Dell Delivers - Even in Second Life

If you go to Dell's main site at www.dell.com, you have an unexpected option on the pop-up list of countries and regions at the bottom, as this post shows. Yes, Dell really seems to get this Second Life lark.

Mashup 2.0 and a New Data Commons

One of the defining characteristics of Web 2.0 is the ability to combine data from various sources - the mashup. And yet, in a sense, mashups so far have been purely additive: you take something and add it to something else to create a third. The two sources rarely meet in any deep way to forge some truly new information or insight, other than ones born of clever data representation (not to be sneezed at, either).

That's what makes the new Swivel service important. The Web site reveals nothing currently, but TechCrunch has some tantalising details:

the site allows users to upload data - any data - and display it to other users visually. The number of page views your website generates. Or a stock price over time. Weather data. Commodity prices. The number of Bald Eagles in Washington state. Whatever. Uploaded data can be rated, commented and bookmared by other users, helping to sort the interesting (and accurate) wheat from the chaff. And graphs of data can be embedded into websites. So it is in fact a bit like a YouTube for Data.

But then the real fun begins. You and other users can then compare that data to other data sets to find possible correlation (or lack thereof). Compare gas prices to presidential approval ratings or UFO sightings to iPod sales. Track your page views against weather reports in Silicon Valley. See if something interesting occurs.

And better yet, Swivel will be automatically comparing your data to other data sets in the background, suggesting possible correlations to you that you may never have noticed.

This is really heavy stuff, and will allow truly new information, and new kinds of information, to emerge from the comparison of other data - something that gets stronger the more data that is uploaded. And what makes me think it's going to be hugely successful is that it has a viable business model attached:

Not all data will be public. The companies business model is to provide the service for free for public data, and charge a fee for data that is kept private. Private data can still be compared by the owner to public data sets.

Which is exactly what you want: all the benefit of the public data, but none of the issues of sharing your own. Essentially, this allows limited private grazing of a new data commons, whose overall creation and care is paid for in part by that grazing. Brilliant.

Update: Swivel is now up, in beta at least. Inevitably, there's not much to see yet.

All the News You Can Trust

Here's an interesting twist on the Digg idea: a site that does not merely vote stories up or down, but which rates them in terms of their reliability - quality, not mere popularity:

In recent years, the consolidation of mainstream media, combined with the rise of opinion news and the explosion of new media outlets, have created a serious problem for democracy: many people feel they can no longer trust the news media to deliver the information they need as citizens.

To address this critical issue, NewsTrust is developing an online news rating service to help people identify quality journalism - or "news you can trust." Our members rate the news online, based on journalistic quality, not just popularity. Our beta website and news feed feature the best and the worst news of the day, picked from hundreds of alternative and mainstream news sources.

This non-profit community effort tracks news media nationwide and helps citizens make informed decisions about democracy. Submitted stories and news sources are carefully researched and rated for balance, fairness and originality by panels of citizen reviewers, students and journalists. Their collective ratings, reviews and tags are then featured in our news feed, for online distribution by our members and partners.

It's a laudable idea, although I'm not sure how it will be funded in the long-term, or whether it will fall victim to people with an agenda putting together a clique to skew the results. (Via OpenBusiness.)

From O(GL)LPC to O(W)LPC

An interesting story here:

Microsoft wants to make its Windows operating system available on the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) notebook computers, OLPC chairman Nicholas Negroponte said at the NetEvents conference in Hong Kong on Saturday.

...

"We put in an SD slot in the machine just for Bill. We didn't need it but the OLPC machines are at Microsoft right now, getting Windows put on them."

The SD slot is needed so that memory can be boosted sufficiently to run Windows. That probably won't be a problem in terms of cost, because memory just keeps on getting cheaper. But what's deeply ironic here is that the current price of the GNU/Linux-based OLPC system - around $140 - is utterly dwarfed by the cost of Windows. Obviously Microsoft will offer a cut-down, el cheapo version, but nonetheless the unjustifiable disparity between hardware and software costs is striking.

Microsoft's interest is understandable - it doesn't want to lose a potentially huge and impressionable market. What is less understandable is Negroponte's willingness to give up all his fine principles of empowering children, and to allow them to be shackled by closed source/DRM/Trusted Computing - for what looks like a rather pathetic and unbecoming reason:

"I have known [Microsoft chairman] Bill Gates his entire adult life. We talk, we meet one-on-one, we discuss this project," said Negroponte, according to a transcript provided to vnunet.com.

