Connecting the Dots

Halloween: Urban terrorism or a fun time?

For those of us that went trick-or-treating several decades ago, it's amazing how things have changed: fear of razor blades in apples, poison candy, lots of tricks that are actually crimes, shooting in the air within certain urban settings, childhood obesity to name a few.

But I've experienced zero problems with my own kids (and live in the 'burbs so shooting in the air is a non-issue). My daughter is now 17 years old and we had nothing but delightful experiences when she went trick-or-treating, except for the Halloween blizzard in 1991 when she went out as Batman wearing a down jacket underneath looking like Batman-on-steroids. My son is 11 (and this might be his last year) and the same thing has happened with him...just fun and few incidents other than an upset stomach the next morning.

So what is it about us that causes fear to outweigh critical thinking? Is it a natural fear as a parent to protect our kids at all costs? One could think about the razor blade in an apple as an example of terrorism against trick-or-treaters, couldn't one?

Though watchful at all times for anything out of the ordinary as I accompany my kids on their appointed rounds getting candy (and yes, we check ALL candy before it can be eaten), my goal is to let my little guy tonight revel in and delight in the traditions around Halloween tonight. Nothing more, nothing less.

Connecting the Dots podcast for October 30, 2005

It's all about Dad (my 79 year old computing father). This week's show is about dumping an old PC with a HUGE old 17" CRT in favor of a new Mac mini and a 19" Acer LCD monitor (less than $800 for the whole shebang). This is the perfect combination of a system easy to setup for a newbie. Plus, no viruses. No adware. No spyware. No worms. Yet.

Having an easy system to maintain is vitally important for those of us who wear a "tech support" hat for family and friends!

Listen to or download this week's podcast

How we see the world...

Moments ago I came across this fascinating article about how we perceive color in Science Daily and it couldn't have come out at a more interesting time (and, of course, that I just happened to be mentally open to seeing it). It starts off like this: Researchers at the University of Rochester have found that the number of color-sensitive cones in the human retina differs dramatically among people—by up to 40 times—yet people appear to perceive colors the same way. The findings, on the cover of this week's journal Neuroscience, strongly suggest that our perception of color is controlled much more by our brains than by our eyes.

Hmmm...is this further scientific proof that we all see the world similarly through our thoughts though we're physically wired differently? Most of us have seen all the optical illusions like these ones that fool our brains (which are expecting to see one thing vs. what is actually in front of us) so we know how important expectation and perception is in actually seeing something.

I just happened to be open to seeing this article and thinking about its implications (about how we view the world and behave within it) due to the seminar I'm at this week. The workshop I've been attending (Spencer, Shenk, Capers & Associates Process Communication Model) has dealt with how to fully grasp our own varied and complex personality types and of those with whom we interact...and how to optimize our communication as leaders. Really good stuff.

This workshop led off by setting some context for us. How do we perceive our world and the other humans with whom we interact? How do we get our psychological needs met and ensure others do thus ensuring good communication occurs vs. breaking down? Our "contact perceptions" are the way in which we each perceive the world and use our own unique, preferred lens to interpret it. Of course, our personality type (workaholic, persister, reactor, rebel, promoter, dreamer) is the key behavioral "filter" through which we project our contact perception to others, and through which we subconsciously behave within the world.

Obviously it's not just our personality that dictates how we see the world and deal with it. There are tons of other variables like education, experience, traumas, our work and home situations (that may cause us to get in to distress and thus be impacting our behavior) and much more. Drug use and/or mental illnesses would cause an aberrant perspective -- but is not often germane in a business context (the one we all shared at this workshop).

This color perception article fascinated me since I wanted to know "why" our markedly different, hard-wired retina's still perceive color in much the same way (there is a ton of research on color theory, color's impact on our emotions, and color healing that make perception of color really important). Could it be as simple as our brains sync our visual cortex to the frequency of color so no matter what...our brains adapt to our physical limitations in order to optimize our perceptions? (Seems like correctly perceiving the world visually -- aligned with everyone else -- would be a *very* useful survival mechanism over the millenia!).

One last thought: so *if* our brains do adapt to physical limitations in order to sync with our world perception what will help us to survive psychologically as our world changes? In just the last 100+ years, we've had the phone, TV, videogames, driving cars vs. horseback, computers, the internet causing an accelerating tsunami of electronic stimuli and thought streaming almost directly in to our brains, and a growing body of knowledge about how to precisely target our behavioral propensities and perceptions. Will our brains begin to re-sync our physicality to this new reality? Will we grow in our perceptions? After this workshop I wonder, will our personalities change and adapt too?

