Mmm, Yes, But

Antony Mayfield points to an interesting piece in the Guardian that worries about what it calls the Mmm, Yes, But culture that blogs can spawn:

They will write: "Mmm, yes, but have you considered ..." To which we will reply: "Mmm, yes, you could be right about ..." And so a wonderfully civilised post-Blairite conversation will ensue. I wonder. There's nothing very civilised about a lot of the posting happening now; it's more like a shouting match-cum-punchup. And that's why it's often so entertaining. There is something about the Mmm-yes-but theory of the blog that is quite disquieting. Even if it became a reality, it could result only in hesitant journalism, bland criticism and writing that is predisposed to dull consensus.

As a journalist and blogger, I too have noticed this practice. Indeed, I adopt myself. But this is not out of timidity, but because I think it is the only way if blogging is to lead to anything of value in terms of online discussions.

If you want to see why the mmm-yes-but approach is necessary, take a look at the comments on Digg or Slashdot. There you will see human nature at its worst, with abusive, ad hominem, logicless attacks on the other posts leading to yet more of the same. If, on the contrary, you answer with the mmm-yes-but technique, I've noticed how it quickly chills the temperature of the debate. Not, let it be noted, the level of the debate, merely the language in which it is framed.

So to the Guardian writer and his points, I can only say: mmm, yes, but....

I Want My Virtual London

Imagine:

flying at rooftop height up the Thames. You dive under Tower Bridge, then twist between the Gherkin and Tower 42 skyscrapers. As the London Eye looms, you bank right and dive into a translucent globe which transports you into the middle of St Paul's cathedral.

Yes!

This is an inadequate verbal description of the experience of using Virtual London (though you can click here for a clip). It is a dramatic 3D computer model showing every single building inside the M25 as at least a shaded box; some are in almost photographic detail. The model is being developed, with government money, to help Londoners visualise what is happening to their city.

Yes! Yes!

What Londoners cannot do, however, is experience Virtual London on the web. The reason will be familiar to anyone who has been following Technology Guardian's Free Our Data campaign: Virtual London is based partly on a database created by Ordnance Survey, a state-owned body which has to generate commercial returns. Although Virtual London was funded by another state body, the computer model cannot be posted on the web without infringing Ordnance Survey's copyright.

No!

As a Londoner, and proud of it, I demand my virtual birthright. If the Ordnance Survey isn't up to providing it, I suggest we place an ordnance under 'em and be done with the wretches.

Interview with Second Life's Philip Rosedale, Part I

As I mentioned, last week I had an article in the Guardian about Second Life and the concerns over the CopyBot program. This was largely based on an extensive interview with Linden Lab's founder and CEO, Philip Linden, conducted on 6 November, 2006, together with email follow-ups.

One of the frustrating things with articles for hard-copy titles like the Guardian is that space is always at a premium. This means that there were only a limited number of quotations that I could use from the interview, and that a huge amount of interesting material remained unprinted. Happily, blogs can function as an adjunct to traditional publishing, offering all kinds of supplementary material.

So I'm making the full text of the interview available here. I've tidied this up only minimally, since I was keen to preserve the incredible energy and enthusiasm that Rosedale transmits in his speech. This first part concentrates on the roots of Second Life; the second and final part, looks at its current state and possible futures.

Glyn Moody: When did you first start thinking about creating an imaginary world? What was the attraction of the idea?

Philip Rosedale: I'd say there are two things about me that probably made me so passionate about what we are doing. The first was that since I was a little kid I was interested in physics, and also in how things worked. I was doing doing electronics when I was really young, and started programming computers as soon as I had enough money to get one.

I think the second thing about me that made me have the particular bent on Second Life that I did was that I was very creative. Sometimes you get that, you get somebody who's fairly artistic and creative but they get into science and technology. I'm definitely one of those people. I am left-handed, and I'd say cognitively I'm really left-handed.

