Tuesday, June 11, 2002

"20th century business was about mass; 21st century business will be about micros... Some industries like entertainment, publishing, and financial services will be hit first, but eventually nearly every consumer-oriented business will have a clear and unwavering focus on the micros." --Peter Shoemaker 1:31:55 PM    comment  []

"The revolution will be decentralized." [via Adam Curry] 8:27:11 AM    comment  []

Tuesday, May 14, 2002

"The Tragedy of Commons is stated succinctly thusly: shared resources, when they become popular, are unusable for their original purpose. In the ur-case, we're talking shared pastures. The shared pasture protocol was that common inputs resulted in a common resource. When the common use of the resource exceeded the resources ability to replenish, the commons is destroyed. Or, to loosely quote Yogi Berra on Coney Island, it's so busy nobody goes there any more." [via 801.11b Networking News] 11:14:28 AM    comment  []

Thursday, April 25, 2002

Clay Shirky: What Web Services Got Right ... and Wrong "Web Services has gone from a vague idea to the major trend in Internet development . . . " "Web Services has gone from a vague idea to the major trend in Internet development . . . Web Services start to look like the way to implement peer-to-peer." " . . . once someone gets a broadband connection they leave it on all the time." " . . . you can't currently walk into J&R Computer World and buy 802.11b equipment, because people ask for it as it comes off the truck. When they get a shipment then they sell out that day . . . " " . . . the bandwidth providers have not understood that unlicensed spectrum could in any way be a threat." " . . . the general agreement that SOAP is a pretty good way to package and move data back and forth between applications is fairly widespread. . . . so many people are interested in having it work that it seems to me like it's going to work." " . . . Web Services is more about cost savings, lowering the difficulty of doing something, more than it is about creating fabulous new sources of revenue." " . . . people strongly prefer buying a product outright to paying an annuity for services." " . . . one of the most important things about the technological infrastructure is, unlike the Web, call and response are in the same language. . . . With Web Services, if you can read SOAP you can write SOAP. If you can write SOAP you can read SOAP. So modulo only the firewall issue, everybody's a peer." " . . . the standards for peer communication are actually going to come out of Web Services." 1:08:45 PM  Google It!  comment  []

Tuesday, April 23, 2002

Berners-Lee: Prepare for Next-Gen Web Now " . . . a high-level overview of the Semantic Web " " . . . the Semantic Web attaches well-defined meanings to data -- enabling it to be used for discover, automation and reuse across various applications.  Driving this dynamic tool is Resource Description Framework (RDF), a language designed to support the Semantic Web in much the same way that HTML is the language that helped initiate the original Web." "'My advice to companies is to . . . get information into RDF format. As tools come along you'll be able to do more with it.'" 3:22:10 PM  Google It!  comment  []

Saturday, April 20, 2002

naming names: What do you call this phase of the Internet? "Last August, author and speaker Clay Shirky posted a message to the Yahoo decentralization group in which he discussed the 'emergent Internet Operating System.' While he didn't coin the term—it's generally attributed to publisher Tim O'Reilly—he did finally provide a clean explanation for it. 'Given the degree to which applications running over the network are taking over some of the work previously done by apps running on individual machines, the idea of an Internet operating system seems a fruitful way to contemplate these effects,' writes Shirky, referring to the symbiotic effects of complex networks. . . . Shirky later pointed out that a more appropriate term was 'Internet Platform,' as suggested by UserLand founder Dave Winer. This label more closely fits the shift from viewing the Internet as a communications network to seeing it as an application development platform." " . . . the shift from Web pages to executables. Rather than accessing documents at different locations on the Internet, we're now beginning to access applications. And we're building those applications as services that can be accessed by still other applications. This leads us to yet another name, one you've probably heard quite a bit about by now: Web services." "By building applications that support standard protocols like SOAP, WSDL, and UDDI, developers are exposing functions and data to other applications. This saves time and money by making it easy to connect existing applications or build new ones. Web services won't save the world . . . but they will open many doors for technology architects. Behind one of those doors is what Tim Berners-Lee calls the Semantic Web. In the Semantic Web, applications understand the context and value of messages they receive, and can therefore act as agents on behalf of end-users." "So then what do you call this phase of the Internet's evolution? Is it the Internet Operating System, the X Internet, the Semantic Web? Or does it not even deserve a name because it's just repeated history? It doesn't matter. The truth is, with any other name, you'd realize the same thing: that the Internet has the potential to be much more than a communications pathway, and that we—the developers, CTOs, designers, and architects—have the power to make it what we wish. Dream big." 1:39:29 PM  Google It!  comment  []

