Connecting the Dots

Free Car Wash via SMS

As I was going through the dead trees version of the Minneapolis StarTribune this morning, an article grabbed me: Kids phone in car-wash scam From cell phone to cell phone, word rippled through town: Use this number for a free car wash.

For anyone still not aware of the acceleration in network-based swarm communications behaviors, look no further than this example:

Over several weeks, cars carrying high school and college kids lined up six or seven deep outside Severson's Food Plus convenience store in Austin, Minn., waiting for a touch-free/cash-free wash.

With the stolen maintenance code programmed in their phones or memories, they ripped off at least 1,000 washes, police and store officials said Thursday.

Though I chuckle that NO ONE managing the store noticed such a huge spike in washes over several weeks without a commensurate amount of cash showing up in the daily receipts, for any of us building online applications or other systems that could be exploited or "gamed," this shows how even a small loophole or piece of useful information can propagate exponentially with just one person initially leaking it.

Out at Etech I was in a conversation about Twitter, swarming and the upcoming US presidential election. If you recall, the last election cycle saw protestors at the Republican and Democratic convention sites relegated to fenced in areas out-of-sight and out-of-mind effectively rendering them impotent. My premise in this conversation was that people -- probably dressed in clothing that will make them appear to be innocuous or like young Republicans -- will suddenly swarm and coalesce in a protest as a flash mob...then dissolve back into the crowd before police can react. Rinse and repeat.

In the same way that the Internet is designed to route around bottlenecks or damage, so will flash mobs route around controls in political protesting and friends of friends of friends who need free car washes (and who've discovered a loophole in an application or a system) will send it. With mobile phone's being ubiquitous, I predict we'll be seeing A LOT more stories like this one.

CTD Podcast for March 28, 2007

Interview with Mike Shaver, Mozilla Corporation

The Mozilla Corporation's CEO, Mitchell Baker, recently published a Mozilla Manifesto providing a guiding set of principles that sets out a vision of the Internet as a piece of infrastructure that is open, accessible and enriches the lives of individual human beings.

My friend Marc Orchant of ZDNet's Office Evolution and Foldera, was kind enough to invite me to sit with he and his interviewee today, Mike Shaver, (and they graciously agreed to my lurking behavior recording the interview) to talk about the reasons behind the Manifesto, what it means, why it came into existence and why it matters.

Download or listen to the podcast

EFF Pioneer Awards

Last night I attended the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) Pioneer Awards. Just simply being at this event and absorbing the vibe was meaningful for me and I'll bring forth a perspective that may be atypical and worth putting into the conversation about EFF.

Nearly four years ago was the first time that I donated to EFF and began my support of this organization. Though I look like "a suit", a Republican and a mainstream sort of guy, I'm an independent, a closet liberal, enjoy some Libertarian leanings and am quite open to growing in my perspective as I learn -- especially legally and politically -- as we all push against the membrane of the future.

Five or so years ago I became more enlightened. I was stunned by the multiple, parallel, onrush of efforts by copyright holders, Congress, world intellectual capital bodies, governments globally as well as intelligence communities, to command, control and infiltrate all aspects of the Internet.  As I started to try getting my head wrapped around even a few of the issues, I realized that there was NO way that I could be competently informed about even ONE of these issues shaping our future....let alone dozens of them at a time!

Enter the EFF. I learned that here was an organization whose mission was to be that competent, informed entity who'd act to intervene, stop or shape the debate about the most important issues facing us in our digital future. With more and more of our relationships, commerce, free speech, entertainment -- you name it -- being created or delivered digitally, I (and you) could either pull the covers over our collective heads or get involved...and support those who've rolled up their sleeves, dug their hands in the muck and are in the fray.

So that's what I did.  Last night was great for a lot of reasons and validated (in spades) the vital importance of this organization and the people who've dedicated money, support and all or part of their lives to the mission.

Etech Executive Briefing

Today's executive briefing session here at Etech has been somewhat enlightening. It's a conversational style with a small number of visually illustrative examples. In some respects, it's like sitting in a dinner party surrounded by intellectually stimulating people, but for the most part you're sitting in a chair away from the table listening. I find myself eager to talk one-on-one with several of the presenters.

