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Monday, December 9, 2002
Sky zero 
| | Bigger bang theory: Kevin is introducing the Supernova conference. Decentralization is the theme. The energy in the room is fun, attentive... nice. So many people I really dig here. Can't begin to name them all (follow the link above). He's talking about What's Happening Now as something akin to a star exploding. It's that big a deal. Makes me think of a bomb going off in space; hence the subhead above. Anyway, rather than cover what speakers are saying (others will, I'm sure), I'll just gurge a few thoughts as they come along. |
| | WiFi doesn't succeed just because something so decentralized scales better than something centralized (like, say, cellular broadband, which is such a no-brain slam-dunk gotta-have-it tech there's no good reason other than scale-averse centralization to explain its absence), but because anybody can use it, easily, to add value to the Net — literally improving this new world we're making together. Context: the Net's core virtues: |
| | - Nobody owns it;
- Everybody can use it; and
- Everybody can improve it
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| | Hundred Monkeys Theory Sounds like it's raining. Everybody's typing. It's like we've got a room full of court stenographers. (There's a tech I want: court stenographic keyboards for laptops... I'd gladly learn the shorthand.) |
| | Now Howard Rheingold is up. |
| | Nothing personal: Saying the Web is an early sign of collective action. If it were up to corporations, they'd still be "grinding away in our grandchildren's lifetime." Aversive adjective, collective. Nearly as aversive is social, but I like it better. We've evolved from personal to social computing. That's what's happening in this room. What we had twenty years ago was personal. It was typing. The PC was an IBM Selectric with compute power. In terms of maturation, it was a baby, a suckling. It cared only about itself. It wasn't social, yet. Nets made it social. THE Net brought social computing. WiFi is social in ways cellular broadband isn't. |
| | Separated at Nordstrom?: With my glasses off, Howard Rheingold and David Isenberg look like twins, at least above the collar. Howard has a shirt with stars and planets, David is wearing a sports coat. He's across the aisle to my left. Behind me is David Weinberger (reporting thusly). A few minutes ago Dave Winer (whose running comments are here) waved to me earlier from across the room. My real name is David too. See what happens? |
| | It isn't where you are, it's who you are: There is a question about who will be in charge of the technology of location, Howard wonders. I think the answer is everybody. Man, we need open ID services, quickly. |
| | It isn't who you are, it's how you goog: Howard directs us to a lookup of Sun-Diamond. Talk about an emperor with no clothes... S-D is, like, a shaved weasel or something. |
| | Googopoly: From the audience, Dave says Google is every bit a monopoly as... And he's right. Bob Frankston adds There's every reason to fear a majority... We can easily create our own tyranny. Howard says this is partly why he called his latest book Smart Mobs. Adds We are losing some of the time of deliberation by speeding things up. Unspoken question: Is mob-smart going to be more moral than mob-dumb? I think the implied answer is yes. We can inform each other so easily here. The smartest among us naturally want to be smarter, and remain curious. We are impelled by heuristic passions. More information, and more curiousity about information, makes us all smarter, collectively. We know more. Cory: We're good at starting action but very bad at sustaining it. How true. |
| | (On his blog, Cory's saying there are no power outlets in parts of the room... but there are under my table here. I have an extra power bar — an idea I got from Cory, somewhere back there — if anybody wants it.) |
| | Because now isn't soon enough: Dave asked a few minutes ago why Google isn't current in the last two hours (instead of two days, or whatever it is). So hey: for blogs, you can bypass Google, in a nicely decentralized way, by looking up a blog (or other URL) on Technorati. Here's Dave's. Here's mine. Here's Supernova's. Here's Technorati's own. Each of these piles of results (amazingly current in some cases) is called a "cosmos." Coincidence? How about the fact that it was written by David Sifry (yet another David), who's here, and wouldn't be possible without technologies invented by both Dave Winer and Google. |
| | Unrealization: Dan'l is the top dot-Net guy for Microsoft ("a company you may have heard of," Kevin says). Been around for a long time, going back to Apple in the early 80s. He's showing slides. Progress of tech and innovation from TCP/IP to HTML to XML — and, at the same time, from Standard to Connectiviity to Presentation to Programmability. The last two are also "browse the Web" and "program the internet" (under XML andn Programmability). Makes sense, if you're just looking at tech and abstractions. I look at it as a progression from personal to social, from hacking machines to hacking culture — including business and government. So while he's calling this "disaggregation," I'm thinking it's whatever we really need to call decentralization and smartmobbery. |
