Connecting the Dots

Viva Las Vegas

I'll be at a major computer vendor partner show in Las Vegas for a few days and I was reflecting on my first experiences there and how much it has changed.

I started going to Las Vegas about 25 years ago for the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) and a variety of other venues (and occasionally for fun). Did my fair share to keep the lights on by leaving money behind, but that was in my foolish days (my Grandpa once told me, "Steve...gambling is a tax on the stupid").

Just like watching your kids grow up, it's pretty amazing how the passage of time, growth, death and rebirth is almost imperceptible as time marches by. Just thinking on the LV of 25 years ago vs. today is stunning.

When I began going there, LV was still in an afterglow of the time when the Rat Pack, Mafia and unseemly behavior was the norm instead of today's more family and couple orientation. CES was huge and occurred twice per year since there were tons of Ma & Pa retailers selling electronics, along with many local and regional chains. Now it's Best Buy, Circuit City, Wal-Mart and Target so having two huge shows a year is overkill since there are fewer buyers. CES is now once a year and much smaller.

Comdex (the Computer Distribution Expo) was ENORMOUS with 130,000+ attendees at its peak and, at one point, filled something like 9 buildings. Due to problems in the industry and retail consolidation (Best Buy, Circuit City et al), Comdex was skipped in 2004 and may not be back.

Las Vegas has sure changed. On this page of photos, virtually none of these properties had been built 25 years ago. Yikes.

One constant though...Elvis is still there.

The Why of Buy...

Just a quick one post this morning: Researchers scan for insight into how marketing may brand the brain's preference for products and politicians in this article called, "Searching for the Why of Buy".

If you look below at yesterday's post about "How is *your* brain wired?" and one a little further down on "Hacking Your Brain", I'm sure you'll see the acceleration that is occurring in neuroscience. The good news? We'll figure out the root causes for many maladies, behavorial afflictions and ways to enhance ourselves. The bad news? Clever people will figure out new ways to get us to buy, to vote and to be influenced with techniques we may not care to have applied to us!

How is *your* brain wired?

For years I've been fascinated by the ways in which my brain is wired. Always having a sense of 'knowing' mine was different as I always seemed to see things others didn't, there were many behaviors deemed by others to be different that I desired to be the same: disorganization, impulsive risk behavior, and a constant demand for intellectual stimuli. All that said, the best part was enjoying an ability to make cognitive leaps others couldn't which I put to good use often.

As someone not educated in brain chemistry and neuroscience -- and clearly not able to even self-diagnose my ADD -- it wasn't until I met my bride that my interest in this took a left turn. She had worked in a corporation with significant diversity: race, creed, sexual persuasion and more. This woman helped soften my previously hard line view of the world and the people within it (though she'd argue that this had a simpler explanation, "Men don't grow up until they hit 40" and I'm now past that!).

Before she and I got married, I'd never knowingly interacted with anyone homosexual. Though I grew up with the typical male bias against homosexual men, I'd often been intrigued with the obvious fact that gay men saw the world differently. The gay men I'd met through her at gatherings were incredibly creative. Their ability to drive a narrative in literature, the theatre, in song, and with design was atypical and seemed to somehow combine the best of both sexes.

So an article I read today in the New Scientist got me thinking about this issue of how God wired our brains. This article about how Gay Men Read Maps Like Women at first struck me as humorous. But as I thought more about it, the study's hypothesis that, "...homosexual people shift in the direction of the opposite sex in other aspects of their psychology other than sexual preference. That is, gay men may take on aspects of female psychology, and lesbians acquire aspects of male psychology" made me stop and think.

How is your brain wired? Do you even know? What are others researching or thinking about when it comes to neuroscience? I think about the number of aberrant behaviors that are undoubtedly caused by misdiagnosed or untreated neurological syndromes.

Here is some interesting food-for-thought:

• Are top investors' brains wired for wealth?
• Brains wired for addiction
• Scientist Learning How Music May Prevent Dementia (are brains wired for music better built to last?)
• Sexuality hard wired before birth?
• Babies brains hard wired for words
• Are teens just wired that way?
• Attention Deficit: Not Just Kid's Stuff ("...it is estimated that anywhere from a third to half of the adult prison population has ADHD").

