December 2005 Archives
My friend Tara Morris, who was on our Vietnam bicycle trip last year, just spent a week volunteering at a relief kitchen in St. Bernard's Parish, Louisiana. The amount of destruction still evident is huge and completely saddening, but the pictures of the people give hope. The pictures are well worth looking through.
The Ziff Davis folks have a story showing some of the enhancements in the latest build of Vista, Microsoft's next version of Windows.
While I'm sure all of the new security and stability features are the real reason you should think about upgrading when this becomes a production release of Windows (MS says late 2006), I think this new volume control, which allows you to adjust the volume of sound from different applications independently, is a terrific enhancement to Windows:
DJ Michele Myers from KEXP, one of my favorite local DJs, asks people on her mailing list for their top 10 music picks for the year. Of course, she wanted them by December 3, so I'm three weeks late, but here's what I sent (though I just realized I didn't get the World Sax Quartet's Experience on the list...oh, well!):
Here's my top 10 (ok, so it's 12) for 2005, representing what I've been listening to in 2005, not necessarily what was new in 2005 - not in any particular order:
- Thelonious Monk with John Coltrane at Carnegie Hall. A major find of the year, a previously unreleased recording of Monk and Trane when their collaboration was at its peak. The solo piano intro to Monk's Mood is itself worth the price of admission, and Coltrane really swings hard as he dives into his "sheets of sound".
- Joshua Redman Elastic Band - Momentum. Fine funky jazz from a happening group - looking forward to seeing them in January at Jazz Alley.
- Gangbe Brass Band - Whendo. Great soulful African brass band music from Benin. Now that's a fusion worth hearing!
- The Fabulous Thunderbirds - Painted On
- Bonnie Raitt - Souls Alike. A couple of examples of old pros at the top of their games. Quality comfort food for us boomers.
- M.I.A. - Arular - OK, so all the talk was about the political content and her dad being a Tamil Tiger, but it's the cool minimalist dance grooves and the not-quite-singing of her rhythmic rapping that grabs me enough to keep coming back.
- Wayne Shorter - Beyond The Sound Barrier. This jazz is as good as it gets - a live performance where the communication among the outstanding musicians of this quartet seems completely telepathic.
- Spanish Harlem Orchestra - Across 110th Street - groovin' salsa - great horn section!
- Kassav - K'toz - from the Carribean, from the founders of zouk music. Sophisticated, sweet, but always moving the body.
- Larry Goldings Trio - Sweet Science. Not new (2002), but somehow Larry Goldings had escaped my close attention until seeing him recently. This trio, while not flashing their innovation, has true depth.
- Olu Dara - In The World: From Natchez to New York and Neighborhoods - Again, not new (1998 and 2001) but this was the year this avant-garde downtown cornet player turned roots man really connected with me, and both of these disks have been spinning regularly in my ears. "Your lips, your lips, your lips, your lips are joooocy...." Music to make you smile - and what more could you ask for this year?
Back at the ranch after a great week on Maui (picture set here) - I come back rested and with my perspective well adjusted.
The year ends with some good news from different places:
Chandler 0.6 was released yesterday. This version is labelled as an "experimentally usable calendar" - that means it should be usable by those who want to try it for real use, but it's not yet the feature-complete personal information manager that is envisioned.
One reason you travellers might want to try Chandler for calendaring is its support for time zones - when you enter an event in the calendar you can choose in which time zone the event takes place. Then when you switch time zones on your computer as you travel, the events show up in the right local time on the calendar grid. Very cool! Unfortunately, that causes a problem with importing events from Oracle Calendar, which keeps all of its events in UTC (Greenwich Mean Time) - so they show up on the right place on the calendar grid, but labeled with UTC times. If I get some moments over the holiday I'll try to write a script to convert the UTC times to Pacific time.
Also new on the open source front is the production release of Firefox 1.5 - seems more responsive on my Macs and has some new goodies, including drag and drop of tabs and lots of new search engines (including Gracenote (aka CDDB) - if only they had allmusic.com too!).
There's also a prerelease version of Thunderbird 1.5 - I'm very happy to see that they've added support for Kerberos authentication via TLS (which I specifically requested of Mike Shaver about a year and a half ago), and that when you select to forward multiple mail messages as attachment (as opposed to inline in the body of the message) it bundles them up as attachments to a single message. I do wish you could forward multiple messages inline in a single message, but I'll take what I can get.
And last, but not least, I learned yesterday that the forthcoming version of the UW's Email Delivery Manager will allow me to specify an end date for a vacation message - because I always forget to turn off my vacation messages until someone says "hey, did you know your vacation message is still on?". Look for release sometime in the first quarter of the new year.
That's great news all around!
Technorati Tags: Calendaring, messaging, open-source
No blogging this week - We're off tomorrow morning for a week of vacation in Hawaii to celebrate our 25th wedding anniversary (which happened back in September). None of the three of us have ever been there, so we look forward to a week of relaxing and exploring Maui in the warm weather. Woohoo!
Work IN Virtual Worlds -
- Dr. Judee K. Burgoon, et al - StrikeCOM (University of Arizona)
A limited virtual world - ROTC students. Have to communicate to find assets that they are going to call an airstrike on - but someone in there has been told to deceive the rest to protect the asset - the task is to seek out the deceiver.
What is a lie? Deceivers reinforce wrong information - a lie of omission.