Glyn Moody: You've mentioned books as being very important to you as a child, and the fact that they represented an early form of virtual reality: to what extent is your work with virtual worlds a kind of authorship or creativity for you?

Philip Rosedale: I think there's an important differentiation. I think there are people who played a lot in Dungeons and Dragons, and read a lot of books, and immersed themselves in the fantasy world that can be constructed through the simulator that is your brain, by reading books. And I think there are lot of people who went in the direction of saying, Well, can't I create a book in a computer that is my own vision for a particular kind of world? And then you, the user, can wander around in my vision. I think that there are a lot of people in history who have done a lot of really interesting projects that fall into that category. But it's really important to note that Second Life isn't one of those.

The difference is that Second Life is not under my control, and it was never my fantasy to be the Dungeon Master of Second Life. I was very, very passionate from the earliest times about the idea of creating a place that re-implemented the laws of physics in a simulation. But once that was done, I like everyone else would be free to play however I wanted with those Lego blocks, where the Lego blocks were atoms in this new world.

I point that out because there is a real upper limit to what one creative person can do when they are the only artistic input into the structure of a world. And I think there is also an experiential upper limit: World of Warcraft or Everquest can only be so interesting so long as all the content is basically laid out by a first Michelangelo who draws out the world. Second Life just was never that way - it was just dirt at the beginning. I never tried to create anything beautiful, I didn't want to make a book.

Glyn Moody: So in a way you had the same intuition as the free software people about collaboration being a much richer avenue for creation?

Philip Rosedale: I was excited by the idea of being able to build things and show them to people. And I wanted those other people to build things and show them to me. The ability to communicate with great sophistication and to externalise one's thoughts – about my intentions, my thoughts, my designs – those were the two foundational things that I was trying to enable in building the environment.

Glyn Moody: With 20-20 hindsight your career looks as if at every step you've done things in order to achieve your final goal; to what extent did you consciously say: I'll do this and then this in order finally to build my virtual world?

Philip Rosedale: When Snow Crash came out in 1992, my wife bought me the book for my birthday and said: Oh, you're going to like this, another one of these crazy people like you thinking about this simulation stuff. So by then amongst my friends I was well known as the guy into this digital world idea.

I used to do a presentation on the mythology of the Metaverse. Movies often present you with a picture of a future that's mature, and then they try to suggest in some either really detailed or minimal way how things got to be that way. And I always laughed about how the mythology of the Metaverse was always wrong.

People would always say, Well, it all started because businesses wanted to visualise data in 3D and time went by and now we have people walking their dogs and dancing – that's baloney. It never happens that way. New mediums are always used by creative people for play first. And they're not used by big businesses to better imagine their data. The same thing was true of instant messaging, email, television, radio, the Web itself – all of those mediums were used initially for entertainment and just for people who wanted to goof off. They were not trusted; and then as time went by they became trusted, and then people began using them for business because they were in the vernacular by that point.

In the mid-'90s I was already telling my friends this Metaverse thing isn't going to work until it's really sexy and exciting, and it's not going to be with the computers that are around. All these companies and projects are going to fail, and that's going to suck. Because we're all dreaming this dream, and all these people are getting companies funded to go after it, and I want to do that too, but I know that it isn't going to work.

I said to people: video compression over the Internet – this is 1995 - however, will work, and that's a powerful communication enabler. And besides that, I wanted to get some experience writing programs for Windows. So I said, OK, I'll write a program that does multipoint video conferencing – a solvable algorithmic problem if you're just trying to do 2-way 28.8 modem communication of video streams.

So I built this product called FreeVue. Rob Glaser saw it, asked me to go to RealNetworks. I didn't want to move to Seattle; the big final decision that I made to go to RealNetworks was that – and I told my friends this – I'm going to go to Real Networks because I'm going to get a great engineering management experience because this project is going to be a big project – this virtual world thing.