This post is not about any particular issue. Instead it's in the spirit of my blog overall: intellectual curiosity about the "why" behind things I'm observing and how these dots connect. This includes how our brains are wired making outcomes in life potentially our fate if there is no awareness of root cause. That's the power of understanding and making the connections.

They've seen the invisible...

Researchers at Cardiff University in the U.K. have discovered a galaxy made up primarily of dark matter. As it states on their web site, "(Cardiff)...astronomers has discovered an object that appears to be an invisible galaxy made almost entirely of dark matter — the first ever detected. A dark galaxy is an area in the universe containing a large amount of mass that rotates like a galaxy, but contains no stars. Without any stars to give light, it could only be found using radio telescopes."

Here's another good article on the BBC News site.

My only sadness about the finite life I'm living right now...is that the closest I'll get to galactic (or intergalactic) travel is Star Trek.

Positive & Negative: Today in blogging...

Two things of interest today about blogging that is both positive & negative. One positive discusses the power of blogging and its acceleration as a personal publishing phenomena. The other article is a negative one about an Iranian blogger jailed for 14 years.

Update:

A few positive more positive articles here, here and this interesting study from Pew Internet (download PDF of report).

A few more negative articles that are about bloggers getting fired for blogging here, here and here.

Linksys Wireless Game Adaptor: What a piece of crap!

UPDATE 2/22/05 at 8:25pm: It's been 21 hours since I sent Linksys a customer support email (incident: 050221-002616) and I've received nothing. Nada. Zilch. Nice customer service, heh?

Anyone that knows me understands that I have a propeller on my beanie (fairly technical...albeit my propeller is a small one) and I can figure out just about any configuration issue when it comes to consumer electronics or computer products. Love gadgets and problem solving too.

But after my experience last night I have a couple of questions: what the hell does Joe Sixpack do to get all this stuff hooked up!?! If I have issues...Joe has serious problems and companies like Linksys (Cisco) have even bigger ones if they wanna sell more of this stuff...'cause Joe isn't buying more if it's this complicated.

Here's what happened to spur this rant: my 10 year old son has been pretty excited to get on XBox Live. I bought a Linksys WGA11B wireless game adaptor, the XBox Live kit, and last night I set about getting it configured and hooked up. Figured at most it'd be a half hour job.

Quick note about my home network to illustrate that I'm not just some bonehead who hasn't done this stuff before: I have five machines on my wireless network and one device. I run WPA encryption (since WEP has been cracked), a "closed network" (meaning it doesn't broadcast its name -- also called the SSID) and I have the MAC addresses from each computer/device placed in the access control area of my wireless router for kind of a triple whammy of protection.

I spent 3.5 hours tonight trying to get this thing to work (the last hour was with their India-based help desk). For the life of me I cannot get this damn thing on my network unless I completely turn off ALL encryption. All devices on my network are (I mean were) WPA encrypted. *After* I was on with their help desk the first time for a few minutes about an hour in to my adventure, I was told that THIS ADAPTOR IS NOT COMPATIBLE WITH WPA -- only WEP!

Of course, do you think Linksys could've printed this important fact on the box? Nah...that'd be too easy (unless their target market *is* boneheads that run unencrypted wireless home networks). I had to dumb-down my network to WEP encryption in an attempt to get it to work. It still didn't.

There's a lesson here. Is the answer to have Joe Sixpack (i.e., the mass market) be insecure with their wireless networks in order to get wireless products to work? Is it possible to make it any more difficult to get this configured? I also am stumped by my poor experience with the India-based help desk since it was pretty clear that the young woman I talked to was used to dealing with Joe and yet was very limited in her knowledge and not terribly helpful. It was noisy in her call center, tough to hear her, she often put me on mute, and it made my frustrating experience all that more so. Oh yeah...their support website and product documentation were both incomplete and weak.

