The Now Economy

Jeff Ubois in Release 1.0 (October 2003) wrote an issue on Online Reputation Systems:

Some like to think of the Net as a digital village, but in fact it’s closer to a digital city. The ability to interact with a billion people on the Net comes with its own costs: Dealing with strangers is risky, and verifying their trustworthiness is expensive – especially on a case-by-case basis.

…

Companies can use reputation systems to enhance customer support while reducing its costs, and to establish trust, thereby increasing the number and quality of transactions. EBay’s feedback forum, which is used by millions of people for millions of transactions every day, is a good example. According to a study of eBay’s reputation system by Paul Resnick, an associate professor at the University of Michigan’s School of Information, highly ranked sellers can charge about 8 percent more than sellers with no reputation, for identical items.

Commerce is all about reputation. Online reputation transcends any single reputation system, but no online reputation system reflects that fact. Somewhere out there someone’s designing a whuffie system — the one ring to bind them all.

Update, November 29. Dick Hardt reminds us that Sxip enables online reputation systems. One Network to bind them all!

Roland Piquepaille writes about Innovative Uses of RFID Tags:

When your newspapers write something about RFID tags, it’s almost always about Wal-Mart or how these tags are threatening our privacy. But they often miss the important innovations brought by this technology. For example, in Florida, RFID drives highway traffic reports on more than 200 miles of toll roads. Or take DHL, which is tracking fashion with RFID tags on more than 70 million garments in its French distribution center. Elsewhere, in Texas, 28,000 students test an e-tagging system which promises better security for them. And what about RFID tags which could prevent surgical errors and have just been approved in the U.S last week? So, what do you think? Are these innovations promising a better future for us or not?

Read more…

I’ve been spending a lot of time with del.icio.us lately, and am struck by the “me-ness” of the service, as explained by peterme:

While del.icio.us thrives as a “social bookmark” site, it depends on the me-ness of the activity — by and large, I’m saving items to del.icio.us that interest me, that I might want to return to later, and the posting-for-others aspect is largely secondary. It’s an added benefit, but not the raison d’etre.

One of the key emerging trends we’re seeing with things like del.icio.us and Flickr is the merging of personal information architecture and public/shared/group/emergent information architecture. And one of the things we’re seeing in the use of these systems is self-centeredness — how else do you explain the prevalence of “me” on Flickr?

To get back to the notion of annotating space — I would argue that people will annotate space much like they annotate the web, or annotate their photos… More in a notebook sense, a journaling sense. The annotations are explicitly not “meant for other people” — they’re meant for yourself, they only have to make sense for yourself, and if others stumble across them, great, fine.

Jon Udell called it: real-time bookmarking and tagging and tight feedback loops lead to better collective filtering and sharing of information in an increasingly interconnected world.

My delicious page is now something I think about whenever I visit a page and think to myself that I might want to visit that page again. It’s like explicity pointing out parts of my personal web that I would highly recommend to others.

See also: How do you use del.icio.us?, by Roland Piquepaille.

Line56.com: Intranet Trends to Watch For:

One of the most overlooked business trends affecting intranets has been the delivery of real-time key performance indicators and customer information. Executives are asking for precise, real time information and see it as a necessary tool to make smart business decisions. As a recent Harvard Business Review article discussed, depending upon the nature of your organization, this real-time information need can take the form of real time customer transaction information, progress reports on product developments, productivity metrics, subscriber lists and cash flow. Delivery of select real-time information is not difficult given the right technology tools, the hard question to determine will be what information is really needed in real-time and for whom and how should it be delivered.

Peter Yared on Active Grid coming out of stealth:

After 18 months of hard work, ActiveGrid is finally out of stealth mode! Check it out at:

ActiveGrid

There are details about the ActiveGrid Grid Application Server and about Adaptive Transactions, a new technology we are introducing to add intelligence into the execution of transactional applications on large grids.

See also:

• Application Servers 2004: A Big Muffin in a Donut World
• Web Services: “How We Gonna Get These Here Machines to Talk to Each Other”

John Battelle points out that RealNames has relaunched. Founder Keith Teare writes:

The problem addressed by RealNames - that is the poverty of the DNS as a naming and navigation system for the world’s internet users - remains unresolved.

