In February, in a Barcelona restaurant, Mark Kramer caught up with me and asked me what I would be speaking about at the 3rd WLE Symposium (notes from the talk are in a preceding post).
He was kind enough to give me the video, so check it out below.
(and, no, I don't lisp like that - it's the audio quality)
I think about the fusion of mobile and Web all the time. And I’ve been
talking about and thinking about designing services and software for
years. But I also was an academic researcher for about 10 years, with
18 co-authored papers.
All this converged about a year and half ago when I met Matt Cockerill from BioMedCentral, an Open Access publisher of scientific papers.
He had a sort of embarrassment of riches - servers full of papers, videos, info. The problem was how to take all that info and make it work, derive relevance, give value back to the scientists.
That got me thinking. I framed it as a problem - how to make it easy to find-navigate-recombine-share? Suddenly, I saw this as one of the big challenges for the Web.
Now, I see it everywhere in other areas, but science publishing catches my attention, mostly due to my recent focus back on science.
The Rise of the Scientific Paper
Scientific papers arose about 450 years ago as a way to distribute,
between scientists, public letters and correspondence on findings and
reports. The natural scarcity of publication and distribution made this
a necessity.
From this arose lead publishers (for example, Nature and Science) and all that science publishing entails - star editors, reputation, authority, impact factors, and so on.
But that’s so Web 1.0.
Waves of the Web
OK, so I try really hard not to use the Web 1.0, Web 2.0 etc
terminology. I view the Web more in waves than labels. Each of these
waves take the cycle of create, consume, connect to another level.
For me Wave 1 was the Age of the Hyperlinked Document. The first wave was characterized by a rush to digitize traditional publishing assets, such as databases, newspapers, encyclopedias. This wave also saw the rise of Web indexes (Yahoo), search (AltaVista), email, and the browser wars. But in the end, the creators were traditional publishers and indexers. Regular folk just "browsed" stuff, without any contribution.
Wave 2 was the Age of the Fragmentation of the Web. This wave saw the coming of micropublishing (blogs, wikis), emergent (crowd-sourced) indexes (wikis, delicious), social networks, and new ways to search (Google, Technorati). And expectations of interactions with people and content was heavily influnced by IM (rapid morsels of conversational text) and rich interfaces (through flash, video, and AJAX). But the biggest change (at least in this story) was that everyone became a publisher
Publishing, therefore, had gone from static monoliths to morsels of info free to socialize. This has caused the collapse of traditional publishing (witness the record and newspaper industries). Furthermore, there has been an explosion of morsels of data on the Web. Everything has become search-able, comment-able, link-able, embed-able, feed-able. Data and people mix in a social, living, Web.
In short, Wave 1 weakened traditional publishing that used to be based on scarcity. Wave 2 made everyone a source of info, everyone an annotator of data, everyone a publisher; it took hyperlinked documents and morselized the web.
How have scientific publishers fared in this Wave 2?
They've basically kept the status quo. Online. Stuck in Wave 1.
As with many other traditional publishers, science publishers replicated their closed subscription-based model on the Web, republishing their content online.
Open Access has been battling the status quo for 10 years (at least in terms of access). Only now are they getting strong recognition, impact factors, authority, and a little respect. But they are predicated mostly on and restricted heavily by the traditional model of science publishing (for example, stuck to impact factors).
Recently science publishers have been experimenting with comments and annotations. But with little traction (and I have a few ideas as to why). And, granted, the non-paper publishing part of traditional publishers have embraced the Web, but I am speaking of the core product here.
So many similarities...
The irony is that Tim Berners-Lee actually envisioned the Web as a way
to share science information and publications. Openness and sharing are
at the heart of science. And the core cultural structures replicate well
online. Wave 2 behaviors are the same a
s in research: find, navigate,
recombine, share.
And the Web also has structures found in traditional publishing, such as ways to deal with authority and primacy.
In short, science publishing as it should be mirrors the Web.
If there is a Wave 1 and Wave 2, is there a Wave 3?
My view is that we are entering the true era of (and need for) the
Semantic Web. Context is about relevancy is about meaning is about
semantics. I claim that the semantic Web has not advanced in the past
many years because the focus has been on what I call "librarian" tasks
of formatting data and manually building ontologies and so on.
What we know now (from Wave 2 behavior) is that emergent semantics, created through data-mining, but especially via people just using the Web, will be key in helping us navigate the sea of data. In short, the next wave of the Web will require a mix of data mining, librarian tasks, and people to make sense of it all.
How do I see science publishing taking advantage of the Web?
I mapped out behaviors and how it could be on the Web.
Culture vs tech
Risking sounding dramatic, I think more changes are inevitable, despite
publishers wishes to hold on to traditional structures. But the sad
irony is that the future of science publishing depends on culture not
tech. All the tech is here, and it’s evolving, mixing Web, mobile,
context, semantics and other wonder, whether the scientific publishers
want to or no.
But will scientists lead the way?
This post was written from the notes of my talk at the 3rd WLE Symposium in London back in March (presentation below).
I've mentioned Mendeley before. They refer to themselves as a Last.fm for science papers, but I think it'll be much more.
One thing they realize they are changing, as a side effect, is the impact factor (sort of like a Page Rank of science papers, based on incoming links (citations) to the paper and the journal).
Link: Changing the journal impact factor | Mendeley Blog:
At a higher level then, Mendeley’s significance isn’t just about real-time impact factors and article-level metrics. It’s about using technology for the first time to crowd source data and forever change how research is done. That is why I’m crazy enough to move half-way around the world. Mendeley literally isn’t just another “Silicon Valley” start-up.
Spot on. When I heard Victor (one of the founders) talk about this at Next09 I practically jumped out of my seat.
Thompsons was set up in an age when you needed someone to manually go through references and such and report to the community. That's probably part of the reason it takes three years to establish an impact factor. [I pointed this out already a while back.]
PLoS and BMC, who imported the broken authority model from the print world, missed an opportunity in the past 10 years to upturn Thomspons world. So, it's good to hear that PLoS is starting to be transparent in their traffic and links, providing the start of a new way to look at authority.
One thing: being a bit publisher-minded, I, myself, missed the other side effect of opening up stats that could show authority - basically, such transparency might be able to highlight a high-impact paper from an obscure journal. In the traditional world, that paper would have been buried by the journal's own impact factor.
Yeah, we need to open up these stats on a real-time paper level. There's no reason not to do it.
(and go read the rest of the article on Mendeley's site)
Image from wikipedia, on Page Rank
I was at Next09 this week, giving a talk with Rudy de Waele on "Mobile 2.0". Next09 was a good conference, a mix of talks in German and English, covering things like social media, Web tech, and mobile. And, of course, I caught up with a ton of interesting folks I know, and met a ton of interesting folks I was pleased to meet.
