Had an idea last night for a web site called ThisSucks or NoClothes or such like. It would be for people to expose the emperor with no clothes. To be able to open the window and shout "I don't care what everyone else says, This Sucks".

The plan is for people to post to del.icio.us with the tag ThisSucks/their_tag. The site would then pick these up and republish them via RSS and probably via a lazyweb style trackback as well.

I'm probably not going to do this, but maybe by the power of lazyweb somebody else will.

And here's my first.

Google Adsense Sucks for Bloggers!

National Speed Offence Database
[from: del.icio.us]

Clay Shirky
What we think we know about categorization is wrong. Because we're holding onto old outmoded techniques for categorization.

Q: what is Ontology. A: It depends on what the meaning of "is" is. The study of what exists in a domain and how do these elements relate.

The parable of the Travel Agent.
Travel agents exist to distribute the interface between a handful of airlines and a large number of consumers. The web replaces this so the TAs claim they add value. What's surprising is that the internet plays tried to use the same argument. They tried to recapitulate the old order rather than undermine it. It took some time for people to realise the problem had changed.

Classification schemes. Periodic table. Best classification scheme ever. Almost perfect. Context shifts where a whole column were labelled "gasses" where that's only true at some temporary ranges.

Libraries are the commonest classification system. And have huge fundamental mistakes. eg Dewey scheme category religion is all Christian. Library of congress treats Asia and Switzerland as equivalent in size. The essence is actually "number of books" about this topic. Optimises linear shelf space. Not reality. Unfortunately librarians now are using the same approach in the digital domain where shelf space is irrelevant. The argument like travel agents is that they are recapitulating what went before instead of undermining it.

Yahoo grew into a hierarchy of categories. So they hired a professional ontologist. Who built a huge tree. They said "we understand this better than you". They felt they couldn't organise the world without the shelf so they added the shelf back in. And so we get a tree structure. But the world isn't tree structured. So add a few cross links. So let's have a hierarchy with lots and lots of links. But the ontologists said "get outta here" and limited them to a maximum of 3.

In reality, there are lots of links and no tree. And Google took over because there is no filing system. There's only links. Google bought DMOZ, but nobody used it so they downgraded it.

When does ontological organisation work well? Small corpus, formal categories, stable entities, clear edges, coordinated users, expert users, expert cataloguers, authoritative source. Note: ontologists often claim the users don't understand the categories. And see this as a user's problems.

Turn it around and you have where it works badly. And that is a perfect description of the web. Huge scale, uncoordinated users, no authority.

Voodoo categorisation. Act on the model and it changes the world. Classify an SUV as a small truck and it becomes popular. Signal Loss. Ontologists claim that synonyms fail. But actually synonyms refer to different things.

Predicting the future is hard. A. This is a book about Dresden. B. This book is about Dresden, and goes into the category "East Germany". Ooops. Countries are radically different to cities. One is an idea, the other is physical. But we can't change it because we don't have the staff to move the books. Absolutely key. Categorization requires predicting the future.

"My God, it's full of links". Adventures in scale pt.1 Don't merge categories, merge the GUIDs.

Great minds don't think alike. Adventures in scale pt.2 del.icio.us. power law distribution of people and numbers of tags they've done. Long tail. classic sign of an unconstrained population behaviour. Look at number of entries for tags for one person, and it's another power law. 10% of the tags have 90% of the entries. Now look at 2 URLs and study the tags used against them. A lot of entries have very clear convergence. Some URLs have classic power law curves with less consensus. Which gives us a measure of the certainty of the popular tags.

Organic Categorization
- Market logic: individual motivation but group value.
- Merged from URLs (links), not categories
- Merges create overlap, not sync
- Merges are probabilistic not binary
- User and time are core attributes
- Signal loss comes from expression not compression
- One off categories are ignored, rather than deflected. Filtering is after the publishing. (very deep idea here).
- The semantics are in the users, not in the system. Does the world make sense or do we make sense of the world. Objective vs subjective. Recognises that there are alternate views.