| | Clusters define an era, he says. Bottom line of the next slide: We must both tear down and build up... Including (cough) Microsoft? |
| | Now he's talking about swings from evolution to revolution, and how XML is both, in the direction of both client-centric computing and server-centric computing. |
| | Now he's forecasting a later part of his talk, about dot-Net (how does Microsoft come up with the world's worst names for things?), and how we need to "re-architect" the Net with XML. Hope he doesn't justify the creepy feelilng that statement gives me. |
| | He reminds us that the Web was designed by TBL on NextStep. Dan'l used to work for NeXT. Forgot about both facts. |
| | Fundamental tech drivers, he says, are the net and portable computing... and an integration imperative. |
| | Building blocks for success: XML Web Services. dotNet is "Web services support acrosss the Microsoft platform." It's gone all vague. Looks borgy to me, especially around 'structure. I find myself expecting clobbery questions... |
| | Marc: Will My.Net services be available to schmucks like us, or only to MSN customers? Dan'l says they had to start somewhere. Our core business model is not to operate services except for our constituencies. Dave: Why should we trust you? Dan'l: Trust is something we'll have to earn. Also: Whatever identity framework we have will have to federate... Mitch: What constituencies won't you serve? Marc: The schema should be open! You shouldn't have to license and pay for that! Dan'l: If somebody wants to operate servers in the sky, somebody's got to pay for it. Dave reminds us that Craig Mundie at the Open Source confererence two summers ago said Microsoft would exercize its patents, and nobody has refuted that. Dan'l: IBM makes $2 billion on its patent portfolio and Microsoft doesn't. Dave: Do you think we're stupid? |
| | The question I didn't ask: Why don't you open your IM protocols to interop? |
| | Now Rod Smith of IBM is up. Very complex slides, buzz-heavy language... good time to recycle the coffee. |
| | Now Jeremy Allaire is up — on a screen, since he couldn't be here in the flesh. The frame rate is about 5fps, so he looks dubbed. Kind of a Max Headroom effect. I'm an optimist he disclaims. Three trends: 1) Rich clients; 2) Web services, distributed data and logic in the network; 3) Siginifcant momentum for broadband tech. |
| | Client side runtime with a "richer experience" than what we get from browsers, etc. Unshackling from a document-centric model. Container and media environment haven't evolved. Fidelity has. The runtime model and kinds of experiences you can construct haven't evolved. Rich clients break through this. Can support desktop like apps, with the deployment sensibilities of the Web. They enable a 2-way real time app environment. New network programming model based on these services. Push action out to the edge. Disclosure: Macromedia is doing 3 million downloads a day of ... something (Flash?) 60% ubiquity... Now the sound is going to hell. |
| | Now the panel is going up to the stage. I'm on that, so I'm off here... |
| | Okay, now the panel and lunch are both over, and ... |
| | The Internet is not going to bring on Jeffersonian democracy. |
| | Per decentralization: There are some people who believe that every server is evil. Mitch doesn't. The difference between clients and servers is not always clear. |
| | There are services that are bound to be multiplatform. Consider the example of an office "needing" an Exchange server. Why not do the whole calendar thing on a peer-to-peer basis? |
| | We're using the Jabber infrastructure to enable people and servers to describe each other. An example of how they're not going to be pure peer-to-peer. |
| | If it's not seen as being a decentralized and empowering tool, we have not succeeded on our mision. |
| | Over the fullness of time, it will be a platform and not just an application. |
| | If you try to do a platform, you need at least two clients to help determine the requirments, to have generality. If we succeed, there will be a robust platform underneath it, and anybody can build... |
| | Increasingly people's document depository is their email. (Tell me about it.) Why not make files the first item of information? |
| | Dave asks about how he relates to his development team. |
| | Some things are the same, some are different. He focusses on front end and end user, and depends on others he respects to do the implementation work. One difference: I'm more open to the possibility that other people have good ideas. Maybe it's age... Mentions that he hired Mitchell Baker (yay! ... didn't know that... shoulda been reading Mitch's blog). |
| | I get tired of changing what I do every few years. |
| | Hey, I represent that remark! |
