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September 30, 2004

SOA Prominent on 2005 Budgets

Slashdot writes:

Michael S. Mimoso writes "A Yankee Group survey of 473 enterprise decision makers reveals that companies have put aside money for service-oriented architectures for 2005." This is a bigger deal than it sounds - if companies keep moving this away, it will mean a sea change in corporate technology usage - and change the way/why development is done. We're talking everything from SOAP stuff to wholesale ASP adoption like Salesforce.com.

Yankee's survey results suggest that the biggest investments in SOA will come from the wireless telecom and manufacturing markets (78%), financial services (77%), and health care (71%).

Posted by adam at 04:20 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

September 29, 2004

WWW @10

Tomorrow begins the WWW@10 conference on "the visions, technologies, and directions that characterized the Web's first decade... a forum in which scholars and practitioners of all disciplines --- cultural, historical, and technical --- can share perspectives, concerns, and innovative ideas about the World Wide Web." The program looks quite promising.

Posted by adam at 10:19 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

September 28, 2004

IBM Leaps Into RFID

CNET: "IBM said Monday that it intends to spend $250 million on developing RFID, and a related technology known as sensor networks, over the next five years. HP is pouring $150 million into the technology, the company said in a dueling announcement."

Most likely the money IBM and HP are pouring in are essentially the cost of consultants in their services divisions training to understand RFID technologies, but this still points to the trend that "RFID is projected to fuel a buying frenzy, with companies stocking up on the required equipment, including RFID tags, readers, computer servers and new software. U.S. retailers will spend nearly $1.3 billion on RFID projects annually by 2008, according to market researcher IDC."

Posted by adam at 06:14 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

September 27, 2004

Semantic Web Disease

Shouldn't there be more than one Web page in the Universe that uses the phrase "Semantic Web Disease"?

Oh.

Well now I guess there are two. Isn't this how all diseases start to spread?

Posted by adam at 05:59 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

September 26, 2004

The Internet As Platform

Tim O'Reilly writes,

The trends that are emerging today are at least as earth-shaking as the web and the open source movement turned out to be. I'm talking about the emergence of what I've started to call Web 2.0, the internet as platform. We heard about that idea back in the late 90s, at the height of the browser wars, but that turned out to be a false alarm. But I believe we're now starting the third age of the internet -- the first being the telnet-era command line internet, the second the web -- and the third, well, that tale grows in the telling. It's about the way that open source and the open standards of the web are commoditizing many categories of infrastructure software, driving value instead to the data and business processes layered on top of (or within) that software; it's about the way that web sites like eBay, Amazon, and Google are becoming platforms with rich add-on developer communities; it's about the way that network effects and data, rather than software APIs, are the new tools of customer lock-in; it's about the way that to be successful, software today needs to work above the level of a single device; it's about the way that the Microsofts and Intels of tomorrow are once again going to blindside established players because all the rules of business are changing.

Web 2.0 forms the foundation on which The Now Economy will develop --- although I don't know how I like this idea of "network effects and data [belonging to centralized services] [being] the new tools of customer lock-in" --- wasn't the internet supposed to free us from lock-in?

And by the way, in Web 2.0, people have a choice of browser. Internet Explorer is no longer as innovative, secure, or stable as Safari / Konqueror, Opera, and Firefox (the beta of which passed 1 million downloads in 100 hours. I use Firefox as my default browser now, and it makes me verrrrrry happy... :)

Posted by adam at 04:20 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

September 25, 2004

WS* Effect Considered Harmful

Via Mike Dierken we found this wonderful tidbit from Adam Bosworth stating

I have a posted comment about just using XML over HTTP. Yes. I'm trying, right now to figure out if there is any real justification for the WS-* standards and even SOAP in the face of the complexity when XML over HTTP works so well. Reliable messaging would be such a justification, but it isn't there. Eventing might be such a justification, but it isn't there either and both specs are tied up in others in a sort of spec spaghetti. So, I'm kind of a skeptic of the value apart from the toolkits. They do deliver some value, (get a WSDL, instant code to talk to service), but what I'm really thinking about is whether there can't be a much simpler kindler way to do this.

Amen. Stick a fork in WS-*, because as Simon says, Web Services are receding:

Web Services are on their way to a CORBA-like market: sort of interoperable, vendor-ridden, and critically important to a small number of people. If that's the case, then maybe the rest of us can return to vanilla XML HTTP, sometimes known as REST.

Ah, how we all pine for a simpler time, before WS-* made everything feel so much more complicated than Web applications should feel... since I don't have anything more constructive to say, we'll pile on with some beautiful words from Sean McGrath:

The whole WS standards thing has more moving parts than a 747. Much of it recently invented, untested and unproven in the real world.

Given that there are no exceptions to Gall's Law:
    A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked.
I believe WS-YouMustBeJoking is doomed to collapse under its own weight. Good riddance to it.

Why has this situation come about? Because smart people had neural spasms? No. Because smart people realise that this stuff is *real* important and commercial agendas are at work all over the map.

The most important document to read if you want to understand the WS-IfThisIsProgressImAMonkeysUncle cacophony is How to wage and win a standards war by Carl Shapiro and Hal Varian.

That felt so satisfying to read, I'm going out back for a cigarette... ;)

For more wonderful backlash, see also Tim Bray's The Loyal WS-Opposition:

No matter how hard I try, I still think the WS-* stack is bloated, opaque, and insanely complex. I think it’s going to be hard to understand, hard to implement, hard to interoperate, and hard to secure.