Several of the concepts are *really* big thoughts. These are my choices which sparked my synapse firing...and the day isn't over yet:

On Demand Manufacturing: Material shifts in manufacturing are occurring. Not just with technological ways of rapid prototyping and essentially "printing" from a computer to a 3D "printer" which extrudes plastics and increasingly metal (which will lead to output of a tool and die!), but the example was discussed of how a collective community drives a new creation and production paradigm.

Loved skinnycorp's Threadless t-shirt community/commerce site. They're growing at 1% per week (150,000 designs; 40,000 designers to date); sell 80,000 shirts per month; their average runs are ~2,000 pieces and sellout in a few days or a few weeks; the methodology of letting the users 'vote' on the designs is what is driving it -- the top designs is the base from which they manufacture essentially having the community drive their R&D; and their extending their ideas with others.

One example of another shift in manufacturing was about China and motorcycle manufacturing. China is redefining the modularity of the process constructing bikes and is disrupting Asia motorcycle incumbents...article explaining why this is such a big deal here).

Connecting dots at Etech

Am absolutely delighted to be heading out today to San Diego for O'Reilly's Emerging Technologies conference and expect the usual great human connections to be made, conversations held and dots connected.

It's taken me a lot of years (look closely and you'll see gray hair in my photo), a "bet on myself" leap of faith as an Internet-as-a-platform/Web 2.0 management consultant, two strong executive-level guides (Entrevis) and a smart and supportive circle of family and friends to bring me to this place where I'm completely clear on my skills, strengths and what puts a spring-in-my-step.

One of the many things that I've come to be enlightened about on my journey is the sheer delight and highly effective ideation and brainstorming that occurs when I get together with people who already get it (most...if not all...of the people at this conference). There is an energy, an excitement and a shorthand that happens. A leaping forward in thought exploration that occurs when I'm surrounded by people more knowledgeable than I am or are in-the-game building stuff, creating standards or trying to persuade others to move in some direction...and we don't have to start off talking about the basics!

I used to be hard on myself that I'd be at these conferences absorbing, connecting with others, thinking exploratory thoughts and not be heads-down typing away blogging about a session or some technology I just saw. No more.

My experiences over the last few years -- as I've been essentially journaling about all the "dots" I see while swimming in a river of information and change -- has taught me one thing: the only way to connect the dots is to take it all in and then gain perspective. The only way to gain perspective is to let it sink in, think about it, wonder, take my mind off of it, do something completely different, and connections I least expect sometimes get made without my conscious interference. Sometimes I have to work at it pretty hard though.

Blogging may-or-may-not be light this week. Hopefully my posts will be all about perspective and not just some cool happenin' that occurs.

Do you Twitter, Joost or Swarm?

Sometimes I'm dumbfounded as to why some technologies and processes explode in popularity and that others (some with better approaches or technology) do not.

With video on the 'net all the rage, any new developments in this space are receiving quite a bit of attention. Consequently, the awareness of Joost -- a peer-to-peer (P2P) video sharing offering -- makes sense because of the success the founders of Joost had creating Skype. Every technoweenie interested in this stuff wants to see if these folks can repeat that success in this new, hot arena. Same thing with Bram Cohen's Bittorrent, another P2P technology for sharing any file, since they recently received an infusion of venture capital possibly keeping them in-the-game.

But how many of you reading this have heard of Minneapolis-based Swarmcast?

The brains behind Swarmcast have created a high definition-centric process that looks very promising and certainly is as interesting as Joost or Bittorrent, "The patent pending Swarmcast technology is one of the leading solutions for the delivery of high definition video content via broadband." They've been working on the technology and their approach for several years. Will the perfect storm being created by a critical mass of Web based delivery (e.g., YouTube and the allegedly Google insider name for the TV network version, ClownCo.) along with AppleTV, continued falling prices of HDTV's and continued delivery of empowering tools for those of us creating media bring Swarmcast to the forefront? If so, how will that happen?

Another example...

Yahoo Widgets: Is this the way to do it?

Yahoo has announced their new Yahoo Widgets 4 and it looks very promising. Mashable has a nice writeup and Techcrunch adds some strong perspective.

I love widgets...though the ones I actually use are few since they're a little cumbersome. I'm a guy that doesn't like clutter and I find the Dashboard in Mac OS X to be unusable since it requires hitting an "F" key, the widgets zoom in and then it takes roughly 45 seconds to have each of them go over the 'net and fetch their data.