There were some startups also pitching there. I met Jon Froda and Ezra Goldman who were pitching their companies, working in helping corporations capture processes and manage change processes through more social Web services, respectively. I also met Renato Valdes Olmos who had a cool NFC social gizmo.
Bringing citation software to the Living Web
One particular startup I almost missed (Rudy pointed it out to me) was Mendeley. I had heard about it from some of the folks I follow on Twitter (as @molecularist) and had it on my "must check" list, but had no idea what it really was. Rudy summarized it succinctly as "Think of Last.fm for scientific papers".
That was enough to grab my interest, as it seemed to touch on key aspects of the future of scientific publishing that I have been thinking and thinking and thinking and thinking of over the past 18 months or so.
Mendeley is a combination Web and desktop app service for managing your bibliography of science papers. A desktop client helps you extract metadata, annotate, and share the scientific papers you add to your bibliographic database. You can also backup your database online and fill the database ("one-click") with papers from other publication databases.
One of the key upcoming features is a "recommend" feature that helps you find other papers related to the ones you are collecting.
I suppose one could say it has features from delicious (social bookmarking) and StumbleUpon and Last.fm (social discovery), with a twist of sematics and data-mining.
I got a demo of the desktop app and Website and am really impressed. It seemed simple and useful and all the right elements were there.
Kindred spirit
Victor Henning, who is the Founder and Director of Mendeley was kind enough to sit down and talk to me after his talk. He indulged me in my excitement to share thoughts with him regarding what they were doing.
He told me that the idea for Mendeley arose from his and a friend's general frustration in using citation tools that were basically industry standard. Like all great services, Mendeley was something that they built because they needed something like it.
They've been brewing the service for a few years, and have been in a beta for about 4 months. Already they have thousands of users from some of the top research institutions in the world, and are growing at a great clip. Based on the papers placed in the system (over a million), the largest groups of users are from life sciences and computer sciences.
Another cool story is that they reveal a lot of the usage stats, and saw an emergent version of an impact factor as an article from PLoS rose to the top among the most added paper in their database (I think the Web is so well suited to track emergent authority and such).
Good foundation
I shared some thoughts I had about science publishing, and it seemed that some were issues Victor was thinking about. He's quite excited about the service and feels like he could always do more. We touched upon a ton of cool potential and upcoming features. And like always, ideas are more plentiful than one can implement. But, the core is solid, they have a grate foundation that they can build upon, and their position enables them to offer valuable services that folks would pay for.
Furthermore, he mentioned some designers and developers who are working with him and it seems he has an amazingly strong team to make this happen. What's more, some folks from Last.fm, Warner, and Skype have put in 1.5M Euros into Mendeley. So they are going to be moving along for some time still.
And something tells me I'll be cheering for them all along.
I'd been meaning to look into this more ever since reading about it in the quarterly tech review in The Economist, back in Dec.
There are folks who are creating nanoscale structures of pores and particles, combining them with extremely sensitive detection tools, and creating new breeds of macromolecule detectors.
A hard drive for GMR
One of them uses the same tech as in hard drives, used to detect magnetic particles. They are called called Giant Magnetoresistive Sensors (a gnarly review for you hard-core geeks).
As Shan Wang from Stanford says,
Wicked.
And Wang has an example of how this can be used, in this case, in the detection of Human Papiloma Virus.
Pores and beads
The other methond is the sequencing of DNA by passing it through a nanopore. Because, like beads on a string, as DNA passes through a pore each base has a slightly different (and detectable) electrostatic effect and one can read out the sequence as the strand goes through the pore. The only person I found actually playing with this was Aleksei Aksimentiev from whom I took the image above.
Surface issues
When I was doing biochemistry, I used a ton of specialized equipment to measure enzymatic activity. But one that I never got a chance to use was a gizmo from Pharmacia that took advantage of a funky effect called "surface plasmon resonance." The only way I can describe it is an effect by which mass on one side of a surface affects the refraction of light on the other side of the surface (Wikipedia is not any clearer). In that way, you can have something binding on one side of a chip that is then detected spectroscopically on the other side of the chip, with great sensitivity and in real time. From that, you can calculate the on and off rates for molecules binding, which is what a lot of the biochemistry I did was about.
In any case, it's always interesting when hard-core physics meets biology. While I start getting glazed eyes when getting too close to physics, the best parts of my training were when physics and physical chemistry helped explain a phenomenon we were studying. I would say the strength of my training was the mix of physics, chemistry, and biology that made me see systems at many interacting levels, each contributing to the model and experiments.
And, as in most multi-disciplinary endeavors, these folks, above, mixing hard-core physics and biochemistry are also adding to a richness that either disciplines on their own could not.
Exciting.
I don't know why, but ever since returning from SXSW09 I've been wondering about hackspaces. As you might know, hackspaces are like a nerd collective, where there is equipment to use, friendly folks to show you how to use them, and a rich environment for play and exploration.
While writing this post, a quick search for hackspaces led me to a recent article from Wired about folks flocking to hackspaces, so I guess I am feeling a vibe that's going around. The article provides a good overview of hackspaces. Despite what the article says, hackspaces are not new. And hack spaces are not just focused on electronics, either.
Being a bit of a bike tinkerer, the hackspaces I think of are more like the LA Bicycle Kitchen and the Broadway Bicycle School. Back in the 80s, I was inspired by the Broadway Bicycle School, and after reading about the LA Bicycle Kitchen a few years back, toyed with the idea of starting up a similar sort of thing.
There are also ample examples of shared work spaces. My buddies at Republic Publishing hang out a lot at The Hospital in Covent Garden. Todd Bida pointed me to the Cambridge Incubation Center. But these are shared facilities for small businesses and independent workers. And, there are tons of examples of youth centers that provide a hangout-homework-chilllax atmosphere for teens (yes, scoped out a plan for one of these, as well).
Indeed, hackspaces take the shared workspace, add a dash of cooperative thinking, with a healthy dose of tools to create something special for folks to just make something in a supportive environment. Shared spaces, as described above, are usually "co-existence" places, where folks work in parallel, with little cross-fertilization (and that's OK, too). In my mind, I would like a more interactive and social environment (for example, I asked my buddies from Republic how much they interact with others from The Hospital).
With my latest urge to get back into science, I wonder if there might be a market for a, say, DIY biology hackspace. The capital costs for hacking biology are huge, what with incubators, autoclaves, shakers, pipettes, disposables, and the like. In labs I worked in, the burn rate was something like $1500 per person per month (full-time hard-core research, of course). And start-up costs usually were in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
But that speaks for the benefits of shared equipment that comes with a hackspace. And the rise of synthbio and DIYbio suggests that there might be a need for some sort of bio hack space.