I look at Google and Amazon and EBay and Salesforce and see them doing tens of millions of transactions a day involving pumping XML back and forth over HTTP, and I can’t help noticing that they don’t seem to need much WS-apparatus.

I’m deeply suspicious of "standards" built by committees in advance of industry experience, and I’m deeply suspicious of Microsoft and IBM, and I’m deeply suspicious of multiple layers of abstraction that try to get between me and the messages full of angle-bracketed text that I push around to get work done.

This led to WS-PageCount, with a followup and a reference to WS-Halloween.

For more backlash, see also Mike Gunderloy's WS-JustSayNo. (which quoth, "One of the powerful concepts in Extreme Programming is YAGNI, which stands for You Aren't Gonna Need It. The idea is simple: implement things when you need them, not when you think you might need them in the future. As far as I'm concerned, this applies to most Web services experiments today.")

For a more even-tempered approach, see Phil Wainewright's WS-LooseCoupling.

And for those optimistic folks who still believe in the Web Services stack and/or want to know how all the pieces fit together and lead to Nirvana, see Microsoft's just-released An Introduction to the Web Services Architecture.

Posted by adam at 04:20 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

September 24, 2004

Wikipedia Turns a Million

Joi Ito points out that Wikipedia just passed one million articles: "Wikipedia is in more than 100 languages with 14 currently having over 10,000 articles... At the current rate of growth, Wikipedia will double in size again by next spring." Wikipedia itself points to the power of a massive, decentralized content authoring effort.

Ross Mayfield adds, "To put this in perspective, if each article took 1 person week to produce, getting the next million would take 40,000 full-time equivalent resources to get it done in the same amount of predicted time. Co-incidentally Wikipedia has about the same amount of registered users, but they have day jobs too."

Even more impressive, "Wikipedia is a volunteer effort supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation." When I clicked on their fundraising effort, I discovered that they're looking to raise fifty thousand dollars -- a tiny amount by corporate standards. It speaks to the fact that a massive, decentralized effort need not cost a tremendous amount to have a huge impact.

Posted by adam at 04:20 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

September 23, 2004

Electronic Medical Records Are Taking Root Locally

Laura Landro's 9/22/2004 Wall Street Journal article, "Electronic Medical Records Are Taking Root Locally" (available to WSJ subscribers) talks about how

More than 100 state and local groups are moving quickly to establish their own networks in which various health-care providers can securely share patient information, aiming to cut down on medical errors and duplicated efforts...

The regional networks aim to get local providers to convert patients' paper medical files to electronic records, and persuade doctors to exchange pertinent information with a patient's other health-care providers. By using a single network, regional health groups say they can reduce medical mistakes, better track patients with chronic diseases such as diabetes, zip prescriptions electronically to pharmacies, and cut costs by eliminating duplicated lab tests and X-rays...

With no money or federal authority to mandate a national health-care network, regional networks are also emerging as the only solution to wiring up the country's medical system. Creating a nationwide system for sharing medical records would cost billions of dollars, scaring off many legislators... because the U.S. has a highly fragmented private health-care system, 'starting from the bottom and working up is the only viable approach,' says Lewis Redd, who runs the health-care consulting practice for Capgemini.

The federal government's role, he says, is to push for widespread adoption of a single technical standard that will let all the different medical records in the country eventually talk to each other and share data, all the while allowing access only to authorized users, to ensure privacy. Such technical standards already exist, and David Brailer, the U.S.'s health-information-technology czar, is in the process of deciding how best to endorse them and provide guidelines for their use.

As evidence mounts that easily-transferable electronic medical records reduce costs and errors, these grassroots regional efforts will build momentum.

Posted by adam at 04:56 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

September 22, 2004

Decentralized Virus Naming

Reading Anti-Virus Spamming and the Virus-Naming Mess by Dr. Vesselin Bontchev, I was struck by the fact that there is no common name for each virus.

Virus names, once chosen by anti-virus producers, are difficult to change because the original name is already present in press releases, on the website, and in the virus definition files of anti-virus software.

Because it is unrealistic to expect that a standard agreement can be reached by every anti-virus producer over the name of every single virus in existence, any future-proof naming scheme will need to accommodate multiple names referring to any given virus.

Yet another good use for a decentralized namespace.

Posted by adam at 04:42 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

September 21, 2004

IW: CPG/Retail still leading the way in RFID

More evidence of the steamroller in action -- but still, precious little to say of what the killer apps may be except to remind us that the status quo may be pretty awful to begin with. Here's the state-of-the-art: "If there's a discrepancy--the quantity shipped is less than the quantity ordered, for example--the system will automatically push an E-mail alert to the customer." Sigh.

RFID Tops To-Do List In Consumer Goods
 By Beth Bacheldor and Larry Greenemeier, Information Week



Consumer-goods companies this year once again embrace an innovative technology, though for now their time and attention are focused on the mechanics of implementation rather than the higher art of finessing it. Sixty percent of the consumer-goods companies on this year's InformationWeek 500 list are developing or testing radio-frequency identification tags. The technology's promise has caught the imagination of large companies such as Wal-Mart Stores Inc., which is requiring its top 100 suppliers to affix RFID tags on all the cases and pallets of goods they ship to the retailer by January. Target Corp., the U.S. Department of Defense, and others have similar mandates, hoping that RFID will help them track products as they move through the supply chain, providing up-to-the minute inventory details, triggering automatic replenishment, and ultimately generating more sales.

