The Now Economy

I believe 2004 was a turning-point year for web-based applications, or weblications:

I have the feeling that we’ve turned a corner, and that more “only obvious in hindsight” web-based application tricks will be developed in the years to come — thereby solidifying The Web As A Platform and continuing the spread of The Web Way as more users become True Believers who won’t give up their web-based applications no matter how hard the “fat, rich client” camps try.

The future looks bright for webdev, in part thanks to Google, as Joyce pointed out…

The Ninth Circuit had found Napster liable because the company itself maintained and controlled the servers that searched for the digital files its users wanted to download. Grokster and StreamCast, by contrast, operate decentralized systems that allow users to find each other over the Internet and then exchange files directly. Consequently, the appeals court said, the two services did not exercise the kind of control that could lead to legal liability for infringing uses.

(more…)

eWeek on Google moving into product reviews:

Google Inc. is combining online reviews into its Froogle shopping-search service, but rather than eliciting new opinions it is aggregating reviews and ratings from around the Web.

The Mountain View, Calif., company announced on Wednesday a beta of Froogle Product Reviews, which so far is limited to electronics products such as MP3 players and computers.

Google also recently rolled out a feature within Froogle that is common on online shopping sites—the ability for users to store shopping lists and wish lists. By creating a log-in, users can add products found from searches onto their lists and make the wish lists accessible to friends and family, Google announced.

Here’s a review of Archos AV340. Note that these reviews come from scraping, not from an epinions-like interface.

Found this as a link from SemanticBlogging.org, which is itself described in an article in this month’s CACM on the Blogosphere and also uses tags to label postings in collaborative ways…

CiteULike: All about CiteULike

CiteULike is a free service to help academics to share, store, and organise the academic papers they are reading. When you see a paper on the web that interests you, you can click one button and have it added to your personal library. CiteULike automatically extracts the citation details, so there’s no need to type them in yourself. It all works from within your web browser. There’s no need to install any special software.

Because your library is stored on the server, you can access it from any computer. You can share you library with others, and find out who is reading the same papers as you. In turn, this can help you discover literature which is relevant to your field but you may not have known about.

When it comes to writing up your results in a paper, you can export your library to either BibTeX or Endnote to build it in to your bibliography.

CiteULike has a flexible filing system, so you actually stand a chance of being able to find that article that you stored a few months ago when you need it.

Only links to the papers are stored, the papers themselves stay in archives like JSTOR or PubMed. At the moment the database is dominated by biological and medical papers, but there is no reason why, say, history or philosophy bibliographies should not be equally prevalent. The system currently supports: Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) portal, American Meteorological Society, arXiv.org e-Print archive, CiteSeer, IngentaConnect, JSTOR, MetaPress, PLoS Biology, PubMed, PubMed Central, ScienceDirect, but more systems will be supported soon.

CiteULike is a free service, and will remain that way. You will always be able to manage your own personal library, and view other libraries on the site at no charge. The central database is backed up every fifteen minutes, and the information in your library is safe and secure.

Can’t find much more about the specific submission process for those issues yet…

CACM: CACM Editorial Calendar

SEPTEMBER 2005: Tagging the World: RFID Technologies and Issues

Passive radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags will make it possible to add tags to almost every manufactured object, spurring a revolution in how the physical world is connected to the ever-growing information environment. Though motivated by the needs of supply-chain management, RFID tags are likely to find consumer applications as well. Only beginning to be addressed are many theoretical and practical issues in data management, distributed systems, privacy, and data mining.

..

DECEMBER 2005: The Semantic E-Business Vision

As research in the foundation technologies for the Semantic Web develops, the application of these technologies to enable Semantic eBusiness is of increasing importance to the professional and academic communities. Ever-growing competition is forcing organizations to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of their business processes, placing increased onus on managers to develop systems incorporating emergent technologies that offer seamless availability of knowledge. Semantic eBusiness provides organizations with means to design collaborative and integrative, inter- and intra-organizational business processes and systems founded on that seamless exchange. This section will present examples of innovative, knowledge-rich business models that enhance the vision of Semantic eBusiness.