Friday, April 19, 2002

Ballmer sees XML revolution "Now the fourth computer revolution is at hand — XML . . . XML, short for Extensible Markup Language, is destined to become the "lingua franca" of the Internet . . . " "'Remarkable things can be done at a reasonable cost . . . We're on the verge of another breakthrough. Everything is going to be better and better and better' as XML is adopted during the next several years." "With XML, 'You can really do remarkable things without massive change to your systems' . . . " 2:48:18 PM  Google It!  comment  []

Radio, XML, and the semantic web How I do I know the semantic web will happen? Because it's what people want. We've had a taste of what happens when structured data is reflected back to us in useful ways on the web. We can organize our lives, buy stuff, and learn things, in ways we dreamed of a decade ago but didn't imagine we'd live to see. We create vastly more data, in less structured form, every day as we live, work, and communicate. We're only now in the early stages of looping that data back through the web to achieve similar benefits. So of course Radio isn't the endgame. Radio, like the broader movement it's part of, empowers people, not just IT and media organizations, to create these information loops. My point is exactly that Radio's appropriate use of XML makes this possible. It puts XML's power into the hands of users without clobbering them over the head with XML's advanced features and complexity. It helps us get to critical mass. Nothing puzzling about that. Nothing more important, either. 1:26:11 PM  Google It!  comment  []

Thursday, April 18, 2002

Developers dig in to Google's toolbox "Aaron Straup Cope, one developer who wrote a script for APIs in Perl, said he sees the move as validation for distributed computing or Web services, but he added, 'I doubt that (APIs) will make the Earth move.' "'Being able to 'plug' Google-ness in to your Web site will, if nothing else, provide an example of 'distributed computing' that is not as abstract as those that have come before it,' Cope said. He also cited the development of cross-publishing functionality in Web logs." "Cope said Google's APIs give further credence to the concept of an 'Internet operating system,' where people can pull in or manipulate content via a remote function as a page is being published. 'That is, there is a growing interconnectedness among pages, sites (and) applications.'" 11:04:12 AM  Google It!  comment  []

Tuesday, April 16, 2002

Beyond Good and Evil: Saying the Unsayable "[Due to media restraint regarding the events of September 11] something interesting happened - the Web was reborn as a vibrant nexus of a media revolution." 11:20:28 AM  Google It!  comment  []

now i remember " . . . the moment I saw Guy Pearce in Memento, I knew finally someone was telling my story. Here was a movie about the predominant art form of our time: Note taking." "We organize and reorganize. We record and archive. . . . My filing system is my fetish. Before I left the Freightliner Corporation, I bought a wall of black steel, four-drawer filing cabinets at the office-surplus price of five bucks each. Now, when the receipts pile up, the letters and contracts and whatnot, I close the binds and put on a compact disc of rain sounds, and file, file, file. I use hanging file folders and special color-coded plastic file labels. I am Guy Pearce without the low body fat and good looks. I’m organizing by date and nature of expense. I’m organizing story ideas and odd facts." " . . . these are interesting facts, but what can I do with them? I can file them. Someday, there will come a use for them. The way my father and grandfather lugged home lumber and wrecked cars, anything free or cheap with a potential future use, I now scribble down facts and figures and file them away for a future project." "Books are another annex. The books I write are my overflow retention system for stories I can no longer keep in my recent memory. The books I read are to gather facts for more stories. Right now, I’m looking at a copy of Phaedrus, a fictional conversation between Socrates and a young Athenian named Phaedrus." "According to Thamus, writing would allow humans to extend their memories and share information. But more importantly, writing would allow humans to rely too much on these external means of recording. Our own memories would wither and fail. Our notes and records would replace our minds. Worse than that, written information can’t teach, according to Thamus. You can’t question it, and it can’t defend itself when people misunderstand it and misrepresent it. Written communication gives people what Thamus called 'the false conceit of knowledge,' a fake certainty that they understand something." 8:51:52 AM  Google It!  comment  []

The Web's Weaver Looks Forward Tim Berners-Lee, chief architect of the World Wide Web, explains his vision of the next stitch in the process: The Semantic Web  ... [more] 8:34:21 AM  Google It!  comment  []