In mid-1999 networking got fast enough, and Nvidia released the big 3D card, the GeForce2, and I said, Man, I'm out of here, I've got to start this, it can be done. But the "it can be done" was always contingent on the idea that it had to be playful and fun and chaotic and just crazy for the kind of vision for the Metaverse to take off.

Glyn Moody: I believe that originally Linden Lab was going to be a hardware company: could say a little about those early days – what you were trying to do, and what happened to change your mind?

Philip Rosedale: In '93 I was trying to imagine a way to put multiple cheap monitors around one's head. For $300 you could buy pretty good monitors. If you wanted to create an immersive display where you could really have the world all around you, you could put three of these things right next to each other – or more, but three was good – but you had to hold your head 15 inches from the screen to be immersed in the image. All these companies were trying to build head-mounted displays so you could look around, but that was dumb because you couldn't build LCDs that had anyway near the quality of a monitor, even for $30,000.

I was sitting one night just totally obsessed with this problem, and thought: God, you know, what would be really cool would be if I didn't have to move my head - I can't move 40 lb monitors around: what if I didn't actually move my head at all? What if I couldn't move my head at all, but when I tried to look to the left and right, there was something that could feel me trying to look to the left and the right, and would move my view around. And I realised this was a powerful idea.

Fast forward six years. I had some money, and I had time. I said: I am going to get a shop and a welder and a milling machine and I'm going to build this thing, because it's going to cost 50 grand to prototype. So this is '99 to late 2000 - and we actually got it working: we have it here in the office. There's all our machine tools and stuff at the back and you can try it out. They call it "The Rig": our users have heard about it, most people don't know what it is. But it's really, really a cool idea, and we want to get back to it.

There were probably four or five of us in the office by the time we were fiddling around with this prototype, and I remember saying: you guys, even if we build this haptic rig, and you can literally walk into a virtual world and hold your hand up in front of your face and look at it: Where are we going to go with this thing - Doom? It seemed like a pretty paltry use for such revolutionary technology.

Obviously, even in '99 we had been prototyping some of the simulation layers of Second Life, but we had this realisation: the much bigger problem is the software, the hardware's easy. You can use any number of interfaces for this stuff, but the thing that matters so much here is the place. The place that we're all going to go is the hardest problem from a technology perspective and also probably the best business. So that was it.

Glyn Moody: In April 2003, you made a major change to Second Life when you decided to allow residents to keep the intellectual property rights to the things they made. I've come across a couple of explanations for what led up to that, including de Soto's book, The Mystery of Capital, and a meeting involving Larry Lessig and Edward Castronova: could you untangle what exactly led you to make that change, and why it was important?

Philip Rosedale: In 2002 a guy named Doug, who works here, gave me that book, The Mystery of Capital, and he said: You've got to read this. It had a terrible front cover, and I don't have much time for business self-improvement books, and I remember looking at it and thinking: oh god, this is one of these books that some academic wrote because he needed to finish his degree. But Doug's a really smart guy, and I was like, OK, if Doug says to read it, I'll read it. Those first 15 pages it reads like – I don't know what it reads like – it reads like the Gettysburg Address – it's just moving. Basically I read that, and I was like, man, oh man, that's so convincing.

There's a book I read before that, though, that we were talking about a lot, which really informed our design, and that's Jane Jacobs's The Death and Life of Great American Cities. That was one of the most important things because it was in 2001, 2002, that we got into this idea that the way online games worked was just completely inconsistent with what we're trying to do, and that Everquest or online games of the time were what Jane Jacobs was talking about when she said that planned cites all failed.

Then you read Death and Life of Great American Cities, and what that says is that it all has to be random. The randomness gives way to overlapping behaviours where some people are walking to go to the store, some people are walking to their home, some people are walking to go to work. Those people all run into each other, there's a kind of a commons behaviour where they'd like to just double click on their work and get there immediately, but they can't: they have to walk. That means they entertain each other: some of the times you're the one being entertained, and some of the times you're the entertainment, that's kind of what Jane Jacobs said. And we were like, oh yeah, that's exactly what we want. Because if the world is just created by everybody, then you'll have this very haphazard, crazy kind of feel to it, and that'll be incredibly powerful the way New York is.

The Mystery of Capital was like a follow on to that, because it said for people to build that way everybody has to own their own intellectual property - including of course physical real estate - in a very explicit way with alienability and all that stuff.

Then we had this little Star Chamber, with Larry Lessig, Ted Castronova, Julian Dibbell, Mitch Kapor. We all sat down and looked at what was going on and those guys were like, yeah, you've got you're thinking exactly the right way, you've got to let the economy be free running and real.

Glyn Moody: Around the same time there was something of a revolt among the residents of Second Life over the tax system then in place: what exactly happened?

Philip Rosedale: That was us doing dumb stuff and getting reminded of it. We were never misaligned with people's creative intentions – the idea of no taxation without representation. Our initial economy wasn't very real – the economy more or less worked the same way, but you couldn't convert things back and forth to dollars. We always intended to make it completely real, so that people could use those tokens of value, transferable in any way they wanted. That went back to some of the 2001 thinking about how people that owned property or whatever in Second Life would be the operators of Second Life, and that at least some of them would want to make money doing that.

The whole tax revolt thing was very funny because what we were trying to do was balance the public commons - resources that you access in Second Life like scripting and land and how many prims you could build and whether they had lights on. We built this taxation system that every Monday would automatically tax you according to how much stuff you had in the world and how big it was. It's still fundamentally a good idea; the problem was this tax bill that you got every week that was so algorithmically complicated that no human, us included, could estimate what their tax would be. It was terrible. So people just had a horrible experience with that.

It was kind of chance that people were so pissed off with the prim accounting system at about the same time we switched over to allow people to own land. The other thing was, in the initial economy you couldn't pay more and get more land – you had to earn more money within the economy to buy more land. When we made that change at the end of 2003, we said, look look look: this is just land, this is just property. If you want to buy more of it, you can buy it with dollars, we're not going to stop you from doing that.

That pissed off people too, because they said: Look, we want it to be a pure meritocracy. If you're successful in Second Life you cannot use US cash to get more land, you have to please other people. And in principle, I think that's lovely. But the problem is you've got a sort of "water seeks it's own level" there around design; arbitrage always exists. So it seems foolish to be a big central "we're going to catch you if you're cheating" organisation and try to keep people from selling those credits, those Linden dollars on the side. So we said, screw that, we're just going to open the system all the way – you can buy land and turn Linden dollars into dollars.

Second Life by Numbers

Here's a fun list of financial figures associated with Second Life. The really significant one is the following:

652,581 USD - Real dollars spent in SL in the last 24 hours.

- not least because it hasn't wavered during all of the CopyBot kerfuffle, despite what all the gloom merchants were saying.

Speaking of which, I have a piece in the Guardian on the subject, mind-melded with some background to how Second Life came about. The basic message is: Don't Panic.

The Semantic Newspaper

Here's a typically thoughtful meditation from Techdirt that considers ways in which newspapers could usefully embrace not just the Internet, but its more advanced technologies like the Semantic Web. It's an interesting idea, but I fear we may have to wait a while to see it implemented by any of the big names, even the savvy ones (yup, that's you, Guardian.)

Uninspired Little Englanders

I've written about INSPIRE before, and now this depressing piece in The Guardian suggests that the twits in the UK Government are going to scupper it because of their feudal insistence on protecting inefficient and anachronistic "businesses" like the Ordnance Survey. Release the data and let a thousand businesses bloom, people.

Open Source Education

The Guardian has a story entitled "The open source approach to education". It's about a report on the same from Futurelab, and while there's nothing really new there, it's nonetheless good to see the usual memes being spread about a bit in new contexts:

It is also possible to conceive of young people or teachers working together as programmers to create new resources and tools that are of relevance to them in supporting their own learning. These approaches go beyond the traditional distinction between 'users' and 'producers' of educational resources, instead, they offer models of innovation in which these communities are intermingled, the notion of ownership is changed and the economical model of cost and reward is reworked. These new hybrid models of innovation that FLOSS exemplifies require us to ask what models of ownership we might need to develop; what mechanisms might need to be put in place to encourage exchange between sectors; what role users of educational resources might play in the creation of resources; and what business models would need developing to allow further exploration in this area.

Towards a Wikipedia Done Properly

Larry Sanger's name has cropped up several times on this blog, so I was delighted to interview him recently for The Guardian. You can read the finished result here. Larry rightly takes me to task for the misleading headline and sub-head, but in my own defence I have to point out that I didn't write them.

Of FAQs and NAQs

FAQs - Frequently Asked Questions - are one of the characteristic concepts of the online world, born, presumably, of a cheery belief that it is possible for experts to distill any given area into a few pithy questions and answers for the benefit of newbies.

But things are moving on. The Guardian has pioneered what it calls "Newly Asked Questions", and now we have a new kind of FAQ: "Frequently Awkward Questions", aimed at the entertainment industry. I imagine that others will follow in due course.

OpenStreetMap - Finding Our Way

I wrote a little about the Guardian's campaign to obtain open access to Government-generated data (which we pay for), but here's an interesting alternative: generate it yourself.

This weekend, a bunch of intrepid GPS users aims to map the whole of the Isle of Wight, and then to use this information to generate their own detailed maps, which will be in released under a Creative Commons licence.

The overarching project is called OpenStreetMap, and it seems the perfect way to get public mapping data. Rather waiting for the Government graciously to give us our data back, let's take to the streets and do it ourselves: of the people, by the people, for the people.

Now, if only I had a GPS device....

E-commerce 2.0 Re-visited

A little while back, when I was musing upon e-commerce 2.0, I mentioned Chinesepod.com. Now I've gone the whole hog, interviewing the enterprising Ken Carroll, its creator, for the Guardian. I'd also recommend taking a look at Japanesepod101.com, newly-revamped, which is another fine example of e-commerce 2.0, and directly inspired by Chinesepod.

Bloggers Do It Openly

So bloggers do matter after all, according to this Guardian piece. That there exist groups of people who wield a power disproportionate to their numbers is nothing new: it has happened throughout history. What's novel here is that this is being done in a completely transparent way, whereas in the past all the discussions and verbal derring-do would have happened behind closed doors.

So say what you like about bloggers - and heavens knows, I've done my bit - at least they do it openly.

Their Words, Not Mine

Since this whole blog is predicated on the commonality that exists between open source, open genomics, open access, open content, and open blah-blah-blah, my own posts that argue for the power of openness will hardly come as a surprise.

So it is always handy when I can point to somebody else who is saying exactly the same thing - particularly because in this case that "somebody else" is about as far as you can get from your stereotypical sandal-wearing, Guardian-reading, weedy liberal.

It comes from the US Committee of Economic Development - "the best of business thinking", no less - which "has addressed national priorities that promote sustained economic growth and development to benefit all Americans," apparently, so nothing wishy-washy there, then.

And yet its latest report is entitled Open Standards, Open Source, and Open Innovation: Harnessing the Benefits of Openness. Its peroration is positively dithyrambic:

Openness is not an overriding moral value that must prevail in every circumstance. But, its extraordinary capability to harness the collective intelligence of our world requires us to consider its implications carefully, nurture it where possible, and avoid efforts to foreclose it without compelling reason. We should not miss the opportunity to harvest the benefits openness might bring.

Their words, not mine.

The Dream of Open Data

Today's Guardian has a fine piece by Charles Arthur and Michael Cross about making data paid for by the UK public freely accessible by them. But it goes beyond merely detailing the problem, and represents the launch of a campaign called "Free Our Data". It's particularly good news that the unnecessary hoarding of data is being addressed by a high-profile title like the Guardian, since a few people in the UK Government might actually read it.