Of course, a whole ton of barriers crop up in my head: regulation, training, disposal, licenses, and so on. But just a matter of detail, right?
Image: mine
This is amazing. I know folks battling for Open Access in science for over 10 years. Even with heavy hitters, such as Harold Varmus, PubMed, and others supporting Open Access, status quo still dominates the science publishing industry.
Now, Peter Suber reports that the MIT faculty has voted unanimously to give the university nonexclusive, irrevocable, paid-up, worldwide license for all scholarly articles, which the university will then make available through an Open Access directory.
Might this be the tipping point for Open Access? As I see newspapers sinking while holding onto their 20th century biz models, might the big science paper publishers wake up to this change in their world (ten years coming, mind you).*
I'll be giving a talk next week about the future of publishing. Let's see what folks say.
[via @perryhewitt] Peter Suber, Open Access News:
Hal Abelson's [MIT faculty member] 'comments:
I chaired the committee that drafted the resolution and led faculty discussions on it throughout the fall. So I’m particularly gratified that the vote was unanimously in favor. In the words of MIT Faculty Chair Bish Sanyal, the vote is “a signal to the world that we speak in a unified voice; that what we value is the free flow of ideas.”
*BioMedCentral showed that even the old model could work in Open Access, such that they got bought out by Springer.
There's been some buzz around the next phase of search being "real-time". Read Write Web wrote two articles on instances where Google Search failed to connected to the sought-after info, such as "Gmail down" or the river landing in NYC. While I have been telling folks that 2009 is the year we have a serious Google competitor in search, Jonathan Borthwick lays out the reasoning and fingers real-time search as the challenge for Google.
Gerry Cambell has a nice chart that puts it more prosaically. I like his axes of expressed vs considered and delayed vs instantaneous content. That lays out a spread of types of content out there that one may look for or follow. He sees real-time search of expressed and instantaneous content more in line with how we live our lives and navigate a sea of information.
Yes, I think this is one aspect of where search needs to go, but I am not sure it's the only piece. Trending and sentiment analysis, for sure, are much better when using expressed and instantaneous info, indeed, I am constantly looking for a tool that can help me with that.
But I feel there are other aspects that need to be fed in. For example, I think there will be a touch of semantic mining to add value to this real-time search. And I think, at some level, the search needs to know who is searching and fold in relevance that way.
Current search seems to miss the semantics and context and personal aspects of the query, aspects that will increase the value of the results.
Furthermore, I do think that while the linear nature of search, and I expect, real-time search, is not ideal, it will still dominate, since it's easier to build upon an expected mode of interaction and data scanning than to build some fancy (and theoretically more useful) interface to the query results (or at least, that's one area that I am cautious of pushing for innovation).
As a parting thought, this push for real-time search, I feel, has come from the regular use of live streams of info, live streams that are now overwhelming us and for which we need, you guessed it, new filters. So, I do think, at some level, we'll have better real-time search tools, if only to allow us to get a good sense of what's happening in our many incoming lifestreams.
Image from Gerry Cambell
I've been struggling for a while around a very big concept - how to bring scientific publishing to the modern web world of social, collaborative creation. Yes, the current science publishing system is indeed a social, collaborative effort, but I think it quite weak when using current online tools. So I've been spending a lot of time thinking of all the places the current system could be helped by all the tools I use daily in the social, living, collaborative Web.
Ugh. Big Gulp, indeed. So, the best I can do is break it down into smaller chunks. Partly because different parts of the find-navigate-recombine-contribute cycle of scientific publishing are at different Web-savviness. Partly because it's easier to digest for me. And partly because some parts are more likely to change sooner than other parts.
Finding and navigating
If you take the progression of content being generated on the Web, it just seems to be getting easier to publish and more fine-grained. We went from big publishing houses, putting out digital representations of physical units, such as The Article, or The Paper, or The Book. Search and index sites like Google and Yahoo stepped in to help us find and navigate all the Stuff. And the letter to the Webmaster became the feedback channel.
Things quickly got pared down to the blog post size and a democratization of tools causing an explosion of all sorts of info on the Web. RSS feed readers and personal home pages stepped in to help us manage these morsels of information. Comments and new posts became the feedback channel.
The latest push in data generation has been nano-sized grains of info, flooding us through Facebook, Twitter, and all sorts of status update services. Used to keeping up with things by reading everything, we have become stuck just keeping up with what others might be saying. And our tools to follow this are just not keeping up.
I was banging my head trying to summarize what this was. At Le Web, I found myself hearing things related to "filtering". I realize now that this thought might have been triggered by a good talk by Clay Shirky (which I only discovered recently through my tweeps) on filter breakdown - if you can't keep up with the stream then your filter is broken.
That gave me the word I was missing to describe the first and what I see largest issue with the future of science publishing. Indeed, I see filtering as a problem that is relevant to personal social Web use and even to business use of the social Web.
Linearity
The current filter tools we use, such as Google or Technorati, are too linear (an earlier rant of mine on this topic). You need to go through each item in turn, and the hierarchy is linear. There is very little by way of discovering new things or understanding the conceptual relationships between items other than order in a list. While I am at it, blogs are linear too. When there are more than five comments, the conversation breaks down and it's between the poster and the commenter. What's more, after more than five comments per post, a blog becomes less a conversation with the poster, since keeping up with all that can be difficult.
Personal home pages, such as NetVibes are not the solution, since they are still set up by the user and still require the user to read things. No help from the tool except managing the multiple streams. Even sites like Alltop seem to be curated pages for mulitple feeds. No help from the tool, once more.
I have been watching as various multi-dimensional search engines for various particular streams have appeared. Since I use Twitter a lot, I have been more keen to see a new tool to follow Twitter (and was happy that Twitter bought Summize). Indeed, for work, I find Twitter useless due to the volume of of the data stream and my desire to follow and participate in that stream. There are no tools that do this. The tools I have seen are simple word counters (Twitstat, twitt(url)y, Twitscoop, twitrratr) and can have serious failures (for example in this pic, see how a negative reaction was misconstrued)
Semantics anyone?
Folks have been talking a long time about a semantic web, where "meaning" added to information makes that information in some way richer. There are a ton of tools out there based on semantics and folks thinking and working on it. And there are some interesting search engines for the sciences, such as DeepDyve, NextBio, and Knewco, all of which layer some form of multi-dimensional interface on top of search data.
In the social Web space, there is one company that I have been talking with a bit, Crimson Hexagon (hopefully, more on them later). They semantically analyze feeds of data for sentiment analysis.
But, many of these seem like librarian jobs, where much of the semantics is hard-coded in the data as it is classified and created or by data-mining static sets of data. I'd like to see semantics arising out of the use and creation of the data, much like people tagging their photos have added a layer of semantics in Flickr, rather than some librarian in the company data-mining all the time.