Imperial Sugar Co., with sales of $1.1 billion in 2003, already has begun the arduous task of planning to use RFID in its distribution centers so that it can meet customers' requirements. But the company's aggressive stance has more to do with VP and CIO George Muller's belief that RFID offers a way to outsmart competitors. "With RFID, the people that get there first will have a competitive advantage," Muller says. "And they'll be able to take costs out of their supply chains sooner."

...Muller has bigger designs that would take advantage of the fact that IT is a core competency of Imperial Sugar. He'd someday like to co-develop and co-market an RFID system with a third-party service provider that could hook into any back-office ERP system and provide visibility into any company's flow of inventory. "This is late-breaking news that I haven't really discussed with management," Muller says. "We can generate a nice revenue stream with some very attractive margins." Extra revenue would be welcome in the sugar industry, where, Muller says, margins are only about 3% to 3.5%. Plus, "this would give our IT employees an opportunity to expand their horizons," he says. "That could be a lot of fun."

The biggest challenge regarding RFID is to comply with business partners' requirements without breaking the bank, says Jeryl Wolfe, CIO and VP of global business solutions for McCormick & Co. Inc., which makes spices and sauces. "The technology isn't mature, not even close," he says. Whereas cost-effective use of RFID is predicated on the 5-cent tag, decent tags aren't available today for less than 20 cents. "The costs get scary as they scale," he says. McCormick also is a second-tier Wal-Mart supplier with a January 2006 RFID deadline.

RFID implementation cost estimates vary wildly, and much of it depends on how many tags will be required and whether the use of scanners and other associated tools will extend beyond the point that goods are loaded on trucks and moved to retailers. In a Forrester Research study earlier this year, which included interviews with 10 of Wal-Mart's top 100 suppliers as well as 25 tag and reader manufacturers, the research firm estimated that Wal-Mart's mandate could cost a supplier $9.1 million in startup and maintenance fees for one year.

...Imperial Sugar's IT team has just implemented a custom collaboration tool that lets it more effectively communicate order and delivery information with its customers. It's integrated with Imperial Sugar's PeopleSoft supply-chain apps and compares supply-chain data against a number of predefined rules. If there's a discrepancy--the quantity shipped is less than the quantity ordered, for example--the system will automatically push an E-mail alert to the customer. "We're using push technology to people that need to know so we can provide better customer support," Clemmons says.

Posted by rohit at 12:42 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

September 20, 2004

Bob Cringely proposes mutual insurance for data

I found this idea a compelling illustration of decentralization because it highlights that there can be *more* trust in a hydra-headed system run by the masses than a single-point-of-Google. Of course, the storage ratio should probably be 1:10 -- meaning each byte could be backed up to 10 random machines to ensure that some of them are back online when you need it.

The party-pooper aspect is that asymettric upload/dowload links like DSL means it takes much longer to push *or* pull more data. But then again, he's right to focus on backup, rather than interactive storage.

Another aspect of the solution is better metadata management -- you don't need to keep three copies of a digital photo, you just need to keep in touch with the three relatives you already mailed a copy to and the website that's hosting your notes. In other words, most of the time, The Data's Already Out There...

PBS | I, Cringely . Archived Column


That $3.95 per month fee covers any amount of storage the user wants, limited only by how much storage they are WILLING TO DONATE TO THE SYSTEM. Think of this as an alternate and quite a bit more sophisticated Napster. First, it is for BACKUP, so recovery has to be slow enough so people won't think of it as another hard drive. Baxter is data insurance and nothing more. It's a RAID system using donated disk space on a wide area network. Your data is compressed, then cut into chunks, and those chunks are distributed to dozens of places with enough forward error correction thrown in to cover any storage that is lost or happens to be down when recovery is needed. The data is both encrypted (on the customer end, so unencrypted data never enters the system and that vulnerability is eliminated) and split into chunks so no one person has enough to make any sense of it even if they could decrypt it. The Baxter business provides client software, handles divvying-up the RAID information, and keeps track of what chunks go where.


Even though it is Napster-like in that it knows where all the chunks are, Baxter doesn't know what the chunks are, nor is the end-user in a position to use it as a Napster-like system for music sharing, since data recovery is deliberately slow...

Posted by rohit at 02:24 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

September 19, 2004

"Device drivers" for RFID readers

It would be interesting to consider whether SNMP is an appropriate management technique for these readers. But it still wouldn't provide a proper event protocol for relaying actual read data -- UDP traps could be dropped, but reliable queues could overflow. And there would probably be a need to push filtering rules out to the edges, so the reader could use a policy to coalesce multiple reads or drop unrelated products. Let's see what these folks have to say...

Technology Review: RFID Relief

many smaller companies that own multiple brands of RFID readers—one at the warehouse doors, another in the product-label printers, and so forth—and use multiple systems for storing product information can’t afford custom software to link them all together. AirGate’s one-size-fits-all software, to be unveiled next spring, acts like a universal translator. It’s the first system that can take data from any RFID reader and present it intelligibly on a simple Web page or dump it into a database program

Posted by rohit at 11:55 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

September 18, 2004

Intellectual Property Values

Ross Mayfield writes in his post Patents, RFCs, and Reputation,

Here's a thought, which is more valuable: the Eolas Patent on browser plugins or Dave Crocker's RFC for email?