IBM Research - Distributed and Fault Tolerant Computing - Current Seminars at Watson

Matt Welsh, Harvard University Title: Market-Based Programming Paradigms for Sensor Networks Date: 10/20/2004 Time: 2:00 -3:30 PM Location: Hawthorne 1S-F40 Host: Fred Douglis

Abstract: Sensor networks present a novel programming challenge: that of achieving robust global behavior despite limited resources, varying node locations and capabilities, and changing network conditions. Current programming models typically require that global behavior be specified in terms of the low-level actions of individual nodes. This approach makes it extremely difficult to tune the operation of the sensor network as a whole.Ideally, sensor nodes should self-schedule to determine the set of operations that maximizes that node’s contribution to the network-wide task. In this talk, we present market-based macroprogramming (MBM), a new approach for achieving efficient resource allocation in sensor networks. Rather than programming individual sensor nodes, MBM defines a virtual market in which nodes sell goods (such as sensor readings or data aggregates) in response to prices that are established by the programmer. Nodes take actions to maximize their profit, subject to energy budget constraints. The behavior of the network is determined by adjusting the price vectors for each good, rather than by directly specifying local node programs. Nodes individually specialize their operation in response to feedback from payments. Market-based macroprogramming provides a useful set of primitives for controlling the aggregate behavior of sensor networks despite variance of individual nodes. We present the MBM paradigm and a sensor network vehicle tracking application based on this design, as well as a number of experiments demonstrating that MBM allows nodes to operate efficiently under limited energy budgets, while adapting to changing network conditions. This project is in collaboration with Geoff Mainland and David Parkes.

Biography: Matt Welsh is an assistant professor of Computer Science at Harvard University. Prior to joining Harvard, he received his Ph.D. from UC Berkeley, and spent one year as a visiting researcher at Intel Research Berkeley. His research interests span many aspects of complex systems, including Internet services, distributed systems, and sensor networks.

Congratulations, Mark!

Copyright-sharing group delves into science | CNET News.com

Creative Commons, a nonprofit group aimed at carving out ways to share creative works, is expanding from the realm of copyright into patents and scientific publishing.

The Stanford, Calif.-based organization said Wednesday that it hired former CommerceNet executive Mark Resch as its new chief executive officer. It also tapped entrepreneur John Wilbanks to be the director of its newly formed Science Commons division.

“Wilbanks’ addition as leader of the new Science Commons branch…marks a very exciting new phase, as the Creative Commons model is tested in uncharted areas of intellectual endeavor,” Lawrence Lessig, Stanford Law School professor and organization founder, said in a statement.

The group’s move into the scientific sphere could help add new weight to growing criticisms that the current patent process has become too inflexible and often awards too much protection to ideas that aren’t genuinely unique.

Rohit will be attending W3C 10 on December 1…

Speakers and panelists will discuss the history of the Web, W3C’s central role in the Web’s development, and their visions of the Web’s future. The program is built on two themes:

The world of W3C is leading the Web to its full potential. W3C is the steward of the World Wide Web. The organization’s vision, mission, collaborations, and specifications have and will make a difference. During the symposium, speakers will relate stories about the Web’s origins and describe its impact over the past ten years. Members will be thanked and congratulated for their accomplishments. Speakers will present their visions and dreams for the future of W3C and the Web.

One Web with access for all. The Web is a universal, open and easily accessible medium that empowers people. One of W3C’s primary goals is to make the Web’s benefits available to all people, whatever their hardware, software, network infrastructure, native language, culture, geographical location, or physical or mental ability. W3C’s Activities illustrate the consortium’s commitment to universal access. During the symposium, speakers will present the Web of meaning — the Semantic Web — and Web access for everyone, everywhere.

Fine is a former student of Ledyard’s, who also Hanson’s advisor.

Research at HP Labs : Information Dynamics Lab : Papers : Eliminating Public Knowledge Biases in Small Group Predictions

Kevin Lai, Bernardo A. Huberman, Leslie R. Fine

HP Laboratories Palo Alto, CA 94304

Abstract

P2P clusters like the Grid and PlanetLab enable in principle the same statistical multiplexing efficiency gains for computing as the Internet provides for networking. The key unsolved problem is resource allocation. Existing solutions are not economically efficient and require high latency to acquire resources. We designed and implemented Tycoon, a market based distributed resource allocation system based on an Auction Share scheduling algorithm. Preliminary results show that Tycoon achieves low latency and high fairness while providing incentives for truth-telling on the part of strategic users.