| | Scoble: I'm so decentralized that I couldn't go to the decentralization event of the year. |
| | Dave: Don't worry Scoble, it's the usual lies. Nothing happening here. He explains: |
| | I think we're all way too worried how each of us looks, and not enough worried about where we're going. I think this has always been true, ever since Visicalc, but we had enough momentum to hide our vanity and make it seem as if all the bluster somehow mattered. Perhaps this conference will be the turning of the tide, perhaps a real conversation will happen, not in the hallways, but in the conference room. Perhaps we'll leave with ideas for our software, not fear from having our ideas taken and implemented by other people who are more popular, or richer, or whatever. |
| | Cory: Are you encouraging me to go bankrupt (by encourage keeping of email, which can kill the owner in discovery, post-subpoena)? Mitch: keep it encrypted... |
| | I just asked about how this may have excited other open source and independent developer efforts. But I listened closely without typing to his answer and the next panel is up now. Ah well. |
| | Next panel, Collaborative Business. David Weinberger moderates. |
| | DW: Panel intended to talk about some of the things tech enables or works against. The ways in which we flock and swarm. Technology has no precise meaning, unless you're in France, where it has a very precise meaning. Baseline: people working toward a common goal. There has been at least pretty good collaborative software around since the 80s. The business case has been there forever. So if we've had it around, why isn't everybody using it all the time? To John Parkinson (Cap Gemini, Ernst & Young), You've blown about a billion dollars on this stuff, so... |
| | JP: They all suck, basically, he says. Email killed it, even if it didn't suck. And email sucks too. All the design philosphies get in the way of people trying to work with people and systems. |
| | John Hagel: There is precious little time left over for real collaboration, after dealing with what doesn't work with info exchange. |
| | Narry Singh: Is the demand for collaboration always high? No. |
| | DW: We're not making any progress on any front. That's odd. |
| | Narry: It's intriguing, but not odd. Things go unsaid because they're soft and amorphous. Arbitration, dispute management... It's a naive to assume collaboration alone is the story. He takes a broader view. |
| | JP: All the significant stuff is bottom up, not top down. That's the lesson of open source. It's the bane of my existance that we have 500 answers, they're all bad, and none predominate. And this is just in the knowledge management marketplace. |
| | JH: Company from China that's 100 years old is doing the best collaboration, but it's light on technology. (I think I got it right). |
| | Narry: You're confusing connectivity with collaboration. Also You can make old economy mistakes at new economy speeds. |
| | Bob Frankston, from the audience: What's lacking is tools for collaborating with yourself.... We wind up with procrustean tools built around one job... We need end to end tools. |
| | Howard R: We need to re-read what Doug Englebart wrote in '63 about people using three things: artifacts, training and language... Point: we overstress artifacts. |
| | JP: We have three email populations: 1) college graduates who have used email all along; 2) old people; and 3) people who don't get it. Two can't be trained. |
| | Useful Digression: New Technorati (not until now exposed) feature: Top 100 Interesting Recent Blogs (most in this room, including Sergei Brin representing Google, which isn't a blog, but so what). |
| | Narry: What do we do in this chain of people who buy, source and make, say, automotive parts, if we don't even agree about language? This is content management that matters. |
| | JH: Hmm. Missed most of it. Sounded very intelligent and knowing. Ah well. |
| | David W(einberger): Hey (there must be grounds for optimism). Dave W(iner) responds: Right on. These guys are sad sacks... cheer up already. Look at outlining in days of yore, and weblogging today. It's getting very broad and ubiquitous. |
| | Narry: Let me give you a cultural descrambler. This is me, excited. (Big laughs.) There is 5% penetration. Thinks there is some good stuff out there. In my world, where businesses buy and sell stuff, collaboration has a distinctive meaning, and it has ... lost it. The low penetration is unacceptable, but that's the good news. |
| | Digression: Sitting in the midst of all the Davids (to my left, between me and Isenberg, in front of David Weinberger's empty seat) is David Sifry, god of Technorati, who also points to the new and in some ways similar Popdex. Talk about collaboration. |
| | DW(einberer): Are you guys sad sacks? Are you too top-down? |
| | JH: There is still a huge gap between oportunity and practice in collaboration. Has to do with tech, but other issues, too. |
| | JP: Collaboration is a very personal thing. This is a problem. Also, There are no generalizations to be made from the data. |