ACM’s analysis of the article, Computer Magazine - Are Web Services Finally Ready to Deliver?, follows.

ACM News Service

“Are Web Services Finally Ready to Deliver?” Computer (11/04) Vol. 37, No. 11, P. 14; Leavitt, Neal

Standards organizations and industry consortia are working on Web services specifications, but without the presence of an all-encompassing authority, developers are unsure of what standards they will support in the long term, according to Evans Data analyst Joe McKendrick. Groups include the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), whose early Web services specs often concentrated on low-level, core functionality; the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS), whose focus has been on security, authentication, registries, business process execution, and reliable messaging; the Liberty Alliance, whose mission is to develop an open standard for federated network identity that complies with all existing and emergent network devices; and the Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I), which releases guidelines and tools to help developers create software enabled for existing Web services specs (the WS-I Basic Security Profile and WS-Federation, for example), and has been working to address interoperability problems by encouraging collaboration among Web services vendors. OASIS is examining BEA, SAP, and IBM’s Business Process Execution Language for Web services spec as a possible business process automation standard, while a subgroup of the W3C is developing Web Services Choreography Description Language 1.0 as a standard set of rules governing the interaction of different components and their sequential arrangement. Of the two rival reliable messaging specs, WS Reliable Messaging and WS-Reliability, only the latter has been sent to a standards body, and Hitachi’s Eisaku Nishiyama reports that proponents of both specs are attempting to arrive at a compromise. A survey from Evans Data indicates that developers are split nearly 50-50 on whether multiple competing standards could hinder Web services deployment, though W3C’s Philipe Le Hegaret doubts this will stifle the adoption of Web services.

There are some screenshots from their demo site.

“The main asset of the Caltech Laboratory for Experimental Finance (CLEF) is its markets software, called jMarkets. It allows us to run large-scale financial markets experiments reliably and flexibly over the web. jMarkets is pure-Java and J2EE compliant. It was developed from the beginning to become open-source, and a first release to the academic community is planned for 15 November 2004. We decided to make jMarkets open source, in order to promote experimental research on financial markets. Our research to date has demonstrated the potential of experiments, paving the way to investigating longstanding questions. But many more exciting questions exist than we can address on our own. jMarkets’ features will make it accessible to other research groups, usable in a variety of locations and populations. It is to become a tool to which many research groups will have easy access and to which they will be able to contribute.”

Welcome to jMarkets

jMarkets is meant to provide the infrastructure for running large-scale experiments. It is built around a specific theoretical framework, namely, General Equilibrium Theory (GE). This is the branch of Economics that studies large, competitive, interdependent systems.

…

Peter Bossaerts and William Zame are the scientific supervisors of the jMarkets project; Walter Yuan is the technical supervisor; Raj Advani is the lead programmer.

Below is a tantalizing paper combining fMRI imaging with an economics experiment. The headline’s a tease, of course, but it’s that kind of grand thinking that even gets little ideas rolling. The paper itself doesn’t sound too astounding, and certainly isn’t explanatory, but it was also only written up six months ago…!

Social Science Working Paper No. 1189: Mental Processes & Strategic Equilibration: An fMRI Study of Selling Strategy in Second Price Auctions

Social Science Working Paper No. 1189 wp1189r.pdf

Mental Processes & Strategic Equilibration: An fMRI Study of Selling Strategy in Second Price Auctions

Grether, David; Plott, Charles; Rowe, Daniel; Sereno, Martin; Allman, John. 06/2004.

Abstract: This study is the first to attempt to isolate a relationship between cognitive activity and equilibration to a Nash Equilibrium. Subjects, while undergoing fMRI scans of brain activity, participated in second price auctions against a single competitor following predetermined strategy that was unknown to the subject. For this auction there is a unique strategy that will maximize the subjects’ earnings, which is also a Nash equilibrium of the associated game theoretic model of the auction. As is the case with all games, the bidding strategies of subjects participating in second price auctions most often do not reflect the equilibrium bidding strategy at first but with experience, typically exhibit a process of equilibration, or convergence toward the equilibrium. This research is focused on the process of convergence.