Using one of the start pages ((e.g., Netvibes, Pageflakes, yourminis, Google, even Yahoo, etc.) still requires me to populate one of them with widgets but are more useful since I, like many of us, use multiple computers from several locations. Having all my widgets in one place available on the Internet is a beautiful thing.

Still, there is alot of useful stuff that widgets could deliver that I'd love to have just sitting on my desktop. Here's where Yahoo has done something useful: all the widgets can sit in their own dock...which you can scroll through too if you've snagged lots of widgets.

Apple with Dashboard and Microsoft with Vista are both delivering this same sort of functionality at the operating system level. Why would someone need yet another dock full 'o widgets sitting on their desktop?

I'm not yet sure. A handful of widgets might be useful on my desktop, but usually a few times per day I'm stuffing my Macbook Pro in my briefcase and heading out, getting connected in various locations. Having a startpage with widgets living in a Web page is significantly more useful for me and, I suspect, with the increasing number of people who are mobile.

Which brings up the one thing that throttles my widget enthusiasm, regardless of what Yahoo, Google, and all the start page players are doing: and that's mobile. If there was a way for me to invest my energy in widgets that I could instantly have accessible from my mobile device, THAT is the way I'd go so I could have my stuff regardless of where I am and what device I'm using. I'm working on achieving complete mobility so that I have 100% of everything I need wherever I am at the moment. All files, all functionality, everything sync'ed without me even thinking about it. Could this be in Apple's plans with the iPhone and the Leopard OS? Would that give them a significant competitive advantage in the Internet-as-a-platform, participatory culture and mobile worker paradigm?

Yep.

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UPDATE: Unbeknownst to me, (and this is a very good thing), the W3C has a Widget 1.0 working draft in place (via Open Gardens).

Should we be able to do *anything* on a network?

After I had the fun experiences flying along in our car on the Interstate while being connected to the Verizon Wireless network on my trip back from Florida with my daughter (see Internet Access at 80mph and iChat at 75mph), one of my readers kindly pointed out that my instant messaging, video transmission and the like was a violation of Verizon's terms of service as is the moblogging I've done with the application Typepad delivers that runs on my Treo 700p (my emphasis):

UNLIMITED DATA PLANS AND FEATURES
Unlimited Data Plans and Features (such as NationalAccess, BroadbandAccess, Push to Talk, and certain VZEmail services) may ONLY be used with wireless devices for the following purposes: (i) Internet browsing; (ii) email; and (iii) intranet access (including access to corporate intranets, email, and individual productivity applications like customer relationship management, sales force, and field service automation). The Unlimited Data Plans and Features MAY NOT be used for any other purpose. Examples of prohibited uses include, without limitation, the following: (i) continuous uploading, downloading or streaming of audio or video programming or games; (ii) server devices or host computer applications, including, but not limited to, Web camera posts or broadcasts, automatic data feeds, automated machine–to–machine connections or peer–to–peer (P2P) file sharing; or (iii) as a substitute or backup for private lines or dedicated data connections. This means, by way of example only, that checking email, surfing the Internet, downloading legally acquired songs, and/or visiting corporate intranets is permitted, but downloading movies using P2P file sharing services and/or redirecting television signals for viewing on laptops is prohibited. A person engaged in prohibited uses, continuously for one hour, could typically use 100 to 200 MBs, or, if engaged in prohibited uses for 10 hours a day, 7 days a week, could use more than 5 GBs in a month.

For individual use only and not for resale. We reserve the right to protect our network from harm, which may impact legitimate data flows. We reserve the right to limit throughput or amount of data transferred, and to deny or terminate service, without notice, to anyone we believe is using an Unlimited Data Plan or Feature in any manner prohibited above or whose usage adversely impacts our network or service levels. Anyone using more than 5 GB per line in a given month is presumed to be using the service in a manner prohibited above, and we reserve the right to immediately terminate the service of any such person without notice. We also reserve the right to terminate service upon expiration of Customer Agreement term.

They reserve the right to "protect our network". Ahh...but I think they're interpreting this "protection" to include protecting their revenue streams. With Verizon selling VCast and other media services, I'm sure they'd prefer that only they can profit from the expenditures they've made building out their own network. Damn you customers for wanting to use other applications! Damn you innovators for trying to outmaneuver us by offering more competitive products and intruding on our ability to make profits!