| | JH: McKinsey: There is productivity decrease in six sectors, relative to IT. Just inserting tech doesn't do the job. You have to change business practices. That's what rocks. Consider Wal-Mart. |
| | JP: I'm not that gloomy. I got something for my $billion, just not what I thought I was going to get, which is health, wealth and happiness. |
| | Narry: You can only structure processes to a point. They only emerge. (In the B2B space...) We are recognizing acutely that there is only so much you can structure, because you can't predict what your partners are going to want you to do. |
| | Bob Frankston: Collaboration is such a general concept that it's not worth talking about. Unstructured... |
| | JH: We're drawn toward unstructured. But there's a need for structured inside companies. Solving plumbing issues. |
| | Me: I just pointed out that the audience, if you can still call it that, is collaborating all over the place, and hacking the conference, and is unstructured as hell, and kicking the shit out of the panel, which is structured. We're winning. The corporate body, I said, is organic, and can't control pulse. |
| | DW: I'm confusing what we're doing here with the kind of corporate collaboration that involves deep routines (if I get that right). Me, in response: So you need a pacemaker in some cases. |
| | Narry: We're (something with knuckle draggers) and you guys are telepathic. Don't look at me and my company to create anarchy. |
| | JP: My job is taking something from the 70 people in this room and take it to 70 million... (Later...) ERP is the largest waste of money undertaken by Western civilization in two centuries. Also People are not peripherals. |
| | So (to ironicize the just-finished panel) Euan Semple walks up and tells me he's putting blogging tools (sort of.. it's quiet, don't tell anyone) at the... okay, I won't tell you where he works, but it's big and British, okay? |
| | Okay, next panel: (copied and pasted from here) Broadband Media Distribution: Can't We All Get Along? (Cory Doctorow, EFF; Sean Ryan, Listen.com; Morgan Guenther, Tivo; Media Venture Advisors) |
| | Cory: In 1908 piano roll companies were sued for napsterizing the sheet music business. More cases. Well put. (This needs to be transcribed... unfortunately he's talking too fast for me to type along.) The broadcast flag is only step one in a 3 part plan. Step two is plugging the "analog hole." Step 3 is what Microsoft called the Darknet, a lucid and clear-eyed look at securing a computer against its own users. They want to redesign the internet so it can be secured against its users. We know why this sucks. But we're not saying so. We need to say we want NO regulation. Nobody has ever asked the crowbar company to make a crowbar that only opens doors that criminals have... Why ask commodity hardware to do the same? |
| | Morgan Guenther: Theme of the year is transition from a consumer-facing subscriber acquisition model to a (something) of the industry. DVRs will be ubiquitous in five years. How do you get there? Innovation. 550,000 paying customers. $12.95/mo. 50% gross margin. No churn. Impressive. His language is all top-down one-to-many. Stuff pumped to "consumers." Disappointing. Real estate in the living room. The means to reach out to your customer and to build a longer, more lasting relationship is out there. What are you going to do with that? Much better. This is to the new guard. The old guard only said You're ruining our business and we're going to sue ya. We're taking an industry partnership strategy, and have from the beginning. Not sure I buy it. |
| | Cory: What happened with SDMI was a monumentally difficult system that the industry challenged people to break. So when a princeton professor and associates cracked it in a day, they told him they would sue him under the DMCA. Got a judgment that an academic can't be sued for teaching math. The record industry and Hollywood speak with one voice about restricting use in your home. The kind of real piracy done by real gangs in the Ukraine are of no concern. |
| | Sean: There's a mix between restrictions and use of IP. SDMI was stupid. We'll continue to battle this through. We will come out with some compromise. It's not going to please the extremes, and it's not going to be the apocalypse. Rhapsody is signing up thousands of subscribers per day. |
| | Dan Gillmor: I'm looking for evidence that the record industry is willing to compromise. |
| | Sean: The industry is acquiescing to reality. |
| | Aside: I'm trying to follow "Start here" from the Rhapsody FAQ to sign up for Rhapsody. It hangs and goes nowhere. Only runs on PCs anyway, so fuggit. |
| | Morgan: The issues now involve the home network. You want to move content from your downstairs TiVo to your upstairs bedroom. (Clapping...) We're going to the industry and saying "here's how we're doing it." Looking for the industry by inaction saying what we can and can't do. |