The closes analogy I get to explain user-generated semantics versus librarian-style categorization is the difference between Yahoo 1996, with its cadres of employees manually cataloguing the Web, versus Delicious, where the users do it as part of their regular, personal, use of the service. Another analogy I like to use is how paths on a commons can be designed: don't put down paths at first and then observe where the grass is worn down, indicating optimal user paths.
Water water everywhere
I think it's great that there are so many folks working on this. But, the Semantic Web has been expected for a long time, but we've been too busy being geeky rather than applying it for something useful. The services above are all going in a good direction, though, and all of them are trying to get all that stuff on the web and filter it.
I feel that this year someone will come out with a wizz-bang search tool that throws in some form of semantics (part librarian, a priori, and part user-generated) and simple but powerful visualization and navigation of relationships between results. I think there's still a hole for a tool to allow individuals or corporations navigate streams of data. The companies above are all trying it in their own particular way.
Is there a winner in any of them? Or will one arise that takes the most useful features of each of these?
So, I've been talking about trends in biology that I think are significant (maybe because I've only started following biology again in the past year). In any case, I've said the trends were synthetic biology, the future of scientific publishing, and personal genomics.
Personal genomics is where individuals have detailed access to their genomic information (your genotype). To put us all on the same page, your genome is the totality of all your DNA - your nuclear DNA and your mitochondrial DNA. I claim that it also needs to include your micro-organismal biota DNA, as well. But, what the genomic information gives you is the programmatic basis for who you are, where you've come from, and what you might pass on.
Genetics 101
To be frank, you already have a clue as to what your genotype is, through observation of your phenotype (how your genotype is expressed in an observable attribute). For example, if you have blue eyes and only one of your parents do, you know that the non-blue eye parent is carrying a blue-eye gene (in normal cases, of course, but you get the idea). Indeed, the long list of questions of parental and family history that doctors ask are a sort of genetic profiling to give an idea of your own hereditary susceptibility to diseases.
Knowing all your DNA code at this time (through sequencing) is unlikely, mostly due to cost (unless you are on this list, or this program, or are this guy). Sure, it will come (and on the way, someone will win a prize). But for now, you need to be satisfied with just the direct sequencing of known stretches of DNA.
Another way is to look for indicative SNPs (pronounced 'snips', small nucleotide polymorhphisms, basically differences in code at a certain position of the genome). These SNPs are used as markers associated with a gene or phenotype. Hence, knowing SNPs, which are easier to scan for than sequencing the whole genome, are the state of the art in whole genome understanding.
Booming area?
While the dream of personal genomics is to drive more targeted pharmaceutical treatments, I think where it will really boom is in giving people their information to do what they want to.
I have seen a few companies pop up that offer various forms of DNA tests for regular folks, for curiosity or what. It definitely sits in a general self-knowledge, self-measurement trend that new sensors and tools have begun to provide.
One company I have been following is 23andMe (a play on humans having 23 pairs of chromosomes). In a nice twist, the genetic testing (they scan one million SNPs) is really just a conversations piece, a social object that customers discuss on 23anMe's socially-driven service. Yep. Social sharing meets biological diagnostics.
How much can it cost? 23andMe used to charge about $1000 per test (and I think that was for 500k SNPs). Recently they lowered the price to $400 and cover over one million SNPs. I suppose, at some point, the price will level off to ensure business profitability. Well, so long as profitability is based on selling tests. Which I probably suppose it won't be, since these are smart folks running the company.
Thoughts on this
While I am still trying to get a feel for how 23andMe is positioning itself, I do think that the drive in personal genomics will come from people wanting to know more about themselves, to help them make lifestyle decisions, and to feel more secure about their potential health future and of their children. And having the information before knowing what it means is fine, since companies like 23andMe keep combing the literature to add meaning to the data.
Also, pulling on the self-quanitification thread, one might want to marry this with other whole-organism tests. Metabolomics, the sum total of your metabolites, gives a great understanding of your current physiological make up. Marry a string of metabolic analyses with the understanding of your genome, and you have a powerful whole-body understanding. And metabolomics is a mature field with a good technological and informatics underpinning. And it is not expensive.
And and and, what's more. If you think of the genomic data 23andMe are sitting on, they stand a lot to gain from adding further info to the genomic set. They are already doing surveys that they can match to customer genomic profiles. Imagine if they had detailed metabolic information? Then they have a powerful repository of information to mine about health and genetics. Ripe enough to make oodles of money on, without violating anyone's privacy.
Hm.
Image by Image Editor
This is cool (below). Gene therapy combined with a re-install of the immune system.
I am writing a story where the main character basically gets an immune system reboot. Due to the longevity of the people in the story, they are more susceptible to auto-immune diseases as the immune system breaks down or goes awry. Therefore, folks get regular immune system resets and required re-immunizations.
I know someone who is over 80 and is healthy except for an auto-immune disease that he got in the past 5 years. A reboot would cure him. Right?
The doctors reasoned that if they could find a donor who was not only immune compatible with their patient, but also had two copies of the Delta32 mutation in the CCR5 gene, perhaps they could simultaneously eradicate his leukemia and his HIV infection.
Remarkably, such a donor existed. And 600 days after his bone marrow transplant, the patient is both leukemia- and HIV-free.
When I first started working in science, sequencing was just beginning to be a 'kit' science, where anyone could buy a kit and sequence. It was long ago enough for us to wonder at it, knowing that in the early days it took experienced scientists a long time to sequence anything through elaborate chemical means. Back then, any sequence was a big science paper.
Then Sanger worked his magic and things started to take off. Soon it became possible for a grad student to sequence a gene during their thesis work. Sequencing no longer became special but was required to publish a genetics paper.
In my time...
When I was a grad student, I had my own DNA synthesizer on my bench (well, it was the labs, but I used it a lot). The machine was able to make short stretches of single stranded DNA (10-30 based pairs). While we used it for studying the very DNA we made, others started using such machines to make DNA synthesis primers for sequencing.
Now a tech could sequence a gene in a few weeks.
Then automated sequencing machines appeared that allowed you to easily read long stretches of sequence, straight into a digital format. These machines were expensive, so either there was core facility or company with a bunch of tech managing the machines.
By the time I was a post-doc, you just had mix sample and DNA primer (also ordered over the Web), send it off, and get an email with all your sequences. It was fast and easy for what I was doing and I was able to sequence my clones in one go. Such sequence by mail was instrumental in me being able to focus on my core protein biochemistry work.
Shotgun wedding
While many of us were 'walking' down the chromosomes (current sequence suggesting primers for the next run), a clever man, Craig Venter, just started blasting the genomes apart, randomly sequencing it all, and letting the computers stitching it all together (called 'shotgun sequnecing'). He started with small viral genomes and just kept going for bigger and bigger genomes such that in the end it took him some 3 years (if I recall) to do the entire human genome.
Of course, the Human Genome Project guys who were toiling away for 15 years or more, were upset at the risk of being scooped. So, they had a sit-down with Venter (a REAL maverick) and agreed to reveal the sequences at the same time. BTW, this is the 2nd thing Venter should get the Nobel for.
And we're off!
Now in the post-genomic world, we're sequencing whatever we can get our hands on (see funny quote bellow). Genotyping is now a $400 service (it's not full genome sequencing, but powerful nonetheless). And Venter, for his 3rd Nobel, sailed off on his yacht, sucking up sea-water and sequencing all the microorganisms in it.
The writer below expresses her wonder at how things have changed in such a short period of time.
I have to agree.
Link: The Spittoon » My Mind Has Been Blown By Genome Sequencing
“Taste good, sequence it” and “Look cute, sequence it.”
Obviously there are good scientific reasons for both of these projects. But can you believe we live in a time where you literally could just sequence something’s genome because it was tasty or cuddly?!
Image from wikipedia
Synthetic biology is the design and building of novel organisms or biological systems. Sounds amazing, but we have been doing it to some degree for millenia, through husbandry of plants and animals, evolving them over time to drop the traits we didn't want (say, poison, aggression, horns) and promote the traits we did want (say, domestication, wool, meat, seeds).
With the advent of recombinant biology (where genes from one organism are added to another organism), we've been able to modify all sorts of creatures in important or bizarre ways. And, of course, genetically modified crops scare the Jeebus out of some fokls.
Microorganisms are commonly used to grow recombinant proteins, say, human proteins in E coli. But the current spirit of synthetic biology is to rebuild or build (micro)organisms to do some specific tasks or work.
I've spoken about Craig Venter many times. The work he's doing now, that should win him his 4th Nobel, is to specify a microbe that makes biodiesel. Indeed, we already use microorganisms to create biodiesel from various feed-stocks. But Venter takes it up a notch, to the point of specifying the _whole_ microorganism to do exactly the biochemical pathways he wants, rather than mutating or adding or subtracting a gene here or there.
Another person I'm watching is Drew Endy*, from MIT. He and a bunch of other adventurous bioengineers are creating a catalogue of genes that can be used as parts to easily build specific functions in microorganisms. Along with his cohorts, he's been running the iGEM competitions and creating a foundation called BioBricks. There's already a spinoff from these iGEM folks, called ginkgobioworks.
While many of the things I see coming out of this bioengineering seems like trying to shoe-horn a digital thinking onto analogue structures, the breath and depth of the creations, many of them just brilliant in their ingenuity or play, makes me overlook such a anti-digital peeve of mine.
Really, things are just beginning in this new age of synthetic biology. And it'll be really exciting for folks entering it at this stage. I'm looking forward to see how these bioengineering companies flourish.
BTW, the Boston Globe has a good write up of this new breed of bio-hackers.
Image from lofaesofa
*Endy is giving a Long Now seminar on 17 Nov 02008.
A chance encounter, about a year ago, with some interesting minds in the field of biomedical publishing had me going back to my roots: biology. I've been fascinated by science from a young age, particularly biology, which I studied and practiced for many years before a wormhole whisked me away and plopped me in the middle of the mobile phone industry.
The consequence of this chance encounter with biologists was for me to reconnect and catch up with what was happening in biology. I really don't know if my fresh eyes are actually seeing something new or if my absence has made me susceptible to an incomplete model of where biology is going. In any case, what I do see are some exciting developments.
To get to the point, I see three major biology trends that present enormous opportunities:
1) Synthetic biology - from crafting whole genomes to messing with computational biology, we are seeing a renaissance of microbiology and microbial genetics.
2) Personal genomics - as genomic analysis tools like sequencing machines and micro-arrays get cheaper, the ability to rapidly analyze ones own genome at some level becomes a reality.
3) Biological publishing - the sheer volume of scientific publications and data, and their increasing availability in open access digital formats, is straining the way scientists explore, syncretize, and contribute to knowledge. [I need to find a better term for this, as it's not about publishing but the whole cycle of the info.]
These three areas have been consuming a lot of my brain cycles, with resultant decrease in posting the thoughts down here. I suppose I needed to mull these things over before starting to haver about them.
I thought I was ready to knock these off but have been having a fun time following the cognections radiating off from these topics. I have a lot of bookmarks with partially read stories. So, further posts on these topics will come slowly as I continue to digest.
Wow. It's nice to use one's brain.
Image from ynse
Call me old-fashioned, but I want some analog-computing being done with biological systems. I'm never comfortable with digital thinking with biological macromolecules. On-off systems built on chemical concentrations and macromolecular binding just don't seem to make sense to me.
Eh, there are folks doing this who are smarter than me, so I suppose I need to see more systems built to teach the point to me.*
Link: RNA-based logic gates compute inside cells
Detecting tetracycline isn't especially interesting, but RNA that binds to specific small molecules is actually relatively easy to make; repeated rounds of amplification and selection for binding can evolve these RNAs in a couple of days. This means that, in a matter of days, researchers can grow yeast colonies that glow in response to a variety of chemicals, or even to combinations of chemicals.
*Really bummed out that I will be missing _another_ Long Now talk (I'm in SFO two weeks prior). Especially this one with Drew Endy, bio-engineer extraordinaire. I was so looking forward to meeting him. Oh, well. Thank goodness for the video feed.
I've been spending a lot of time thinking about how to find, navigate, recombine, and contribute to ... what's out there, though mostly focused on science and the next generation of science 'publishing' (in quotes, since it'll be quite different from traditional publishing, more back in the hands of the scientists like in the old days).
A friend pointed me to this cool site called WikiProfessional, where they have these cool info navigators. A quick perusal suggests that they focus on the 'find' and 'navigate', though I think they also have a wee bit of 'contribute' through the addition of semantics as you navigate and annotate.
There are a ton of collaborators working on this and I dug a bit deeper into the main one, Knewco, It was on their pages that I stumbled upon the image to the right, about the Knowlet, trademarked, but spot on representing what knowledge really is: a concept with a cloud of facts, co-occurring items, with a few predicted concepts thrown in.
I like.
UPDATE: And here's a paper that goes into the details.
I like. A lot.
When I was a kid, it was a thrill to watch sports live. Up in one corner, there'd bit a big flashing 'Live - via Satellite', a distinct differentiator for networks back then.
Now, we're savvy enough to see if it was broadcast live. Also, networks do the opposite and will label what was normally a live show as 're-broadcast of a show recorded on...'
Now the new differentiator is Live with a mobile phone. The videos and audio sent from war zones using satellite phones, the maps of events that update with a stream of notes and photos (writing about the Love the Farm - Leave no Trace, triggered this post), and, of course, the live Qik streams.
Interesting.
Here's the live map from Glastonbury that we're using on Nokia Conversations.
PhoneBoy asks this question (link below). Indeed, I think the folks who have been ramping down their phonebooth assets were so narrow-minded (as in 'phone booth are for folks who need a to place a call and do not have a phone') that they blew a golden opportunity.
In telecomms, one perennial battle is for locations to put stuff - poles and pipes for wires, plots of land for towers and dishes, rights-of-way for repair trucks, and little squares of sidewalk for phone booths.
About two years ago I came up with some (IMHO) great ideas on how to use phone booth. For starters, there is still a place for them everywhere for quiet space for the talker or for peace for those around the talker. Indeed, on some Finnish trains there are phone booth for folks to use with their mobile so as not to disturb the passenger. I use it all the time for privacy.
It take no genius to realize what one can do with a booth if someone is sitting there for 3 minutes or more (and PhoneBoy is asking the right questions). It can also be a booth for offering other services, such as booth-only WiFi (to make the person come into the booth), or directory information.
The hard part of setting up a service like that today is securing the little plot of sidewalk. But the phone booth guys already had all that: location, a wire coming in, electricity.
And the telcos and their partners blew it all thinking that we don't need phone booths anymore.
Link: Does Anyone Use Phone Booths Anymore?
Maybe instead of ripping out the hardwired phones from these phone booths, maybe they can leave them there as a reminder of days gone by or for those times when you need a little bit of piece and quiet when you’re trying to make a call? Or better yet, turn them into pico cells for the mobile network operators?
Glenn Fleishman did a great interview (back in March) of Clay Shirky on the topics in Clay's new book 'Here Comes Everybody'.
Clay, as always, has some great stories to tell. Glenn is pretty good too. Yeah, you should go and download the interview from Glenn's pages (link below).
The whole interview is great, but it was the very end that made me reel. Glenn asked Clay what business could do to take advantage of the participative nature of the Web. I overly simplify, but Clay, among other comments, mentioned that instead of proclaiming the next great thing in a press release and putting all the money into one pot, that companies spread the money across many endeavors and see what sticks (and do it without fanfare). Basically, have many experiments, put it out there, and see if folks like it rather than gab about it (Show vs Tell?). He uses the example of Wikitorial.
Gosh. I have lots to add to that and a few more examples. (My tongue is bleeding, I am biting it so hard. Though a beer can loosen it, in case you are interesting in a tale of enlightenment, abandonment, discovery, creativity, stealing, cluelessness, and dissapointment.)
While I hope that some companies hear what he has to say and take the learning to heart, I fear that most, as Clay points out, will end up focusing on the wrong thing. Or, as Glenn says, miss the elephant parade passing in front of them.
Sigh.
Hey, I'm just road-kill on the info superhighway. Go listen to some smart people (the link is below, in case you forgot).
Link: TidBITS Blog Post: The Internet Organizes Itself: Here Comes Everybody
I sat down with Clay on 14-Mar-08 to talk about the book for a short article that appeared in the Seattle Times, focused on the business side of his book. However, the Seattle Times allowed me to publish a podcast of our roughly 40-minute conversation.
As an aside: Clay does validate some thoughts I've been having. It's always nice to inadvertently come to the same conclusions as others smarter than me.
Image from Joi Ito
Ok, so lifestreaming is the rage of '08, what with SocialThing! and Friendfeed and all similar services hogging all the attention.
But I also see something that's been bubbling under the surface that I call 'mechstreams'. I see machines edging in as equals in our lifestreaming services, sending out streams of data indicating what they are up to or thinking or what. And I don't mean info alerts like weather or news, but info about what is going on.
This is not new, really, but I think the time is right for these things to mix with real lifestreams.
Examples:
I think this is fine and dandy in this day and age of the re-birth (again) of ubicomp and semweb (both of which I have been waiting to bloom for a very very long time).
So, where do you see this going? Tom Armitage gushed about this about a year ago. Have things really developed further?
[PS: In the course of actually slowing down to write this post, I keep finding more discussion of this topic. The inestimable Julian Bleecker used the term 'blogject' for objects that blog. He wrote up a minifesto 2 years ago. Krap, I need to get out more. Some days I feel like Rip van Winkle waking up and missing a huge chunk of the discussion.]
Just stumbled upon this (no longer remember how):
Link: At SwitchAbit, Twittergram Shares a Common Future - GigaOM
So what is a SwitchAbit? Think of it as a web services switchboard that allows you to plug any type of content from one service (say Flickr) to another (say Twitter) — or even between multiple services. The dashboard is likely to be released later this summer.
Last year I had a few Ramblings on noise that focus on the internet as a noisy environment with data emanating from apps all over the place and how can we find, navigate, recombine, and contribute to that noise in a human way.
I've read a few recent posts that revolve around this topic and that I am still trying to digest. But, these thoughts tie three key trends I see unfolding before us: lifestreams (human streams of data), mechstreams (streams of data from machines), and the semantic web (meaning attached to everything).
What do I get when I mix a top level domain I really do not like, with a concept (transcoding) that I have been grappling with for years, and two really smart guys I highly respect (Russ Beattie and Mike Rowehl)? Severe cognitive dissonance.
I don't know what to think.
DotMobi
Ok, I am not of the 'one Internet' crowd that believes that mobile devices need to be able to view the Web same as any PC. I think that there is and should be many ways to mobilize Websites or use Web services on mobiles. But, I am not of the camp that thinks we should have a top-level-domain specifically for mobile sites.* To me, that's a ghetto, a return to the bad parts of WAP. So, dotMobi has never sit well with me (this is NOT my employer's view, mind you).
Transcoding
There is a place for transcoding, depsite what some very very good friends, who know better than I, advise me. Yet, Mowser, which was recently acquired by dotMobi (see link below), is a transcoder. I like it. Some folks (even dotMobi, it seems) are not into transcoders (such as Google's proxy) that munge all the hard work the Web developer has done. Mowser does a good job trying to stick to that work, and also provides options to go to the full page.
Miker and RussB
Gosh, these are two very smart guys who truly understand the fusion of mobile and Web. And they have the tech chops to put their ideas in practice (magdat and Mowser are examples). Russ and Miker took the ultimate gamble to get Mowser off the ground. Unfortunately, they need to recharge their batteries now before putting in another crack at their ideas, with the learnings from Mowser strengthening them. I am looking forward to them coming back in a few months or a year, reinvigorated and ready to shake the tree some more.