Media richness - does the detection ability go up with more f2f contact? No - people seem to be better at detecting lies in just text - the liars are good at using subtle social signals.
- Cory Onrejka - Second Life
An environment - wants you to log in like you do to your operating system. Academics have begun using it to build curricula and virtual institutions. Also used for providing therapeutic communities
Work ON Virtual worlds
The Daedalus Project - Nick Yee - Stanford
Who Plays? Average age 26; Only 25% are teenagers; 8-16% females; age not correlated with use; 8% spend more than 40 hours a week playing; 70% of users have spent 10 hour or more continuously in the game; 80% play with someone they know in real life
Cory Onrejka - "World of Warcraft is the new golf!"
People are buying condos in Beijing based on sales of virtual currency to people in the US.
Price of developing a single player game is $5 - $20 million - multiplayer games are more.
Virtual Property rights - there's a big market for buying and selling virtual property - we don't have good legal understanding for virtual property, though it's coming. But we already trade virtual properties - like stocks. The Chinese already recognize virtual property. They have government programs promoting the trade in virtual property. This could lead to a massive capital shift to China.
Kristina Woolsey (New Media Consortium)
Working on a research study funded by McArthur.
Most of us were raised on flat paper, but now we're moving into sequenced and immersive worlds. We don't know how to represent ourselves in these new domains.
There's not a media revolution, but a language revolution - now we have tools that allow us to represent things we couldn't before. But it's not a language revolution, but a lifestyle revolution - the density of representation has increased dramatically. The rules of being a productive human have changed.
The New Media Literacy project has four questions they're working on. What are the media afforances? What are people doing? What should everyone be able to do? (what is public education? what is the social contract?) How might people gain new media fluencies?
Pachyderm - new display technology for presentations - San Francisco Museum developed.
New technology trends -
Mobile devices
The telephone is it.
Digital photography.
Publications are being redefined - includes the notion of representation of self. If everybody can publish, of what value is publication?
Standards are developing.
iLife defined digital lifestyles.
Media characterizations -
We have a participatory media. That might change democracy and governments. It's multimodal media. Print, movies, and graphics have changed - e.g. hypertext is a changed form of print. Not only do we have new things, but the old things have changed, and they've combined to form new forms. It's interactive. Collaborative infrastructure - networks connect people, who work in teams. It's any time, any place. It's about managing that lifestyle.
What are people doing?
Affiliation structures - you see this in IM buddy lists. Ou rways in which we connect to other people are changing drastically.
Flow - the addiction of being connected to the stream. Being connected and engaged. Reciprocal attention over the network. Psychological moment - you can get the answer when you have the question. Multitasking.
What should everyone be able to do?
Judgement - opportunity, how to determine reliability, develop better judgement skills...
Use images and text to tell stories withmultimedia. Design - use images to communicate, including critique, collaboration, debate.
Mobile communication, global connectivity, and real space navigation.
Technorati Tags: ecar2005
Bridging the GAP: Unified Approaches to Governance, Architecture and Procurement
Jonathan Murray is VP and CTO of Microsoft for Europe, Middle East, and Africa. This is a new role for the corporation. He runs a group of 30 technology officers around the world that work with government, educators, and others on policy implications of technology.
The World Bank today spends about $1 billion a year on ICT related projects. Sixty percent of those projects have been failing, which has major implications on emerging markets. Jonathan had worked as a technology officer at ARCO before coming to Microsoft, so had a background in enterprise scale IT issues. An example is Siemens, which has 350,000 desktops in 120 countries - highly complex environments. At Microsoft he put in measures to gather data on customer satisfaction with their services. When they started that process they were surprised by a couple of things - one was the larger the customer was the less satisfied they were with Microsoft. So they then formed a group to manage those set of customers separately from the rest of Microsoft business.
Out of that work came some interesting insights. One thing they learned is that all those companies were mired in complexity. What are some of the core issues from those complexities, and what are some of the best practices that come out of those companies?
They went and looked at the Educause data on most important issues, and were struck by the parallels with the private sector. The issue of funding for IT is high in both areas, as are security and identity management, and strategic planning. The issue of ERP implementation has largely been dealt with already in most large enterprises. In private enterprise security is still important but has become part of the system.
He's surprised by how low the issue of Governance, Organization, and Leadership turned up on the latest Educause survey - in private sector companies it ranks much higher as an issue - governance is the glue that makes this all work.
He puts the issues into a taxonomy of Governance, Architecture, and Procurement.
Governance includes strategic planning for IT, faculty development support and training, Governance organization and leadership for IT.
Architecture includes security and ID management, Admin and ERP systems, infrastructure management for IT, elearning, portalks, web services
Procurement includes funding, strategic planning, and support and training. How do you make sure the procurement cycles map to the rapid development of technology? This is a huge issue for governments.
In plain terms:
- in governance you deal with competing needs of many diverse stakeholders (how do you satisfy demand while keeping control of stability?), more demans than capacity, everyone is an IT expert
- Architecture - unless you have good architecture that is well managed and has a long-term plan it is very difficult to plan for an manage the complexity.
- Procurement - the budget process.
The GAP principles - derived from the best in class companies in how they manage IT.
Thesis
- Economic pressures of the early 200s lead leading companies to develop a set of best practices in IT governance, architecture and procurement: The GAP principles.