Sunday, April 14, 2002

Drexler declares nanotechnology victory. [Also Web Services comment] " . . . he characterized the 'revolution' of Web services as not being about so much the reality of tools and services, but one of conceptual thinking that Web services will happen. 'And that revolution in thinking is happening right now,' he said." ... [more] 12:37:36 PM  Google It!  comment  []

Friday, April 12, 2002

What kind of internet operating system do we want? " . . . 'unexpected results.' You get these by creating an environment where innovation can flourish, where users can 'scratch their own itch', and combine the tools in new ways. I like to think that it will have an open architecture similar to that of both Unix/Linux and the Internet. Rather than building a single monolithic system, the original Unix inventors, Ken Thomson and Dennis Ritchie, developed some simple system services, and a powerful concept for how programs could cooperate. As a result, simple programs could be connected in a pipeline, like legos or tinker toys, to accomplish more complex tasks. This same principle is evident in the development of the Internet. Open standards tell you what you need to write and what you need to read in order to be able to cooperate with another program. What you do internally is up to you."  ... [more] 2:59:20 PM  Google It!  comment  []

Saturday, April 13, 2002

Google opens SOAP interface "I'm not sure what's coolest about this. That Google can be used in all kinds of applications, or that it's free up to 1000 hits a day so the independent developers will get a good crack at it, or that's it the first step of Level 2 of the www arriving in a cascading recombinance of web services and scripting glue." [via MetaFilter] 12:24:47 PM  Google It!  comment  []

Friday, April 12, 2002

Inventing the Future "So often, signs of the future are all around us, but it isn't until much later that most of the world realizes their significance. Meanwhile, the innovators who are busy inventing that future live in a world of their own. They see and act on premises not yet apparent to others." "So, what am I seeing today that I think the world will be writing about (and the venture capitalists and entrepreneurs chasing) in the years to come? Wireless. Next generation search engines. Weblogs. These daily diaries of links and reflections on links are the new medium of communication for the technical elite. . . . they are creating a new set of synapses for the global brain. . . . they trade in the same currency as the best search engines--human intelligence, as reflected in who's already paying attention to what. . . . They are also a platform for experimentation with the way the Web works: collective bookmarking, virtual communities, tools for syndication, referral, and Web services. Instant messaging. . . . between programs. . . . They are making collaboration, 'presence management,' and instant communication into a business application . . ." File sharing. . . . When everyone is connected, all that needs to be centralized is the knowledge of who has what. . . . desktop Web sites exposing the local file-system via distributed-content management systems. This is fundamental infrastructure for a next generation global operating system." Grid computing. Web spidering. . . . as hackers realize they can build 'unauthorized interfaces' to the huge Web-facing databases behind large sites, [they] give themselves and their friends a new and useful set of tools." "All of these things come together into what I'm calling 'the emergent Internet operating system.'" "But the most interesting part of the story is still untold . . . will suddenly snap into focus. . . . There's a story here that is emerging with increasing clarity." " . . . network computing is a classic case of . . . a disruptive technology. It doesn't fit easily into existing business models or containers. It will belong to the upstarts, who don't have anything to lose, and the risk-takers . . . " "Spiders . . . are really a first-generation Web service, built from the outside in. . . . sites will offer XML-based APIs that allow remote programmers to request only the data they need, and to re-use it in creative new ways." "There are a number of ways for a company to get benefits out of providing data to remote programmers: Revenue. . . . Amazon-powered library catalogs anyone? Branding. . . . request branding as a condition of the service. Platform lock in. . . . a platform strategy beats an application strategy every time. Once you become part of the platform that other applications rely on, you are a key part of the computing infrastructure, and very difficult to dislodge. Goodwill. . . . the 'coolness' factor can make a huge difference both in attracting customers and in attracting the best staff." "One of the beauties of the Internet is that it has an architecture that promotes unintended consequences." "Bit by bit, we'll watch the transformation of the Web services wilderness. The first stage, the pioneer stage, is marked by screen scraping and "unauthorized" special purpose interfaces to database-backed Web sites. In the second stage, the Web sites themselves will offer more efficient, XML-based APIs. (This is starting to happen now.) In the third stage, the hodgepodge of individual services will be integrated into a true operating system layer, in which a single vendor (or a few competing vendors) will provide a comprehensive set of APIs that turns the Internet into a huge collection of program-callable components, and integrates those components into applications that are used every day by non-technical people." ... [more] 2:04:40 PM  Google It!  comment  []