Brendan Ike
Sorry folks – vagued out.
Archive for the 'conference' Category
stewart butterfield: don’t ask him about the takeover :)
He is giving overview of Flickr.
His talk is on using websertvices as a strategy for a startup – open up and let go.
The Flickr API has 62 methods – atomic pieces of functionality.
They have found that in providing the API they have garnered a lot of trust from folks that would otherwise be nervous about giving important content to someone else (ie. photos).
Credibility particularly with the alpha geek community who have proven very influential, utililty, openness also meant that had to be more disciplined and of course it triggered a huge wave of creativity and created a massive community.
Downside: scalability issues – they lost control over the pace that things happened, they had to deal with other people’s bugs (a big issue).
More subtle issues: privacy/copyright, more support costs, a bunch of business risks – forced to confront issues before they were necessarily ready.
eg. micampte.it, flickr postcards, flickrgraph, 43 things, flickr world map (allthegoodness.com), mappr.com,
4-5% of traffic is API traffic.
webservices for start-ups good but scary.
Rael Dornfest is opening the conference with an emphasis on the hands on imperative, the narrowing of the gap between customer and consumer. The consumer is taking action.
Why?
1. We’re 20 years into the PC era
2. Given enough eyeballs, all features are obvious
3. Advent of the LazyWeb
4. The gospel of Openness is spreading
So why remix rather than hack (the conference theme is remix).
Hacking is remixing, akin to thyming in rap, sampling in dance music, riffing in jazz and blues and ajamming in rock.
Remix your web
View source
Firefox and thunderbird
javaScript
Desktop integration v2.0
Remixing your music
step 1. rip
the music industry’s customers were trying to say something
the music industry wasn’t listening
the customers weren’t listening all that well
Apple was listening
Remix your TV
Any night is Thursday night
Replay offers the 30 second skip
Tivo leaves things open enough
Networks invent the off-by-one minute error
Tivo adds another tuner
Remix your network
apple untethered the laptop
commodity hardware
Remix your movies
BT scares just about everyone (except its users)
VOD on demand acutally provides video on demand time shifing moveis
netflix
Remix your data
scraping begat xml which led to apis
hacks led to standards which in turn led to business opps
Remix your text
blogging made journalism more efficient
remix syndication
rss allowed my netscape to compete with yahoo
rss reinvented syndication
rss flows in my yahoo
everyone monetises rss
remix your bookshelf
prject gutenberg
archivelorg
google print
safari
remix it
be liberal i what you accept, but critical in what you push out
hacks become frameworks become foundations
the raw material grows on trees
remix the browser (again)
remix brick and mortar
the cirle of packages
use amazon to search meatspace
in store pickup re-remixes the physical and virtual
if it ain’t online it is not visible
Etech is all about unreasonable expectations
Tim O’Reilly
What is on O’reilly’s radar:
Design Patterns – Christopher Alexander
Design for participation – a succesfful open source software project consists of small peices loosely joined.
Therefore: architect your software or service in such a way as to be used easily as a componet of a larger system: keep it modular document your interfacesa and use a licence that doesn’t hinder recombination.
USD : there is great benefit in sharing your dev efforts and pocesses with your users.
Syndicated e-commerce
on today’s web, you no longer need to build or own all the components of your application.
eg. isbn.nu
therefore glue together the small pices of others
The perpetual betA
When devices and programs are connected to the internet, applications are not longer software artifacts, they’re ongoing services.
therefore: don’t pacikage up new freatues into monolithic releaseds. rather fold them in on regular. basis. eg. flickr, google etc
pn: definition of beta seems to be emerging – if being constantly mod then in beta
Teh key to comp adv in networded apps is the extent to which users augment your datw with their own.
therefore: architect for tparticaption beyond design and dev: invite your users. users add value to shared data.
eg. amazon – they are getting more and more distinctive as they encourage users to add more and more information to the available commodity data. In contrast to say Barnes and Nobles which does not.
eg. flickr – the users are building the flickr database (commodity data – PN)
only a small percentage of users will go to the trouble of explicitly adding value
therefore: make participation the defult, aggregating user data as a SIDE EFFECT of activity.