Web 2.0: Think Strategically...not Tactically

There seems to be quite a bit of discussion amongst the technology thought leaders in the blogosphere about where we're headed next with Web 2.0. I've been thinking this same way for some months now and it's pretty clear to me that we're transitioning from the easy and tactical....to the hard and strategic.

VC Peter Rip hits the nail-on-the-head with this interesting post entitled, Web 2.0 - Over and Out that had this operative statement I thought about summed up the current situation, "Now the hard part is moving from Web-as-Digital-Printing-Press to true Web-as-Platform.  To make the Web a platform there has to a level of of content and services interoperability that really doesn't exist today." No kidding.

Mid-to-enterprise level companies have always been known to carefully plot strategy and investments before choosing a vendor of information technology products or services. Having been in the small-to-midsize business (SMB) space (or sold into it) in several parts of my career, the characterization of SMB -- or even consumers for that matter -- being ones that knee jerk and choose solutions tactically I think is absolutely flat wrong. This thinking on the part of consumers, SMB's and the enterprise clearly extends into Web 2.0. It may not be as overt as you might think, but the decision-making process on choosing is still the same as the big, strategic enterprise plans.

Why You Might Not Want to Use Some Web Applications

Why is it that almost every time I travel, I can get a significantly better price than what's offered on a hotel, rental car and, in some cases, airline Web site?

Just happened again today as I set hotel, air and car reservations for a San Diego and a San Francisco trip. I calculate that a little bit of social engineering on the phone saved me $400 in cumulative expenditures. Yes....$400!

This was done by bypassing the Web applications and going directly to the reservation agent. In one case I went directly to the hotel. I've been doing this for years and it works again and again and again.

So what's clear to me as a voracious user of Web applications is that with a little bit of effort, I can always get a better price. The purveyors of these Web sites are teaching me (and my bride...who is a master at getting a better price) that a little bit of effort -- and a direct human connection to an expensive customer service person -- will save me money. (Note: it's not just travel sites....I do the same thing with ecommerce sites in general and get stuff tossed in to the deal often).

Again....they're teaching, instructing and rewarding me to cajole, ask, plead, tell sob stories, and call back again to "see if there is a better deal".  It makes me wonder if all these companies really know that they're essentially helping me drive down their gross margins by increasing their costs and reducing their top-line revenue.

I suspect this is due to a reluctance on the part of these companies to expose too much in the way of their best deals online so that competitors could easily harvest their site and thus match or better them on price. But in the end, they're ensuring their customers (and their best ones at that) learn to hammer on them to uncover those good deals. Gotta be a better way.

Brain Hacks: Will this amazing one continue to work?

Something amazing has occurred that my pragmatic, cautiously optimistic self usually would wait to discuss in such a public way and after being armed with more evidence, but maybe...just maybe...this will be of benefit to others so I'm going to leap forward with my very preliminary results and post about our progress over the next 12-15 months.

As I discussed in my podcast on March 11th, I've got ADD and my son inherited mine with a hyperactive twist (i.e., ADHD) which, by the way, I view as a positive and not as a "dysfunction". Fortunately, his Mom and I have taken an extraordinarily proactive approach to dealing with it in an attempt to shield him from many of the negative effects that often befall young people as they progress through their teen years (e.g., chemical dependency, criminal or aggressive behavior, lack of achievement and failure in school, etc.). So far he's remained his delightful, 99th percentile IQ, voracious-reading self but is struggling with organizational issues (or should I say the complete lack thereof).

We've been to the Amen Clinic and had the Brain SPECT imaging performed which added to our knowledge and really helped us narrow down my son's ADHD subtype. In terms of regimens, we've done diet, exercise, reward, herbal, medicinal and other approaches with only modest success.

Fairly desperate, we've continued to be on the hunt. A few weeks ago, after meeting with his exasperated teachers and the school staff due to his missed assignments, disorganization and lack of focus negatively impacting his achievement, I came home and Google'ed my little heart out for hours looking for cutting edge research and approaches.

I found one...and it seems too good to be true and damn, its effects have been almost magical!

Why in the world would Cisco buy WebEx?

When Cisco bought into the social networking game, there were a lot of folks in the blogosphere scratching their heads wondering why they did it. I didn't pay much attention to this acquisition since it seemed tactical and not terribly interesting. But now with Cisco buying WebEx (press release here) it sheds a whole new light on their potential strategy to become even a bigger and more material part of the Internet-as-a-platform layer.

