Self Valeting Cars

Imagine a car that can go find it's own parking spot, and return when you call it on your phone.

It could come get you if you need a ride, and are stuck at the office.

Imagine if ZIP cars could do this!

The future is cool again!

Looks like Twitter has managed to upset some of their vendors to the point of taking action to offsource it.

Google wave - Web 2.0 at last

Google has acidentally created the first good realization of web 2.0.  By providing a way to mark up hypertext, they are on the path to resolving one of my long term frustrations with HTML and Web 1.0.  It will now be possible to collaborate in fine grain, with minimum loss of context because of tools that lack the ability to point at a part of a document.

As Tim O'Reilly says:

Our experience with collaborative editing of book manuscripts at O'Reilly suggests that the amount and quality of participation goes up radically when comments can be interleaved at a paragraph level.

Colaboration and sharing of data is about to take off in new and very powerful directions. I highly recommend you take a few hours, watch the demo video, and dive in to see what the future is going to bring. It's very exciting.

Sneakernet 2.0

Metafilter linked to Google's Project 10¹⁰⁰ which is looking for ideas to help humanity in general.

I don't know why by here's my first contribution, which I think can be done without any money or great deal of time. I copied my answers out of the form before I hit submit, because I thought it was a pretty good idea and wanted to be sure to save it. You can read them at the bottom of this post.

My basic idea is to learn from history, toss in modern code and the fact that almost everyone can get access to a working computer / USB port, to build a set of social networking tools that don't need the internet, but could certainly use it. 

We need Sneakernet 2.0

I have massive amounts of photographs which I would like to share with my family. Because of the limitations of even "broadband" connections in the US, it's just not practical to do this across the internet. I'm sure that there are lots of people with lots of stuff they want to share that just aren't willing to try to stuff it through the net.

Plain text (or html) is tiny compared to the vast size of the thumbdrives we now throw away. With the appropriate software and/or organization tools, you could re-implement "fidonet" using USB keys to eventually get things to the places they need to go, with or without the net.

The internet is nice, but there needs to be more, with store/forward and some hints provided by the people who carry the stuff around, you can get far more bandwidth to far more people. This I believe is a worthy goal.

My favorite quote on this subject from history:

Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway. —Tanenbaum, Andrew S. (1996). Computer Networks. New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 83. ISBN 0-13-349945-6.

There's already projects to be done, I'll survey the existing stuff and join one if it looks promising.

Here's the questions and answers raw from the form I filled out, in case they help explain things better.

10. What one sentence best describes your idea? (maximum 150 characters)

Build a complete set of social and computer networking tools that can be distributed on/via USB Sticks.

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11. Describe your idea in more depth. (maximum 300 words)

CBBS opened a new vista of social networking in 1978, which lead to Fidonet, to parallel UUCP, etc. Build a set of tools which allow the modern update to it, with sneakernet as the backbone.

This could be used by families to share photos. Researchers with huge data sets on the larger scale of things.

Provide a nice standard way to share stuff on a massive distributed scale that's extremely easy to use.

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12. What problem or issue does your idea address? (maximum 150 words)

Routes around censorship and trust issues with the internet. Lowers the barriers to entry for social networking.

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13. If your idea were to become a reality, who would benefit the most and how? (maximum 150 words)

Anyone who needs to share a huge amount of stuff with others they meet or send packages to on a frequent basis.

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14. What are the initial steps required to get this idea off the ground? (maximum 150 words)

Some brainstorming, evaluation of available tools, and a small community of people who want to contribute to the idea.

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15. Describe the optimal outcome should your idea be selected and successfully implemented. How would you measure it? (maximum 150 words)

Everyone around the world gets to share more stuff, and gets more as a result.

We need Social Journalism... NOW

We need Social Journalism... NOW

We've got just a bit more grace period before the financial world implodes, and things get a lot meaner. Either we figure out means of carrying out journalism and democracy amongst ourselves with the newly minted technologies we have available, or we're all toast.