It is rather ironic that at a time when nobody outside Redmond disputes the power of open source, and when open access is almost at the tipping point, open data remains something of a distant dream. Indeed, it is striking how advanced the genomics community is in this respect. As I discovered when I wrote Digital Code of Life, most scientists in this field have been routinely making their data freely available since 1996, when the Bermuda Principles were drawn up. The first of these stated:

It was agreed that all human genomic sequence information, generated by centres funded for large-scale human sequencing, should be freely available and in the public domain in order to encourage research and development and to maximise its benefit to society.

The same should really be true for all kinds of large-scale data that require governmental-scale gathering operations. Since they cannot be feasibly gathered by private companies, such data ends up as a government monopoly. But trying to exploit that monopoly by crudely over-charging for the data is counter-productive, as the Guardian article quantifies. Let's hope the campaign gathers some momentum - I'll certainly being doing my bit.

Update: There is now a Web site devoted to this campaign, including a blog.

(B)looking Back

I wondered earlier whether blogified books were bloks or blooks, and the emerging view seems to be the latter, not least because there is now a Blooker Prize, analogous to the (Man)Booker Prize for dead-tree stuff.

I was delighted to find that the Blooker is run by Lulu.com, discussed recently by Vic Keegan in the Guardian. Lulu is essentially micro-publishing, or publishing on demand: you send your digital file, they send the physical book - as many or as few copies as you like. You can also create music CDs, video DVDs and music downloads in the same way; Lulu.com handles the business end of things, and takes a cut for its troubles.

Nonetheless, the prices are extremely reasonable - if you live in the US: as Vic points out, the postage costs for books, for example, tend to nullify the attractiveness of this approach for anyone elsewhere in the world, at least from a financial point of view. But I don't think that this will be a problem for long. For Lulu.com is the brainchild of Bob Young, the marketing brains behind Red Hat, still probably the best-known GNU/Linux distribution for corporates.

I emphasise the marketing side, since the technical brains behind the company was Marc Ewing, who also named the company. As he explained to me when I was writing Rebel Code:

In college I used to wear my grandfather's lacrosse hat, which was red and white striped. It was my favourite hat, and I lost it somewhere in Philadelphia in my last year. I named the company to memorialise the hat. Of course, Red and White Hat Software wasn't very catchy, so I took a little liberty.

Young, a Canadian by birth, was the perfect complement to the hacker Ewing. He is the consummate salesmen, constantly on the lookout for opportunities. His method is to get close to his customers, to let them tell him what he should be selling them. The end-result of this hands-on approach was that he found himself in the business of selling a free software product: GNU/Linux. It took him a while to understand this strange, topsy-turvy world he tumbled into, but being a shrewd chap, and a marketeer of genius, he managed it when he finally realised:

that the one unique benefit that was creating this enthusiasm [for GNU/Linux] was not that this stuff was better or faster or cheaper, although many would argue that it is all three of those things. The one unique benefit that the customer gets for the first time is control over the technology he's being asked to invest in.

Arguably it was this early understanding of what exactly he was selling - freedom - that helped him make Red Hat the first big commercial success story of the open source world: on 11 August 1999, the day of its IPO, Red Hat's share went from $14 to $52, valuing the company that sold something free at $3.5 billion.

It also made Young a billionaire or thereabouts. He later left Red Hat, but has not lost the knack for pursuing interesting ideas. Even if Lulu.com isn't much good for those of us on the wrong side of the Atlantic, it can only be a matter of time before Bob listens to us Brit users (to say nothing of everyone else in the world outside the US) and puts some infrastructure in place to handle international business too.

Can Google Measure up to Technorati?

Google has acquired Measure Map, a service that tracks visitors and links to blogs. This is of double interest to me.

First, because like all that pathetic crew known to the wider world as bloggers, I am hopelessly addicted to learning who has visited and linked to my blog (this sad human need will surely form the basis of several killer business applications - if only I could think of them...).