(note: If you don't understand Unix, you are doomed to re-invent it. There is only World, Group and User)

In a primary school that had no server. How it works.
- The teacher runs Instiwiki on her iBook.
- Students find the wiki on the lan via rendezvous
- Security is simple. Turn the laptop off.
- Students and teachers can easily find their work.
- The app is very responsive
- This solution is not supported by the local T department!
- Teacher and laptop need to be present. Which is tricky when she's sick and their's a temp.

The whole thing started as a weblog post. Trying to create an OSS school administration platform. All REST and built on Zope.

Clay Shirky. Teaches a course for computers and art. Aimed at Artists and creatives who aren't afraid of the machines. Looking for things which ought to exist and trying to bring them into reality

The students are running point and they started to involve phones into what they were doing. Now more formal.

PacManhatten. Big Games Class. Tried using GPS but in an urban environment it doesn't work. So fell back on two way voice, over phones. A control room controls a runner.

ConQwest. Joint venture with Qwest. Combines 2d barcodes (semacodes) with cameraphones. Automated server interpreting the semacodes and sending data back to phone.

Dodgeball. First mobile social software. Problem is that you have to tell the system where you are. But it is SoSo that becomes part of real life. First problem was the ex-girlfriend bug. Your ex is still a friend of a friend so you get messages suggesting you meet!

Mobjects/Hearbeat. Bluetooth huggable piece of soft plastic. Send a hug to someone and their Mobject glows and demands a hug back.

Phone hardly used as a device.
- Standard connectivity beats local flexibility.
- Only the minimum latform is widespread.
- SMS had in USA (doh!)
- Develops lack experience and tools
- Device manufacturers unfamiliar with hackishness
- OWNERZERD by the US carriers. (same in UK).

- Server infrastructure is key. Pry data out of carriers.
- Out of band (eg Flickr) allows complimentary value.
- supports CPU-intensive post-processing
- Phone # is universal primary key

Underuse of Voice
- VoIP.

Mesh is coming but not soon.
- Dodgeball is social mesh on point to point links.
- Multi-network coming. Bluetooth, Wifi

Note here the differences with the UK. And the recent announcement that Broadreach WiFi hotspots would be free for Skype only. So Skype + Skype in and out + wifi + PDA + Broadreach = free encrypted phone calls with presence.

I was just walking through the lobby and came across a Brit I didn't know. He's got his Apple iBook open facing outwards with a camera on the top running iChat and the remote video on full screen. On the screen is Suw Charman in the UK (a regular on IRC #joiito) talking and listening as he walks round the conference. Hi Suw!

In the hall is a big Apple screen. It's running the feed from a chat session. The chat is full of bots that are scanning the crowd for Bluetooth devices and then looking up the IDs on Google and matching them with people's websites. It's also getting a feed from Technorati of all the blogs and photos people are using to document the conference. You should be able to see this at http://etech.inroomchat.org/chatlogs/

The Brits are a little subculture within the conference. They're constantly giggling and cracking jokes about obscure UK TV programs. During the last corporate presentation from Nokia there was a mass IRC coordinated walkout.

There seem to be very few Bluetooth headsets here compared with the UK. But everyone has a cellphone pressed to their ear.

Out on the streets, the Californians are all trim and lightly tanned. Very few *big* people compared with the rest of the US.

Clay Shirky (commentator), Stewart Butterfield (Flickr), Joshua Schachter(del.icio.us), Jimmy Wales(wikipedia)

Wikipedia categorization started last summer. English was chaos for some weeks. It self organised quickly but took a while to rationalise.

Stewart. Tags are not necessarily a replacement for categories. 200,000 tags.