The long tail:
many of the limiting factors for distribution are absent on the internet. therefore the power of the computer to monetise niches formerly too small to be commercial. Eg. google adsense
software aboce the level of a singel device
the pc is not longer teh only access point for networked applications.
eg. isync allows you to have your data across all devices.
therefore do not design for a single device
social networking:
social networking are a by-product of social applications like email, IM, photosharing, even book buying
therefore: architect your app to capture and ashare the social fabric underlying your app.
eg. really simple chat
: etech.inroomchat.org/chatlogs
data is the next intel inside
(new conference: Where 2.0 june 29th San Fran)
packets and shipping containers
understand teh optimum packet size for our application domain and devise
o’reilly has re-packaged their books so that they are more web sized packages – eg. hackers series, Make etc
remix
when content is digital it lends itself to being broken down and remixed.
therefore: build your businesss model so as to make your living from the smallest atomic unit.
eg. safari U
what else is on their radar?
ajax – asynch JS plus XML
eg. john odell – walking tour
hardware hacking – car pc hacks, networked objects, fabbing, make
Saul is going to talking about collaborative hardware hacking
ruby on rails www.rubyonrails.com
visualisation: showing vast amount of data flickr colour wheel, baby names
VOIP – skype, asterisk
People – the p in P2P is people
I experience childlike glee whenever someone mentions 3D printing and copying. This is entirely fueled by the desire to fabricate at will and the very optimistic hope that it is the precusor to the words “beam me up”. So you can imagine my excitement when there are several foo sessions on the subject. Tim Anderson started this morning talking about his company Z Corp that builds 3D printers. Very cool.
However, arguably the most interesting idea was planted by Tim O’Reilly when he asked whether there was an open source community around the digital fabrication. I immediately imagined a world where the ability to fabricate a cup was dependent on your purchase of the fabrication template. In other words, things we take for granted as being in the public domain – ie. the basic notion of a cup becomes something that is licenced because the design is captured in a template.
ars electronica:2004:part 3:creative commons austria launch
Published Tuesday, 7 September, 2004 conference 2 CommentsToday Austria CC launches – www.creativecommons.at – I have spent a few days hanging out with the organisers of the Austrian effort. They have done a great job and it has been really interesting to see how the existance of CC is identified as being a key part of the network infrastructure required to develop open and/or free culture domains in Austria. Often, when I speak with CC folks they are very focused on individual artists, however it seems the institutional link has been made here very early. They already have one university that has incorporated CC as part of the student contract. This means that all student work is licenced under CC.
Interesting stats coming out the creative commons. It turns out that 95% of all licences types selected included attribution. In future, CC intend to make attribution a default feature of the licences.
Other new things coming out of CC include continuing development of the nutch based search engine and the development of a CC content wiki.
BBC just got a great plug for the creative archive project. This project is of enormous interest and gaining in profile across Europe.
ars electronica:2004:part 2: digital communities panel
Published Monday, 6 September, 2004 conference 1 CommentWarning – raw conference notes.
This year the Ars Electronica added a prix for digital communities. Howard Rheingold was the jury chair and is having a little chat about the history of digital communities.
wikipedia won a golden nika. Jimmy Wales is giving a rundown of wikipedia – this is the same presentation that he gave in London.
dorothy okello uganda – combination of offline and online technologies are important in order to ensure reach and inclusion. uganda’s official language is english. online sources are really important sources – they are used and incorporated in newsletters and
the world starts with me – golden nica
hiv aids, illegal abortion, life skills, alex okwaupt, teaching young people life skills, sexual and reproductive health information, virtual peer educators, used across schools.
Missed the middle part of this panel – smart extension is a cultural survival tool. It is a tool to try and keep culture alive – tonga.
Joi was on the panel – 14 honorary mentions
some of the key notes was that many political activism sites were overly complex.
Joi does it again with this quote:
it used to be that you watched tv and your vote counts – now you engage in media and your VOICE counts.
