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April 24, 2003
Done at ETCon
I'm leaving the ETCon a day early. A good friend is graduating from college tomorrow and I need to be home for that. Its a shame all the nanotech stuff was scheduled for Friday. I really wanted to hear more about that. One of the great pleasures of the conference was meeting Doug Kaye in person and being able to spend some time getting to know him better.
06:33 PM | Recommend This | Print This
Hertzfeld and Kapor on Chandler
Andy Hertzfeld (of Mac fame) and Mitch Kapor (of Lotus fame) are speaking about Chandler, an open source productivity tool that Kapor is funding out of his own pocket. The organization Mitch created to build it is the Open Source Applications Foundation. Why Chandler?
- email is the most important productivity tool
- there are gaps between what email is and what users want.
Mitch describes it as Lotus agenda meets the Internet. A rich ability to associate all kinds of thing and people in natural ways. Here are some features:
- Power email - managing large volumes of email
- Sharing and collaboration - share anything with anyone including browsing other people's repositories. Publish and subscribe to let you receive changes automatically.
Chandler is a platform (seems to be the mantra here). The UI is scriptable with a graphical font-end for doing the scripting. Andy says "the hard thing about being a programmer is keeping track of lots of abstract things." I disagree. The hard part of programming is creating static documents (whether textual or graphical) that result in correct dynamic interactions. This static to dynamic barrier is something most people don't cross with ease.
Beyond scripting, the program is designed to be extended in many different ways. All of the subsystems, including the UI, the object database, networking, sharing, and security, will be usable independent of the application.
The application uses wxWindows for cross-platform development and Python as a development language. There is a persistent object database for storage. The architecture allows for multiple front ends: GUI, PDA, cellphones, Web, etc.
I enjoyed the tour around the site and seeing how they've set it up for managing the open source development. They are using a WiKi.
OK, here is the coolest thing I've heard so far: every item in Chandler has a URL. This is totally the right thing. I want all of my items to have a unique address that i can reference. Its interesting that even though naming is very fundamental to Computer Science, we build do many applications that don't give names to things.
Chandler is available now as a 0.1 release. The early releases are not feature complete, although what's there now is interesting to play with. Mitch thinks that by the end of the year, 0.5 will be out and the most extreme early adopters will be able to start using it.
05:30 PM | Recommend This | Print This
The Internet Bookmobile and Copyright Protection
One of the talks I didn't get to go to, but wanted to was on the Internet Bookmobile. This is a real vehicle (see the pictures on the link) that drives around printing books on demand. The books are all in the public domain (which lots of classics are). The bookmobile doesn't keep them on a harddrive, it downloads them as needed. The printer in the bookmobile can print and bind a book in two minutes, producing one every 30 seconds (pipelined). Cost is about $1. We could probably use one of these in Utah. This is a great example of society benefiting from material in the public domain after the author has enjoyed their monopoly. Congress is keep lots of good material out of the public domain by continuing to push out the copyright period everytime it comes up for a vote. Your grandchildren will suffer so that Sonny Bono's estate can accumulate more wealth. Great societal tradeoff, huh?
04:27 PM | Recommend This | Print This
WarblogsWarblogging
We're talking, via phone, to Stu Hughes of the BBC from the UK. He created a blog before he left for Iraq as a way for him to communicate his experience with friends and family. He was in a land mine accident and now is recovering from surgery where part of his leg and his foot were amputated. . His blog talks about the experience and his steps (literally) to recovery. Xeni Jardin is interviewing him and doing an excellent job. Very touching story, but interesting from the standpoint of Stu using his blog to reach out to others, explore his new situation, and, I suspect, get a little therapy. He says something that is very true: you write for yourself and if someone else gets something out of it, then that's good too. You have to have that perspective if you want to keep blogging. Sometimes there's not much feedback.
Doc Searles commented about the community surrounding warblogs and the fact that there are two or three stars who are at the center of that community. I think that's an interesting idea. These people seem to have to exist in these communities. Doc says that he's chosen not to be political in his blog. I agree. I have tried to stay away from that as well. Part of my reason is that to do it justice, I'd have to spend much more time at the political stuff than I'm willing to do right now. Otherwise, you say some stupid things and you just get into trouble---people get very passionate about these things.
Stu is discussing being scared when he realized his blog was getting a lot of attention. He was scared because he hadn't thought about how public it was and wasn't sure he'd been as careful as he should have with what he said and scared that when his employer found out, they'd ask him to shut it down as he hasn't gotten permission first since he saw it as a personal way to communicate with his family.
03:26 PM | Recommend This | Print This
Ben Hammersley on Semantic Urhmmmmm
RSS is extensible. Ben is showing RSS that contains contributor information (using Friend of a Friend data inside Dublin Core contributor tags), trackback data, and annotation references. All of this is added automatically by the system.
ThreadsML is based on RSS 1.0. It uses an Apache module called mod_threads and Dublin Core. Using ThreadsML, conversation happening in blogs, mailing lists, and IRC could all be merged together to form a threaded stream of the conversation.
The major problem with this is subject.
One answer might be ENT or Easy News Topics for RSS 2.0. ENT allows ontologies to be created on the fly. This takes away the cultural specificity and allows each person to define and publish their own classification systems. (Here are notes about a breakfast conversation on ontologies that I didn't take part in.)
To make this useful, there needs to be a way to link ontologies. There's a big question about whether this will scale or now. One test site called e-Kcollectors has five sites feeding ontologies and quickly reached 50 top levels. So we could see so many ontologies and categories that the diminishing utility is rapidly reached.
03:10 PM |
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Clay defines "social software" as software that supports group interaction. This is a radical concept given that most of the technology patterns prior to the Internet were point to point or broadcast. The best group interaction technology was the kitchen table. Clay's premise this morning is that social software is its own worst enemy.
W. R. Bion did research with groups of neurotics. He discovered that, as a group, the neurotics were taking actions that defeated efforts to help them. They were not acting individually, but there was not clear group consensus. Bion concluded that humans are fundamentally individuals and fundamentally parts of groups. Kind of like the wave-particle dynamic for electrons. Clay gives an example:
You're at a party and you're bored, but you don't leave. This is different than from a book store, etc. if you get bored -- you usually leave. That social stickiness is what Bion is speaking of. However, when one person leaves then everyone leaves. This triggering event (Gladwell's tipping point) pushes group over to action "Paradox of groups"
Bion identified some specific patterns of group interaction:
Group rules like Robert's Rules of Order protect groups from falling into these patterns and thus protect the group from itself. Clay gives an example of BBS systems in the 1970's that started out as "open access" and "freedom of speech" were "overrun" by teenage boys who wanted to talk about bathroom jokes, sex, etc. The group didn't have enough structure to fend off these "attacks" on the group. This was a social issue, not a technological issue. "An attack from within is the pattern that matters."
Clay just said "they formed a government because they needed a government." I think this is an important point. Groups of all sizes need not only rules, but meta-rules (like a constitution). The probability that any unmoderated group will get into a flame war over whether to have a moderator approaches one as time increases. Small groups can engage in patterns of interaction that large groups can't. We are now getting interesting ways (RSS, chat, etc) to experiment with this, and ways to do the experiments quickly and cheaply. When you lower cost, interesting new things happen.
We're seeing an explosion of social software. Clay asks "why now?"
There are some things that need to be understood to help make groups work:
There are some design features:
Overall, regardless of what the Register article claims, Clay is a forward thinking guy and his talk was thought provoking.
Note on how this blog entry was created. A lot of folks here have started using a Rendezvous enabled editor called Hydra to do collaborative note taking. I've been logged into the feed, making some contributions, and freely using the group notes to remind me of workings, organization, and other things that happened during the talk, as it happened and I blogged it. Actually very cool.
12:11 PM |
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Of course, standards like RSS and Web services are important to making this work. Kevin sees Central as the glue that can tie these things together. I call these kind of applications "type-2" Web services-based applications. Type-1 Web services applications are built using application networks like those being pioneered by Web services brokers like Grand Central. Type-2 Web services applications are those built using rich internet applications like Central. In that sense, Central is a Type-2 Web services application framework.
11:15 AM |
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To prove his point, Alan is going through four or five examples (all with live demos and video which is pretty cool) of really neat, revolutionary computer science breakthrough including Ivan Sutherland's Sketchpad and McCarthy's LISP 1.5 implementation for the PDP-1. He is now showing what is likely the first collaborative software system: Engelbart's NLS. Built in 1968, it had live full motion video conferencing and concurrent document editing with shared cursors.
Alan shows something called "end user computer literacy" which is a graphical LOGO-like environment where users draw things like cars and steering wheels and then connect them together using scripts they build from property panels. It doesn't sound dearly as impressive as it was to see. The goal is to get kids building programs and using it to do experiments. One of the examples is using the system to explore the notion of a gravitational acceleration constant.
The base system is called Squeak. Squeak is the programming language and the OS. Its a grand total of 2.8M of binaries. One interesting thing he showed was that his presentation was actually a sequence of desktops so that each slide was a fully functional view. This made for some pretty cool demos.
Clay Shirky on Social Structure in Social Software
Clay Shirky is giving the final talk of the morning. Clay was the subject of some controversy during the conference caused by this article in the Register. Tim O'Reilly bit back saying He got a complaint from a speaker who didn't get included, and made that complaint the basis for a rant. He didn't talk to anyone at O'Reilly. He didn't make any effort to get background or hear the other side. He wrote a flame, not a story. I told Tim that I'm not surprised at all. Anyway, here's what he said...
Kevin Lynch on Central, A Type-2 Web Services Application Framework
Kevin Lynch from Macromedia is talking about an upcoming macromedia product called Central (whitepaper in PDF). Central is an example of some of the rich internet applications that people are developing. Apple's Sherlock is another example. One way to think of Central is "internet as desktop" but done more much "right" than Microsoft's attempt to just turn the desktop into a browser. Central allows users to link chunks of data from various sources and tie Internet-based applications together. The following concepts are important to Central:
Alan Kay: The Computer Revolution Hasn't Happened Yet
The keynote for this morning is Alan Kay and is entitled "Daddy, are we there yet?" Alan is the inventor of SmallTalk, among other things and he has utah ties, getting his PhD from the Univ. of Utah in 1969. His primary complaint is that the last 20 years have been pretty darn boring because we're spending our time making better buggy whips in the form of better spreadsheets, better ways to write memos, etc. Alan quotes from a paper written in 1963 called "Man-Computer Symbiosis:" In not too many years, human being and computing machined will be coupled together very tightly and the resulting partnership will think as no human brain has ever thought before. he claims that this hasn't happened in large part yet, although I'd argue that networked computing has allowed some of us have made some progress in that direction.