Joshua. del.icio.us started with a personal text file with 20,000 url entries. Then he started adding #tag on the end so that he could do search and replace. Then it became a web site. Then multi-user. What's interesting is community behaviour where people group round a common tag that means nothing in itself. JB: I love this! This is how open source software gets written. It starts with a personal itch that you can't stop scratching. And often because the simplest possible tool you're using doesn't quite cut it any more.

Flickr: People using the comments attached to a photo or tag to have a conversation. So the tag or photo becomes a placemark for an on the fly discussion board.

Q from Marc Canter: Can we share tags across systems? Technorati already doing that. (Incidentally, arc keeps asking this and I don't get what he's asking for)

There are no bad tags. As long as they are useful for the user and there is feedback they will tend to be good enough. There is still a UI problem with finding things tagged with say Java when people used JDK. making it useable relies on clever UI around "Related" tags. "the point wasn’t to let you find all and only pictures of elephants, it was to give people better tools for organizing their own pictures, it was a happy accident that it worked across users. "

James Wales.

English >500,000 articles. In 350,000 categories. Higher Alexa than NY Times. 500 million page views per month.

Wikicities.com Social computing successor to home pages. 170 communities formed in 3 months. Growing faster than Wikipedia did. Users free to license content however they like.

Wikis Solve Author Fatigue: anyone can take over. Quality control: Everything can be peer reviewed and improved.

Organisation by the community: Software does not force how the community works.

Wikipedia is a social innovation not a technical innovation.

Justin F. Chapweske Founder of Swarmcast.

The trend is towards larger and larger files. We're now at the stage of moving DVDs around over the net. But http doesn't work for very large data files. Probability of failure tends to one as file size grows. So is there an equivalent to RAID for moving large files? Fault tolerance doesn't help. Load balancing still has a single transaction happening on a single server. Akamai costs 20-30 times normal bandwidth. The cheap version of using mirrors introduces security risks and the user experience sucks.

Hence Swarming. Ad hoc CDN (Content Distribution Network). Transparent: Looks no different from normal http. Opens up the possibility of swarm streaming. This should become ubiquitous. Uses simple additional http headers.

Best Practices for web design to support this.
- Static elements

Public test edition available. http://onionnetworks.com/products/swarmstream/

JB: I have my doubts about this. I'm not sure why people will install this in their browser. Maybe it needs to partner with the pr0n industry like peercast.

Cory Doctorow. He's reading a speech which will be posted on the net. I'll find the URL.

http://www.boingboing.net/2005/03/16/corys_talk_from_etec.html

read it. This one's important.

Day 2
Neil Gershenfeld. Director of MIT Centre for bits and atoms.
State of the Art in Fabrication. $10 billion chip fab. Just spreading stuff around and baking it like we've been doing for thousands of years. Just with finer detail. But it's nothing compared with Ribosome fabs and DNA. Passes all the tests of computing. undamentally digital process.

So they're working on hardware fab where the materials and process are a computer. The spec for the design is implicit in the materials. Working downwards from cm to micrometers to nanometres.

Back to communications theory. Shanno showed that there is a threshold. With some error checking, there is a threshold. Below that you can get zero errors despite finite amounts of noise. Now the ribosome-DNA process has error checking built in and so can replicate with zero errors. This shows it's possible to have hardware fabrication with zero errors if you take a computational approach. The challenge is to do it at all size levels.

So MIT started a course, "How to make almost anything". Some projects: A scream body (scream anywhere in silence into a back pack and then play back the scream later). A browser for parrots. Defensive clothing to protect your personal space. It turned out personal fab means you can produce anything for a single individual. Laser Cutter+Sign cutter+small micron milling machine+automated electronics assembly. for $20K. An approximation of a personal fab plant. Labs like this now all over the world including the 3rd world. He's showing Ghana street kids using a lab to build stacking bots. In India building milk analysis machines for rural farmers for $1 of parts. Norway building mesh network sensors to track reindeer. India-Pakistan border putting up internet enabled qounset huts. Gives people something to do instead of shooting each other. Now using the labs to make the huts self-reproducing.