Sitting next to Jan – www.web-laun.ch/pieceoBlog – he bluejacked me within seconds of sitting down – cheeky :)
panel conversation: There is a feeling that the validity of information from a source is really important. This seems to me to be missing the point of having lots of points of views available. Surely the myth of objectivity is finally coming undone. While journalists do not use first person grammar one only has to look at FOX news to see that it does not make them anymore objective. The point seems to me to be that consuming news/information is now something that you do by following facets of objectivity. You can now get a lots of different truths and come to your own conclusions about facts. – this is stream of consciousness – will work on later.
free bitflows: the future of filesharing-darknet reloaded
Published Thursday, 3 June, 2004 conference Leave a Commentjanko roettgers (DE) a darknet full of friends
janko is talking about how he would like to see a social P2P network – where he knows the people – this is a world that is emerging with small groups of people sharing files with trusted group members. The problem with these groups is that the threshold for boredom or content drought is high – need regular injection of new content. However how do you have broader groups of users without risking exposure and their cover is blown or security is risked.
Janko points to friendster as an example of social networks – foaf. Suggests it as a model that could help to provide frameworks for P2P social networks. Also uses Orkut as another model. Particularly interested in the profile pages where you elect who gets to see information about you – these decisions are based on a radius of friends – ie. direct friends, secondary friends etc. It requires decisions to be made, risks to be assessed.
His main idea is that calculated risk is one way of attaining a mid point between closed darknets and exposed open networks of filesharers.
third speaker: ian clarke – the freenet project
freenetproject.org
Ian is speaking at notcon on sunday – so attend if you are interested. Will try and summarise here.
starts by talking about freenet: see www.freenetproject.org
goals for architecture:
allow practical one to many publishing of information
provide reasonable anonymity for producers and consumers of information
provide deniability for operators of nodes in the network
rely on no centralised control or network administration
be scalable from tens to hundreds of thousands of users
be robust against node failure or malicious attacks
interesting aspect of freenet is that reputation is attached to long obscure string of characters.
difficult to judge numbers however 200Million downloads of software. 5000 people subscribe to mailgroups.
Continue reading ‘free bitflows: the future of filesharing-darknet reloaded’
free bitflows: organisational intelligence for independent producers
Published Thursday, 3 June, 2004 conference Leave a CommentReni Hofmueller (AT): Radio Syndication over the Internet
Reni is speaking on the organisational issues associated with undertaking something like community radio station.
1. Open Source software – she highlights that each radio station develops very tactical specific solutions for their needs. She suggests that a very pragmatic idea would be to share solutions with other community radion stations. This is so possible in the world of opensource particularly given that many use open/linux based solutions as their base. The other aspect is to think about the power of standards in order to develop commonality.
drifted a little but she grabbed my attention with a discussion about the audience needs and the identification of whether an audience even exists…she posits that occasional we can be guilty of broadcasting just because we can..without really thinking through whether their is an audience.
second speaker in german – ummm…sorry folks no idea. yay – he has swapped to english. I am really reminded how English the world is forced to be. This is a conference in Austria – yet this native Austrian has just been told by the organisers that he must speak English cos the dummest folks in the audience (that be me) only speak english.
anyway – he appears to be talking about …community radio software…sorry folks you are suffering from my profound ignorance on all things radio – oh wait – http://www.reboot.fm/ – he is talking about content management and workflow – you can’t get away from it :) by the looks of it is a meta management system that allows for independent radio stations, which are largely staffed by passionate individuals, to access a common tool to use air time to talk/play their passions. This allows for them to share the schedule, subject and the actual assets with their fellow station folks and other community radio stations.
third speaker: marco deseriis: is “interested in tactical grids development in order to hijack the dominant discourses”!! i like him already :)
He is from Italy – he introduces his talk with some background on the italian media landscape – really interesting and so intwined with politics – as in party politics care of Berlusconi.