Connecting with history of a place

I'm having yet another experience where I'm struck by what was...and what is. I'm in southern California for a leadership workshop staying at the Inn at Rancho Santa Fe. Not knowing much about this area of San Diego (except for the Heaven's Gate suicides in the late nineties), I've been delighted being here.

The history of this place is considerable (more here). Out of all towns or cities in the U.S. that are 1,000 homes or above, this is the wealthiest per capita (so it's pretty nice). On the Rancho Santa Fe association history page it sums it up nicely:

In 1906, the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway, through its subsidiary Santa Fe Land Improvement Company, acquired the majority of the original Rancho San Diegu to land grant. Through many of its actions, the Company was to leave an indelible mark on the Rancho. Intent on developing a tree farm as a source for railroad ties, the company planted millions of eucalyptus seedlings on the rambling land grant. Frost, drought and the unsuitability of the wood for ties led to the abandonment of the forestry experiment. However, the eucalyptus plantings forever changed the character of the area. What was once a typical Southern California terrace, sage scrub environment was now heavily wooded, rolling hills.

Looking to recoup their losses on the failed timber venture, the Santa Fe Land Improvement Company began the development of a planned community of gentlemen's ranches with a thematic unity of architectural style and an ambiance evocative of the Spanish and Rancho eras.

The smell of the eucalyptus trees are incredible. That said, I'm struck by the change in the topography over the last 75-100 years (which was mostly barren before the millions of trees were planted) and how even an enclave as exclusive as this is still packed with people (and, curiously, there's ubiquitous wifi throughout the Inn grounds which is complimentary...and fast).

Being here makes me wonder about where people will go to get peace, quiet, and connect with nature as the United States continue to add people and build over most areas. I've believed for most of my adult life that disconnectedness from natural surroundings causes dissonance and the lack of internal peace. Something to think about as we all rush headlong in to the future...

Openness, anarchy and innovation

The older I get and the more I learn, the less I know. I'm constantly struck by different points of view presented to me, shades of gray in areas I thought were close to being absolute, and exciting opportunities that turn out to have downsides requiring push-back on those in control.

Dave Winer makes a great point today about the requirement that the Web -- and the conferences, meetups, and access to them -- must be open. Not invite only, not closed to points of view, not focused on a singular path without options to digress or be tangential. As evidenced by all the categories you see in my left blog column, I have a fair number of eclectic interests and, like the name of my blog, I try to connect the dots. So I'm even more struck when I connect dots and it turns out there are dots I hadn't even seen and this happens over-and-over again (and with increasing frequency) making openness more important to me by the day.

At the Web 2.0 conference a few weeks ago, I was struck by the dirty little secret no one talked about there (the secret being the woefully inadequate nature of true web services interoperability and the technical infrastructure barriers in the way of all the cool startups that were showcasing their stuff). When I asked others and ran this by them, without exception it was top-of-mind and a glaring omission for other attendees and there wasn't a meaningful, open forum for dialogue about it (and the $2,795 price of admission created its own barrier to entry).

In 1983 while still in my 20's, I was in Hawaii for the Apple Int'l Sales Meeting (post about it here) where Steve Jobs introduced the Macintosh to the company and sales organization. I knew then that I didn't "fit" the Apple culture or lifestyle and it seemed like I was in a foreign land. As a midwestern, suburban kid with traditional values and upbringing, I wasn't comfortable with the seemingly radical thoughts and envelope-pushing being done by the sandal-wearing crowd (as I wore my preppy Polo shirt, khaki trousers and Topsiders) though I had already fallen deeply in love with the notion of windows, icons, a mouse and how they would clearly change the nature of human/computer interaction. It took a radical way of thinking to make this a reality.

Man how things have changed in my head. Acceptance, openness to ideas, approaches, and thoughts, are all critical for innovation and I've had that mindset for many years. Change is messy. New ideas often create pain in the minds of those sitting in the midst of the status quo who most often try to kill them...but innovation and real change demands being open to new ideas, methods and approaches.

A MODEL FOR CONFERENCE OPENNESS?