So tomorrow evening I'll be returning this product and the XBox Live kit to Best Buy for a refund and Linksys will have to eat the return (plus I can't imagine what that one support call for an hour to India cost). Can you guess whose wireless products I will *never* buy again, never recommend nor give positive feedback about in the future?

Most importantly I'll have to figure out an alternative or deal with a disappointed boy.

Structured vs. Unstructured: Are blogs a mess?

During my morning workout today I was listening to David Weinberger (Cluetrain Manifesto, Small Pieces, Loosley Joined) giving a talk to the Library of Congress (LOC) about taxonomies, categorization and knowledge. He compared and contrasted these with the physical (i.e., libraries and the Dewey Decimal System) with the virtual (internet and/or digitized content), and how all that relates to the 'old' way of capturing knowledge vs. the 'new' way of handling it on the internet. Pretty interesting observations by Weinberger in this talk.

The reason he was invited by the LOC was his observational skills coupled with his blogging abilities and insights. The essence of where he ended, though, was troubling to me. It was all about the unstructured nature of blogs, the explosion of content, the cross-hyperlinking, and the difficulties of capturing all that information -- without tying up the loose ends and actually have answers or recommendations.

There are ways being developed to pull together the blogosphere at least. Google bought Blogger. Technorati is doing a great job at identifying searchable blogs and having an engine to do so. Others like IceRocket, Daypop, BlogDigger, Bloogz, and even the boringly named "Blog Search Engine" are enabling the targeted searching of blogs.

While this is useful and there truly is a trend to be able to tap in to the collective consciousness of bloggers, how does this help drive knowledge? How can we turn this in to helpful information within a context of what we might be trying to find, learn or discover? What if we have specific knowledge we're trying to gain...how do we find the published (encyclopedia's, Wikipedia, mainstream media) *and* all the connections to them from bloggers? (This pre-supposes that bloggers are, in fact, hyperlinking to any of these published media -- and many don't). At the very least, is anyone tracking all of these connections being made by bloggers? (Maybe there is a trend here too).

Big problems to fix. Big minds thinking about them. We've only just begun....

Skim *Hundreds* of Blogs & Feeds in Moments?

Carved out some time today to finally sign up with Newsgator online. It is a *very* powerful aggregator of RSS (syndication) feeds from web sites and blogs.

I went there and signed up for the free service (there are other ones with more features that are premium pay for upgrades) and chose many of the blogs in my "Fav Blogs" bookmark list which I surf to every day. It also suggested several others and let me add my own feeds. Very cool.

I can't help it though...I've always had a love-hate relationship with aggregators. Some of the aggregator web sites I still somewhat frequent are ones like FreshNews, NewsHub, and one of my favorites WorldTechNews.

The love part? Being able to quickly scan for items which might interest me. This is incredibly useful when I'm trying to stay on top of a company, an industry or a trend. This is my main mode during my work day and I am often scanning several aggregators like these so I don't miss anything (the jewels I find are amazing too...and people have often wondered how the hell I find all the stuff I do).

The hate part? No context. No serendipity. Take a look at an "A" "B" comparison between my own blog posts within Newsgator...and those same posts right inside my blog. Though the Newsgator parsing is pretty good, it's not as pleasing to view. Also, I've built context around the posts (like who is the nerdy, ADD poster child that is writing this damn thing anyway!) that help set the tone for the posts. The value of context is probably arguable with my blog...but most others I go to have interesting context wrapped around the posts and I often go off on tangents and discover new things or make new serendipitous associations.

Of course, a Newsgator or site aggregator user can easily and instantly go directly to the blog or web site of interest and gain the context if they so choose. This is what I do too. But what if much or most of that context is purposely there to help offset costs with contextual ads or commerce? It's all stripped away with an aggregator.

The tradeoff for me of losing context and the serendipity factor is mostly positive when I'm in a hurry during my work day and negative when I've got leisure time to read, poke around and go off on tangential web discovery trips. So yes, the jury is still out on my opinion of Newsgator.