| | Morgan: We have the technology to create your own highlight reel and channel. You'll geet vehement arguments from the industry on this. |
| | Bob Frankston: Making the point that the industry remains cartelized and closed (a point I want to make). |
| | Morgan: We're not even a hardware company. We're a buffer... a bit bucket at the end of a pipe. And those sales and gross margins are on... what? I wonder. |
| | J.D. Lasica: Wants to hear more about file-serve television. Are users part of the process? |
| | Morgan: Good question. Founders believe streamed at the end makes the most sense. We're all about distributed computing. Storage on the edge. That model provides the best, most scalable... best consumer experience in the TV industry. What you'll see is more and more cable companies adopting closed standards for serving up TV off hard drives at the head end. Scared to death of IP delivery. The Series II is broadband ready. We can deliver content into the box. It's just about bandwidth, content and metadata. Over the long run, when you turn on your TiVo, regardless of where the content comes from, we don't care. And you don't, either. |
| | I asked a question that Morgan answered (sort of), but I don't have time (or sufficient memory) to write it out. Marc just asked a question too. Missed it. |
| | Sean: We're still trying to compete with free, and that's hard enough as it is. The question: How do we get to some kind of deal that works? |
| | Cory: Sony and Microsoft both assert patents over rights expression languages. |
| | Morgan: Sony has over a hundred million devices out in the market and want to be able to move media around. Their focus is around moving media within the home and around the Net. |
| | Cory: Sony has funded some good guys. |
| | Morgan: They're not exactly known for their pursuit of open standards. |
| | Marc, to Morgan: Where do you stand on the RePlay lawsuit? Morgan was evasive, but understandably so. |
| | Bloggers are running the asylum |
| | The best of times... We have all kinds of new fun shit |
| | The worst of times... It's not about the unsolved issues of the Web era. But we haven't sorted out some of the challenges that came with the intro of the PC. Look at what Mitch is up to. |
| | Infrastructure. A word that's come up. What's below and above the line. That's tomorrow's theme. |
| | Control. What forms are acceptable, or inevitable. How do we process all the choices in a decentralized environment? |
Shoot back
Pepys show
| | Is there a Pepys Award for primo diarizing? There should be, just so we could give it to Chris Locke, whose post this morning would knock any other contenders, if there were any, out of the ring. |
| | [Later...] Subhead Xplanation: Samuel Pepys odd surname is pronounced "Peeps." |
Divided Airlines
| | So United has pulled out its pockets and shrugged, filing for Chapter 11 protection from clueditors, which are loaning it more money, apparently. (They probably don't have much choice.) |
| | Speaking as an Executive Premier frequent flyer — that's the second-highest customer caste with the airline — I'd like to suggest that United find a way to either 1) get some real leadership that can convince its hyperunionized rank&file to get over themselves, and 2) turn itself into a holding company for a bunch of smaller airlines, such as Air Wisconsin, which operates United Express. |
| | It's plain that United's cost structure doesn't work, and that its unions have a fatally vested interest in maintaining that cost structure. (Will American's? We'll see.) |
| | It's also plain that United's management has been unwilling to deal with the facts of a radically changed industry. |
| | Successful airlines, such as Southwest and Jet Blue, are Greyhound busses of the sky. That's what all the big old airlines need to be. And that's what the market wants. |
c'est clue'nefique
| | I  rather like that the only English on Elanceur Weblog is the little flag to the left here. |
Here and there
| | So I got up here in 4.5 hours flat, had dinner with friends, and checked in at the Comfort ... I dunno, Something ... in Palo Alto. It's cheap, so I wasn't expecting much. Which is what I got. It's the usual Lysol-scented low end room with a blurry TV and canvas sheets. It figured I wouldn't do better than dial-up, so I didn't bother trying. |
| | But then I noticed the blue ethernet cable coming out of the wall next to the TV. Could it be? I wondered. |
| | A plastic sleeve on the cable said "High-Speed Internet Access...As Easy As 1-2-3." So I plugged it into the laptop, and there it was. Not even an intevening Web page telling me this would be $9.95 or something. I called the front desk. Is this free? I asked. |
| | Yes, it's free, they said. |
There are responses to this message:Re: Monday, December 9, 2002, Nicholas Dunham, 12/10/02; 12:35:44 AM Re: Monday, December 9, 2002, Fred Grott, 12/9/02; 7:15:38 PM Re: Monday, December 9, 2002, John Robb, 12/9/02; 11:21:36 AM Pardon me, sir, your links are crooked, Matthew Thomas, 12/9/02; 5:29:44 AM
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