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Monday, April 21, 2003
Not so easy? 
| | As a format, ENT is easy to understand, easy for application developers to implement, and pretty easy to parse. Kudos to Matt and Paolo for coming up with a design that is simple but extensible. |
| | The downside isn't so easily excerpted. Read the link for more. |
| | Back on the upside, Ross Mayfield says, Great work guys. Just what RSS needs to be smarter yet stupid -- metadata that can be used at the edge. From feed to feeds. |
Lungchalking by phone
| | The text-messaging service pinpoints the locations of confirmed cases of severe acute respiratory syndrome. It's one of many ways people in the region are using mobile technology to cope with the disease. |
| | Launched by Sunday Communications, the service allows subscribers with SMS-enabled phones to identify the "contaminated" buildings within a kilometer of their calling location. Subscribers can also learn which buildings visited recently by patients suspected of having SARS, or "atypical pneumonia," as the disease is known throughout much of Asia. |
Globe, live
Dinner Floating in New York
| | Okay, it's public. Halley and I are blogging out loud about putting together a bloggers dinner in New Yawk next week. Speaking for myself, it'll have to be Thursday. The rest is up to the rest of ya. |
The unmanaged revolution
The World Live Web
| | I've become convinced, just in the last few days, that we've been limited in our understanding of the Web, and of the Net, by the real estate metaphors we use to make sense of it: site, address, location, home, delivery... Even commons. Those are all necessary yet insufficient to a full understanding of what the Web is for. |
| | Yes, the Web is a place. Sure. But what do we do there? Is it just a place to put up sites? A place where we store and forward messages and publications to each other? Or is it a place where life happens? Is it a place where we can truly live? |
| | The World Live Web first came to me as a one-liner from Allen when he was describing GlobeAlive (an idea he'd developed over the last two years without me knowing a durn thing about it). The idea of a search engine that would let you find people rather than sites — real human beings and not just their addresses — at first seemed audacious in the extreme. |
| | But then I thought about the centrality of search to everything we do — not just on the Web but in life (from white pages to directories in the lobbies of high rises). And I thought about how the concept of a live Web brought together a whole pile of allied concerns and development efforts: digital identity, instant messaging and presence, markets for expertise, syndication, mobile messaging, moblogging, social computing, smart mobs, P2P, transaction, directory and metadirectory services, strip mall infomediaries, weblogs... It put all these emerging technologies and movements in a single new perspective: a live one. (Even if a lot of what happens is archived or stored and forwarded.) |
| | So I want to thank Allen for that. And also thank all the people behind all these other movements that seem to be heading in a convergent direction. The economy may suck, but there's a pile of interesting shit going on. And hey, maybe having a sucky economy helps. |
| | I also look forward to seeing a bunch of ya'll at ETCon this week. |
| | Doc's soooo right on this (as is the following entry)....Digital identity is about turning the web from a read/write medium into a true *relationship* medium....praise the lord! can i get a witness!?! |
| | I'd say ya got a lot of 'em. |
Digital ID Exostructure
| | For anyone with a passing interest in the Biz game, y'aughtta know that my current feeling is that the user-controlled and people-friendly projection of secure and authenicated identity into the internet will herald the next generation of e-commerce and be the principle cause of our next economic boom. I didn't say it first, but it's the first time I've said it here. Maybe I'll elaborate on this in the not too distant future, but in the meantime, I'll explain why blogs are a good foundation for this. Again, this isn't a totally original idea. Doc Searls has a little ditty about it on his blog today , but I can tell you this sort of thing has been on my mind for quite a while. |
| | Basically, it occurs to me that If you're willing to put your name on your blog and keep it real -- my original inspiration being Jusin's Links -- it could be the ultimate "I ain't scammin' you" proof. Using my blog as trust collateral first popped up when I wanted to buy something on eBay a while ago, and I realized that all these people had thousands of transactions and I had the goose egg zero and those suspicious-looking sunglasses. EBay lets you put up a little something about your self, so I stuck this up there. I like to think it helped me put prospective sellers at ease. |
| | That was nice, but the real ah-ha! moment was when I started including my url in exploratory emails for freelance gigs off of craigslist or one of the innumerable job boards. This provides tremendous initial value for me as opposed to just some dude with an aol account: people can click my link and immediately see what I'm about and that I'm a real person, far more so than we'd be able to establish in an initial phone call. They also have a sense of what I'm about and so forth, lets them know if they want to deal with me or not. |
| | Also, I used the term collateral specifically for a reason, that being having a personal blog gives me something to loose. Unlike a hotmail address or a monster.com login, this website gives me a non-disposable stake in the online world... |
| | I suppose the blogless will have to come up with some other form of collateral, but still: this is a perfect perspective. Its a mydentity even if it's not the mydentity. In other words, it represents one part of our own personal DigID, and one personal DigID with which others in the world might like to deal. |
| | Here's another way of putting it: I'd have no trouble doing business with Outlandish Josh, because I know his blog well enough to trust him. Now, Outlandish may be just one of Joshua Koenig's many personas, but so what: he seems sane enough to do business with. His other personas (if he has them) might be interesting, but irrelevant. His blog is trustworthy enough to attract my faith and credit. At least for some things. Maybe for a lot of things. Enough things, anyway, to suggest he might be hip to some business opportunity here. |
| | Here's another way of looking at it. Some population short of everybody will have a blog. Those people will have an advantage if, in a P2P way (and a P2B way, and a B2P way), some new business comes along that relies on DigID that isn't imposed in a top-down way by the BigCos. |
| | This is not to say the BigCos would have nothing to do with it. Au contraire. Smart ones would be all over it. But the pioneering will happen at the gas roots we call blogging. |
| | In the World of Ends we call the Net, the infrastructure that counts will necessarily be end-based. Think of it as an exostructure. |
| | - relationship
- conversation
- transactions
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| | Our focus for most of the Industrial Age was on transactions, although there was plenty happening in the conversation and relationship departments. Still, transactions were what business was mostly about. The movement of money. The Cluetrain Manifesto pointed out the markets were conversations, too. Even though this wasn't news, the point was timely: we were ready to see and run with it. |
| | Relationship is the new frontier. No, not everything in a market is about relationship, or even conversation — not by a long shot. But if you're looking for opportunity, that's a good place to find it. And if you want a DigID infrastructure that actually works at the gas roots level, you need a conceptual framework that goes beyond transaction, and even conversation. |
| | Almost speaking of which, I got some great hang-time at PC Forum with Simon Grice, the CEO of Midentity, which seems like a very cool company. |
There are responses to this message:The Doc effect, lou josephs, 4/21/03; 1:09:24 PM Yo Dave is the Globe bloging the Marathon, lou josephs, 4/21/03; 11:22:03 AM Re: Monday, April 21, 2003, eric norlin, 4/21/03; 10:50:35 AM Gas Roots?, Joshua Koenig, 4/21/03; 7:43:00 AM
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