Leads onto discussion on telestreet movement – 50 points of broadcast across Italy – each with varied schedules – some daily, weekly etc. Lots of different groups using telestreet ranging from “traditional” local community stations through to more radicalised groups.
mmm…must look at telestreet
terrestial for berlusconi and the satelitte for murdoch – quote
copyriot
Continue reading ‘free bitflows: organisational intelligence for independent producers’
i joined this talk late…and there is a real chance based on my first five minutes that i will not understand very much of this…so stay with me if it starts to get a bit wobbly….
another five minutes have passed and it is fair to say that on the surface of it, the presenter is speaking clearly but my brain is not capable -
ok so this is last resort reporting…i will comment on the presentation values rather than the content :)
nice visuals – drawn from pop culture
lots of jargon pop jargon
gigaware – mass use software – requires internalisation, accessibility, and apparently special requirements for women users !!
aspect oriented programming.
power usage
the data is more important than your program…plan for the demise of your software but the perpetuity of the data.
what groups will be
www.evident.com
well anyway…[joke]
learning from experience is the worst possible way to learn – clay shirky
why is that we refuse to learn from our experiences in groups?
*health warning* this presentation
group = a set of folks that know one another and have an awareness that they are in a group
community = a group that cares about one another more than they have to
the central premise is that groups are really important
the secondary premise is that the web is really bad at facilitating my participation and management and even understanding of my set of groups.
decentralisation serves the purpose of building the connections necessary for forming groups but that same decentralisation means that the net is poor at managing those groups.
(reads law)
example:
friendster
[laughter cos screen isn't working so david is painting a picture in words...screen fades in and he is pointing at exactly the right place on screen]
friendster’s limitations
- is that you only have a binary relationship – either friend or not friend…no room for associate, new peer, etc
- the interests page is really a marketing tool…you are marketing yourself and therefore being highly selective about your choices that you list.
- also it assumes that there is only one “me” and does not cater for the multiple modes of my existance.
the current environments do not encapsulate the wildly complex nature of self description and relationships.
david wary of environments that seek to service all types of relationship building and management.
explicit and implicit -
most of the tools requires that we make things explict…he posits that in doing this you lose the context required and the ambiguity of implicit (ambiguity adds richness in social contexts – i think that was the position).
what comes first – the group or the constitution that governs the group?…david argues that you cannot establish a constitution initially as the relationships ie. the group has to drive and direct the constitution. also building constitutions requires explicit statements (i think he is using explicitness in the context of actually stating things) which we don’t like as it is an act of violence ?? – i think he means that we are uncomfortable defining instrinsics…implied.
knowledge management – the big problem with km as social software is that it ignored the value of ambiguity – really trying to understand what exactly he means by this statement…??
km devised to help try and find the diamond information in the rough..problem with information is that it takes on diamond value to someone while having coal properties to someone else. it ignores the social value in context. you therefore end up with systems that are self delusionary.
it was also devised to capture individual knowledge bases ie. a person’s knowledge. it also failed cos most knowledge bases ie. people don;t have the skills necessary to make that knowledge explicit.
if ambuigity (ahh…i think he means that when something remains in its context it remains ambiguous).
good social software allows structure to be developed while understanding that this is inherently an unnatural/uncomfortable experience for groups.
the same point being made that real needs/real context drive groups
1. there will be tons of services for group use
2. the coming age of dID maybe we will think less about managing groups and more about managing our various selves in the public of the web.
3. we are at the beginning of this whole social software – why is it that we are still only at the beginning…why a buzz now – maybe, the reason that we are now buzzed about ss is that we are coming out of our infatuation with binary thinking – maybe we are moving/ready to embrace the ambiguity inherent in “webs” and social networks.
questions/comments:
metadata is crap – context is hugely important – pn. this is really interesting but surely context is just another metadata variable…these folks are having fab conversations about metadata….implicit and explicit – david argues that explicit metadata is crap..reputation models floating in my head…not sure why.
there is a buzz about the netscan presentation yesterday
we need to liberate groups/individuals from db…
finishes by saying that the future of ubiquitous group transactions is the use of something like threadsML!
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