- Many higher ed institutions continue to implement GAP approaches which leading companies evolved away from in the late '90s
- Higher edu adotpion of the GAP principles would enable accelerated deployment of new services and technology
What are the principles?
Governance:
1. IT is a service provider to the business. - Buiness units and information technology organizations need to be intimately linked through managed engagement processes.
2. The CIO requires real authority - CIOs need effective authority to mandate architecture standards across organizational boundaries. This is absolutely critical. The best of class companies have CIOs with the authority to set and enforce standards. This is a thin layer of authority which runs horizontally across the entire organization.
Architecture - Good architecture demands abstraction. Too much of what we build is tightly vertically coupled. Increasingly what we need to do is build flexibility built on open standards.
Procurement - Architecture is the foundation - a long term strategic model is required for core architecture procurement. Service orientation in architecture enables flexibility. SLAs are ok, but they tell the service provider the minimum they need to know, so they're not the end-all.
Over the history of enterprise computing, nothing has gotten simpler over time. The late 90s we saw the IT "abyss", with IT spending growing rapidly (no old stuff was being switched off), operations and maintenance dominating IT budgets (that's still the case today - about 60% of budgets are spent on this, with only 28% being spent on adding new value), the complexity of distributed computing environment was exploding, and new development was ineffective. (1997 McKinsey research study).
Three catalyst events:
- Remediation of systems for Y2K - this was the first time organizations understood what IT systems they actually had, because they had to inventory.
- Stock market crash and bursting of the internet bubble
- september 11 attacks - told companies that the world is not predictable, which had a big affect on the trend towards outsourcing.
What do leading private sector organizations look like today?
Architecture:
- the web as the fundamental fabric - open stanadards, xml, http, etc. internal as well as external
- application abstraction through service orientation. So need to know what the core services are that need to be developed and then delivering them in abstract ways
- Systems abstraction through virtualization - fully virtualized data centers. This is very big in the financial services industry. Compute, disk, memory, IO are just a pool of resources in the data center, which can be allocated on demand.
Governance:
- Federal models. There is a CIO empowered to set standards for infrastructure that have to be implemented company wide. Includes desktops, middleware, and service infrastructure. CIO has the board's authority to mandate that all development will use these standards. Having account managers, sitting day-to-day inside the client units is a best practice - making the standards understandable to the clients and feeding back the information from clients on business needs to the IT organization.
- Architectural "hegemony" - Shel points out that in research institutions you need to plan for those disruptive technologies that will arise and break the architecture.
Procurement:
- strategic partnership - picking vendors whose products are committed to the set of standards that are being implemented.
- The rise of shared service models - how do you make systems and services work together across units to service the customers. One example is in South Africa where they are trying to combine individual institutions into a system, and want to offer common services.
Benefits of good architecture - not about specific products, but about standards.
- Abstraction of complexity - making sure that applications all go through the same middleware layer, for example, to allow changes in the back end without application changes.
I asked about the conflict between abstraction and ERP implementations, and Jonathan replied that most well managed companies implement ERP in order to enforce standardization of business policies and practices in order to get a global view of their business, and use the ERP as a transaction engine, and then build a series of data warehouses that people interact with to get information. Not everybody gets access to the ERP, and nobody gets custom reports. At Microsoft the data warehouse applications provide HR data, for example that's no more than 20 minutes old.
Technorati Tags: ecar2005, IT-architecture
Sandra Braman (University of Wisconsin-Mulwaukee)
Why does it matter?
- Research success is mission critical for many institutions, which means you need researchers. The Ability to do work is central to researcher identity. Serious researchers are willing to trade salary or switch institutions to improve support. It's clear to researchers that IT are collaborators, not just service providers.
How do we know what we know? Direct and indirect info from national reports, conversations with faculty, anecdotal & systematic reports from CIOs, scholarly publications on research trends and methods, and trade press reports.
Factors affecting research use of IT - Disciplinary cultures; professional development on computational techniques (more widespread at elite institutions); institutional and general incentive systems - there are many ways in which research trends (like collaboration or development of new algorithms) are being undermined by incentive systems; Efficiency - how do we evaluate the efficiency of research? Trade-offs will be made in how people use technology based on efficiency - if I have to add metadata to get data into an archive, it won't likely happen; Relationship between research & teaching - the use of research computing among grad and undergrad students is growing; Diversity of research approaches - people use high performance computing in conjunction with other research methods.
Institutional issues: competition for resources; history of privileging certain faculty and units; emphasis on homogeneity - can generate problems for researchers; assumptions about activity in units - IT may not be engaged with units new to research computing, but the assumption that support is happening in the unit may not be correct; inertial regarding institutional motivations.
Research culture issues: the rapid spread of computationally-intense research across disciplnes, e.g. music and dance or databases of videos in humanities; speed and continuous nature of innovations in research methods (needs for training); generational issues.
Decision making about IT for research: Hiring commitments by deans etc without discussion with IT units; Resource allocation - faculty may want to participate; collaborative infrastructure development (Princeton's new supercomputer purchase from funds shared across units); policy implementation - if faculty are in on development of policy they are more likely to abide by it.
Collaborative Decision making - multiple options not mutually exclusive. They are quite rare at present. MIT has multiple working groups that orient differently around research problems. Deans and chairs don't often really have any idea what's going on in the research areas in their units.
Computing needs - capacity; stability (and help with transitions); architectural flexibility - people who know about OS and research app architectures are usuall not talking to each other.