The Copyfight...

Continuing on yesterday's theme of the Creative Commons and why it's so necessary, it's clear to anyone who has followed the Napster/music industry/movie industry angst over piracy, the challenges surrounding disturbingly long copyright extensions fostered by the Sonny Bono Act, and many other areas of copyright law being defended by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, that we've got serious systemic issues with the state of copyright law in the United States. 

You may not be aware of all the areas being hammered on by restrictions on copyright. One such area is in the agonizing pursuit of permissions for film documentaries. The most famous of these is the struggles encountered by the PBS film "The Eyes on the Prize". First shown in 1990, rights began running out five years later and it can't be shown anymore (the escalating rights payments prohibit it).

I remember reading a couple of years ago about a filmmaker sued for showing the "copyrighted garden design" of a courtyard in Los Angeles (there was a scene in his film showing someone walking through the garden). Music playing in the background in a scene needs permission and payment. What's next? No more street scenes or you have to pay every trademark holder showing on building signs?

The Public Voice Project has a site about The Copyfight (read about it here). The copyright fight is worth making your voice heard. Also, check out The Copyright Site for some "copyright 101".

Loosen up a little....use the Creative Commons

There is a cartoon I've shown to people that has made me howl with the tagline "I think you should be more explicit here in step two" (click the link to look at the cartoon for the joke). For today's post I wanted to use this cartoon as the basis of my post but was uncertain over usage rights.

On Sidney Harris' web site was this request, "Copyright © 2005 by Sidney Harris. No reproduction other than for personal enjoyment without written permission."  Since I respect copyright and property rights (and am uncertain over the "journalistic or editorial liberties" I can take with a blog) I sent them an email.

My inquiry:

Every time I look at your cartoon,  " you should be more explicit here in step two" I howl. I've used this personally
as illustrative of how often people make cognitive leaps in business and sort of go from concept to finish...usually
skipping over the middle.

Was wondering: may I show this on my blog? Address below...

Their response:

To: Steve Borsch

Thank you for your inquiry about using the "I think you should be more explicit..." cartoon on your blog.

Because the cartoon is copyrighted, we follow the guidelines of the National Writers Union, and ask a reprint fee
or honorarium for any use of it. For blogs we ask our minimum fee, which is $35 per cartoon.

If this is satisfactory, payment can be sent to the address below.

Yours truly,
Jennifer Charl, Copyright and Permissions
for S. Harris

Sidney Harris
Box 1980, Federal Station
New Haven, CT 06521

It's not the $35 (I can handle that) and they're within their rights to not have their content stolen. There is an easy and better way to balance one's rights with decent use: The Creative Commons (CC) licenses.

It's really pretty simple as it states on the CC web site: Creative Commons defines the spectrum of possibilities between full copyright — all rights reserved — and the public domain — no rights reserved. Our licenses help you keep your copyright while inviting certain uses of your work — a "some rights reserved" copyright.

While I don't mean to disrespect or demean Mr. Harris or his work, he's not exactly Garry Trudeau of Doonesbury fame and could probably use a little exposure -- which bloggers could do.

Patents: Protection or threat?

The mission of the United States Patent & Trademark Office (USPTO) is to promote "industrial and technological progress in the United States and strengthen the national economy." To most reasonable individuals, that means the intent for patents and trademarks is for protection of ideas with which to innovate and financially benefit from sweat and effort in building something instead of using patents and trademarks alone to create and run "idea toll roads" with toll-booths collecting fees.

Last year I began reading articles like this one, and this one, along with the Electronic Frontier Foundation's efforts that talked about the growing threat from patents on innovation and against open source. Knowing Microsoft's opinions about open source as an example -- coupled with the size of their cash hoard and ability to stave off legal threats for years -- their possible use of patents as a weapon seem to be assured.

Today's CNet article by Richard Stallman was an interesting counterpoint to Bill Gates' recent comment that "There are some new modern-day sort of communists who want to get rid of the incentive for musicians and moviemakers and software makers under various guises. They don’t think that those incentives should exist." (good overview of the controversy here).