Eolas recieved a half a billion settlement from Microsoft, and the original inventors could realize a considerable reward, if appeals reach an end. I'm using Eolas as one of the perfect examples of pure return, and this is in no way a knock against the inventors. A patent and a standard are hard to compare because the process of invention is so different. But to you personally and society the answer is clearly the latter.

The real question is, have standards surpassed patents in reputational return?

This reminds me how strong the tradeoff is in deciding the value of intellectual property when it's being created. Those who want money and power choose to close access to an innovation through patents and the protection of the law; those who want fame and glory choose to open access to an invention through standards and the leverage of an appeal to something bigger. When a person or company can do both at the same time -- the so-called embrace-and-extend strategy -- that person or company has the foundation for an empire.

Ross points out that "Aaron Swartz is right to be proud and congratulated on RFC 3870", and we agree.

Posted by adam at 12:43 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

September 17, 2004

Open Source and Offshoring

Tim Oren writes in Be Careful What You Wish For: Open Source and Off-Shoring:

I am bemused by folks who can simultaneously cheer the global spread of the Internet and the beneficence of the open source (OS) movement, and decry the offshoring of IT jobs. Whether they're naive, or disingenous, or took Emerson a little too seriously, they are missing the correlation: Open source and IT offshoring are the products of the same driving forces, two faces of the same coin. And they are feeding off one another.

If IT does matter, then IT has to deal with increasing commodification. Tim adds,

If you're competing with free, you've got to be - well - cheap. And that's not available in Silicon Valley. Even if you are building on free, or adding value through services, you get to cope with customer expectations for cost set by deployment of things like the LAMP stack in enterprise environments. Guess where you get cheap?

And the debate of IT doesn't matter rages on, as offshoring and open source keep pushing the free part of the "free, perfect, and now" that are the forces driving The Now Economy...

Posted by adam at 12:23 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

September 16, 2004

RSS goes corporate (Forrester)

Intriguing tidbit that came across my desk from a Forrester newsletter... it led me, in turn, to BlogAds, which appears to be running a private-label ad network of top bloggers with quite a bit to recommend it.

MercuryNews.com | 08/19/2004 | Company must now take steps to go beyond good by Dan Gillmor


It's also an obvious business for competitors. If Microsoft and Yahoo weren't tough enough opponents, consider the growing number of micro-advertising services that are springing up to serve niche markets. In the Weblog world, for example, a small company called Blogads (www.blogads.com) has been effective for advertisers who want to target specific online journals. Google's ad products are fine, but they're hardly a monopoly.

Forrester Research: An Introduction To RSS: Why Companies Should Pay Attention Now

September 27, 2004, 1:00 p.m.-2:00 p.m. Eastern time
Cost: $240 or 2 Service Units (no charge for Member-level clients)

Consumers have started adopting the use of RSS (which stands for “rich site summary” but also “really simple syndication”) as a way to easily read content feeds from Weblogs as well as publishers like CNET, The New York Times, and Wall Street Journal.

* What is RSS? * How will RSS develop?
* What should content providers be doing RSS?
* What should marketers be doing with RSS?


Vendors Mentioned: BlogAds, Bloglines, Craig’s List, FeedDemon, Feedster, NewsGator, Pheedo, Technorati, Yahoo!


Posted by rohit at 09:58 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Declassifieds

It's taken a few weeks for this to sink in: John Battelle's post on Sell Side Advertisting (inspired by Ross Mayfield's post on Cost Per Influence).

Ross wrote: "An important facet of this format is the amount of user choice. Users decide what feeds to subscribe to and ads to block. Bloggers should be able to choose what ads to both host and pass through."

John's addition:

Instead of advertisers buying either PPC networks or specific publishers/sites, they simply release their ads to the net, perhaps on specified servers where they can easily be found, or on their own sites, and/or through seed buys on one or two exemplar sites. These ads are tagged with information supplied by the advertiser, for example, who they are attempting to reach, what kind of environments they want to be in (and environments they expressly forbid, like porn sites or affiliate sites), and how much money they are willing to spend on the ad.

Once the ads are let loose, here's the cool catch - ANYONE who sees those ads can cut and paste them, just like a link, into their own sites (providing their sites conform to the guidelines the ad explicates in its tags). The ads track their own progress, and through feeds they "talk" to their "owner" - the advertiser (or their agent/agency). These feeds report back on who has pasted the ad into what sites, how many clicks that publisher has delivered, and how much juice is left in the ad's bank account. The ad propagates until it runs out of money, then it... disappears! If the ad is working, the advertiser can fill up the tank with more money and let it ride.

This concept of decentralizing ads (instead of "classified ads", they're "declassifieds") empowers multiple agencies -- not just advertisers and ad networks but publishers, too -- to determine which ads propogate.

Taking this a step further to create a truly decentralized advertising network requires asking oneself the question of who is empowered to determine what goes in the square inch of real estate used by web browsers and feed readers to display ads? Not just advertisers, ad networks, and publishers -- but the software writers and the actual people reading the web and feeds as well.