What's needed is distributed VC to help fund distributed fab design.

Personal Fab is now at the PDP11 era from the 70s but it's moving really fast.

Bits to atoms discussion
JB: This stuff reminds me of SF novels. Imagine a garbage can in the corner. Pour grey goo into it, download a program to the can and out pops a microwave.

Tim O'Reilly , Dale Dougherty, Bran Ferren, Neil Gershenfeld, Saul Griffith

Squidlabs. A startup to build personal fab plants in SF.
Applied Minds. High pressure rapid hardware prototyping. Building tools to support this. Merging creativity wth engineering by starting at the model, rather than the spec. (JB: extreme engineering to parallel extreme programming. There's a note there that the first time an engineer uses a CNC machine, they can't believe how dumb they are.)

The ideal workshop is one which lets you quickly build the tool you need to build the thing you actually want. eg Using a computer controlled water jet cutter or ink jet printer to feed cad designs straight through to complex physical shapes. I get the feeling that when Apple gets bored with music and video, we'll see them produce iFactory! See also ifabricate from last night. A community web site to break down a big hardware project into sub-routines that people can describe individually; When building a bicycle, somebody else can design the wheels. So a project becomes assembling designs from other people.

An aside "Just in time education instead of just in case education".

iFabricate.com
Really rather cool bunch of Australians doing OS hardware fabrication. Like Bicycles. [from: del.icio.us]

What is TV? A collection of transports. A format involving synced picture and sound. An activity.
TV is what we do on the couch. Computing is what we do at the desk.

What is "taking back"? Opening up distribution. Opening up content creation.

Cable. Lack of standards. Need to cut cable operator into revenue.

Finally we got to the demo. They're building an interactive TV system where it's all open standards and can be downloaded as a package onto an open hardware platform.

I suspect this is waiting for Apple to release more amateur video tools. Anyone can take a photo some people can create music. Almost no-one can create video that's worth watching. It's an order of magnitude harder. But like everything the barriers to entry are dropping.

The search for pr0n drives people to become alpha geeks

Everybody wants pr0n + laws and norms + everybody loves tech. =innovative ways to look without being seen.

The first vibrator was steam powered.
Early vibrators, were camouflaged technology "I only use it for therapeutic purposes."

1920 vibrators appear in pr0n and get banned by various states.

Late 1970s VCR introduces "private pr0n"

Obscenity law. What is Obscenity?
The Miller test.
- appeals to prurient interest
- offensive sex and/or excretions based on contemporary community standards
- has no social, literary, artistic or scientific value

child pr0n post 82, always obscene unless it's a fictional representation

seven dirty words. broadcasts subject to different values.

Private VCR tapes very different from movie theatres. much less likely to have community complaints. Hence VCR widens and encourages market.

Meanwhile on the internet.
Ascii pr0n was poor.
But cheap, easy and private means internet + pr0n is inevitable.
And Internet breaks 2nd prong of miller law. Where is the community? Important case that established that Internet was not subject to broadcast restrictions.

2005 US vs Extreme Associates
obscenity statutes are unconstitutional. Tight interpretation of privacy in own home.

Nitke vs Gonzales ongoing.
How can you define obscenity in community when community is the world.

pre-paid internet pr0n cards let you pay cash for porn.
user friendly anonymous proxies.
eg TOR. tor.eff.org downside is anonymous attacks on legitimate sites

Off the record messaging. repudiability and forward anonymity Each chat session has unique key exchange and key is discarded after session. "What's good for pr0n is good for free speech"

"Anonymity loves company. today's pr0n tools are tomorrow's human rights protections."

Other Tech areas being driven by pr0n industry. Bandwidth issues. peercasting, video on demand, teledildonics.

I wasn't there but caught a couple of comments on IRC.
(according to salesforce guy) "Sforce web service API is now responsible for 20% of salesforce.com activity."
Hm. And flickr this morning was cited at 15% right now, yes?

People seemed unimpressed by they're development environment. "Re-inventing Oracle forms".

Hilarious session with Matt Jones and Chris Heathcote. I can't remember any of it, because I was giggling on IRC the whole time. Mostly about moving computing down to unusual devices like door knobs and furniture. But the performance was like Adam and Joe. Gotta love the Brits.

The room was packed with people spilling out the door. O'Reilly have some size and planning problems.

Richard Rachid. MS Research.
- Harnessing human scale storage. Terabytes now cheap.
- Sensecam. A Black Box for a human being. Lots of sensors. Image stabilization a big problem. Key issue was working out, did something interesting happen. Is the camera stable. Privacy studies to see how people feel both about taking the data and appearing in it. Now working on V2.
- Unconventional devices. Live tables that react to things placed on them.
- Holographic films to create 3D displays linked to the 3D world. To create a 3D user interface.
- Fighting HIV with computer science. HIV. "The borg would be proud". Relates machine learning, spam and HIV. Shorter genomes are better. So using computer search to find shortest genome that expresses as one aspect of HIV.

Yahoo! Research. Gary Flake.
- Working with O'Reilly.
- Y!Q bookmarklet to popup a window that is context sensitive to what you were looking at.
- Improving aggregation by combining MyYahoo RSS aggregator with search. (sounds like technorati)
- Tech:Buzz game. Markets as predictors. Weights opinions from people who predict well. Built in partnership with NewsFutures. Like a futures market but tracks ideas and lets people compete on them. Fundamentally new type of auction. Has an API.

Google. Peter Norvig
- Key area of research is indexing new types of data. Then anaylsing it, then presenting it.
- Now showing Google Suggest. I don't think there's going to be anything new shown here. What Google are doing with these is to come up with new ways of interacting with a web page.
- Google personalization. Tags?

Jeff Bezos. Showing A9. He's using Win XP and the demo has just blown up!

Vertical search. Provides drill down into Google search data. Aim is to get the user community to create vertical search domains. Adding 3 tags to RSS to allow search to be syndicated which A9 then aggregates.

New A9 launched this morning. "See more columns"

Hard to describe but it allows people with domain expertise to develop tight search criteria that refelct their domain. And then to feed that back into the central site so other people can use it. Almost trivially easy to extend.

Break time. Now I have to try and find a power outlet or my laptop will die.

Ex Thinking Machines. Started the Long Now project to build a 10,000 year clock. Has worked wth Disney Imagineering. Now Applied Minds. Remixing Art, Technology. Aims to build V1.0 of things and avoid ever doing v2.0 So working with partners.
Los Angeles warehouse. But full of hardware, CNC machines, electron microscopes and stuff. 40 projects currently.

Now showing a Robot dinosaur.

- Robots. Best bit of robots is building the small models. Some very cool videos of 5 legged crabs, 4 legged rollers and a snake that hops. On the IRC channel someone says "okay, I'm holding my breath now, hoping that those cute robots aren't being bought up by the Pentagon and turned into killers.". The IRC channel is irc://irc.freenode.net/etech

Unbelievably hacked SUV. Packed full of electronic gear.

Also showing a software project on analysing anti-cancer drugs.

IMHO. Applied minds is what The Media Lab was and should have become.

Now showing a map interface combining a touch sensitive display built into a table. touch-sensitive full-table display of map. can drag with finger, move new images over old, zoom in zoom out, etc. Shown to map makers who were weeping with emotion. Great project. Consists of hardware, software and emotion.

Now working on a table that physically deforms the surface to show mountains. Audience oohs and aahs.

Brendan Eich.

Key idea is that Firefox is a development platform. Using XUL, RDF and Javascript. And most extensions ship with source so anyone can view source and extend them.

Build with web technologies as well as C++. Lowers the barrier to entry.

Firefox 1.2 may have a Python language I/F. Much clapping from the audience.