Former Microsoft CTO Nathan Myhrvold obviously saw the same intellectual property light Bill Gates has seen and doesn't intend to let "communists" do anything for free when someone damn well should be paid for it. Patent as many ideas as you can -- even if just thought about as possibilities -- and you'll own the idea toll road and can set up the toll-booth.

Myhrvold started an "idea toll road" company five years ago (Intellectual Ventures) that is focused on a strategy to "create or buy new ideas, accumulate patents--exclusive rights to use the inventions--and rent those ideas to companies that need them to do the gritty work of producing real products."

How is he doing this? As it says in the article, "To generate patentable ideas, Intellectual Ventures hired a dozen top scientists as part-time consultants to participate in several all-day gabfests each month, which the company calls "invention sessions." Lawyers transcribe the discussions, which can range from biotech to nanotech to solid-state physics, and follow up on the most promising ideas with patent applications." He's obviously the most visible person involved in this activity. Pretty soon (if not already) *any* idea you have had better be fully patent-researched before you embark on a new adventure.

In my view, using patents and trademarks to "own" ideas and corner-the-market in some given area is going to seriously hamper innovation and people taking risks to start up companies.

Hacking your Brain

One could argue that the coffee & caffeinated soda drinking we do is a brain hack. Same with sugar and carbohydrates. Certainly alcohol and drugs are hacks for both the brain and body.

There is a lot of effort and energy around hacking your brain and you should take a peek at these:

• Focusing on Better Humans
• Center for Cognitive Liberty & Ethics
• You can hack your brain with an iPod
• There's an interesting book on Mind Hacks
• Blogs like Brainworld, CogNews for the cognitive sciences, NeuroDudes
• Sites like the International Brain Research Organization, NeuroTech Reports, and the Society for NeuroScience.

Last but not least is the whole area of cogniceuticals and -- what Zack Lynch (one of my favorite bloggers) wrote about, "Will Neuroceutical Usage Widen Ability Gaps Within And Across Societies?" and "Mental health is the ultimate competitive weapon."

This entire area of brain hacks is going to continue to accelerate. Imagine competing with someone for a job that has hacked their brain and is significantly more alert, has much more energy, is happier and more optimistic and needs A LOT less sleep than you.

Open Formats more important than Open Source?

Users complain about bloated software (..."but the consumer wants to do more!", protests the software vendor) and feature-creep continues unabated. CIO's and procurement managers complain about this never-ending upgrade cycle of software to ensure that -- when their people receive files from others -- they can be opened.

When we think about open source software, the word "free" comes to mind. But it's so much more than that. What most don't consider is how important it is to have heretofore proprietary file formats be open file formats.

You may be aware of some of the moves happening with Open Source software in Munich and the controversy surrounding the Commonwealth of Massachusetts dictate well over a year ago that Agencies will integrate open standards compliance language in all IT bids and solicitations. But they compromised (and there is no word yet on why they did so...though my dog could probably guess why). Massachusetts has now moved away from an emphasis on Open Source software and toward Open Formats. 

According to an article in Information Week, Secretary Eric Kriss of the Massachusetts Office of Administration and Finance (AOF) said the Commonwealth could have locked out suppliers using proprietary software from companies like Microsoft. A new policy--described as an "extension" of the previous policy--has been discussed by AOF's chief as: "specifications for data file formats that are based on an underlying open standard, developed by an open community, and affirmed by a standards body; or, de facto format standards controlled by other entities that are fully documented and available for public use under perpetual, royalty-free, and nondiscriminatory terms."

Open formats are a good thing. As I'd mentioned in a post on December 31st, I'm cautiously concerned about how quickly media formats die and what that means to future generations' ability to view that media. To me, open formats mean that (spec'ed correctly) will be upwardly compatible with future software and thus able to be opened. It also allows software vendors and the open source community to write to the spec and innovative around and on top of it.