Open source software, USB storage are the keys to building and propogating a social network that can sustain the cause of Liberty in the face of powerful forces which would censor us into oblivion.

The newest bailout AIG is rumoured to have provisions to allow a firm to raid the assets of all the accounts it holds to "aid liquidity"... this is just what happened to LTV steel here in the Calumet Region, which resulted in all of the workers getting screwed out of about 1/2 of their retirement, and the loss of their health care plans. 

Is this true or not? I as a single person may not be able to find out, which is what gives the people who write these insipid little clauses later used to steal from us wiggle room to work.

My reason for bringing this up is a creeping sense of dread... one reason is that my pension has just been threatened, and I have no real means of determining the truth, other than to wait and see if I'm a victim or not.

Further along that thread is the realisation that any private assets held in the United States can be siezed under a number of guises...

• RICO - claim it was drug money, force the rightful owner to PROVE it wasn't
• Terror - claim they were supporting terrorists, throw them in jail
• Retirement - allow the holding firm to raid your pension
• US Dollars - fudge the inflation numbers and print as much as you want to spend
• Stocks - the DOW isn't keeping up with inflation
• Houses, Land - Emminent Domain

So there are a number of "legitimate" ways to take anyone out of the middle class without arousing suspicion... it's becoming increasingly clear that we'll need some way to fight back, outside the system, but within the framework of the law. We're all at risk here if we don't have some way to find the truth.

Social Journalism would seem to be our best bet.

The best way that I can think of to jump start this is to use blogs while they are still open and free to get a consensus and figure out what truely works and doesn't. We have to pick up the slack and do our own investigation and reporting, as the corporate giants buy out the last newspapers and commodify our process for finding the truth.

Edit suggestions always welcome. 

  --Mike--

The future is Usenet, all over again

With the rise of Twitter, and the subsequent introduction of Laconica to federate things, I think I'm beginning to see the rhyme of history. Eventually we'll want to replicate everything in Usenet, but just a bit different

• Anonymous posting will be prohibited
• Tags will replace the hierarchy of groups
• Digital Signatures will prevent forgery
• All posts will have URIs so we can still link to them.
• We still won't be able to markup hypertext. (a pet peeve)
• Data will be streamed instead of batch mode.
  

There were a lot of things to like about Usenet

• Push model saved bandwidth
• Aggregation was built in
• Group hierarchies helped increase signal to noise
• It was federated from the start
• Binary attachments were supported
  

So, we'll get some new hybrid which will help us adapt to the contemporary demands of the internet. I believe that a new push infrastructure is on its way. If done right, we could even get rid of Email and the spam problem, but that's story.

Why Silos work

I think we need to have a conversation about Silos, specifically about why they work. There is another level of depth to the silo analogy that Doc Searls uses, which I present here.

Contemporary farming uses a process known as ensilage preserve crops for feed during the off season. The process allows for the slowing of the otherwise rapid decay of plant material by limiting the intrusion of oxygen, and controlling unfavorable reactions. It requires fixed infrastructure (silos) and a set of skilled workers to prevent unfavorable results.

The current version of the Internet relies on a similar process. Companies such as Google, Yahoo, Twitter, Flickr and others provide server farms to store content for distribution of users. They also provide the set of skilled workers to prevent unfavorable results.

At first glance, the analogy seems to be a fairly simple one... a place where things are stored, and kept out of the weather. However the analogy has a lot more depth than even Doc Searls might have imagined. The mechanism of preserving something and transforming it by adding value also works to give the metaphor more depth.

Taking something as ephemeral as a grass crop and storing it for 6 months is a remarkable achievement if you can do it on a sustained basis. The same can be said for taking the daily diaries of the general public, and keeping them online for years. It takes a persistent effort by a skilled set of workers in both cases to keep conditions optimal.