Posted by adam at 01:52 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

September 15, 2004

Responsibility is Complex in the Now Economy

Courtesy of Mike Dierken we found Bill de hÓra's "WWW cubed: syndication and scale", in which he writes:

The most advanced thinking that doesn't involve throwing out the Web is probably Rohit Khare's PhD thesis, which suggests an 'eventing', or push style extension to the Web model. An early example of this approach where the server calls back to the connected client instead of the client initiating each time, called mod_pubsub, is available as open source. One of HTTP's designers, Roy Fielding, is rumoured to be working on a new protocol, that could feature support for easing of the load on servers.

The question of responsibility – especially in the event of operational issues arising – becomes complex. With a pull delivery model on the other hand, organisational boundaries are crisp and clear." This may not matter for consumer applications, but a surprising number of important business systems and services are now based on HTTP data transfers. And many people believe that syndication technology like RSS and Atom will also be used for commercially consequential exchanges in the b2b, or "business to business" arena. Switching from a polling to a pushing mode, also confers a switching of responsibilities, and this might in time have far-reaching consequences where cost-efficiency is traded for risks, legal and financial. One day, your online bank might be morally and technically culpable for getting your bank statements to your computer. In that case, expect to sign even more of your rights away in the fine print.

The Now Economy will be guided by all kinds of Service Level Agreements. Empowerment comes when people understand the benefits -- and, more importantly, the limitations and risks inherent -- in moving to a world where information travels to where it needs to go instantly and across trust boundaries.

Posted by adam at 10:16 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

September 14, 2004

IBM open sources some voice-reco code to ASF, Eclipse

A minor news item in the larger scheme of things, but the very fact the maneuver surprised me means I haven't internalized what a fad it is to donate code. It doesn't appear to be a full VoiceXML stack, nor is it the acclaimed ViaVoice desktop engine, but it's a start nonetheless...

Technology > Speech Code From I.B.M. to Become Open Source" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/13/technology/13speech.html">The New York Times > Technology > Speech Code From I.B.M. to Become Open Source

After decades of research and development, speech recognition is moving toward mainstream use. Advances in statistical modeling, pattern-matching algorithms and processing power have enabled speech recognition to interpret a far broader vocabulary of words and phrases than in the past, though glitches remain.

The software for speech-recognition applications once had to be custom built, but now packages of reusable and standardized tools are becoming available. The speech software can now be added to a Web application so that programmers can use familiar tools and need little additional training.

"This whole speech world is going in the same direction as the rest of the information technology industry, and that should drastically reduce the cost of building speech applications," said Mark Plakias, an analyst at Opus Research.

I.B.M. is donating code that it estimates cost the company $10 million to develop. One collection of speech software for handling basic words for dates, time and locations, like cities and states, will go to the Apache Software Foundation. The company is also contributing speech-editing tools to a second open-source group, the Eclipse Foundation.

Posted by rohit at 02:25 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

September 13, 2004

Taking on eBay

Nick Wingfield has a compelling piece titled Taking on eBay on page R10 of today's Wall Street Journal.

His main point is that the dustbins of history are filled with those who tried to compete directly against eBay in the broad online-auction market; however, there are pockets of energy where vibrant challengers are able to compete, including:

eBay may have a wonderful business, but it cannot be everything to everyone. There will never be a single marketplace for all transactions on the Internet, and that's a good thing.

Longer term, Nick Wingfield evokes the ghost of Paul Ford (see: August 2009 -- How Google beat Amazon and Ebay to the Semantic Web), stating

There could still be long-term threats to eBay's overall franchise. Google, Yahoo, and other search engines could eventually challenge eBay's dominance if small businesses, which make up the vast majority of sellers on eBay, decide they can do better by advertising on search engines to draw customers to their own Web sites.

That scenario is particularly intriguing to us at CommerceNet, for it points to decentralized e-commerce: a world in which, rather than coming to a common place like eBay to transact, buyers and sellers can transact on their own terms, freeing them to transact in innovative ways, the way real society does business outside the Internet today. Imaginging eBay without the eBay isn't as hard as it seems.

Posted by adam at 12:34 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Feedmesh: Decentralized Web Notifications

Jeremy Zawodny talks about the inevitability of search results as RSS that can be subscribed to, quoting Tim Bray:

They’ve also done something way cool with their Google appliance; one of the bright geeks there has set up a thing where you can subscribe to a search and get an RSS feed. Well, duh. Anyone could fix up one of those using the Google API, I wonder why Google isn’t supporting this already?

This in turn reminds us of Jeff Barr's real-time headline view (more thoughts), which he talked about this weekend at Foo Camp, also attended by Sam Ruby, who talked about FeedMesh, a working group to establish a "peering network" for decentralized web(site|log) update notifications and content distribution. This is the start of something potentially wonderful...

Posted by adam at 04:23 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

September 12, 2004

Grassroots Metadata, Creative-Commons-Style

Matt Haughey talks about the switch of the Creative Commons search engine (used to record the semantics of web page metadata) to use Nutch: "We flipped the switch last week and have been testing it ever since. Compared to the last version of our search engine, this one is blazingly fast to return results, the results are much more specific to what you're looking for, and it is constantly keeping up to date on over 1 million pages with Creative Commons license info in them."

Notes Doug Cutting about the newly launched Creative Commons Search: "It crawls CC-licensed pages, indexing license properties, making them searchable. I did most of the initial development, using it as a motivating case when adding metadata support to Nutch... This is cool in several ways. It demonstrates how easily Nutch can be extended to do stuff that would be hard to do with any other search engine. (This is all of the CC-specific code.) It's also cool since it helps folks find content they can reuse, like songs that can be sampled, art that can be clipped and text that can be excerpted."