Voices in your head: iPodder + iTunes + iPod

This is a very brief audio overview of today's experience of setting up iPodder -- software for the PC and Mac that let's you select from a directory of "genre's" and subscribe to podcasts with automatic downloading to a directory on your computer.

Next is setting up a "Smart Playlist" in iTunes for that "Podcast" genre. I have my iPod setup with iTunes to automatically update itself every time I plug it in -- even the Smart Playlists.

There you have it: a completely automated chain of events for seamless content from the internet to my iPod. Take a listen to how I set up this chain...and that I have even MORE content than I had before!

And now for something completely different...

Check out this Gene Kelly "Singin' in the Rain" remix. This WILL surprise you (you'll need the free Quicktime player from Apple though you'll have it if you have installed iTunes previously).

Then check out this car...I want one. (you'll need the free Quicktime player from Apple for this one too)

 

The Power of Point of View

The recent tsunami disaster in the east was so horrific that it riveted the world. People scrambled to see -- from others point of view -- any news, photos or videos. Anything to try to make sense and understand the magnitude of what had happened. Blogs were a medium of immediacy that allowed global dissemination of information quickly. This was most evidenced as photos and videos of the tsunami disaster began to proliferate around the Web -- led by bloggers posting them -- and people around the world had a point of view from those that were there.

If you don't think things are changing with communications, then you're unaware of the groundswell of activity in blogging, audioblogging, podcasting, video or 'v' blogging. This activity has been enabled by the power of personal production environments (iMovie, Garageband, etc.) and the proliferation of tools for blogging to name just two. Here are just a few directories or ways to find them:

• Video blogs, searches and feeds: Last Minute Blog, Me-TV, Yahoo Video Search, Google Video Search, Feedster.
   
• Podcasting (also sometimes called audioblogging): Podcast Alley, Podcast.net, Penguin Radio, Podcast Directory, Digital Podcast.

All of this together is taking the points of view of the masses and allowing them to be instantly available worldwide. Some believe that it is leading to Grassroots Journalism that is changing the face of news, information and eventually human communication itself by accelerating the transference of memes from person-to-person (or culture-to-culture, country-to-country) at internet speeds.

Google Maps...look out Mapquest

I've been goofin' with the beta of Google Maps. I *really* like the freshness of the visuals, the ease of scrolling (and it's smooth!) and the attractiveness of the graphics. Besides all of that, it's fast.

In the picture at your left, I did a screengrab of a lookup on one of my favorite coffee shops in Eden Prairie where I live (it's in a renovated farmhouse...lots of character). As you can see from the graphics on the higher level view *and* the zoomed in view, it has quite a nice user interface and map representation. Give it a try...

What's your hurry? Where ya goin'?

According to an article today in New Scientist, "Astronomers have spotted the first star known to be hurtling out of the Milky Way. And an encounter with the supermassive black hole at the galaxy's heart may be the cause of the star's exodus."

Speculation that this star has 'slingshotted' by a twin and thus is hurtling out in to space is discussed. It's heading out of our galaxy at 415 miles per second and will be oughta here in 80-100 million years (damn...here's yet *another* celestial event I'm gonna miss).

When you look at a spiral galaxy like ours, it makes perfect sense that it has to be spinning around some sort of humongous gravitational force -- like water going down the drain. A black hole is the logical candidate (read more about interesting black hole theories in one of my earlier posts entitled, "Missing Link: Milkway to the Big Bang"). I guess I'm sort of intrigued that today's article was the first time I've ever seen the words about the center of our Milky Way galaxy being a black hole written down. Maybe I was daydreaming in class that day.

IceRocket: My new favorite search engine?

Listening to a podcast featuring Mark Cuban from the Web 2.0 conference, he mentioned a company he'd participated in with funding. Since he built Broadcast.com and sold it to Yahoo during the dotcom boom (and became a billionaire), people are interested in what he's up to -- plus he's a hoot to listen to like Ted Turner.

The company he mentioned was IceRocket. I went to the site last week and searched on it about IceRocket itself. Good article on CNet here.

Is it my new favorite search engine? Nah. But there is something kinda lovable and quirky about it that has compelled me to use it more and more. It makes Google seem buttoned-down and conservative...but I'm good at Google, use it dozens of times per day and have to get comfortable with IceRocket. By the way, since loyalty is but a click away for internet users, it's worthy of note that Yahoo was, at one time, my one-and-only favorite search engine. I use it *maybe* once per month now.

IceRocket has some cool features I really like such as searching in key categories: Blogs, News, Phone Pics, Images, Multi Media besides normal searching and something I find particularly amusing: IceSpy (lets you watch a scrolling view of other people's searches!).

Is it my new favorite? Not yet...

Plasma, LCD, or DLP rear projection?

Just returned home after a Super Bowl party at a colleague's house. Beautiful home with finished basement and a 42" plasma high definition TV built-in to a custom cabinet.

I'm usually the go-to guy for friends and family to turn to when deciding on what computer, digital camera, video camera, or other gadget to buy. I usually either have one or know enough to be dangerous.

Not so in this category 'cause I don't watch enough television to either have a burning desire to buy one or to have invested the time in preparing to do so. But after tonight -- especially when we watched a snippet of a Sting DVD -- I realize that I want the cinema-like quality for my TiVo recorded programs, DVD's and more.

Do I buy a Plasma, LCD, or DLP rear projection? Right after returning home, I went to CNET to start poking around and read their review of a wide variety of sets. Wow. Pretty dizzying array of choices. I'll probably choose the best balance between quality, cost and DVI input (so I can plug in my laptop to it).

I also know that whatever I end up doing for a TV size, I'll make sure that we provide for the possibility that bigger sizes will need to be accommodated in the future. In fact, my bride wrote on her blog in a post entitled, "Goodbye Armoire," where she forecasted that flat panel TV’s would make entertainment centers obsolete.

Star Trek coming true?

When the second Star Trek movie came out in 1982 (Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan), I was enamored of the premise of terraforming in one of the movie's central themes called the "Genesis Project." In the movie, there was a Genesis device that -- when shot down to an otherwise barren planet's surface -- would cause a chain terraforming reaction creating a complete M-class (i.e., like Earth) planet with water, an atmosphere, and other ingredients required for life as we know it.

Now it looks like NASA researchers are thinking-through injecting synthetic "super" greenhouse gases into the planet's atmosphere to raise its temperature and melt its polar ice caps to provide conditions suitable for biological life. The main thought? Injecting synthetic greenhouse gases into the negligible atmosphere of Mars could make the planet hospitable for humans.

With a travel time of two and a half years to Mars each way, NASA better get moving so I can go there while I still have my teeth. 

My personal enlightenment in 1997

Having spent a chunk of my career in interactive media and computer based training (Pioneer New Media; Authorware (merged with MacroMind now MacroMedia); Apple) and a heavy user of ISDN, Gopher and email in the early Nineties, I was pretty delighted when the WWWeb hit my radar screen pretty hard in 1995 with my first download of Mosaic in the first couple of months of that year.

But my personal experience with it didn't really hit me right between the eyes until the summer of 1997. That was when my Dad and I headed to Germany for a two week adventure. I took along a Powerbook, an Apple Quicktake digital camera, an acoustic coupler, a copy of PageMill, Photoshop and my Compuserve account. My plan was to chronicle the Big Trip to Germany for my kids and ended up with extended family, friends and others logging on the Web to view the trip too.

My Dad was *very* interested in discovering whatever we could about my great-great grandparents (Johann and Suzanna) who emigrated from Mehren, Germany in 1854 to Minnesota and we scored some genealogical gems. Besides trying to find these gems, I just wanted a good experience with my Dad while drinking in the country and 'publishing' a daily diary of the trip so as to stay connected with my bride and kids (which is why -- if you view the Big Trip -- the writing might seem a bit sophomoric or goofy but my daughter was 9 and son 2.5 were the target audience). I did and it worked.