What could this mean and why should you care?

If you're a developer, it's important to keep an eye on strategic moves since (by their very nature) companies try to position themselves for category dominance. Unfortunately, this often translates into trying to wrest control of standards and protocols or otherwise defend against competition, maintain growth and enjoy huge gross margins often to your detriment.

If you're a buyer of I.T. products or services, you need to understand what's happening strategically so that you know which horse to bet on and ensure you don't paint-yourself-into-a-corner with some given vendor and their approach.

But there's alot more to this acquisition than meets the eye.

Mobile Global Grid: When the World is At Your Fingertips

Like me, if you're paying any attention to the signs, trends and foundational elements upon which innovation in technology occurs, then you have to be seeing what I'm seeing...it's sooo close.  Do you see it?

Right there. Don't see it yet? OK then, let's push against the membrane of the future together for a minute.

If you look now you can just make out a mobile device, connected to a ubiquitous wireless network (that you can use even when you're miles from a major metro area, off the autobahn or Interstate highway system, or at some point in the future on the Serengeti plain in Africa) and is so simple to use that you're able to connect and re-connect to the global grid in an instant and have all the world's knowledge at your fingertips.

When you're in your car, at a restaurant, a dinner party, at a business meeting, at school...anything connected to the global grid you're authorized or able to grab is yours for the snagging from a device in your hand.

We're partially there now and more is coming.

Unless you've been living under a rock, Apple's eagerly anticipated iPhone is the closest concept yet to a just beyond the membrane of the future simple to use, multi-function device that will be useful for the masses to leverage our currently decent wireless network...and is one set to expand dramatically.

According to GigaOM today, there are distinct chunks of spectrum that hold the promise of mass geographical coverage and expanding the grid. An increasing number of mobile communications online applications are proliferating (e.g., this list at eConsultant). The World Wide Web Consortium's Mobile Initiative adds even more fuel to the fire of a mobile, global grid.

Couple that with the always-on, always-connected, culture of participation (see "Rise of the Participation Culture") and you have a brew from which all sorts of possibilities come forth!

Though I look like some geek when I do this, at least twice a week I'll be in a conversation and someone will say something like, "You know...that ocean...the one by (country here)....what's that called?"  I'll whip out my Treo, go to Google, enter a search string and, I swear to God, almost instantly I can find a reference to that country and there's an obvious link that contains the data where I can answer that question. It's a bit of a conversation stifler at the moment as I futz with the device, but I'm pretty good at glossing over my thumbing on the Treo, we carry on the conversation, and I circle back to the fact and insert it into our discussion. Works great.

Did this at a dinner party one evening awhile back when people were struggling with an artist and a song. No one knew, the conversation continued, and about two minutes later I mentioned the artist. "OH YEAH!" came the head-slap comments and we carried on. Trivial in the scheme of life I realize, but extend this to the DOZENS OF TIMES PER DAY that I look something up on Google, use Google Maps, find a phone number on Directory Assistance, send SMS messages, send a photo/blog post to one of my private client blogs, use Instant Messaging....all from applications that run on my Treo!

So how is this going to transform the world? In ways predictable but mostly ones that are not. Who knows what will be the killer application for the always connected world -- especially when better geotracking is in the mix?  What I do know is that some of it is already here...and if you push just hard enough on the membrane of the future you'll have a good indication of what's coming.

World Population to Hit 9.2 Billion by 2050

If there were ever a reason to work toward reducing our carbon footprint, building Web applications, online virtual spaces and other activities that allow humans to minimize our impact on the Earth, it's the report from the United Nations that, "The world population continues its path towards population ageing and is on track to surpass 9 billion persons by 2050, as revealed by the newly released 2006 Revision of the official United Nations population estimates and projections." (More detailed data is here as both a PDF and Excel spreadsheet).

Holy crap. Over 9 BILLION?

To give you some perspective on how population change is ACCELERATING, this quaint little map from the British Empire Atlas from 1918 that you see above says in part, "The population of the World is 1600 millions, the bulk of which is settled in two regions: the Indo-China-Japanese region about 800 millions (half the population of the world), and the Central European region about 360 millions. The only other densely populated region is the Eastern side of the United States and Canada with about 90 millions." (More here).