The more I think about it the stronger I am in my belief that -- at a minimum at important, major conferences -- a model for conference participation needs to be something like what AlwaysOn CEO, Tony Perkins, did at his recent Innovation Summit at Stanford University which I participated in from Minnesota.

The entire conference was webcast. Not only were participants able to view the panels and workshops, but could participate through an online chat that was projected up on to a huge screen onstage! This took a lot of guts on Perkins part and yes, it was anarchy. At the same time it was innovative and, most importantly, it was open.

Even Doug Kaye's ITConversations are incredibly valuable but -- in his deference to most status quo conference organizers who want to protect revenue and the speakers who copyright and probably sell much of that same content -- the lag time on release of podcasts from those conferences are weeks or months later. This is *not* in keeping with the instant, always on, always accessible, rapid proliferation of ideas and thoughts that the Web fosters and makes these podcasts increasingly irrelevant. 

Connecting the Dots podcast for October 22, 2005

Apple's Aperture, Who is controlling the internet?, Quantum Dots and LED lighting are the main topics of this week's podcasting audio adventure.

A brief audio demo of microphones (AudioTechnica's ATR55 and Pro24 mikes) in the hope one would complement my new field recorder (the M-Audio Microtrack).

Listen to or download this week's podcast

Quantum Dots to Stop Global Warming

OK, OK...it won't stop global warming, but this is pretty cool and it has promise in being one key way to significantly reduce global energy consumption.

This previous post about LED lighting made this one point: LED's are more efficient (they burn cooler and at a higher Kelvin temperature so they're brighter per watt of energy) and that -- if incandescent bulbs were replaced throughout America -- we could reduce energy consumption. 10% here...10% there...pretty soon we're talking about real savings and a reduction in dependence upon foreign oil. 

Imagine me then stumbling across this article today about a Vanderbilt University student who accidentally came across a new way to "coat" LED lights with quantum dots to produce a bright, white light. The article in Science Daily recaps it nicely *and* discusses the Dept of Energy forecast that the energy savings could approach 29% by 2025:

The resulting hybrid LED gives off a warm white light with a slightly yellow cast, similar to that of the incandescent lamp.

Until now quantum dots have been known primarily for their ability to produce a dozen different distinct colors of light simply by varying the size of the individual nanocrystals: a capability particularly suited to fluorescent labeling in biomedical applications. But chemists at Vanderbilt University discovered a way to make quantum dots spontaneously produce broad-spectrum white light. The report of their discovery, which happened by accident, appears in the communication “White-light Emission from Magic-Sized Cadmium Selenide Nanocrystals” published online October 18 by the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

In the last few years, LEDs (short for light emitting diodes) have begun replacing incandescent and fluorescent lights in a number of niche applications. Although these solid-state lights have been used for decades in consumer electronics, recent technological advances have allowed them to spread into areas like architectural lighting, traffic lights, flashlights and reading lights. Although they are considerably more expensive than ordinary lights, they are capable of producing about twice as much light per watt as incandescent bulbs; they last up to 50,000 hours or 50 times as long as a 60-watt bulb; and, they are very tough and hard to break. Because they are made in a fashion similar to computer chips, the cost of LEDs has been dropping steadily. The Department of Energy has estimated that LED lighting could reduce U.S. energy consumption for lighting by 29 percent by 2025, saving the nation’s households about $125 million in the process.

Quantum dots, like white LEDs, have the advantage of not giving off large amounts of invisible infrared radiation unlike the light bulb. This invisible radiation produces large amounts of heat and largely accounts for the light bulb’s low energy efficiency.

Cool, heh? Read the original Vanderbilt University press release here, or any of these articles that cover this discovery as well as many others that will give you access to more info around quantum dots.

Free Rein to Control the Internet

That sound you hear is the door-of-innovation being closed by the wireline telephone company executives as they institute control over what you can and cannot do on the internet -- and those gleeful grins on their faces are courtesy of our Federal government and the free rein they've been give to exhibit this behavior. Free Skype phone calls over the internet is poised to kill their businesses and they will not allow that to happen. Those other sounds you hear are the collective moans from wireless telephony executives that have realized citywide wireless technologies like WiMax will allow free Skype calls (and data transfer) in the urban areas where they enjoy the lion's share of their profits.