Training - there's a gap between how you were trained in grad school and current practices. Inadequate reliance on current students - lots of issues with use of students in terms of knowledge transfer, security, etc. speed of innovation. Range of diffusion techniques - working groups for getting peers in communication. Institutional and inter-institutional synergies. Linkage with methods courses.
More about software - needs range from simple scripting to custom software creation; software specialization as national institutional niche; finding researcher-authored software (NSF is talking about funding software archives)
Data needs: Collection; storage; preparation; presentation
Storage & preparation - multiplicity of types of storage (project-specific repositories to long-lived data collections of global importance) - UCSD is offering up 100 years of data storage to researchers from any institution. Multiplicity of storage venues. Rising & complex preparation needs. Policy issues (access, control, raw vs. cooked, - feds are pressing for release of raw data to federally funded research; etc).
IT & Ontologies - NSF is funding lots of work in metadata and ontologies. Driven by effort to bring info architects and disciplinary scientists into system design. One approach to user-centered design.
The new big two issues - more support for learning, adatpting, and writing software specific to their research problems; Researchers need help managing their data as it enters worlds of public presentation & long-lived data archives. UMich has a lib school training work for disciplinary specialists to do ontological and metadata work. Peter Murray from UMBC quarrels with these two issues - the hot topic is sophisticated pre and post-award information systems. Faculty and PIs want to reduce the administrative burdens. Everybody's dealing with compliance.
I didn't see any mention in this presentation of what is probably the biggest issue for us, which is demand for housing research computing in a centrally run data center environment. That need is being driven by security and recoverability issues.
Greg Jackson makes the great point that this analysis doesn't recognize that many of the shortcomings are the results of tradeoffs made as a result of incomplete analyses of cost, risk, and opportunities. We need to do the analysis of which services are actually worth spending scarce money on.
...and Everything Connects to Everything
Lee Rainie (Pew Internet & American Life Project)
Meet the Millenials, born 1982-2000. Might be a bigger generational cohort than baby boomers, the most diverse in American history - 31% minority. They think of themselves as a special generation apart. They are sheltered and more confident in every measure. Less individualistic and more team-oriented - date in groups, travel in packs. Highly achievement oriented - a rebellion against their baby-boomer parents. They feel pressured - the generation of the hurried child.
The most distinguishing thing about them is their special relationship with technology. They started elementary school when the Internet became something of interest in the culture. There are striking differences within the cohort - divide by class, sex, race, etc.
There's an interesting study of very young children and media by the Kaiser Foundation.
8 realities of Millinals' lives and 8 implications
1. They are immersed in technology. 87% of kids 8-18 live in homes with computers. 46% have high speed internet access in their home. The presence of a minor child in the home is a strong predictor of having a computer and Internet in the home. The implication is that teens expect to be able to gather and share information in multiple devices. They shrewdly sort out what communication and what information "belongs" on what device and under what circumstances. "Email is for old folks." - It's what you send you teacher, your uncle, your parents.
2. The internet plays a special role in their world. It's how the get information on movies and TV, tnhey play online games, use IM (75%), download music, read blogs. Teens share their own creation - they are contributors to the online commons. They're much more likely to do this and to create blogs than adults. They want to manipulate, remix, and share content. They love to play with the media, to have fun, and show off. They think of themselves as participants in a dialog more than consumers of media. They live in an "always on" world. They think of the internet as a: virtual textbook and reference library; virtual tutor and study shortcut; virtual study group; virtual guidance counselor; virtual locker, backpack, and notebook; and as a trusted, smart friend.
3. They are multitaskers.
From the Kaiser Generation M study - they spend to 8.5 hours of media access per day in 6.5 hours of time. The live in a state of "continuous partial attention" - Linda Stone. "scanning incoming alerts for the one best thing to seize upon". Plans aren't firmed up until the very last minute. We're in a state of "mild social panic" about the new rules of civility in this new environment. The number of possible interventions has grown beyond those in the immediate physical environment.
4. Their technology is mobile - 45% have cell phones, etc. They're constantly interacting and forming "smart mobs" and "presence" is a concept that is less physical and more virtual to them. They act on information in real time. This is causing all kinds of social strains as boundaries break down between public and private' work, school and home' and consumer and producer.
5. They are unconscious of being "on" technologies. The internet and other technologies have become the wallpaper of thelives. Implications: The use of technology for time shifting will be commonplace. THe importance of "appointment media" will fade and the value of ever-better search strategies will elevate. Long tail content will matter more.
6. They are often unaware of the implications of their tech use
75% agree: "Music downlading and file sharing is so easy to do, it's unrealistic to expect people not to do it". 55% say they do not care much whether what they download is copyrighted or not. They are often uncaring about their own privacy and they enjoy "soft surveillance" of others. This may change as they grow, but some of the smartest companies are using this to their advantage. There will be new models of things that grow up as a result. Greg Jackson makes the point that they're very jealous of their privacy when someone they don't want to finds them (e.g. spam) and they don't get the connection between their voluntary disclosure and its sometimes unintended results. There are opportunities for "teachable moments" in here.
7. Different teens use technology differently: boys and girls; young and old; broadband and dialup, etc.
Jack McCredie asks if there's any information on why, given this level of technology savvy, there's fewer students wanting to go into computer science or math - there doesn't appear to be any real data here.
