jibbitz decorations tipped so fast, that one year in business (if I'm not wrong) had sufficed for an impressive 20M$ exit.



While reading the Crocs-Jibbitz story a tune kept playing in my head; it was Jason Fried, the CEO of 37Signals, explaining why Basecamp (the Crocs of the Project Management software... well, at least from a look & feel standpoint) has been deliberately "crippled". As Fried put it, "it wasn't about competing with other products on a feature by feature by feature basis, it was about competing with less features".


Crocs, like Basecamp, competes with less features. As strange as it may sounds - this is a critical success factor (and I'll elaborate on that later on). Nevertheless, "just" less features is not enough: great products are designed in such a way that an eco-system, which serves as a viral distribution mechanism, can be easily evolved around them. The members of the eco-system are the salesmen and the connectors that distribute the buzz and make the product tip. The phenomenal success of the Crocs-Jibbitz mashup should be therefore attributed to the fact that Crocs is not only a shoe, but also a platform, that inherently communicates an invitation for participation.

And now back to the "less features" principle: a platform that wants to succeed in its invitation for participation can have neither a rich set of features nor a dominant "character" (personality), as participation and innovation can occur only in a leveled playing field. You cannot tell the following to your customers: "We have a wonderful and well-thought product that we are proud of; it consists of dozens of exciting features, gathered through our close work with fortune 100 companies; our top notch engineers, who are ex-professors from the most acclaimed universities, thoroughly designed it to meet the most demanding conditions. And now, dear customer, we invitie you to innovate; you are welcomed to participate". With such a story, most of the customers would feel initmidation, rather than invitation.

The End of Shoes as Usual

I recommend visiting both the Crocs and the Jibbitz web sites. It's a fascinating demonstration of web1.0 vs. web2.0. While Crocs communicates business as usual with a traditional site layout (products, company, shop...), the Jibbitz site provides an excellent example of a straight (add to cart & checkout placed right on the home page), simple, personal ("Jibbitz - Personalize Your Crocs"), DIY [Do it Yourself] and social [blog, Flickr] commerce site. It is refreshing to the point that you start considering joining the party. But, hey, for that I should first buy a pair of ugly and bulky Crocs. Hmm... I'll leave it to my daughter.


Notes:

Jason Fried's lecture, Basecamp, can be found here