So, yeah, it stinks that Mowser didn't catch. But, is it good that a top-level-domain company is getting into transcoders? Eh, could be, at least for dotMobi. They already offer a tool from mobileSiteGalore to help folks make .mobi websites (I use Winksite for my personal site and Nokia Conversations, I also use Mippin for Nokia Conversations). Mowser can be well integrated into that.
What do you think?
So, yeah, 1) good for Mowser, 2) good for Miker and RussB, 3) good for dotMobi. It's just the dotMobi part that must be grating on me. Eh, my problem, not theirs.
Congrats Miker and RussB!
Link [via Tweeps @twhume and @mtrends]: dotMobi Acquires Mowser Assets
dotMobi's acquisition of Mowser's technology, developed by Bay Area mobile pioneers Russell Beattie and Michael Rowehl, is another way for dotMobi to provide a complete range of mobile content creation solutions for businesses of all sizes.
...
"At its heart, Mowser is a PC website-to-mobile website content adaptation engine," said Trey Harvin, CEO of dotMobi. "dotMobi has been vocal against 'blind' content adaptation because it doesn't allow site owners to have control over their content. dotMobi believes that brands and businesses should always have the final say over how their material is presented, and that the content should uniquely take advantage of the capabilities of a mobile device. This has been one of our core philosophies all along, and something dotMobi is looking forward to addressing with the integration of the Mowser assets into the dotMobi product line."
*I do think .sex would make a great top-level domain. It can be typed with just the left hand, and might cause a flurry of left handed domain names to be registered. Heh.
Loïc wrote a great article (with video) on global thinking for start-ups, with a ton of great tips (link below).
But, I think he's being a bit narrow-minded about the death of local internet services.
In many ways he is right that being a copy-cat who makes a localized version of a global service is not an easy task anymore. Nonetheless, I do think there's a future for local startups. Indeed, I think hyper-locality is the where a lot Web growth is. Much like social media is breaking down the power of Mass Media, I think we need to realize that in some segments, it pays to be local.
For example, a yellow pages or classified service, really does best with a local presence. A media service that is local would do better than some global service.
Just as mass media no longer is for everyone, not every service is at its best if global. Yet, it's just hard to scale globally with a local business. Web-heads like to add servers, not people, to grow the company.
I know some people who are creating great local services that are not copy-cats and will do well specifically because they are local. Do you know of any?
Link: Global Or Die: Is There A Future For Local Startups?
My friend Loic Le Meur wants to convince startups to avoid the lure of focusing only on local markets. He asked to write the guest post below, which I think is worthy of debate.
*Also, Loïc's a great example of someone who realizes the tyranny of Silicon Valley, that the Valley really is the only place in the world to run a tech business. I've railed against that tyranny, me not being from the West Coast. But, the past few years has shown some growth in cities like New York and Boston in the mobile and Web space. Also, I don't know if it's just because I have so many tweeps from there, but lately a lot seems to be happening in London, too. That's good.
I've been reading about iGEM and the Registry of Standard Biological Parts. It's a component view of biology - that there are parts in biology that can be used much like electronic parts.
Eh, I know they don't think it's that simple, but it sure can be misleading what they are trying to do.
These folks are characterizing biological parts and creating a catalogue from which to plug and play and mix and match to create circuits that do something. They are looking to establish standards, construction tools, and some abstraction to make it easier to build synthetic systems. And that's all fine and good. It's like the early days of electronics. And they have done some amazing things, light replicating photography with bacteria, some cool circuits, and more.
But, in my biomedical-scientist eyes, I just wished they would think more than just creating digital circuits on analogue systems. Also, I feel that biology doesn't gate well, I mean, it's very non-linear and hard to do on-off 'mathematics' with biological components. And by trying to build digital stuff, they lose the value of analogue.
In short, I think the questions they are asking are not the right ones for the system.
And thinking back to Craig Venter, moving forward, synthetic biologists are going to have to think of analogue, of biological answers to questions. We are so accustomed to neat and clean binary fixes to things, but seem to forget that in biology, so much is probability, fuzziness, and selection, and failure is so much more nuanced.
I've designed many macromolecules and expression systems, grew all sorts of micro and macro organisms, and dealt with all sorts of biological systems. In so many ways, we were not far from the brewers of Mesopotamia, coaxing and praying for a healthy growth and production of the right enzymes.
Yet, we have had in the past 30 years, and even more so in the past 5, a deeper understanding of the mechanisms. But, we mustn't just translate that all into our digital minds, we need to think of these organisms and molecules on their terms.
When I was a grad student, my advisor was a physical chemist doing biochemistry. To him, DNA wasn't just A T C and G, but a chemical entity. I came out of there seeing proteins and DNA in a way that my molecular biologist colleagues did not, and a deeper understanding of the complex interactions in biological systems.
In the same way, synthetic biology is going to have to go beyond linear circuit building, but take advantage of the strength of these marvelous billion-year evolved systems.
Here's a video of Drew Endy, a leader in this field, putting synthetic biology in perspective:
BONUS: If you really get a kick out of visualizations, the Machinery of Life, by David Goodsell, is a really neat peek into the molecular world at the scale of proteins and bacteria.
I haven't been paying much attention to 23andMe. I heard about them, but have yet to dig deep into what they are up to.
To me, it's bringing genetics to everyone. Michael Arrington did a nice post on what you get for a $1000.
Well, for starters, his DNA didn't get sequenced (that would be much more expensive). It was passed over a chip to detect hundreds of thousands of known DNA segments that as a whole determine some of his genetic make up. But, it seems like the set of DNA segments chosen are enough to create a relevant and interesting genetic profile (Mike goes over his a bit).
What seems interesting is the genealogical aspects. If 23andMe get enough people, might it start dong the 'friending thing' of 'oh, this person shares your haplotype for soft-earwax Bretons', would you like to add him to your watch list?
Josh Cantone, on Read Write Web has a run-down of a bunch of different ways to lifestream (link below). I don't know about you, but I think that's significant.
He also points to an earlier article (primer) by Rich McManus. It was reading some stuff by RIch about lifestyle aggregators that initially got me thinking of this and was a driving thought behind the stuff I did here at Nokia.
The great thing is that there is a large collection of ways folks are doing lifestreaming. With each one, we end up learning more about what works and doesn't, increasing the chance of a big breakthrough (in the next 6 months?).
One other thing that Josh points out, is Jeremy Keith is one of the early explorers in this space. Interesting. I'd forgotten that.
Link: 35 Ways to Stream Your Life - ReadWriteWeb
It's a pretty good bet that if you're not making a Twitter or Facebook application, you're probably making a lifestreaming application.
The list of names of the companies in this TechCrunch article looks like my own watch list.