It's clear that the Semantic Web will happen not all-at-once but little by little as cool efforts such as this one create a groundswell.

Posted by adam at 12:24 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

September 11, 2004

Pareto optimality should be computed over time :-)

A running joke is that Adam's cellphone gets more and more positive comments as it gets more obsolete. It's one of those long, flat Sharp ones -- and since that form factor is dead and buried, no one's seen one recently.

This NYTimes article (by way of C|Net) talks about several retro trends in one piece -- old phones, adding old handsets to modern cells, pseudo-retro record players, PC case mods... a quick read.

The commerce-relevant part is that it should be possible to increase consumer choice by adding the past back to the present -- that is to ask, why is that that no one can buy a new instance of Adam's phone?

It should be possible to go to a website and design your own phone, with your own form factors, sliders for trading off color with battery life, network providers you need support for, and expect a custom-manufactured phone in the mail back to you within a day or two. That is the Now Economy at work...

A digital generation's analog chic | CNET News.com

When Eugene Auh went trawling at eBay for a cheap cell phone last month, he searched for one with a decidedly anachronistic bent.


"I wanted the biggest cell phone I could find," said Auh, a 27-year-old investment manager in Philadelphia. His winning bid of $25.95 bought a Motorola DynaTac, a 1980s-era "brick" cell phone that fits more comfortably in a backpack than in a suit pocket.

Rather than subtracting from its charm, the phone's cumbersome size--it is roughly 8 by 2 by 3 inches--is its main attraction, Auh said. Indeed, he plans to take the phone to work, to the gym and even to his nighttime haunts.

...Auh, meanwhile, is holding off on his romantic overtures until he finds a service provider that can support his antiquated cell phone. But once he does, the women of Philadelphia will need to act quickly, Auh warned.


"This cell phone only stores nine numbers, ladies," he said, "so it's first come, first served."

Posted by rohit at 10:51 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

September 10, 2004

Could RFID opposition be theological, not just ideological?

Interesting opinion/recap piece this morning on a perceived alliance of interest between libertarians and Christian millenariast ('mark-of-the-beast') folks to oppose RFID (specifically, when used for humans -- no word on the privacy rights of cats and dogs :-)

This piece is supposedly triggered by reading recent reader feedback mail about some RFID apps, including the infamous Spanish nightclub VIP pass for buying drinks and getting into the lounge...

RFID tags: The people say no | Perspectives | CNET News.com by Michael Kanellos, Editor-at-Large


"When our society reaches the point that credit cards can easily be faked, look for a push to implant a chip that will take over our trade institutions," reader Jeff Phelps wrote.

A large number of letters also asserted that human RFID tags are a demonic tool.

"I can assure you the resistance to this will be very strong from Christians...You will see tens of millions refuse this chip, even when it means great personal suffering will ensue."

...this is going to be one long, ugly, uphill battle. The issue has united people with fairly strong religious beliefs and libertarian privacy advocates. That doesn't happen often.

On the other hand, the relationship between consumers and industry isn't even close to a crisis point. At the turn of the last century, corporate leaders often faced assassination attempts, and striking factory employees sometimes got shot. Try to double-park in front of, or across the street from, an office of J.P. Morgan Chase. Private security officers will immediately shuffle you away, the legacy of a 1920 bombing at the financial institution's New York offices.

Many wrote to say they fear that the tracking technology will be exploited to monitor our private lives--but that won't likely happen. Governments and companies won't have the time or energy to sift through all that data. Even if they do, what will they figure out? That car thieves are among the most loyal consumers of Sunny Delight?

On a gut level, I think that much of the antagonism against the technology is rooted in a general distrust of large institutions. Anyone who has been stuck on hold when phoning for help knows that the standard of customer service continues to plummet.

But in the end, people distrust RFID, I believe, because it forces people to get tagged like a circus bear so that an already overpaid executive can obtain a bonus for cutting costs. If companies want to win the public over to this technology, they are going to have to be the ones jumping through hoops.

Posted by rohit at 10:11 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

September 09, 2004

Plott on Decentralized Pasture Management

I came across this preparing to visit Prof. Plott at my alma mater next week... here's some snippets from one of his very latest papers; he's been interested in information aggregation of late.

DECENTRALIZED MANAGEMENT OF COMMON PROPERTY RESOURCES:

For several centuries, villages in the Italian Alps employed a
special system for managing the common properties. The
experiments and analysis of this paper are motivated by an attempt
to understand why that particular system might have been successful
in comparisons with other systems that have similar institutional
features. The heart of the system was a special monitoring device
that allowed individual users to inspect other users at their own cost
and impose a predetermined sanction (a fine) when a free rider was
discovered. The fine was paid to the user who found a violator.
In addition to the replication of the results of others, the paper
finds three classes of results. First, in comparison with a classical
model of identical, selfish agents, the data can best be captured by a
model with heterogeneous and other-regarding preferences where
altruism and especially spite play an important role. Second, the
model with heterogeneous agents suggests that the success of the
institution is related to its ability to turn these individual differences
to socially useful purposes. Third, the model also explains important
paradoxes that can be found in the existing literature.

...