But the most powerful thing was this new publishing medium and my own amazement that I could send the HTML over the wires to a server in Minnesota and have it be instantly available to anyone, anywhere with a connection. It seems pretty old hat today, but at the time virtually everyone I knew thought it was incredibly cool.

Oh yeah...this publishing adventure was not without its frustrations. Standing in a phone booth at night with a Deutsche Telecom card trying to get connected to Compuserve made me -- more than once -- want to throw my computer through the glass and kick the snot out of the phone booth. I spent more time than I cared to goofing with the files, backing up the camera pics to the Powerbook, taking double pics (one with the cheesey digital camera and a 'real' one with a film camera). Dealing with the 'tone' pulse that Deutsche Telecom and hotels placed on the phone line (a 'counter' that would measure the time the line was open so the hotel could charge you...but it would often disconnect my modem connection!) often made me want to walk outside and scream.

All in all though it was a fun and interesting trip made all the more so by this unique online diary I kept during the trip. As I think about that experience vs. the type I have today (Wifi high speed connections, lots of 'net tools, blogging software, film-like digital pictures, etc.) I treasure having that experience...and sharing it with my Dad and being with him on the trip. This was an experience we'll not have again and one I'll treasure forever.

Searching *inside* your photos, podcasts, movies and more...

When I was at Vignette during and after the dot.com adventure, we were the web content management engine behind numerous marquee sites with rich media.  One of our partners -- on whom I drank the KoolAid about their value proposition -- was a company called Virage. These guys had an unbelievably cool technology that could essentially index a *huge* set of data about what lived inside unstructured media content: facial recognition; the closed captioning track; real-time analysis and encoding of streaming media (which to me was THE COOLEST thing); and a whole lot more.

Virage's customer list is a who's who of media companies globally. In the summer of 2003 they were acquired by Autonomy who has also sold licenses of their analytics for the U.S. intelligence services (seemed like a good fit: the Virage sweet-spot is media...Autonomy's is static content plus context and more).

I did a little "dot connecting" this evening.

Tonight I was reading Doc Searls blog entry about frustration with tagging his photos so they can be found. Later I was looking at some video content on a blog (I've been exploring video blogging or "vlogging" lately) and also organizing the podcasts that were downloaded today to my machine. The groundswell of rich media content creation is palpable and I think it's pretty exciting -- if you can find the great content being created.

Instead of just stumbling across this content while poking around (except for the podcasts which I've made a point of selecting), what if I was actually looking for something specific? What if I'd wanted to search for a particular scene of a video or for snippets contained within a podcast? This is currently a really hard problem to solve unless some human has input text (like closed captioning for video) or built metadata around an audio file -- but is really tough to do on-the-fly and automatically.

Virage has done some interesting things (like facial recognition) but I'm not certain where the state-of-the-art is with accuracy. I recalled Virage while I was thinking about this problem tonight (searching inside and for rich media content) and wondered what engines for media metadata creation might look like, what the market opportunity might be and what "dots" I should connect:

• My own post about drowning in content and, frankly, even finding it,
• Concern by people like Doc Searls over how to tag his own photos (which seems significantly more simple to solve than creating searchable rich media),
  
• The acceleration in content repositories like the Internet Archive,
• The proliferation of do-it-yourself tools like iMovie, Garageband, Audacity, Premiere, which ONLY means that we're going to have even MORE rich media we'll want to find
• Continuing reduction in price and increase in power of PC's and video/audio tools,
• Blogging offerings like Audioblog that stream media to-and-through blogs
• Virage/Autonomy could solve a lot of the above as a hosted service.

There is no question that there is a coming tidal wave of unstructured media that is going to be VERY hard to find -- unless the right server-centric horsepower is there for all to use. I'm gonna take a guess that someone, somewhere is or has been chatting with Autonomy and Virage about just such a service to compete with the gorillas in search.

Of course, our search gorilla pals at Google undoubtedly see this clearly and have kickstarted a beta search offering for video. I have a sneaking suspicion that they see this problem/opportunity. I also suspect that they understand the blogging demand that is growing (since they acquired Blogger) and might very well be working on this problem on a large scale.