8. Technology world will change radically in the next decade
Trends - a smarter environment (the extreme example being rf devices embedded in the soil); mor mobility will be built into the system; content creation will explode; search will get better and more social; the pressures on the internet to break into layers will intensify.
Implication - there are no Jedi masters for educators to consult in this new world.
Technorati Tags: ecar2005
While I had to stop blogging due to dead Powerbook batteries, the conference wrapped up with a cocktail reception hosted by Stanford's Media X group.
I got to use the time to chat with O'Reilly's Rael Dornfest about having some calendaring events at the Emerging Technology conference in March, to talk with Rael and IBM's Stephen Farrell about managing activities as opposed to projects or calendars, to introduce myself to Joyce Park and Adam Rikin from Renkoo, to carouse a bit with Lisa Dusseault and Tantek Celik (how do you make that C with the thing hanging down?), and to finally meet Dick Hardt from Sxip.
There's some video from the event up on CNET, as well as link to more coverage.
I thought that all in all it was a terrific day - kudos to Esther for organizing and leading a really thought provoking event that brought together a lot of disparate threads - I'm not sure it all melded together, but I think that there are definitely some themes - the merger of organizational and personal calendaring is one (which obviously has implications for identity management too); the closeness of discussions of time and place; and the whole world of event management and notification. This feels more and more like a set of topics that is rapidly reaching critical mass - at last!
Technorati Tags: Calendaring, when2
Will Wright (Maxis/Electronic Arts, and the creator of Sim City)
Models are a good way of abstracting data to make it understandable - building physical models is a good way of starting.
The idea that there could be a whole world living in your computer is fascinating. He showed the first version of Flight Simulator and the latest as a comparison.
One of the interesting things about games is that you can restart games from the begining - an iterative way of experiencing time. Games are a good way of understanding chaotic systems because you can see how small changes can create large differences in outcomes.
Possibility space - the shape of the landscape of possibilities is how you model the difficulty of achievement. Tried to model the Sims so that people needed to balance material and social success - but people tend to go for one side or the other. Now they're doing dynamic tuning of the game based on data from real players and how they negotiate the space.
A story is a way of how to displace someone's experience in time and space to apply it to another person. While you're seeing one linear path of events, the drama is created by imagining all the other things that didn't happen ("what would've happened if he had tripped here?").
Kids will mash all the buttons, look at what's happening on the screen, and build a model of the cause and effect relationships - kids are great at building a mental model of arbitrarily complex systems. Hey - just like science!
Games are doing the same thing - looking for simple compact rules that can create large spaces of possibilities.
Dynamics - the change of structures through time. We tend to think in terms of topologies, which are the parts of the systems, then there are the dynamics that occur to these things, then there are paradigms (network theory, adaptive systems, chaor theory, etc). Game player intuitively understand topologies within two or three minutes of playing.
A unique property of time is nested interaction loop with success and failure at each level. First you have to learn basic control, then you can deal with their needs, then you can get to the next level. The most intereseting side for most players is the failure side - that's where people spend the most time. As long as people understand why they failed they are willing to go back and try it again.
Interesting book - the User Illusion. Most of our intelligence is pre-conscious.
When players look at games a similary thing happens - use visuals in the game to tell the player what the nouns and verbs are. In first-person shooters you discover things by going around and bashing everything with the noun you have.
Games run on two processors - the computer and the player's imagination. A lot of what gets built in games is scaffolding for the player's imagination. A lot of the trend lately in games is to go to more open-ended games where the player has a role of authorship.
Technorati Tags: Calendaring, when2
Using time and time patterns to detect things.
Bob Pinner (CDC) - An internal medicine and infectious disease doc, now working on epidemiology - three major dimensions are time, place, and person. The structure of things they think about are similar to events. Infectious disease surveillance is what he works on - monitoring trends, or more recently, early detection. Can you go earlier than a specific diagnosis, to a syndrome, or even earlier, to a set of conditions. The earlier you get the less specific the signals are. Public health functions are organized locally by state and county - that's good for local response but not so good for national distribution of medicine, for instance.
Steve Hofmayr (Sana Security) - Trying to detect malicious software on a single computer. Gathering information can leave you vulnerable. If you're looking at time on your computer, looking at dynamic behavior of a system. When it behaves a little strangely, it's not enough to define it as bad, but when it's a lot strange it's too late. With machines you can roll back what happened once you know. Analagous to the immune system, which doesn't mount a massive response right when it sees something new, but waits to gather more information before responding. A classic example - You'd think if something on its machine that tries to hide itself is bad, but it's not necessarily. Or if a process survives a reboot. But if enough of those kinds of events are correlated in time, then it becomes more likely that there is some malware.
Dan Doman - At doubleclick they had a vision of highly targeted advertising. Keeping track of demographic data is difficult - he got interested in inferring demographics - e.g. people who go to sports sites are likely to be guys, etc. Contextual advertising is delivering advertising within the context that the consumer is in now. You look for the numbers of times people are looking at things ("velocity") over a period of time which indicate an intensity of interest.
Omar Tawakol (Revenue Science) - Behavioral targeting - advertisers and marketers have always wanted to reach people based on what they care about. Behavioral targeting talks about the person reading the page, not the text on a page. It also brings the notion of time into the equation - if you go to a car site, and then to an entertainment site, the entertainment site can show you car ads. In advertising there are two uses for time - one is branding, which is all about your interests; the other is direct response, where the goal is immediate response. Branding is more time independent - it you're a golfer you probably will be in five years, but if you're looking to buy a mortgage, you probably won't buy again for five years.