The success of the Carte di Regola system appears to be related to its ability to use the
heterogeneity of preferences to socially advantageous ends. The system also appears to have
a type of robustness against institutional and parameter changes. Notice first that the Carte di
Regola channels attitudes that might normally be considered as socially dysfunctional, such as
spiteful preferences, into socially useful purposes. People with spiteful preferences choose
to monitor and sanction at a monetary loss. But when their preferences are considered as
part of system efficiency, they are the ones who can perform the function most efficiently
and are channeled into the activity for which they have a comparative advantage.

One might think that the Carte di Regola is similar to a system of vigilantes but there are
important differences. In the model, spiteful people do not care who they hurt, they just
enjoy hurting others, so it is important to direct and constrain them. The Carte di Regola
directs them by reserving the judgment of guilt for the courts, as opposed to the vigilantes,
who would be happy to judge anyone guilty. The court convicts a person only when the guilt
is consistent with social purposes. The magnitude of punishment is also reserved for the
courts in the Carte di Regola system, while in a vigilante system the inspector is allowed to
judge and determine punishment. So, the Carte di Regola constrains what the spiteful can do
to the guilty. Thus, there are important differences (OWG, 1992).

The Carte di Regola also channels arbitrary or random behavior toward useful ends. Such
behavior might ordinarily be regarded as dysfunctional from the point of view of economic
efficiency. Mistaken inspections or impulsively random inspections are costly to the
inspector and thus involve efficiency losses, but the fact that inspections take place has
consequences for those who are excessive users of the common pool resource by increasing
the likelihood that a sanction is imposed. Thus random inspection behavior that would
appear irrational helps preserve the commons.

Posted by rohit at 01:40 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

September 08, 2004

Just Call Him Van

Two years ago Trevor F. Smith wrote about the pronunciation of "Vannevar Bush":

Bush showed his own "spark of belligerency." He was quick to take exception to things. Even his own first name, with its Dutch pronunciation (Vuh-NEE-ver), irritated him. "The strange name" was "a nuisance," always requiring an explanation or a quick lesson in pronunciation. Bush wished his father had named him John, after the first name of his friend, and his sisters indeed called him John at times.

The Vannevar Bush Wikipedia entry confirms that His name was pronounced Van-NEE-var. as in "receiver".

Posted by adam at 06:25 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Decentralized Authoring Can Be Self-Healing

BoingBoing in Wikipedia proves its amazing self-healing powers pointed us to The Isuzu Experiment, which goes like this:

Joi Ito points to an ongoing discussion regarding the authority of wikipedia as a source of information and knowledge. The discussion was prompted by an article in the Syracuse Post-Standard that suggests, in part, that wikipedia “take[s] the idea of open source one step too far” by allowing the user to make corrections.

The article has been correctly ridiculed by many, including Mike at Techdirt. In a later posting, he suggests an experiment: why not go to a certain page, insert something provably incorrect, and see how long it lasts.

No matter which side of the debate you find yourself on, this sounds like an interesting experiment. So, I have made not one, but 13 changes to the wikipedia site. I will leave them there for a bit (probably two weeks) to see how quickly they get cleaned up. I’ll report the results here, and repair any damage I’ve done after the period is complete. My hypothesis is that most of the errors will remain intact.

Does that invalidate Wikipedia? Certainly not! If anything, the general correctness and extent of Wikipedia is a tribute to humankind. It suggests the Kropotkin may be right: that the “survival of the fittest” requires that the fittest cooperate. It means that there are very few Vandals like me who are interfering with its mission.

Terrible experiment, but it demonstrates how decentralized authoring can be self-healing. Wrote Phil in the Boing Boing summary,

Remember Al Fasoldt, the journalist who disparaged Wikipedia? He was challenged by a Techdirt writer to change an item and see if his change was found. While Fasoldt dismissed the idea, Alex Halavais thought it was an interesting idea. He made 13 changes to 13 different Wikipedia pages, ranging from obvious to subtle. He figured he'd give them a couple of weeks and then fix the ones that weren't caught. Every single change was found and changed within hours.

It's a terrible idea to vandalize Wikipedia like this. But it's a wonderful thing how quickly self-healing Wikipedia is to such attacks.

Posted by adam at 12:35 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

September 07, 2004

Service Grids in 2004: No Standards

David Longworth wrote an excellent piece, Grid Lock-in On Route To SOA, declaring that "vendor strategies to promote grid computing as the IT backbone for service oriented architectures are missing a vital element: standards." Among his findings:

Immature and incomplete standards for sharing grid computing resources could leave enterprises locked into vendors' proprietary technology stacks:
  • IBM, CA, HP, Sun, Microsoft and Oracle each have grid strategies
  • All aim to dynamically offer IT capacity to meet business needs
  • But vendors' proprietary grid environments aren't interoperable
  • Standards for resource sharing and management are emerging
  • For now, implementing grid means accepting vendor lock-in

Concludes Longworth: "Research group IDC has estimated that the market for grid computing will grow to $12 billion across both technical markets and commercial enterprise... But until standards like WSRF and DCML gain substance and momentum, the reality today is that the majority of commercial grid initiatives will be tied to individual vendors' proprietary grid environments, without the ability to share or manage resources across separate grid architectures."

