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.
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.
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).
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.
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:
Tom Armitage hooked up the Tower Bridge to Twitter so that it can say 'What am I doing?' every time it goes up or down.
I heard yesterday from Jan Chipchase of a teapot that says when it's boiling water. In this case, it's an unobtrusive tool to keep an eye on elderly folks - if the teapot is being used, then the old folks are doing fine.
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.]
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 recentposts 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.
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?
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?
Cognections - site Precognition, cognition, recognition - photos and writings.
Lifeblog - site Thoughts and actions ranging from biomedicine, molecular manipulations, indiscriminate writing, the long now and a post-electronic age, various forms of performances thespian and corporate, and philosophizing on the fusion of Internet and mobile devices.
One night A global story of one night in the mobile life. Written for Vodafone's receiver magazine. Made into a podcast, too.
chillin' Deep thinking while up in the stratosphere.
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).