Technorati Tags: Calendaring, when2
Had a good time at lunch chatting with Lisa Dusseault from OSAF and Tantek Celik from Technorati about the hcalendar microformat, calendar urls, and lost of other interesting things.
The afternoon panel, on time and functionality is just starting.
Munjal Shah (RIYA) - Tagging lots of digital photo data - uses face recognition and text recognition to infer what and who are in a photo, and turn it into a searchable database. They do it for consumers on the desktop, and have a permissioning model for letting people search their friends. One insight is that consumer photos come with timestamps, which they used to enhance face recognition through time-based clustering. For instance, if there are ten photos of you at a party wearing a particular shirt and only one of them is full-face, they can infer that the other photos of the same shirt around the same time are also you.
Tantek Celik (Technorati) - Time searching on the web is terrible - try looking for just this year's version of the conference. Technorati relies on pings from blog software for indexing. Before an event people are talking about it, during the event people are blogging it, after the event people write about it. What happens in short time windows? We find that humans are the best at knowing what's going on right now - the most popular ten searches on Technorati. News - let's look at what bloggers are linking to in the last forty-eight hours - turns out to not being the same topics a newspaper editor would choose. They see the names of bloggers in far-flung places around the globe that we may not have heard of - it dramatically flattens our view of the world.
Esther asks when most documents will have timestamps on the web - Tantek asks whether you can trust time information in documents? The ping is a more reliable time stamp, because Technorati knows when the ping was received and when they went out and retrieved the information. As we get used to copying info from the web we'll make much more use of time-based information. Technorati is working on microformats, small extensions to html that enable information within web pages to identify the same kind of information as ical and vcards.
John Arenas (Worktopia) - Worktopia is about the premise that the ubiquitous network and collaboration tools are freeing the workforce from physical limitations. Matches demands such as temporary space with supply. Enables companies to have a distributed workforce. This kind of relationship allows hotels and other meeting spaces to tap short-term markets between big meetings, for example. John notes that Sun now has 1.5 workers per desk, so this is an accelerating trend.
Ben Cruze (Demand ID Systems) - enabling users to request live music events, and over time other kinds of events. Provide a market intelligence to show level of demand for a performer in any part of the country - that doesn't exist today. On the back end, when an event is scheduled, they alert consumers who requested the event, so they can purchase tickets and merchandise. They can also alert sponsors to how many people might be likely to attend an event, so they can better plan and target their sponsorship dollars. The consumer service is under the brand name of Tourvote. Enabling people to have a voice in creating an event is important.
What's the business model? Munjal - Search is the model - you'll search for places, products, and things - not professional pictures but user generated pictures, which reflect reality better. The premise is that travel advertising will support the business. Tantek - Marketers are using Technorati to do research on their brands.
Mark Johnson from Intuit on how does time influence decision making? The (somewhat silly) example he gives is the decision of whether to spend $4 a day on a venti cappucinno vs. $4 a day on Starbuck's stock. Esther comments on making latent demand visible - knowing that you're part of a larger group that all want Bonnie Raitt to show up. How is our discount factor changing with respect to time?
Ben asks Munjal the question about whether people have the right to put up pictures of buildings and other businesses that they don't own, and about the tension between business owners who want to link to photos of their businesses and the reality of what user photos might actually show (e.g. the cockroach in a hotel).
Technorati Tags: Calendaring, when2
People are loading photos to Flickr, under the tag when2.
Here's Mitch, Yori, Ray, and Raymie from this morning, from Phil who's sitting next to me.
Andy Baio (upcoming.org) - Everything on the site is user self-defined. Purchased by Yahoo. Yahoo Local is not strictly user generated. Working on the fusing of those views. None of us realized just how big the universe of events is. Zvents is just focused on the San Francisco Bay, and each day can have a thousand of events, which is just a fraction of the possible events. The trick is being able to filter the noise.
Brian Dear (EVDB) - Started with a community network in San Diego in 1988 - had to put in movie showtimes, which was a huge pain. Around 1994 explored building an events module into what they were doing, but couldn't justify the expense. Wanted to build an event alert service. With the rise of RSS and ical share it seemed time to take a look at it again. EVDB is taking events that are already there out there in the world.
Scott Hieferman (Meetup) - Years ago, 40% of Americans went to local meetings - now it's like 10%. When there were no computers, people had neighborhood events - now we're isolated.
Ramesh Jain (Eventweb) - Events are an abstraction for time, and calendar is a structure for representing that. The beauty of events is that they are related to each other - at any time we are affected by lots of events. How do we create this web of events? Have to go beyond the calendar. You will be searching for events that are in the context of other events. Events have a strong experiential character - it's becoming easy to capture experience of events. When we search for events we're also looking for the output of past events.
There's a bunch of stuff about business models that I don't track as I try to get email working - the When 2.0 wireless isn't getting me anywhere, and the Stanford wireless seems to not pass kerberos authentication - sheesh. Back to WebPine.
Scott says that when they went from free to fee they lost half of their meetups, but now, six or seven months later, they're back to where they were and business is growing at about 15% per month.
Scott also brings up the cautionary example where Meetup thought they'd make money from people advertising locations to hold events, but it ended up with people threatening to boycott establishments because events of opposite philosophies were taking place there. They went from people paying for listings to wanting to sue.
Technorati Tags: Calendaring, when2
Working Together Should Be Easier
Collaboratively constructed work products - stuff people put together with other people - e.g. presentations, documents, schedules, source code, etc.
Pavel would argue that we support this kind of activity very poorly.
Collaboration via email - everybody writes their own section, sends their section to one owner/victim, who pulls it together, unifying styles, sends it out to everybody, and everybody makes an edit. Victim coordinates and goes quiethly insane.
Collab via shared files - put draft out on a file server, each author editing on a single copy - but can't author at the same time or when disconnected, so they make a copy...etc.
What do we really want? Never prevented from editing, can edit while disconnected, owner needs to review edits and selectively undo them, and to control who can edit what when.
Better collab vie email - send first draft as attachment, each user edits, application aggregates edits and sends back to everyone..
Really we just need to send the edits, not the whole documents - "delete N characters ad position P"
How do we make this work? Goal is that everybody sees the same story, including the order in which things happened - the order that "God" saw the edits, including disconnected edits. Involves some mucking about with the incoming edits coming by email. What makes a good order? Everybody can compute locally without talking to the server - given two edits which one comes earlier? Everybody gets the same story everywhere. Respect causality.
How to implement order - label every edit with its potential "causes" - what other edits were received before this edit? If edit A knew about strictly more edits than B, A comes later in the story. If neither edit knows more, use arbitrary rule to order.
Transform edits - can't just take your edit and apply locally as if nothing else had happened, because I've been working on the doc. Must transform edits with knowledge of what's changed. If i know what you knew when you made your edit, I can do that. It gets a little bit complicated, but it's doable. Need two kinds of tools - transform before, and transform after. Then all becomes possible.
Current status - About sixteen years ago some guys in Texas defined the problem. People have been coming up with algorithms but not the transformations themselves. Pavel solved this problem - putting together an advanced team at Microsoft and building an app-indepndent toolkit. Resolving intellectual property issues within Microsoft.
Tantek asks whether Pavel's used SubEthaEdit - Pavel is familiar with it, but hasn't looked at it in depth. Solves some of these problems in a restricted domain.
Pavel - Collaboration is not a product, but it should be part of nearly every product. He's looking forward to openly publishing this whole set of technologies, but there are other people at Microsoft who may have other opinions.
Technorati Tags: Calendaring, When 2.0
Esther - We have a lack of standards - would having standards free up resources?
Mitch - it will free up developers from re-inventing the wheel. ICal is fine for representing the data of the event. But when you're trying to coordinate multiple events among multiple people, that's the realm that CalDAV and SSE are trying to get into.
Question - is Microsoft a part of the discussions? Ray - Not yet, but he'll be chatting with Mitch shortly. (Huzzah!)
Raymie - it's good that people are working toward interoperability of read/write of events, but the next frontier is the kind of things Yori is working on, the social aspects of scheduling and rescheduling.
Technorati Tags: Calendaring, When 2.0
The first panel has:
Mitch Kapor, from OSAF: Why has Chandler focused on calendaring? Because we learned that with a gigantic vision it can't all get done - need to innovate in a series of leaps. There's much more pain around calendars than mail right now. The killer feature for the rest of us is to make it easy to share calendars in a variety of ways. Nothing has gotten above the bar so far, and when there is something usable there will be a lot of users who will adopt it. Outlook and Exchange have an enterprise focus when you get to calendar sharing - 200 million of them but zero of everybody else. We bring a bunch of skill and a good team, and a commitment to see something through. To get something that a big corporation might use is a huge undertaking.
Yori Nelkin - Timebridge is a coordination platform - view is that a scheduling is not a database loolup problem of free/busy - you may be free but not unless certain conditions are met. It's a transactional exchange that, even in a business environment is very social. They plug into email as well as calendar - Outlook initially. There's a lot of hidden motivations behind what people are doing, their goal is to keep as many balls in the air as people want until they make decisions - waiting to see who else is attending, what the agenda is, etc. Make a decision when it needs to be made, not before. Esther notes that the amount of disclosure is an issue - Yori provides some control of disclosure, but leans towards openness. Continuing conversations "out of band" in email is consistent with Timebridge. Shooting for release on Feb 8 or March 12.
Ray Ozzie - Esther asks - what would you like to do? Ray notes that he's not in the Outlook group. Outlook in general - the things he's seen indicates that it's continuing to make forward progress, in a classic MS Office way each release continues to bring new features. Release 12 brings significant UI enhancements - no menus! Calendaring module now supplies overlaid calendars and integrated tasks. One of the pain points is managing many different sets of calendar entries and contacts with many different people - would like to have a mesh of sharing. Uses Outlook as an agregator, but would like to have co-editing of things with other people. Got together with some lead developers with Outlook, Exchange, MSN, Windows Mobile and asked why can't we share among the products? Brainstormed and decided on agreement of two very simple things: vcards to represent contacts and icalendar to represent single events. Publish those with RSS, including some categorization. SSE is a way of synchronizing subscriptions bilaterallly. Individual products should take these things deep - whether it's Chandler, Trumba, or Outlook.