This acquisition places another company offering similar services, Technorati, squarely in Google's sights. It also makes Technorati rather more desirable to Google's rivals - no names, no pack drill, but you know who you are. Which brings me neatly to the second reason why this move is of interest to me, since I have an interview with Technorati's founder and CEO, Dave Sifry, in the Guardian today, which touches on many of these points.

I first interviewed Dave some six years ago, when I was writing Rebel Code. At that time, he was riding the dotcom wave with his earlier company, Linuxcare. This had come up with the wizard idea of offering third-party support for all the main open source programs that were widely used in business at the time. As a result, it had mopped up just about every top hacker outside the Linux kernel - people like Andrew Tridgell, the creator of Samba, a program that allows GNU/Linux machines to interoperate with Windows networks by acting as a file and printer server.

There is a certain irony in the fact that Google will now be a competitor to Sifry's Technorati, since in two important respects Linuxcare anticipated a key Google practice: mopping up those hackers, and then encouraging them to work on ancillary projects on company time.

Sifry's explanation back in 2000 of the logic behind this approach throws some interesting light on Google's adoption of the idea:

Number one, it encourages us to get the best developers in the world. When you are actually telling people, hey, I want you to work on open source software while you're at work, , that is pretty unique. And then once you get some [of the best coders], you end up getting more. Because everybody wants to work with the best people. Number two is, the more good open source software that's out there, the more people who are using open source software [there are]. And guess what, that means the more people who are going to need the services of a company like Linuxcare. Number three, when you encourage people to work on open source software while they're at work, you end up getting leaders and teams of open source engineers who now work for your company. And then lastly, but by no means least, it's great PR.

It was good to talk to Dave again, because I found that he hadn't really changed from the lively, enthusiastic, generous individual I'd discovered those years ago. It was particularly good to find that success - as I say in my Guardian piece, Technorati is either going to be bought by someone for lots of money, or make lots of money with an IPO soon - hasn't changed any of that.

More conclusive proof, if any were needed, that free software really is good for the soul.

The Mesh Behind the Mash

Great article by Jack Schofield on mashups. The journalistic detail it brought to this amorphous and currently very trendy Web 2.0 idea helped me understand something that I'd vaguely realised before, but hadn't fully been able to articulate.

The reason that so many mashups use Google Earth (aside from the fact it's a clever application and freely available) is that to bring together information from different sources you need something in common - a kind of peg on which to hang the data. Location is a very natural peg to choose, since everybody carries around in their heads a representation of the physical world, which they use to navigate through it. Moreover, we instinctively use it for our own mashups - the experiences and knowledge of life that are tied to locations. Google Earth therefore provides a convenient and very natural mesh for mashed-up online data.

In fact, it's hard to think of any other mesh that combines such fine granularity with this ease of comprehension. Perhaps something similar could be done with time (which, anyway, is simply the fourth dimension, and very similar to space) or Wikipedia entries (or subsets of them), since the latter are effectively a mesh for the non-physical world of ideas.

Update: I've now come across this interesting matrix of mashups. It shows that Google Maps is indeed the most popular mesh; others include Amazon, Del.icio.us, Flickr and Technorati.

DRM's Evil Twin

I wrote below about the escalation of the DRM threat; now it looks like DRM's bigger and even more evil sibling is beginning to stir again. I'm talking about patents, specifically software patents. If DRM wants to put strict limits on what you do with content, patents are about tying down ideas - something even more pernicious.

The bad news is that the usual suspects are girding their loins for a re-run of the EU software patent battle they lost - against expectation - last year. As this Heise article explains (also available in a rather bumpy translation), they are worryingly upbeat about their prospects - not least because they only have to win once, whereas opponents of software patents have to keep on winning.

When I wrote a feature for The Guardian about the previous software patent battle, I exhorted readers to contact their MEPs using the excellent WriteToThem site. Until some concrete proposals on software patents are released, it's probably a little premature to start doing this. But don't worry, when it's time, I'll let you know.