Lifeblog

Swimming the sea of knowledge (the Concept Web?)

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.

The Electric Knife Syndrome

I'm at the Mobile 2.0 conference in Barcelona. I was talking with Mark Kramer, and Bryan and Stepanie Rieger about the things we usually talk about. I had mentioned how I was at a conference where the enthusiasm for the 'technology' made folks forget to use simpler and better solutions. That led Mark to tell us about his stay in Albania where he saw someone using an electric knife to cut bread at a shop. There was no reason to use the electric knife, a regular knife would have sufficed. Mark suggested that it was using the ultimate tech to be cutting edge.

Another example of this came up later in the discussion. I then realized that we were discussing what could be called the 'Electric Knife Syndrome', where the tech used is subtly inappropriate in relation to existing solutions. This is slightly different from Post-Optimal Objects, where the solution itself is useless. But I think the Electric Knife Syndrome occurs more frequently and we forget a simpler solution is available.

Image from tizzle

Twitter is the queen of micro-down

My design for Twitter's "over capacity" screen
Originally uploaded by Mykl Roventine

Twitter has been so popular that it finally reached a stage where it was down more  and more frequently (Down is the new Black). But, after a total melt-down, they got their act together and sailed through Apple's WWDC without a hitch.

Or so they want us to think.

One of their clever solutions is to throttle down various features as things get heavy, features such as pagination, IM, mobile page.

I was wondering how that might work in practice, but now I know.

Instead of all of us suffering with a massive down time, the down time is spread across all of us, micro-down moments, one at a time. And because the micro-down time shows up once in a while to an individual (it goes away to micro-down someone else as you reload), _individual_ perceptions are improved.

So, the Queen of Micro-blogging is also the Queen of Micro-down.

At least this is what it feels like. Is this the case? Does anyone know?

Does Anyone Use Phone Booths Anymore?

A long forgotten phonebooth
Originally uploaded by schickr

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?

Awesome Clay Shirky interview (with a side-comment that cuts too close)

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

Plaxo is acquired by Comcast, Zyb by Vodafone

Ok. This is last week's news.

But, I am not seeing much discussion about this. Why?

Mashable picked it up right away. But not one person commented on Plaxo's own site (link below).

Is this significant? Does it matter? Does this remind you of 1999 when Telcos bought Web-heads and did nothing with them?

FWIW, I just deleted my Plaxo account. Never really got anything out of it. BUT, with Pulse, they had an uncanny way of adding things I was thinking of. I think Pulse could have been like FriendFeed (and was about much earlier), but it happened to be attached to a company that made its name in corporate contact management. Eh. Brand dissonance.

Also FWIW, Zyb announced it was picked up by Voda two days later. Their post got a bunch of comments. Zyb was on a similar trajectory as Plaxo. Both were considered the leaders in this area, but we always felt Zyb a better mobile offering. (and I did not delete my Zyb account just yet)

We followed both closely since synch is a part of the (ever) upcoming Ovi.com that I was a part of (and Nokia also has the My Nokia Back Up service). Yeah, both companies had set out to mix PIM back up with social networks. And, yes, the company who can solve this issue will do well.

Do you think Zyb and Plaxo have done well with this fusion?

Link: Plaxo's Personal Card: Comcast to Acquire Plaxo; Pulse to Become Central to Creating Unified “Social Media” Experience Across the Web, the TV (and more)

Joining forces with Comcast is a real win for our customers, our investors, and our employees. Comcast has an exciting vision to bring the social media experience to mainstream consumers. Together, we will be able to help users connect with all the people they care about, across all of the devices they use, with all the media they love to consume, create, and share. This is also great news for the Internet industry at large, where Plaxo has been – and will continue to be – a strong advocate for opening up the Social Web.

From my sideline seat, Thompson Reuters seems awfully archaic

Can someone please explain to me how and why Thompson Reuters Scientific has such a grip on scientific journal Impact Factors?

If you look at the list of various indexing services, you can see that they are all brushed aside for Thompson Reuters. It seems to me that unless a journal is indexed by Thompson Retuers, then it really is not considered to have any relevant impact on the scientific literature.

OK, so maybe these guys were anointed by the community to stand in as the über-authority index. I can deal with that. But, I think also there is an opportunity for an independent authority index, à la Technorati.

I think it just might be my natural inclination to suspect a single source of authority ranking. But I think it's more likely because I see so many tools available to measure impact that could be more responsive and maybe more granular than what the current system seems like to me.

I've started looking into this. People are coming up with alternatives. It also seems like Thompson Reuters realizes that they might lose a hold on their position.

Yeah, my brain has been munging on this lately.

Link to article that set off this brainwave: BioMed Central Blog : Orphanet Journal of Rare Diseases tracked by Thomson Reuters and set to receive first impact factor in June 2008

Orphanet Journal of Rare Diseases was recently accepted for tracking by Thomson Reuters. It is included in the ISI Web of Knowledge database and will receive its first impact factor this summer. We are delighted with this achievement, which confirms the prominence and reputation which Orphanet Journal of Rare Diseases  has achieved in its field.

Link to recent journal article: Effectiveness of Journal Ranking Schemes as a Tool for Locating Information

As de Solla Price observed [3], the number of scientific journals and the number of papers published in those journals is increasing at an approximately exponential rate. The size and growth of the research literature places a tremendous burden on researchers—how are they to select what to browse, what to read, and what to cite from a large and quickly growing body of literature?

Mechstreams - when machines start lifestreaming with us

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.]

SwitchAbit as the great data switchboard in the cloud

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).

Mowser and dotMobi: Ouch, the cognitive dissonance is huge here for me

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.