Sharing the Credit for Sharing

Time magazine has one of those tiresome list thingies: "10 Ideas That Will Change the World" (pretentious, moi?). To its credit, it does correctly identify one of the key ideas that is already re-shaping our world:

it's the young who are leading the way toward a different form of consumption, a collaborative consumption: renting, lending and even sharing goods instead of buying them. You can see it in the rise of big businesses like Netflix, whose more than 20 million subscribers pay a fee to essentially share DVDs, or Zipcar, which gives more than 500,000 members the chance to share cars part-time.

So, where do they think this all started?

Even as Bush was announcing its birth though, the ownership society was rotting from the inside out. Its demise began with Napster. The digitalization of music and the ability to share it made owning CDs superfluous. Then Napsterization spread to nearly all other media, and by 2008 the financial architecture that had been built to support all that ownership — the subprime mortgages and the credit-default swaps — had collapsed on top of us.

Well, Napster was an important moment when the idea of sharing spread to content, but it was definitely following in the footsteps of the Internet and free software, particularly the latter. When Napster arrived, RMS had been articulating the moral imperative to share for a decade and a half, and his followers had been doing it for nearly as long.

So although it's good to see the idea of sharing singled out in this way, it's sad to see poor old Richard Stallman and the free software crowd once more written out of history.

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Mashup 2.0: Inheriting the Mesh

I've written before about how mashups need meshes. Typically that mesh will be geographical, but another obvious one is time. Time is interesting because it's often linked to people's lives - or rather several interlinked lives. That's the insight behind this new startup, AllofMe:

Founder Addy Feuerstein has described AllofMe in the following way:

“The idea is that if I or someone else has a picture that includes my son, alone or with friends, I or anyone else will be able to tag the people in the picture and transform these digital assets into part of my sons. When he grows up and takes control over his own timeline, he will have a timeline of tagged material from his childhood…We will also transform the timeline created by each person into a video movie, through a widget on an internet site [and] enable comparison of your timeline with that of your acquaintances, or chronological data files. For instance, you will be able to compare your own timeline with historical events of Time, and see where you were when some important world event occurred.”

I'm not sure about the company, but I think the idea is important, because it hints at a further key property of Mashup 2.0, where it becomes possible to use pre-existing meshes in richer ways.

Time Jumps When Microsoft Snaps Its Fingers

I missed this the first time around:

So, for most of the world, the Gregorian calendar has been the law for 250-425 years. That's a well-established standard by anyone's definition. Who would possibly ignore it or get it wrong at this point?

If you guessed “Microsoft”, you may advance to the head of the class.

Datetimes in Excel are represented as date serial numbers, where dates are counted from an origin, sometimes called an epoch, of January 1st, 1900. The problem is that from the earliest implementations Excel got it wrong. It thinks that 1900 was a leap year, when clearly it isn't, under Gregorian rules since it is not divisible by 400. This error causes functions like the WEEKDAY() spreadsheet function to return incorrect values in some cases.

Here are Rob's updated thoughts on the subject, and how the problem is being propagated by Microsoft's rival to ODF, OOXML.

Intellectual Property is not "Up for Grabs"...

...as this interesting post suggests; it is just simply broken. Time to wheel it away and consign it to Time's winged dustbin.