Gosh, you must be important. (Via Slashdot.)

The Great UnSuggester

This, surely, is what technology was invented for:

Unsuggester takes "people who like this also like that" and turns it on its head. It analyzes the seven million books LibraryThing members have recorded as owned or read, and comes back with books least likely to share a library with the book you suggest.

After all, who wants to know about things that will slide down your mental gullet like a proverbial oyster? What we need are intellectual chicken bones that makes us choke on new ideas.

Free Tibet, Free Tibetan Typeface

I came across this worthy project through an article about Tibet by Paul Jones:

The Tibetan & Himalayan Digital Library project at the University of Virginia is pleased to make available the alpha release of the Unicode character based Tibetan Machine Uni OpenType font for writing Tibetan, Dzongkha and Ladakhi in dbu can script with full support for the Sanskrit combinations found in chos skad texts.

Alpha release here, people: could all Tibetan hackers please hammer the code.

See Viv Run

Yes:

The European Union's telecommunications watchdog has called for regulators to take a backseat in setting standards--and allow consumers to take the lead by picking the platform that offers the services they want.

Speaking on Monday here at the ITU Telecom World 2006 conference, Viviane Reding, the EU's commissioner for information society and media, said regulators should no longer be the main force in charge of mandating standards.

...

Reding said the spectrum freed up by the switch to digital TV will offer a "once-in-a-generation opportunity" for expanded wireless services, adding that regulators must be flexible and "get out of the command-and-control system."

Now, if we could possibly make that liberated spectrum into a commons....

Climate Commons

A new one for the commons collection:

Climate commons is a networked conversation space that creates a cross-disciplinary platform for planetary ecological concerns. Twelve people who research issues relevant to the arctic and climate change contribute the progress of their investigations and reflections from October 10, 2006 through January 10, [2]007. These networked conversations can be read by and contributed to by visitors to the exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary art Boston or on the web at climate-commons.net.

It also offers some open source-y goodness:

Matt Shanley has created three main visual tools to help foster the dialog on this site.
The word count history graph uses sparklines to give you an idea of the ups and downs of site activity at a glance.
The hexagraph provides a spatial representation of the threads of a conversation. You can literally see when a conversation branch is bursting at the seams.
Category highlighting reveals common threads by illuminating the key words.

Each of these extensions will be released as an open source project in early 2007, around the time Climate commons is coming to completion.

I have to say, though, that there is something vaguely jarring about a project to do with climate change, sustainability and all that coming to "completion": shouldn't it just go on and on? (Via WorldChanging.)

Thanks - I'll Pass on that Poisoned Chalice

Good news, you might think:

Novell today announced that the Novell edition of the OpenOffice.org office productivity suite will now support the Office Open XML format, increasing interoperability between OpenOffice.org and the next generation of Microsoft Office. Novell is cooperating with Microsoft and others on a project to create bi-directional open source translators for word processing, spreadsheets and presentations between OpenOffice.org and Microsoft Office, with the word processing translator to be available first, by the end of January 2007. The translators will be made available as plug-ins to Novell's OpenOffice.org product. Novell will release the code to integrate the Open XML format into its product as open source and submit it for inclusion in the OpenOffice.org project. As a result, end users will be able to more easily share files between Microsoft Office and OpenOffice.org, as documents will better maintain consistent formats, formulas and style templates across the two office productivity suites.

Pretty cool, huh? Well, maybe not.

The code may well be released as open source, but there's the small matter of patents they might draw upon. Given that "Novell is cooperating with Microsoft and others", there must be the fear that to produce these undeniably handy translators Novell has availed itself of some inside knowledge kindly provided by that nice Mr Ballmer.

I've no idea whether that happened or not, but if I were in the OpenOffice.org group I do know I'd be refusing the proffered chalice - just in case. (Via LWN.net.)

Time to Praise Simão Jatene?

In these dark days when everything seems to be getting worse with the environmental commons, it is rare to come across something as positive as this:

Vast tracts of rainforest in Brazil are to get a new protected status.