Joining this anally retentive and controlling crowd are the cable companies, the movie industry and the media conglomerates that are seeing major portions of their respective businesses threatened by the possiblities that a free and unfettered internet allows. These groups will not allow that to happen and are also being enabled by our Federal government to do whatever they please to protect their businesses.

The control? Block successful offerings like Skype through port blocking. Cripple the use of technologies like Bluetooth in mobile phones so you can force your cell phone customers to pay twice (once for voice and again for data access -- even though any technologically savvy person *knows* they're getting screwed). Pressure Congress to extend copyright and institute ridiculous laws like the Digital Millenium Copyright Act so they don't have to compete in the free market.

The mainstream media has *finally* awakened and are writing about what's going on. Today's Wall Street Journal had a front page story about telcos and cable companies that are blocking certain applications which subscribers use on their networks, ostensibly to preserve the quality of the network. Video file-sharing is the primary scapegoat since it consumes a lot of bandwidth but VOIP providers like Skype were discussed at length. Draconian laws and control measures shoring up downtrending industries (telco's, publishing and media) have created an accelerating climate of control which has twisted Adam Smith's invisible hand so it's down the front of our trousers squeezing our family jewels. Luckily we're finally to the point that the average person is also feeling the pain.

Though it is obvious to even a casual observer that the Bush Administration has demonstrated zero leadership in balancing the internet-as-platform-for-innovation and instead is cowtowing to US business interests and internal protectionism (while the rest of the world blows by us with their innovation), it's not too late to stop the choking off of innovation here at home.

Where are our leaders and what are they doing besides command-and-control and instituting regulation and protectionism? I could've sworn that it was the Democrat's that were slammed for more and more governmental regulation and the Republicans who were supportive of the free market.

Apple's Aperture: Another link in the creative value chain

Today Apple announced a professional photographer's workflow dream application: Aperture. Though there are literally dozens and dozens of web sites and blogs where you can read all kinds of opinions on this new photography application (e.g., is it a Photoshop killer?), I'd rather take a different path and connect the dots I'm seeing with this app...and others Apple has released.

First off, delivering this app is *not* about Adobe and Photoshop. Photoshop is the killer app for photography and is not about to be casually replaced (investment made by prosumers and professionals to date is too high to throw away, too many plug-ins exist and have been purchased, a critical mass of knowledge exists in the heads of users requiring retraining) but even I -- a casual prosumer user of Photoshop -- find the workflow woefully inadequate in Photoshop which has left an opening.

With Aperture, Apple has an application that will meet that workflow need head-on as well as doing so elegantly (with meaningful -- but only high level -- image post processing built-in). Aperture will be another tool in the photographer's bag and is simply one more application that is accelerating the momentum Apple has always been known for in prepress and publishing: the Mac is *the* creative's machine.

But there's another, more fundamental point...

Using web services can be ugly...

Today I thought I'd create a prototype blog to show the CEO at the company for whom I work. Now...you'd think that my hosting provider, Typepad, would be fast. Nope...in fact is incredibly slow (and getting slower lately) and I ended up taking several hours to build a fairly simple blog. You'd think my audio provider, Audioblog, would stream quickly. Nope. Certainly speedy Gmail -- the poster child for AJAX rich internet applications -- would be super fast. Nope.

So what's going on? Is this Web 2.0 thing real or is it comprised of doohickey's stuck together with chicken wire and duct tape?

My earlier post about the "dirty little secret" of Web 2.0 is already at fruition with just these two services. Typepad is doing really goofy things like failing to load the WYSIWYG toolbar on my post page. It's also dog slow so *all* actions to build a blog (colors, backgrounds, uploading files, building links) TAKES FOREVER!

Audioblog allows me to "publish" an audio stream and a Flash player (with cute VCR-like controls) straight to my Typepad blog. But whenever anyone loads my Typepad blog, it waits to load the player and waits again until the stream begins. The latency is actually pretty minimal...but seems to be growing over the last few weeks as Audioblog grows.

Browser based applications have always been slow since *all* data had to be fetched from the server to function. Then when the AJAX paradigm appeared (loading a huge amount of functionality in to the browser immediately so only minimal amounts of data had to be fetched from the server) everyone seemed to think everything would be just fine. It's not.

As I do more and more on the 'net with browser based web services offerings, I find myself more and more dismayed that they aren't desktop applications with minor use of server side functionality.

Unless latency and throughput is addressed, it'll really stunt the growth of Web 2.0.

Connecting the Dots podcast for October 16, 2005

This week's show from New York City comes comments about the ZDNet Digital Life show at the Jacob Javits center; Streamload...a company with a business model to address the exploding world of personal media; and a few musings about publishers and a broadcaster in the heart of the city.

Listen to or download the mp3 file of this week's show

New York: Digital Life @ Jacob Javits Center

So my bride and daughter headed off on a shopping adventure today and my little guy and I headed over to the Javits convention center to check out ZDNet's Digital Life show. To me it was lame...to Alex it was a *huge* hit.

It was crowded and primarily video games. I'd seen just about everything else before in multiple venues (e.g., CES in January) and have been at dozens of trade events and shows in my life that were hundreds of times more exciting.

But today I saw the show through Alex's eyes. He thought it was *way cool* and it was fun to watch him stand in line (some for 20 minutes or more) to play a game, put on 3D goggles to try 'em out, and box like Jackie Chan in a fun exercise game series.

I often realize that it's tougher and tougher for vendors to wow people...what with sites like Engadget and Gizmodo all the rage and showing sneak previews of gadgets that won't ship for some time.

Off to New York City...

Start spreading the news, I’m leaving today
I want to be a part of it - New York, New York
These vagabond shoes, are longing to stray
Right through the very heart of it - New York, New York

I wanna wake up in a city, that doesn’t sleep
And find I’m king of the hill - top of the heap

These little town blues, are melting away
I’ll make a brand new start of it - in old New York
If I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere
It’s up to you - New York, New York

New York, New York
I want to wake up in a city, that never sleeps
And find I’m a number one - top of the list, king of the hill
A number one

These little town blues, are melting away
I’m gonna make a brand new start of it - in old new york
And if I can make it there, I’m gonna make it anywhere

It up to you - New York, New York

New York

Forbes: Past Climate Change Supports Current Global Warming

Only someone completely unable to think critically would believe for a moment that humans haven't made an impact on the Earth (just look at these before and after pictures to illustrate). Certainly fairly liberal organizations have compiled information about global warming...but conservative pro business publications like Forbes magazine insert at least some meaningful data within their pages from time to time (or online in this case).

Forbes had this article today about Past Climate Change Supports Current Global Warming:

Some of the strongest evidence yet of a direct link between tropical warmth and higher levels of greenhouse gases is found in past climate records, U.S. researchers say.

The current steady increase in tropical temperatures caused by global warming could have a major impact on global climate and result in more destructive storms like Hurricane Katrina, according to a team at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

The study appears this week in Science Express, the online publication of the journal Science. In addition, Google Scholar has this list of studies on global warming for your leisure reading pleasure.

Video iPod: a podcaster's dream machine?

Prior to today, the only way to lift the artificial 8khz "ceiling" for recording on the iPod -- beyond telephone quality) which some of us wanted to do for portable podcasting -- was to install the iPodLinux Project operating system (which facilitated up to 44.1khz recording).

While it's perfectly understandable that Apple artificially capped recording capability so as to appease the record companies -- and now that they've got the power tipped in their favor they can do more -- what I don't understand is that they didn't provide a microphone accessory (say, a USB powered condenser mike that plugged in to the dock connector) and gave Griffin a heads-up so that there'd be a way to use an iTrip with this device.

Obviously someone will make one if Apple doesn't. At first glance I thought, "Oh geez, I just bought the M-Audio Microtrack for $400" but realize now that its capabilities for field recording far surpass what I could achieve with the iPod...without lots of additional accessories.

So no....this is not a podcaster's dream machine (video, audio, photos, and podcast recording all rolled in to one). It's cool...but it's just a handy, dandy playback device.

*Trust, but Verify* in Web 2.0

Do you have multiple usernames and passwords for web sites? Do you get phishing emails from Lord-knows-who? As web services explode and you want access to them (and they to you), are you prepared to fill out dozens more forms and have still dozens more usernames and passwords?

At the Web 2.0 conference my horizons were raised about the state of identity management (a long way away from being real, ready and ubiquitous) and the importance of it being in place before the next generation of the Web can truly explode.

We've all experienced the frustration of constant form completing and the multiple passwords we all use. At last count, I had 121 separate sites/web services that required my credentials (username, password) to access. 121!?! It's no wonder that most people use the same username and password across the multiple sites they visit and I sometimes do too (only on sites with little value...the big deal stuff like banking and stock trading get my double super secret, industrial strength hexadecimal passwords).

There is a lot of effort, energy and brainpower focused on identity management. Using tons of web offerings simultaneously will *demand* that we have a single, trusted authority that allows each one of us to have a trust/verified identity that can be federated across multiple sites and web services. In fact with all the buzz about social software and Web 2.0 -- and the power of people all over the world connecting up with others that share their affinities -- trusted, verified identity is critical and is well thought out here.

To learn more, you can read articles here and here or visit Doc Searls' fabulous list o' links.

Connecting the Dots *Web 2.0* podcast for October 9, 2005

A podcast after the close of the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco.

• Tim O'Reilly's Web 2.0 White Paper which came out a few days before the conference
• Blogger's write about the Web 2.0 Conference
• Coverage about the Web 2.0 Conference
• Jeremy Allaire's Brightcove
• Launchpad companies: AllPeers 2.0; Flock; Joyent; KnowNow; Rollyo; Socialtext; Wink; Zimbra; zvents
• Morgan Stanley's Mary Meeker gave this (PDF) Internet Trends presentation
• Other: Google Reader

Download or listen to this week's podcast from San Francisco

Web 2.0 Conference: The dirty little secret

Lots of buzz in the blogosphere (and here, of course) about being very lean-n-mean on building your startup and building cool web services (Flickr, Zimbra, Rollyo, Tribe, Socialtext, Joyent, zvents, et al) and getting stuff shipped so to speak. At the same time, Yahoo, Google, AOL and IAC were showing numerous offerings that are consumer targeted, web services. Very cool stuff introduced by both startups and big guys.

But the dirty little secret is that a lot of plumbing stuff isn't being discussed on blogs or at this conference...and I gained some interesting perspective over the last few days as well as at breakfast this morning. I'm a glass-is-half-full guy, but can't ignore the holes and what's necessary to make Web 2.0 a reality. Things discussed -- which are enormous holes needing to be filled include:

• Identity management. Dick Hardt's sxip is an interesting offering and will be successful in many ways. They see the problems, "get" the scale and scope of the technical, political and funding friction that exists, but are a for-profit organization that may-or-may-not get the support of the community (look how Microsoft Passport was crushed by the lack of adoption by the community!). Without "trust but verify" directory/identity management services, true consumable web services will be low level only. Healthcare consumer services won't fly, commerce will suffer, unless there are trusted networks and directory services that providers and customers can share.

• All Your Data is Mine. There was a fair amount of debate here about the collection of personal clickstream data by Amazon, Google, Yahoo and others...and that that data should be "free" and manageable by the owner. Sitting by Microsoft CTO Ray Ozzie during a panel discussion that included an Amazon guy expected to answer "yes" to free'ing customer data, I leaned over to him and said, "Maybe I'm not getting it, but why would Amazon willingly give up an enormous competitive advantage and make it free?" "They couldn't" he responded. I agree obviously since what would Amazon's incentive be to do that?
  

Investing in the infrastructure and software necessary to offer premium and high value services means that one return on investment for all companies (like Amazon) playing will need to include be the harvesting and use of this data (retail stores and malls have done customer observation, traffic flow and purchase analysis -- and matching it to credit portfolio analysis -- for YEARS so this isn't new...just more transparent). Admittedly balance will be required so that Big Brother doesn't emerge from the corporate world vs. the government -- but educating the consumer of the threat *and* providing them with an alternative will be the only way this will fly.

• Latency. This is a technical problem. Imagine you have a portal that is "consuming" web services from a bunch of different sites. You've undoubtedly experienced ONE web service in the past (DoubleClick ads) where the web page "hung" (didn't parse) waiting for the DoubleClick service to deliver the ad. Now imagine that your blog or web page is grabbing photos, catalog items, maybe audio or video, blogrolls, calendars ALL from different web services, and you end up with one incredibly horrible user experience!

BitTorrent is an amazing technology for moving huge files around with minimal cost and impact with internet transfers. With huge momentum around digital use leveraging all these cool web services, audio (e.g., podcasting), video (e.g., Brightcove) which will accelerate internet use and massive downloading, exacerbates the latency problem mentioned above.

Latency and Open Infrastructure: One plugged-in visionary I follow (Marc Canter, founder of MacroMind, leader in the open infrastructure movement) has a blog that is, ironically, a poster child for latency. Besides my news aggregator, I visit 50 or blogs a day and -- because Marc connects up to a wide variety of sites (i.e., web services sort of), I often find myself waiting and waiting while his blog loads all these piece-parts snagged from all around the Web. I find myself pissed off often with the slowness of his blog but tapping in to his knowledge and connectedness has, so far, made it worth the wait.

• Exposing data and functionality as web services. This is a big one since getting as many independent software vendors (ISV's) to proffer up appropriate data so as to be consumed by web services is key. The ISV I work for has "punch out" partners so our customers can seamlessly use our procurement application, set up an account with a supplier, and punch out from within the application, buy stuff and automatically populate the purchase within our system. All these partnerships are one-off business relationships...effort and cost for us and our customers which could be obviated with a trust, secure, global web services infrastructure which we could leverage.

Lots to do. Lots to think about. Collective energy and leadership will hopefully drive standards and problems out of the way so we can deliver more innovation and functionality to users and customers.

Web 2.0 observations...

Though this is my first Web 2.0 conference (ah...does it count that I read all about the last one?), I had a few general observations.

• Had a brief conversation with Microsoft's new CTO, Ray Ozzie today. An impressive, accomplished and smart guy, it was nice to chat with him though he didn't know me from Adam and he was very gracious. If he is indicative of the "new Microsoft" and the open nature of their thinking, exciting things are going to be coming out of Redmond

• The internet as a platform has a HUGE amount of energy, effort and enthusiasm behind it. There are so many doors being opened to opportunity, open source software that fuels the building of new companies, and people working on the building blocks (open infrastructure, trust, formats, identity, etc.) that the momentum is palpable

• The user is centric. Not proprietary platforms, formats, or applications. All the discussions about open source infrastructure, identity management, tagging, blogging, user contributed content, etc., are ALL focused on setting up this next generation of the internet in the most open and user-centric way possible

• There are too many people here. The workshop rooms were too small, too hot, and NOT geared toward learning and open discussion

• For a venue that attracts the cognoscenti and leaders of the nextgen internet-as-a-platform, the lack of power outlets (*everyone* has a laptop) and the woefully inadequate WiFi is inexcusable. (Uploading the 50MB mp3 file from the AttentionTrust yesterday was impossible until I returned to my hotel at 11pm last night...even general surfing was dog slow).

I'm certainly not in a position to prognosticate about exactly what the internet-as-a-platform future will look like, but I do know one thing: ignore what's going on right now at your own peril.

AttentionTrust Board Meeting at Web 2.0

Attended the AttentionTrust Board Meeting at Web 2.0. Steve Gillmor moderated and asked if someone was recording it. No one was...but I had my new M-Audio MicroTrack in my briefcase so recorded it. You can download an mp3 recording of the meeting here (NOTE: Audio is faint for the first minute and a half since the recorder is away from the main table...but is then brought closer so you'll hear the rest of the hour just fine).

AttentionTrust: First Board Meeting and Discussion (Open to All)

Steve Gillmor, President, AttentionTrust.org
Hank Barry, Partner, Hummer Winblad
Seth Goldstein, Chairman, AttentionTrust.org
Time: 1:30pm - 2:30pm
Location: Franciscan II

Attention is the substance of focus. It registers your interests by indicating choice for certain things and choice against other things. Any time you pay attention to something (and any time you ignore something), data is created. That data has value, but only if it's gathered, measured, and analyzed. Right now, you generally lack the ability to capture that data for yourself, so you can't benefit from it. But what if you could? And what if you could share your data with other people who were also capturing their own data, or if you could exchange your data for something of value with companies and other institutions that were interested in learning more about the things that interested you? You'd be in control--you would decide who has access to what data, as well as what you'd accept in exchange for access to your data.

This Web 2.0 workshop will explore the definition of attention, the goals and principles of attentiontrust.org, and the creation and seeding of tools for the notification, preservation, and leveraging of attention metadata in the Web 2.0 marketplace. The session will also serve as a public forum for discussion of the first release of AT.EXT, a browser plug-in that will facilitate commercial attention services.

At the Web 2.0 Conference

Limited posts this week...or maybe a lot of 'em. Not sure how jammed I'll be at this conference, but suffice to say that there is too much to do and not enough of me.

Studying the main as well as the workshop schedules, I find that at each time slot there are at least two and sometimes three workshops that I view as "must attend" events. I pinged a woman with O'Reilly to inquire about buying video or other content of the sessions I'll miss, but they don't offer it (hmmm...seems like a revenue opportunity to me!).

Web 2.0....Schmeb 2.0

The Web 2.0 Conference starts tomorrow and the debate about what it is, should it be called *anything*, has reached a fever pitch (complete with this new rant).

Dot.com, Web 2.0, service oriented architectures, rich internet applications/AJAX, software-as-a-service, whatever. The most important thing in business regardless of delivery is finding-a-need-and-filling-it (and profitably dammit!). All the debate and ranting about Web 2.0 (and dare I say "hyperbole"?) misses one fundamental point: human beings have a really hard time cognitively understanding new, fundamentally different concepts which is why labels like Web 2.0 are attached. It's why and how humans build upon a baseline of knowledge surrounding a new concept like "the internet as a platform."

We all struggle with taking the new and finding a bucket to toss it in. If there isn't a bucket then people who think deeply about what the essence is of the new thing try to do so. For example, podcasting is nothing new...it's just that the value chain (enabling technologies to RSS to iTunes to iPod) closed the loop and was the gasoline tossed on the fire of the podcasting opportunity -- though there really isn't anything new with posting mp3's on the Web. Still, the name "podcasting" hit the essence of what that value chain is in one word, leveraged the hit/buzz/cool-factor around the iPod and people nearly instantly "got it." Listeners understand, potential podcasters grok it, investors do and, if you follow the money, advertisers do too as they struggle to pinpoint a target market so they can shoot their rifle at potential customers vs. the shotgun approach that occurs with the currently downtrending broadcast radio (and print and TV and...).

Web 2.0 -- whether it's the right moniker to hang on internet-as-a-platform or not -- succinctly and cogently defines the scalable, social, buildable (via exposed API's and web services interconnectivity), global network delivery medium around which VC's and entrepreneurs grow major wood get very enthusiastic over.

CTD for October 2, 2005 (M-Audio MicroTrack review)

This week's show covers my new toy: the M-Audio MicroTrack portable compact flash recorder.

For those of you who have listened to my podcast for awhile, you'll know that I've been on-the-hunt for a small, phantom powered, brain-dead-simple-to-operate device for portable podcasting. For now, I've found what I've been searching for (though an iPod with greater-than-8khz recording would be my all-in-one-device choice).

There are a multitude of stories I want to capture. Many are ones my 79 year old father has stored away in his brain. I plan on taking him to places within Minneapolis where he grew up and where he had experiences...since I loved listening to them as a kid and don't want to lose them.

Download or listen to this week's podcast

Photofest photos-to-video

Videoblogging, vlogging, vodcasting (assumes an iVod video device comes out soon from Apple) means that at some point, those of us interested in blogging and podcasting will also be delivering visual content.

So today I decided to gain an intuitive sense and understand what it would take -- and what the workflow would be like -- to simply take photos (from my recent Brainerd Lakes area PhotoFest), add a transition between each, set the production to music and publish it on my blog. No big deal video...just a straightforward, fast and seemingly simple video that should've taken 45 minutes. I've been at this on-and-off for five hours!

What an adventure. Even my preferred platform (Macintosh) which sports iMovie, Final Cut Pro (which I own) and Quicktime 7 (I have the pro version) wasn't enough to allow me to deliver video in two flavors: high quality, H.264 (mp4); and -- so those Windows users could view it -- delivered as an AVI or WMV file. Guess what? The utilities aren't built-in to any of the Mac tools to easily encode video to either AVI or WMV (AVI is built-in to Quicktime Pro for encoding/exporting, but in extensive testing I couldn't get Windows Media Player 9 to play the video properly *and* it looked aliased and crappy) (NOTE: there are pay-for plug-ins that do this...but I'm not paying $99 for the privilege).

No question Apple has little incentive to support Windows Media nor wants to do so. Microsoft is probably bent-out-of-shape that iTunes installs Quicktime in stealth mode (need Quicktime to use iTunes) so the more iTunes users there are...the more Quicktime is in the marketplace and the critical mass of users grows.

So that's why I'm delivering this video as a Flash video (90%+ of all web browsers on all platforms support Flash) and allowing higher quality H.264 download. Sigh...this is still way too difficult.

Download the high quality H.264, mp4 version