The farm worker is trying to prevent decomposition, control pests, and maintain sweet silage. The internet worker is trying to thwart hackers, spam, zombies, and any number of other pests, while working with fundamentally unreliable hardware and internet connectivity.

Flickr is a typical internet silo. The input is millions of photos (and now videos) from users throughout the world, along with some of their time and attention and a dash of identity. The value added is that of hosting the photos, transforming them automatically into thumbnails and a number of other sizes. Simply storing everyone's snapshots is nice, but there is far more value added than is immediately obvious.

When you link to a Flickr picture, everyone knows it's safe because it is really a photo, and not some malware waiting to trick your jpeg processing library in your browser. They also know it's not likely to be offensive, because of the filtering done on the images to conform with social standards. A further sense of safety is implied because the identity of the photographer is coupled to the photos, which also allows safe conversations back through the built in mail system.

Flickr works mostly because it was there first, has good network scale, and provides a great deal of safety. It's hard to replicate these things by accident, so it's important to have done your homework and looked deep into the real value proposition of the existing silos.

Twitter works because it makes IM safe and easy (when it works). A distributed twitter system has to replicate not only the message passing and filtering part of twitter, but the core value in terms of social value... the ability to ban users and moderate content.

There's a lot more to a good silo than servers and bandwidth. It takes a skilled team to keep the technology working, and a different skilled team to keep the social networking going as well.

It will be interesting to see what kinds of distributed silage systems get built in the next 10 years. I'm willing to help anyone who wants to start one.

--Mike--

JumpBox - The start of a whole new industry

Jumpbox offers the application you want, preloaded onto a server. They let you try out their server for free, and if you like it, you have two pricing points for what is essentially rent.

When your server arrives, you turn it on, and it auto-configures itself for your network. It then tells you how you can connect to it via a web page. You then do all of the administration and management via web pages.

Jumpbox makes the whole process quick and easy. Far quicker and easier than was ever possible in the past.

How? Imagine the infrastructure required to build, configure, test, and ship a server. A very big UPS/FedEx depot, a hotline to a server vendor, staff to set up the boxes, install the software, and test the heck out of it before shipping it off, etc.

Jumpbox does all of that... except with virtual servers. They still did all of the hard parts, except now they can just give you a Zip file with a server in it, instead of having a supply chain consisting of China/Dell/FedEx/some tech lab/FedEx/You


I first heard about Jumpbox through Robert Scoble. While it might seem like just another baby step in the story of virtualization, this is a fairly big jump. The value added can be summed up:

• Runs on multiple virtualization platforms
• One distribution works on any of the above
• Consistent price point
• Consistent administration and management features
• Instant deployment

I look forward to see the virtual appliance industry growing in the future. The OS is becoming irrelevant, and I for one am glad to see it go. I'll be happy to see a future without "Windows Activation" screens.

Imagining the future

In the future, you'll post a page to a server some where. The site, folder, or specific page will then contain a few pieces of metadata to make all of this comment mechanism obsolete:

• GUID (Globally Unique ID) string to allow reference to a document
• Digital Signature for the document, and its authors
• List of places for the reader to find updates, comments, etc.
• List of places where the author publishes his comments, ratings, etc.

The process of getting a web page won't be as simple. The resulting view for the reader will depend on the original source content, plus the additional data that their browser may have gathered depending on their preferences, web of trust, etc.

If this page, for example, were created in my desired future, there would be a link to a public comments server somewhere, to help with compatibility to the current web browsers.

A FireFox plugin would search the document and its locale (folder, server, etc) for a list of places to find and put comments, markup, etc. It might also search some private lists as well for comments hosted by communities I'm involved in.

The browser then could check through the identities of the authors of comments, and highlight or hide their comments based on various pools of reputation to which the reader has access.


It's a much richer, more complex, and if done properly, a closer approximation to the way we social humans deal with each other. We're still at Web 0.1, we're not even up the the level of the Vannevar Bush vision of the memex which at least allowed for markup of existing documents.

More later... Virginia's on the move...

--Mike--