Though population estimates are significantly more accurate today, 1.6 billion to 9.2 billion in 89 years is a pretty frightening increase.

• As I think about these numbers, the sustainability questions flood my brain: How can the Earth sustain this number of humans? What will we eat and drink? As industrialized nations move from growing food to growing renewable energy resources, is there enough to go around? Since most of the population growth is in developing nations, will the pressure on richer nations mean more wars, negative economic impacts or, God forbid, ways to accelerate genocides like what's happening in Darfur?

• A continual migration from real-world to virtual questions abound: What happens as we disconnect from the natural world and move online?  Will all of us move into our heads and be less in touch with the natural world?  Even though I've shared many experiences with them in wilderness, I've found that my kids already are pretty unaware of the subtelties and nuances of the shift in seasons, how to align with nature and even their expectations as we travel down an Interstate highway in a remote area that a few miles off the highway there is....no one.

• Lastly, the enormity of the problem, the strategic political and governmental necessities, and the moral ambiguities between cultures and religions exacerbate attempts at controlling the problem. I wonder how those who consider themselves religious ignore these realities and object to birth control (no....I'm not going to discuss abortion) as a means of population control?

Remember last year when physicist Stephen Hawking proclaimed that humans *must* colonize other planets -- he believes global warming, nuclear war or a genetically engineered virus could wipe out the earth --in order to survive as a species and he was ridiculed in many circles? I read dozens of blog posts, news articles (like this one) and opinion pieces that missed the point of his central argument: humans all settled in one place (i.e., our planet Earth) are vulnerable to mass extinction.

He didn't even get in to a discussion that we might breed ourselves into extinction.

Qwaq Launches Virtual Workspace

Last week I was delighted to receive an offer to be in a hosted session with Greg Nuyens, CEO of Qwaq, to take a pre-launch peek at a secure, virtual workspace product called "Qwaq Forums"...a product built upon the open source Croquet project (site Croquet Consortium site here).

In April of last year I wrote a post entitled, "Is Second Life the Future of Collaboration and Social Software?" since I'd been thinking deeply about the implications of metaverse world's like Second Life providing us with ever higher ability to be involved in an immersive, persistent, engaging, fun and creative space. But just like Skype's proprietary protocol limits the ability to leverage their IP telephony or Apple's closed iPod (and soon to be closed iPhone launch) limits the expansion, this seemingly needed control limits what organizations can (or will) do with technology.

Qwaq's approach is that their product, Qwaq Forums, "...enhances the productivity of distributed teams by bringing critical resources together in a virtual place, as if they were in an actual physical location, and providing them with all the tools and collaboration capabilities they need to work more effectively together. With Qwaq Forums, users can work together to establish workflow steps, create or review information in software applications, and evaluate designs in 2D and 3D, all while discussing topics using built-in text and voice chat. Further enhancing employee productivity, Qwaq Forums virtual workspaces are always available so users can return to a forum at another time to access and view changes that have occurred since they last visited the virtual space."

So what was my experience like and why should you be keenly interested? I think you might be surprised by my perception...

CTD Podcast for March 11, 2007

Are you blessed with a child (or yourself) who has Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) or Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD)? Then you might want to listen to this week's podcast where one guy who has ADD discusses it (and how he's wrestling with his son who also enjoys ADHD).

Signs point to Thomas Edison, Wolfgang Mozart, Ben Franklin, Winston Churchill and others who "suffered" with this "deficit".  Discussed is Thom Hartman's "hunter in a farmer world" metaphor that he espouses in his book ADD: A Different Perception. Also discussed is the Learning Breakthrough program and the Dore program (which is partially based on the LB methodology) and the possible cerebellum exercises which might offer some brain hacking breakthrough.

Listen to or download the podcast

"Building New Synapses for the Global Brain"

The post title above sums up what is being delivered with a new offering, Metaweb, and is a quote by (and contained within) Tim O'Reilly's very cogent overview of its core essence (John Markoff's New York Times article is here).

As you're well aware if you read this blog, my synapses fire like crazy as I connect the dots. What excites me to no end about the acceleration of the Internet-as-a-platform and the collective consciousness of humankind being connected, is the web of interconnected knowledge being built so that billions of dots can be connected through our collective effort. There just haven't been a lot of tools available for us to easily and seamlessly connect disparate pieces of information that alone, have no apparent connection, but once connected clearly show a whole, a pattern, or some previously unforeseen new value.