If you are curious why I think 2008 is about lifestreams, then just see how many folks have popped up or added lifestream aggregation.
Link: Yahoo’s MyBlogLog Adds An Activity Stream Feature
If that sounds familiar, it’s because it’s the startup feature du jour. Facebook first popularized the news feed in late 2006. Later others took the idea and opened it up, creating a news feed around activities on a variety of social networks. FriendFeed is the most popular, and recently raised a $5 million round of financing. Plaxo, Soup.io, Iminta, Spokeo, ProfileLinker, MyLifeBrand, Fuser, 30Boxes, Mugshot, Readr and Second Brain all have variations. Party planning site MyPunchbowl recently released its version. And now, Facebook is planning to open up their NewsFeed and allow users to add other services as well.
I've been playing with Socialthing for a few weeks (link to blog below). They recently outed themselves at SXSW, and were blessed with a barrage of traffic from TechCrunch.
Of course, they are not he first on scene, and are now being compared to FriendFeed (which I have also played with).
My take on FriendFeed is that they are too focused on ‘me’ and ‘pubilc’ instead of ‘friends’ and ‘private’.
For example, the only reason I would want to aggregate my own lifestream is to show it to someone else (FriendFeed). The reason I want to aggregate my friends’ lifestreams is to follow them all from one place, hence I don’t want to see my own stream (SocialThing). Ok, so I might be simplistic and egotistic here, but it's what I am looking for in lifestream aggregators (though I've been mulling over some earlier comments).
I, so far, like the way they have it set up. It dovetails with a lot of my thoughts over the past years.
Now, they mention ‘post stuff back the network’. I need to learn more.
Link: A semi-FAQ
Socialthing! is and always has been about making your digital life easier. We bring your friends into one interface, make it easy to post stuff back to the networks, and just in general, try to make social networking easier.
I haven't been up on my Cringely, but reading one of my Tweeps, Oliver, led me to his recent commentary on social networks.
He makes a reference to the rise and collapse of CB Radio, and then spells out in his usual thoroughness, that the social networking emperor has no clothes (hm, not sure if that's a good metaphor).
In my comment on the post, I mentioned that I too have been saying:
1) We don't need another social networking service
2) He who brings the pieces together holds the attention - pointing to the opportunities for for social network aggregators (strong influence I was able to bring to Ovi.com)
3) Facebook has become an annoying Julie McCoy.
I keep seeing it this way:
What do you think?
I've heard a lot about Matt Web through those closest to him, but never really met him.
Matt is half of an interesting and insane design duo, Schulze & Webb (I have met Schulze, BTW). It's safe to say that Schulze & Webb are racing forth, defining what happens when you mix design and Web and bits and atoms (and mobile).*
At the end of last year, Matt wrote down some notes on essays he'd wish he'd have written, but didn't. The notes are a loosely connected series of topics that joggled more than a few conceptual pinballs in my head.
Surface binding
One topic Matt touches on is 'surfaces', basically, recognizable bits of structure (data) on the Web. This is really about micro-formats.
But, and this pleases the bio-geek in me, he compares Web surfaces to protein surfaces and browsers as recognizing these surfaces and making sense of the surface structure.
If I understand it, there are patterns in the categories of structures in Web pages. Matt seek the range of these types of structures to be finite and stable, hence such a classification of types to recognize is possible.
Hm, this may be a solution to extracting meaning (tying to another thread of though of mine). I suppose this begs for some taxonomical survey of Web structures, if there isn't one already.
Refactoring code
It was a blast from the past for me when Matt stated his wish that code not be refactored, but added to. In the late 90s, I was at an amazing talk by Marvin Minsky to us biomedical post-docs. Minsky also said that we should not rewrite code, but patch it - there was value in the old stuff.
Matt likes to use biology or chemistry example, but doesn't here. So I offer: Genomes are not necessarily refactored by evolution, but usually written over. And a lot of variability in the genome is derived from cutting and pasting of new and old code, rearrangements, duplication, and divergence of old code, and repurposing of old code (and don't get me going about 'junk DNA').
Bringing about change
Matt has a few great points on change and ultra-stability. But one thought that is radically funny is devilishly deviant: drive badly to accelerate the adoption of self-driving cars.
He takes it further in relation to mind enhancing drugs.
For example, 'erectile dysfunction' was hyped and marketed as a problem, so that pharma could create and sell the performance enhancing drug, Viagra. Therefore, Matt asks, we could start pointing out a problem with mental abstraction as a risk. Then, after papers and studies and articles come out about 'the problem' a market would arise, demanding solutions to the 'abstraction problem'. Then pharma could be provided with the material to persuade regulatory bodies that pharma should and could come up with the solution to the problem, for the benefit of business and society.
Heh, that's be something cool to try (reminds me of the Frindle). Kinda like a Saffo Mind-bomb for the future.
Path through services
Fred Stutzman who writes on social networks keeps pointing out the need for services to answer the 'What's Next?' after adding all your peeps to the network. On a similar note, Matt mentions the never-ending game quality Flickr has (indeed, Flickr was first called the 'Never-Ending Game'). The game aspect keep leading the users back, 'auto-catalyzing' engaging behavior.
In the end, Matt's insight is to keep the path the user takes through the services to never end (and designed to bring in others, to grow).
I think that this path is not always the utility (feature of service) path, nor the best path, though I have no examples to base this on. Also, with the mobile lifestyle in mind, how can that path have interruptions and long gaps?
Product evolution
his very last topic is about evolving a product locally. Matt devises a vending machine that optimizes the product flavor based on popularity.
For me, it touches a bit on what randomness can bring a product. Since most products are about consistency, could a machine be made to randomly dispense a product to surprise the buyer? Kinda like Bertie Bott's Beans. Indeed, there is a drink that sort of does this.
What's with the biology?
Until I read this big article by Matt, I had not really read any of his ramblings (though I have seen him speak and read some of his more formal writing). The biggest surprise was the number of hard-core biology (and chemistry) examples. It could just be my bias to see these topics stand out, but I think I need to ask some folks what the story is here.
For example, one of his notes completely surprised me with the items places in one sentence, ranging from metabolics, to tectonics, to the Austro-Hungarian Empire (need to follow up in this, too).
I think he's just a well-read curious guy, who revels in mixing disciplines. For sure, this guy is as scattered in his interests as I am. And tis explains all the interesting things he and his gang spout off. I suppose I do need to introduce myself to him, if only for his bio references, but also because we have a lot of overlap in the people we interact with (though his are much tighter in time and place than mine).
As for you, go read him. He's a trip.
*Indeed, the crowd Matt hangs with, which I mostly follow second-hand via @blackbeltjones and @anti-mega, are all brilliant and creative.