Raymie Stata (Yahoo!) - Started Bloomba with an email client, with a specific vision to make email better - found that calendaring is really where the pain is - the tag line of the company was "change your outlook". But learned that Exchange was really where the pain was. The innovation was to put the conflict resolution into the client so that the server side is simple storage, like WebDAV. There's a mindset around these products - there's what Exchange and Notes do today, but what we see in new products like Upcoming (not part of Yahoo) is a view of scheduling and event management that breaks out of that box - view of social relationships that is not contemplated in corporate products - the desire to talk about and discover events. The work around events at Yahoo will lead to being able to do "bloomba-like things" within a social network.
Esther - you can't really manage time, but only what you do with it. What you really want to do is manage specific kinds of activities - the challenge is to represent activities, knowing which people, documents, etc are part of an event. The challenge is to represent the activity in software as something that happens over time, whether it's a budget cycle or your kids' college application process.
Mitch - Chandler made a choice to start out delivering the basics - in their case calendar with sharing, in order gain momentum through adoption. The price is that it will take them longer to get to fancy features. There's a lot of web momentum around David Allen's Getting Things Done. OSAF has drunk some of that kool-aid, which is activity oriented - tasks, projects, next actions. Your can use that system with a word processor, but that puts a lot of burden on the individual. Chandler will have some facilities to enable this kind of activity - tasks, emails, etc are all stored in a unified store, and have stamping, where you can make one item be multiple kinds of things - e.g. turn a task into an event so it has calendar-type attributes so you can structure its meaning in time. A lot of this is inherited from Lotus Agenda and will be experimental at first. Most open source projects do something that's been done in other ways before within an open source context, but Chandler is trying to architect a project to do new things in an open source way. There's a server piece called Cosmo, based on CalDAV for sharing. Mitch hopes to have some conversation with Ray later today about CalDAV and SSE and how to make things work together.
Esther - Innovation in calendaring seems to be coming from the consumer side, rather than the enterprise. Being enabled by the huge increase of people online.
Raymie - as we've been decomposing calendaring, at the end of the day what you manage is your commitments to other people at specific times. The calendar is to help you deal with that baseline commitment in ever more complicated lives, to make sure that you don't overcommit. In introducing search into email, the amount of filing people do goes way down, saving people's time. His theory is that the amount of time people spend organizing is constant - you can spend that time managing your past, by filing, or by organizing your future, by engaging in activity management.
Ray notes that the calendar is more than just commitments, but a shared space for exchanging information, including notes related to the calendar events.
Mitch notes that the 0.6 chandler release has shared read/write calendar sharing with a notes field - that's the beginning of the kinds of things that Mitch is talking about.
Steve Farrell (IBM) - the hard thing is drawing links between disparate things that are part of the same activity.
Esther notes that she's never seen a calendar that understands location - there's general agreement. Mitch notes that there's a timezone feature in Chandler, which is a step towards understanding location. Events have timezone attributes. It turns out that it's difficult and nuanced to get something as simple as timezones right.
Mitch - read Getting Things DoneECAR 2005 Symposium - when that soaked into OSAF culture the way they did things really changed. If you're looking to add value, look to make groups effective at working together - they all need help and tools and service, and that will drive innovation, more than what we do individually.
Esther - The role of the assistant is intriguing. More people in the room have lost assistants in the past three years than have acquired one. That's a market.
Hans Bjordahl - The Outlook guy at Microsoft. It's clear that time management is undergoing a shift from paper-based to electronic. They're on board with ICal in the new release.
Technorati Tags: Calendaring, When 2.0
Esther introduced the conference workshop with a quote that "two is a conflict of interest, three is synergy", and went on to talk about events as being good and productive things - they happen, they create content including photos, and connections between people. Until recently this has been unstructured information that needs to be sorted out after the fact. This event came together rather quickly, and is accompanied by content, including a newsletter distributed to participants.
The morning will be about time-management, and the afternoon will be about how people are using time to enable other sorts of things.
Technorati Tags: When 2.0, Calendaring
I'm in Palo Alto today for Esther Dyson's When 2.0 gathering. The meeting topic is "Time and Timing" - featured speakers include Mitch Kapor, Ray Ozzie, and others. There's a fair amount of overlap between attendees here and the Calconnect consortium, and I imagine calendaring standards will be a hot topic here. I'll be blogging the proceedings as best I can.
Later in the week I'll be in Arizona for the ECAR Symposium 2005 , where Richard Katz always pulls together some thought-bending topics and speakers.
Should be an interesting week!
I, seemingly unlike most Americans, watch hardly any television. But if I did I might really want one of these:
Features
• Record effortlessly from any video source (TV Cable box, Satellite Receiver Box, PVRs or DVRs Like TiVoTM, DVD players, VCR, Camcorders).
• Simple setup that works without a PC and operates like a VCR.
• MPEG-4 video format allows you to view content directly on your PSP™ or any other device that accepts standard Memory Stick or Compact Flash (CF) memory cards (not included).
• The MPEG-4 format is also compatible with most other portable media devices.
• A great way to digitize your home movies for archiving, emailing, or playback on portables and laptops.
• Can play back from Recorder 2 through TV’s and home theatres. Pocket-sized device is small enough to use as a portable VCR.
• Three resolution Settings: VGA (640 x 480) for near-DVD quality playback on TV; QVGA (320 x 240) for high-compression playback on most handhelds; and WQVGA (368 x 208) optimized for playback on PSP™.
Thanks, Cory!
