Come on in, the water's fine! You don't have to rat on your portfolio companies, but we do expect an annotated guide to every swimmin' hole on the continent.
11:41:11 PM    

At the FHP Wireless talk. I know this domain pretty well so I'm not going to plow over old ground. If you think it's interesting, in addition to FHP, check out:

• Mesh Networks
• KarlNet
• Tim Pozar's homebrew efforts at Bay Area Wireless Research Net

Now it's getting a little more interesting, since audience members who are working on the same problem are banging away with questions, attempting to extract some of the protocol secrets that might be in the FHP architecture. Getting more context from the audience than the talk...
5:43:38 PM    

Jo Walsh is talking about her RDF markup version of a MUD that's templated off the real world London - or at least the tube map. This is a species of surrogate travel, a notion going back to the Aspen Movie Map of 1979. What's different here is using the mental landscape of the real world as a context for group interaction online (Jabber), and also as a framework for building up real world content on the net, such as the Grubstreet open guide to London. Now she mentions the very cool idea of taking Pepys' Diary and binding it into the time and locale from which it originated.

I'm a skeptic of the more high-flown views of the 'semantic web', but this is one application that makes a lot of sense. The markup is being leveraged to describe in computable form a true consensus reality called - err - Reality. Abbe Don and I have talked off and on for years about the possibility of building up oral histories within a virtual space/time framework. This quiet, understated talk showed me more progress in less than an hour than I've seen in years.
4:59:34 PM    

Listening to Maciej Ceglowski's talk about "Peer-to-peer semantic search" in which he's describing a new search algorithm he has just published. Actually, it's not new. Take a look here for prior work at UCSD on spreading activation algorithms that appear to be identical.

Now we're onto 'peer-to-peer' search, which is mixing together results from multiple engines. Again, this seems to duplicate work by Ed Fox's group at Virginia Tech over many years. And while I enjoy the content, being a Civil War buff myself, there's really no excuse in this day and age for using a toy information collection, when the whole seething Web is out there.

It's great to see some more people working on this front, but do your prior art! You never know who might be lurking in the audience.

Update: I want to give credit to the author, who tracked me down as soon as someone referred him to this post. I gave him a list of relevant pre-Web references from my ancient HyperCard bibliography stack - which came to life under OS X after years of dormancy - and few pointers to IR researchers who have been down the road before. The publication will be updated accordingly.
2:49:54 PM    

A remark on the DRM panel here (by Joe?) about the potential for micropublishing and micropayment creating an alternative has me thinking again about the series of posts here and elsewhere about the application of Power Laws to describing the distribution of attention on the Net.

Now one problem from the point of view of us bloody-minded folks is that while there are studies that definitely show the power law curves' existence, there is precious little data to suggest how much of that curve might be newly monetizable (is that a word?), given the possible existence of things like attention focusing mechanisms or open micropayment systems. Although it feels good intuitively, there's precious little hard evidence that I've seen.

Note there are several reasons why this is a hard problem. Mini & micropublishing are going to be inherently niched. Each niche has its own characteristic power law coefficients. Each niche exists as an epiphenomenon of a community of interest. The standards for reward in each of these communities are going to differ. Ergo, some of the creators might want monetary compensation, but others may be more interested in other outcomes: influence, egoboo, attention. So you can't assume that just because the content source exists at a particular scale that it will be explicitly monetized.

So if you're with me so far, I'd like to issue a challenge: I'm looking for proxy measures for the potential size of mini & micropublishing markets, in any and all niches. I'm interested both in arguments as to why an existing phenomenon might be a good proxy, and in actual data. Just to give some examples: The number of non-label, indy bands that have made CDs might be a good proxy in one domain. Does anyone have that number? How many advanced amateur/semi-pro photographers have tried to sell their images online? Got a number? Got another idea for a currently observable proxy for likely intent to play if such a market existed? How would you measure it? Number of participants, both selling and buying? Total value?

Here's my deal: Send 'em to me, both proposed measures and actual numbers, and I'll collate and republish the lot, perhaps with some commentary. The e-mail address is over there to the left. If you've got a blog, post 'em there as well and mail me the permalink, and it'll get posted in my digest. Then we can all argue about what it means.

Thanks to Scott Loftesness for indirectly inspiring this query.
2:04:31 PM    

A useful piece at Business Week. If you're not into all the acronyms and modulation standards, this is an OK top level treatment on why it matters.
1:17:12 PM    

What resonated for me were the remarks of Joe Kraus of DigitalConsumer, who has been getting some real world experience in lobbying. Summarizing a few of his points:

• Silicon Valley loses if its is sucked into a head-on conflict with 'Hollywood'
• Valley folks and technologists generally, from the point of view of politicians, have no more to say about content markets than the average Joe.
• We do have enormous credibility in innovation.
• The proper way to portray the conflict is innovation vs. the forces of incumbency.

Cory's appeal to "stop burning down the library" left me rather cold. I'm afraid that the average politican (or Joe Sixpack for that matter), don't see the situation as that dire. And it does run head-on into both the credibility and vested interest of the existing content business.

Behind that tagline, there was a key observation that should have been more precisely explained to this audience: In the US, intellectual property rights are not a 'moral right', they are a matter of economic and social utility. The current scheme of copyright, patent, etc., rests on a belief that it optimizes incentives for creativity and economic growth. It is a cogent criticism of the current regime that its day may have passed, that in the face of digital transmission, strict copyright may be counterproductive. This argument would gain more credibility when and if there is a counterexample, a way of creation and compensation that grows in the shadow of the dinosaurs.
11:50:33 AM    

Howard has dumped a large chunk of his canned material about Smart Mobs, retitling as 'Technology Innovation and Collective Action' and is instead off on a riff about 'technocollective action' which arises from using electronic tools (media) as enablers of new social processes, much as the printing press gave rise (in part) to democracy and science. He brings up open source, unix, the Web and the Internet itself as both products of such processes and further enablers, along with an exhortation to build more such. Particularly he wants the assembled technorati to make sure we are working to evade limits that vested interests will attempt to set on the conversation, e.g., DRM, 'trusted' computing, control of spectrum, attacks of end-to-end (stupid) network architecture. Howard does sketch one distinction that may have caught my attention more than many in the audience: He's not saying that technocollective action is collectivism - I presume in the sense of state socialism - rather voluntarism. He's not (for instance) saying their shouldn't be a music business, but that it has to change to reflect the new realities of technology, a view I heartily endorse.

Howard observes (and eggs on) the trend of technocollective action becoming an enabler of political action. Part of this activism is of course turned back on the technology itself, to both confront and circumvent those that would limit it. Howard also observes that the 2004 elections might be a test case for technologically enabled influencing. His sampling of the current political effects of technocollective activity is just a tad skewed: moveon.org and antiwar organizing vs. The Man (Karl Rove) with Blackberry and cell phone in hand. As anyone who wanders about the blogosphere will have observed, there's everyone from Freepers to neocon warbloggers who are also using the Net as an organizing and media tool. The change being created is in the process, not necessarily the outcome, certain techno-determinists aside. It's a vote for a more vibrant, diverse and (Howard's words) "chaotic, rough and tumble" system. It's no accident that blogs are bringing back the fine art of political invective at the same time as they extend the 'tail of the curve' of publishing to more of us, and it's a good thing.
9:52:47 AM    

Died, at 79, Edgar Codd, the inventor of the relational database. He was a long time computer scientist and inventor at IBM, which delayed developing a product around his innovation long enough for a certain Larry Ellison to ship first, and the rest is history. All this 'normal form' stuff was still new when I was in grad school, I have to confess, so both as an old fart and long-time database afficionado, this one hurts.
8:38:23 AM