I am absolutely convinced that we're on the cusp of a major evolutionary leap in knowledge, creativity, innovation and social connection (and this post of mine sums up a bit of my excitement). But we need our "smart" machines (i.e., computers) to take the some of the burden off of our inefficient, cumbersome, laborious connecting of dots and our increasingly vain attempts to see and understand it all. It's just not possible anymore as information exponentially increases.

In the same way that the plow, the cotton gin, assembly lines, factory automation, transportation, distribution and other systemic, machine-based systems allowed us to produce more, perform significantly more work and further specialize by amplifying our meager abilities, having methods for humans to make connections that machines could later use will jumpstart computer's capabilities to make new, more likely connections for us or at least present top possibilities in a more efficient manner.

On a daily basis I invest HOURS in staying on top of everything I can on the Internet and Web. It's one reason I'm now shunning TV, radio and many books. The issue? Even all that time invested can't begin to ensure that I see it all.

Case in point: yesterday's post about JumpTV. I'm fairly on top of the innovation and offerings in the Internet TV space but hadn't heard of them. Why is that? They were probably on a list somewhere but I glossed over it. In fact, I've been peripherally aware of Metaweb and a one sentence description of what they were up to (it was something about the Semantic Web and I thought, "Oh yeah...and they're going to boil-the-ocean right after they ship Metaweb") so I ignored it until today when more information was released.

One of my favorite shows from the past was James Burke's BBC Connections. There was one show I vaguely remember where he was describing all of these VERY different inventions, processes, discoveries that all led up to...the clock. Each one on the surface made NO sense at all...but when Burke connected them all every single disparate piece made perfect sense and the viewer could instantly see that the clock wouldn't have been invented had it not been for each of them! 

The Metaweb holds the promise (though note my emphasis on "promise") of all connected humankind weaving a tapestry of connections that more and more of us will be able to stand back and say, "Hmmm....I see a pattern here" and thus be able to invent ever higher value, solve deeper and more profound problems and take us all to places we can't yet imagine.

Why TV Will Never Be The Same!

I'm amazed at what comes my way every single day as the Internet explodes as a platform and -- besides the obvious sites on everyone's radar screen like YouTube, Revver and Brightcove -- there are other very interesting ones *and* the tools to create extremely high quality visual content are accelerating too. So let's connect a couple of dots that hit my radar screen today as further evidence as to why TV will never be the same.

Case in point: a colleague's son-in-law is involved with JumpTV and he sent me an email as an FYI with several attached links (here, here, here and here) about the company.

I went out to their site and was delighted to see the capability to stream live video from many other countries all over the world. Though there are other solutions for streaming live TV, this is the first one that seems as straightforward as needed so that non-technical people can subscribe and watch IPTV.

I immediately emailed my friend John who married a woman from Peru (who works in international marketing here in Minnesota for a Fortune 100 company and my family and I traveled to Peru for the wedding two years ago...but I digress). I'm pretty certain that she'll find it wonderful to be able to watch a channel(s) from home over the internet (as well as her ex-patriated friends from Peru now living here). JumpTV is making the world just a little bit smaller by this enriched content being available to those interested.

My Dad + Macintosh = Ahhh...

Much to my surprise and delight, about five years ago my Dad started taking computer classes at a senior center. My sister's and I bought my (then) 76 year old Dad an inexpensive eMachines PC running Windows XP for Christmas. The computer, 17" monitor and cheap inkjet printer was less than $600 so we got him setup quickly and easily without breaking our holiday budgets.

Since I'm the family propellerhead, all tech support was my responsibility (I support both Mac's and PC's). Though Dad is only about 20 minutes from my house, I set him up with a VNC server that I could get into securely so I could perform remote tech support for him. Every time I touched his system, there was an incredible amount of spyware and adware on it or something had gotten hosed up somehow.

Dad is now 81 years old. Since he loves his computer, broadband connection and uses them often, I wanted to upgrade the memory and get it to run faster. But it was worse than just a slow machine. When I was at his house fixing something there were dancing naked ladies on his taskbar since he'd inadvertently clicked on a spam email attachment and this garbage was loaded. It was sort of funny if you knew my Dad...but also I was just tearing my hair out over the constant tweaking necessary to keep the system running. After looking into the cost of upgrading this ancient computer, I decided to make HIS life and MY life alot easier: I bought him a Mac mini, an LCD monitor and my sister got him a new printer.