Posted by adam at 08:32 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

September 06, 2004

Hal Varian on Differential Pricing

Amit Patel wrote about a 1996 piece from Hal Varian on differential pricing:

I had thought that charging customers different prices for the same thing was unfair and the result of pure greediness. But Hal Varian explains why “differential pricing” might be better than fixed pricing, especially in industries with high fixed costs. One of the arguments boils down to: if some people are willing to pay more than others and the fixed costs are high, then you can end up in a situation where it is worse for the consumers (as a group) to all have the same price than to have different prices. The producer usually benefits from differential pricing, but in many (most?) situations the consumer does too. One case in particular is when the producer would go out of business without differential pricing; there is no benefit to the consumer of losing the opportunity of purchasing a product or service.

My sense of fairness says you should charge the same amount for the same thing, but the math shows that society is (overall) better off with less fairness.

"Fairness" is in the eye of the beholder.

Posted by adam at 08:53 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

September 04, 2004

Decentralizing Akamai

A step in the direction of "decentralizing Akamai" -- but still uses the "centralized DNS" to create an interesting distributed web caching network -- is the Coral Content Distribution Network.

Mike Dierken talks about the Coral CDN by quoting Gordon Mohr quoting Michael J. Freedman's post to the p2p-hackers list:

To take advantage of CoralCDN, a content publisher, user, or some third party posting to a high-traffic portal, simply appends .nyud.net:8090 to the hostname in a URL. For example:

http://news.google.com/ --> http://news.google.com.nyud.net:8090/

Through DNS redirection, oblivious clients with unmodified web browsers are transparently redirected to nearby Coral web caches. These caches cooperate to transfer data from nearby peers whenever possible, minimizing the load on the origin web server and possibly reducing client latency.

Mike writes: "DNS/HTTP based P2P -- Wicked cool and finally a REST based scalable p2p network. I wonder how I could use that at Amazon..."

Rohit asks if this technique could help Slashdot alleviate "The Slashdot Effect." According to the Slashdot post on Coral, apparently not.

Posted by adam at 06:12 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

September 03, 2004

Institution building: a look back at W3C

A long time ago, I wrote an article for a standards-policy seminar at UC Irvine on my experience with the development of the World Wide Web Consortium; I later presented to a cyberpolicy seminar in Georgetown. That was about it, until I started reflecting on the challenges in intiating a new Labs division for CommerceNet. It's a perennial challenge to foster innovation within a multi-party cooperative research & development consortium; the Harvard Business School press even has a book on the topic: Technology Fountainheads: The Management Challenge of R&D Consortia by E. Raymond Corey.

The Evolution of the World Wide Web Consortium


The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has developed a novel organizational form as it attempts to "lead the evolution of the Web" -- equal parts academic lab, industrial research & development consortium, trade association, and standards body. In this paper, we trace the history of W3C's adaptations in structure and process to accommodate the shifting opportunities of the Web market.

Posted by rohit at 10:31 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

September 02, 2004

Alien's RFID Boot Camp

It would be really interesting to see the state-of-the-art in actual tagging technology. I have to admit, for being a lab focusing on the Now Economy, I haven't actually held an RFID tag in my own hot little hands. (There was an InterMEC reader left behind in my cube when I moved in, though :-)

There have been some nice reviews of Alien's classes, though other manufacturers surely offer similar events. The key would appear to be some learning-by-doing insofar as you learn what materials you can scan through or not, for example.

Alien Technology - RFID Academy


Years of RFID Experience Packed Into Two Days... RFID Academy course fees are $5,000, which includes a Development Kit. Register early: Classes always sell out.

... Participants of RFID Academy have a choice between receiving a 915MHz Passive UHF system or a 2450MHz Battery Assisted Passive (BAP) Microwave Development Kit along with the two-day technical RFID training session.


  • 915MHz Passive Development Kit and Circular Polarized Antenna

  • 2450MHz Long Range Battery Tag w/Temperature Data Logging Option

Of course, for half the price, I suspect that I'd have a lot more fun at Web 2.0.

Posted by rohit at 12:01 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

September 01, 2004

Markets in Deep Space

We've recently written a new position paper titled
Agoric Architectural Styless for Decentralized Space Exploration. It's been submitted to the
2004 Workshop on Self-Managing Systems (WOSS'04) to be held at FSE-12 in Newport Beach. it was originally based on some notices of intent (NOIs) for a NASA Broad Agency Announcement (BAA) on innovative Human & Robotic Technologies (H&RT) for future space exploration missions.



Abstract: This position paper discusses an architectural approach to managing decentralized space exploration missions. Developing control applications in this domain is complicated by more than just the challenging computing and communication constraints of space-based mission elements; future exploration missions will depend on ad-hoc cooperation between independent space agencies’ elements. Currently, the frontier of interoperability is providing communication relays, as shown in by recent Mars missions, where NASA rovers relayed data via ESA satellites.

Future mission planning envisions more extensive autonomy and integration. Examples include: taking advantage of excess storage capacity at another node, multicasting messages along several paths through deep space, or even scheduling concurrent observations of an object using several instruments at different locations. An architectural style for developing mission control applications that does not depend on positive ground control from Earth could provide (a) increased margins for space-based computing systems, (b) increased reusability by an effective build-it-for-autonomy-first strategy, and (c) avoid the single-point of failure bias in standard distributed system design approaches.

In particular, we propose combining an architectural style for decentralized applications based on the Web (ARRESTED) with agoric computing to apply market discipline for allocating resources dynamically among coalitions of mission elements in space. Similar approaches may have applicability in other domains, such as crisis management or battle management.

Posted by rohit at 11:25 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack