July 15th, 2005 · Comments Off
Bela Labovitch, Andrew Dallas and I have created an early version of a dedicated OPML
search
engine public service, which we think is perhaps the first. We
believe in the potential of OPML (more on that later) and our goal is
to
create something of value for the OPML and podcasting community. This is a lab project. Technically, it is lots
of fun because it must function recursively. User-wise, we have
many questions regarding how and what it should render, what it should
display, and what actions it should facilitate, in order to be most
useful. So we need your help!
If you want to try it out now, go to http://opmlsearch.com,
which will redirect to our current server location and provide an
up-to-the-minute view of our progress. Expect changes, and, sometimes,
downtime. This is a research project!
If you have an OPML source with a URL, please click on “Add your OPML source here”
and we will spider your source regularly. Then we will maintain
your source as part of the archive.
Also, if you provide an email address when you submit your OPML URL, we
can contact you with more information and updates, and at your option,
invite you to join a list to discuss and input re: the engine and its
evolution. We will protect your private information absolutely,
and of course you can opt out of updates or the list at any time.
Please feel free to email us suggestions on how you would like your search displayed, and how this
engine might be of most use to the community of users and developers.
I can be contacted directly at jmoore at cyber.law.harvard.edu. When you send to me
you will encounter a spam
challenge almost
immediately, to make sure you are a person. Anyone reading this
passes! So just reply to the message and you will get through.
Thanks for your help!
Tags: Economics and cybenetics
July 15th, 2005 · Comments Off
For some time I have been interested in investing in what I call “web
superservices.” Our RSS Investors fund is dedicated to helping
entrepreneurs create such services and link them together into scripted
metaservices, to solve important social problems. Web superservices
provide essential functions for solving problems (such as search,
storage/archive, security, pooling of information, notification of
changes, identification of relationships, analysis of memes), are
available on the web as public or near-public global resources with
enormous economies of scale and scope, have very simple open APIs, and
can be integrated (scripted together and/or customized) by users or
near users to provide custom solutions to important problems.
These services are rapidly evolving, and are radically changing the
ecology of information technology, the availability and flexibility of
computing solutions and, indeed, worldwide society.
Consider the new web ecosystem. Ecological succession continues
in Internet and society. This is the direct analogue of ecological
sucession in nature: grasses and weeds giving way to connifers
giving way to hardwood forests with mature canopies. Each new stage of succession brings with it
new keystone species, linked togetether in new forms of relationships.
Small, “one server” companies are becoming essential services: Bloggdigger, del.icio.us, weblogs.com.
Companies consciously bioengineered for the new ecology
are becoming well-established and are evolving quickly:
Bloglines, Technorati, Blogger, Typepad, Newsgator, Flickr.
Large e-commerce and search/portal/media companies are opening up their
interfaces more and more deeply to enable users to access their core
functions as scriptable services: Yahoo!, Google, MSN, eBay, Amazon.
Media companies are adding so many RSS feeds, with so many specific
topics and sources, that they are becoming realtime scriptable content
sources to anyone using a news aggregator. Boston.com has 42 discrete RSS feeds for specific columnists. Want to follow the Red Sox? And my.yahoo.com has become the world’s largest aggregator, and–not coincidently–the largest online news site.
By the wide deployment of open standards and APIs by web sites, and
especially by the invitational, “pull” orientation of URLs and
RSS–where the user can initiate a relationship with a service whenever
and howerver the user wants–the population of global, powerful,
scriptable superservices is fast expanding, as is the diverse community
of users that are scripting these services together into solutions.
Dave Winer gets much of the credit. His original blogging and
aggregation software was based on a functional analysis of the ATEX high
end content management system that at the time was used by most
newspapers and magazines. His journalist friends complained about it,
and it was expensive. Dave’s columns for Wired were edited in an
ATEX. Dave made a functional analysis of what the ATEX did, and
created an open, inexpensive, community-oriented version of it.
This content management system in turn enabled a whole community of
users to create blogs.
Now this methodology of system and service development has become more
general. This is in large measure due to Dave’s influence in keeping RSS simple, and in promoting what I believe is a new approach to developing service and application software.
Superservices are going to advance very quickly from here on out. We
will be presented with an expanding array of powerful, general purpose,
scriptable and user-oriented services from which to choose in rewiring
our world. All the “verticals” will be affected. The
functional analysis of media continues, with the new
search engines and aggregators and other superservices, but more
important, the functional analysis of other information technology
solutions is spreading, and will yield new forms of superservices not
yet conceived. Consider SAP, the largest provider of enterprise
resource planning and management system. SAP has recently
promised to open the APIs to its conventional web services. But this is
too little and too late. Expect entrepreneurs to analyze the
underlying functions of SAP systems, and provide open, superservice
alternatives, letting corporate users script together powerful new
networks of superservices at a fraction of today’s cost, and with
vastly more speed and flexibility.
Revolution.
Web superservices Google search July 15, 2005
Tags: Economics and cybenetics
July 15th, 2005 · Comments Off
Here is a
terrific summary of citizen journalist coverage of the London bombings.. Sad
but also inspiring. Bloggers–citizens–now consistently provide
instant coverage of breaking news wherever their numbers are large
enough. From the article:
“London is a cell-phone saturated city, and what may be most remarkable
about the instant proliferation of snapshots by average Joes is how
unremarkable it was viewed by the blogging community, says technology
journalist Xeni Jardin. Of course cell-phone images proliferated; of
course citizen journalism played a significant role in the day’s
terrible events. More interesting than widely circulating cell-phone
pictures, she says, is the fact that Thursday may have been the first
time cell-phone video footage was used so extensively by high-profile
media outlets. The first video footage of the event that appeared on
CNN, after all, was videophone footage from inside one of the damaged
trains. Ever since, broadcast networks and wire services have been
actively soliciting amateur video footage and photographs.”
*
From an “emergent organizational systems” standpoint, there are a number of interesting things to reflect on:
First, the event caused a near-instant replication of the well-known
three-layer structure of the bloggosphere: Some bloggers happen
to
be present at the scene, and manage to take a phone picture, file a
phoned-in-podcast, or write a note. Others are in position to
swarm to the scene, and still more are able to scan the emerging news
stream and aggregate it, summarize it, and comment on it. All in
real time. This is the second superpower swinging into collective
action with no explicit central coordination.
Second, the techology and culture of content sharing and
community-based content categorization facilitated in this case
by moblog.co.uk.,
“picturephoning.com and then Wikipedia,”* allowed the creation of a near-instant shared resource of photographs.
Third, Creative Commons licenses were applied to much of the content,
enabling sharing, derivative works, and widespread
republication–a.k.a. syndication. Perhaps most important,
mainstream news publishers were able to republish blogger citizen
content without those outlets having to make contact and negotiate
rights with the citizen producers of the content. And at the same
time, the rights of the content owners to the most important, thing,
attribution, was preserved.
“Take, as a case study, the most instantly iconic photo to emerge from
the bombings: a hazy picture of a man in a crowded, eerily lit subway
tunnel, holding a handkerchief to his mouth. That picture was taken on
a camera phone by Adam Stacey, by no means a professional photographer,
who happened to be on the subway train that was hit in a tunnel outside
the Kings Cross tube station. Stacey instantly beamed the image to his
friend Alfie Dennen, who runs moblog.co.uk. Dennen published the
snapshot with a
Creative Commons
license permitting anybody to reprint it provided Stacey received
credit for the photo. From there the image was picked up by
*
Overall, the response to this tragic event showed not only the
potential, but the realized capability of full-stream “really simple
syndication,” joining simple legal permission on top of simple access
to searchable high quality content aggregated from the simple
contributions of hundreds of citizens acting on their own initiative
and yet also as members of an emergent community catalyzed by the
bombings.
Tags: Economics and cybenetics