If you're a PC user that helps out family and friends or is incredibly frustrated as you spend hours futzing with your Windows PC...listen up. If you're a Mac user, this is old news so feel free to take a quick nap.

My Dad loves the new Mac. I made the icons huge so he can see everything, it's easier to navigate, and the spyware and adware are now a complete non-issue. There's nothing that he cannot do on this computer and I *rarely* have to do any remote logging in to fix something. I've now discovered that one of my favorite utilities (Onyx) can "lock" the icons in the dock so the last little problem of him inadvertently dragging an application icon from the dock and having it disappear is soon to be another non-issue.

You're undoubtedly well aware of the religious wars between Mac and PC users and it's not my intention to fan the flames since I really don't care what anyone else is using. I just quietly revel in my delight with my own machines and choices. But damn...this one decision has saved me HOURS of time and his machine just runs...and runs....and runs.

I'm not alone in this position. All around geek and multi-platform media god, Leo Laporte, is a TV, radio and netcasting master at helping people with computer issues and routinely recommends that neophytes or modestly techno-futzing people buy a Mac vs. wrestling with a PC.

Thoughts on Building a Blog Audience

After I wrote a post wondering out loud who was in my audience of blog readers, I was delighted that I heard from many of you....and some of you who read this blog came as a bit of a surprise.

I have a lot of hard core, alpha male geeks who are interested in my posts on Web 2.0, design and usability. Next is a fairly large base of readers who are comprised of educators (K-12 and higher ed) as well as non-profit and association leadership. I must admit the latter came as a bit of a surprise, but several of you told me that it was because "...you have a knack for distilling abstract technical concepts down so we can understand them, and are great at telling us why they're cool and useful."  That was flattering and helped me understand why people read.

Lastly there's sort of a mix of folks that range from small-to-midsize-to-enterprise I.T. and business people as well as about 200 or so who wander by daily after hitting upon a post via Google. I can tell from the referral logs how someone gets to one of my pages and I can follow a breadcrumb trail as they wander through my archives, click on my About page, and read a bunch of stuff. Last week someone came in from Google and read nearly every one of my posts since December 2004! God how I'd love to talk to that person to see what they thought.

A few times I've been "Dugg" at Digg.com which resulted in multiple thousands of unique visits -- usually because of some provocative post title I've used. Someone also inserted one of my posts in StumbleUpon and that drives dozens of pageviews per day frequently. On occasion I've had any of my Apple-centric posts GO WILD and get huge numbers.

2,000 miles of Wireless Internet

As promised, I've got a few experiential observations on my road trip from Fort Lauderdale, FL to Minneapolis, MN (though we're stuck in Iowa tonight since I-35 is closed due to the winter storm).

As I write this, the Discovery channel is airing a program entitled FutureCar and the automatrix...the promise of a mesh network where seamless and ubiquitious connections allow a host of services where a smart vehicle does an amazing array of stuff because it's connected.

If my experiences are any indication, we're a long way off from the promise in this program becoming a reality.

I've now been in two chain hotels (La Quinta and mostly Marriott's) both of whom boast "Free, Wireless Internet". It's free but it's been sloooooow in every single location. I've done extensive testing in each hotel and have averaged onlhy 220kbps download and 305kbps upload speeds -- I could go faster by connecting through Bluetooth and my Treo via Verizon Wireless! This was done at various times of the day and finally had a tech support guy with one chain's vendor tell me, "Oh...we throttle the speed due to all the video and stuff people are doing now."  Great. So much for Web 2.0 and free wireless hotel Internet.

The fun-as-hell Verizon wireless-on-the-interstate access I've had still amazes me, but there's no question that a propeller on your beanie is extraordinarily useful connecting this way. Lots of futzing to get and keep the connection running. Sometimes I'd move from location-to-location and it would hang...until I disconnected and reconnected to establish the connection again. Probably due to different providers I was roaming within, but this is still not a solution for Joe Average user.

All that said, we are SO much further along with wireless technology than I would've expected for an Internet that's less than 12 years old (if you want to mark the commercial emergence of the Internet with Netscape's IPO). I want seamless and easy...and everywhere access that's FAST.