In the data reported here subjects participated in sixteen auctions, after which all subjects were told the strategy that will maximize their revenues, the theoretical equilibrium. Following that announcement, sixteen more auctions were performed. The question posed by the research concerns the mental activity that might accompany equilibration as it is observed in the bidding behavior. Does brain activation differ between equilibrated and non-equilibrated in the sense of a bidding strategy? If so, are their differences in the location of activation during and after equilibration? We found significant activation in the frontal pole especially in Brodmann’s area 10, the anterior cingulate cortex, the amygdala and the basal forebrain. There was significantly more activation in the basal forebrain and the anterior cingulate cortex during the first sixteen auctions than in the second sixteen. The activity in the amygdala shifted from the right side to the left after the solution was given.

the breve simulation environment : home

breve is a free, open-source software package which makes it easy to build 3D simulations of decentralized systems and artificial life. Users define the behaviors of agents in a 3D world and observe how they interact. breve includes physical simulation and collision detection so you can simulate realistic creatures, and an OpenGL display engine so you can visualize your simulated worlds.

breve simulations are written in an easy to use language called steve. The language is object-oriented and borrows many features from languages such as C, Perl and Objective C, but even users without previous programming experience will find it easy to jump in. More information on the steve language can be found in the documentation section.

breve features an extensible plugin architecture which allows you to write your own plugins and interact with your own code. Writing plugins is simple and allows you to expand breve to work with existing projects. Plugins have been written in breve to generate MIDI music, download web pages, interact with a Lisp environment and interact with the “push” language. To develop your own plugins, you’ll need to download the plugin SDK from the download section.

Klein, J. 2002. breve: a 3D simulation environment for the simulation of decentralized systems and artificial life. Proceedings of Artificial Life VIII, the 8th International Conference on the Simulation and Synthesis of Living Systems. The MIT Press.

[from a recommendation by Kai Mildenberger]

Newswire - Collaborative real-time content delivery

Why Newswire? Newswire is a peer-to-peer, fully decentralized system that brings news to your desktop, within seconds after it is published.  This technology gives the community the power to weave a collaborative infrastructure for the delivery of essential information to individuals in a robust, scalable and secure way. Newswire is a survivable system which will deliver news to subscribers even if large parts of the infrastructure are under attack or stress. The development of Newswire followed discussions after the 9/11 attacks when flash-crowd effects made it impossible for many to reach essential news sites. Email and weblogs proved more effective technologies in that situation, although both still suffer from the centralized risks of overload and single-point-of-failure. A more robust approach is to use a peer-to-peer structuring of the system and provide strong incentives for people to collaborate on the delivery of information to everyone by giving up a bit of bandwidth and CPU cycles. Newswire has the additional effect that it can significantly reduce the load on the websites carrying real-time news information by providing hints about when information has changed. This would change the frequent redundant poll behavior seen by many news sites into more effective visits. The Newswire Technology What is the technology that makes Newswire so special? At the core is epidemic communication and state management to maintain distributed knowledge about  subscriptions, participant network capabilities and forwarding load. The epidemic technology was first developed by Alan Demers and friends at PARC, but has been completely revised at Cornell in the past years The structuring into zones and virtual hierarchies is based on the small worlds phenomenon. When you organize participants into  small groups of local participants with some knowledge of other remote nodes you can construct very effective routes in a decentralized, autonomous manner. These technologies are used to build a loosely coupled, dynamic overlay network, that continuously monitors network load and capacities to achieve a fair load. Subscription information stored in Bloom Filters is aggregated such that simple forwarding decisions can be made anywhere in the network based on the location of the publication and the direction where possible subscriber are localed.

Vogels pointed to half a dozen really great papers in All Things Distributed: Epidemic Computing at Cornell

… that having to scale up your system is no longer a burden, but it becomes an advantage and you can deliver on the true promise of scale-out: more nodes means a more robust system.

Also, he noted: All Things Distributed: Wired on the Scalability of Feed Aggregators

We have had some legal issues with the deployment of the newswire beta, and a new core communication component is being developed. But I would be happy to break open the ideas in the system and work with others to see whether this can be a good experimentation platform.