The segments of land in the northern Para state together cover 16.4 million hectares (63,320 sq miles), an area of land that is bigger than England.

Thousands of wildlife species inhabit the pristine forest, including jaguars, anteaters and colourful macaws.

Campaigners say the decision made by Para Governor Simao Jatene is one of the most important conservation initiatives of recent years.

If it is true, then Governor Jatene deserves to go down in the annals as a wise and great man. The only trouble is, I can't find anything confirming this wonderful news on the site of one of the organisations quoted in the story above. Instead, there is just a rather dry report on forest management.

Let's hope.

Of Kant and Cant

Sad to see the once-rigorous nation of Immanuel Kant falling for the, er, cant of the content industries in the copyright reform discussions:

But Jerzy Montag, Member of the Green Party opposition, sees this slightly differently. “The current reform draft is in some points friendly to industry and antagonistic to the interests of authors and creators,” he said. “We should give more rights to creators, but I am pessimistic here. And it makes me see red to think about how vehemently based on the current draft the CDU-SPD [Social Democratic Party] coalition wants to go after users.”

The target of Montag’s critique is a proposed change to establish criminal liability for illegal private copies. A mass complaint against 25,000 private users resulted in a clear statement of a court in Karlsruhe that it was unable to bear that load and therefore would not open proceedings in minor cases.

The German justice minister reacted with the introduction of a “bagatelle clause” into the draft proposal to limit criminal proceedings on commercial “pirates.” Yet after heavy criticism over legalising intellectual property theft from rights holders and some members of parliament, the minister withdrew the bagatelle clause (which refers to a minor case of no commercial relevance).

"Pirates", "intellectual property theft", and so on, and so on....

The Distro Xerxes Would Have Used

Here's one that famous blogger Mahmood Ahmadinejad probably prepared earlier:

Jalal Haji-Gholam-Ali who is a member of Sharif Technical University’s Advanced ICT Scientific Board and consultant of the ICT Ministry in launching the Persian Linux Project, reiterated, "Launching the Pilot Study phase of Persian Linux Project has be[en] commissioned to TCI’s Research Center."

...

Emphasizing that many of the main services of the ICT are Linux-based, he reiterated, "That ministry is determined to migrate towards Linux."

Referring to the establishment of an infrastructure Software Work Group at the Secretariat of the ICT Ministry, he said, "This work group is established aimed at facilitating the migration of the ICT Ministry towards full usage of Linux."

(Via tuxmachines.org.)

Ode to an Expiring Blue Frog

I suppose every frog has its day, but I hope that this doesn't mean the end for Azureus as we know and love it:

Azureus, maker of the popular peer-to-peer client, has revamped its software to include video publishing and distribution tools with a much slicker and user-friendly interface. To support the new platform, called Zudeo, the company has raised a $12 million second round of funding.

This space is hot; BitTorrent last week said it had raised $20 million from Accel Partners and Doll Capital Management. Much like BitTorrent, Palo Alto-based Azureus incorporated, took venture money, and came up with a business model only after the massive success of its open source software.

After all, it's well known that bloat is bad for frogs and software.

Saint Johnomics

Sir John Sulston is one of my heroes, right up there with RMS. Indeed, Sulston can reasonably be called the RMS of genomics (or maybe RMS is the Sulston of software). More than anyone else, it was Sulston who fought for and won the free availability of the human genome's digital code. Without him, I suspect that the company that once seemed set to become the Microsoft of molecular biology, Celera, would "own" the human genome, with all the appalling things that this implies.

I mention this because there was short piece by him in the FT recently. It's an edited extract from a talk he gave; the editing and extraction are not very well done, and it certainly doesn't do justice to the man or his ideas. For that, you should read his book The Common Thread - significantly, subtitled "A Story of Science, Ethics and the Human Genome".

Great literature it ain't, but it fair bristles with the same sense of mission and moral imperatives that makes RMS's stuff such fun to read. If RMS is St IGNUcius, perhaps Sulston is St Johnomics.

Open Provenance Architecture

Interesting:

Ultimately, our aim is to conceive a computer-based representation of provenance that allows us to perform useful analysis and reasoning to support our use cases. The provenance of a piece of data will be represented in a computer system by some suitable documentation of the process that led to the data. While our applications will specify the form that such a documentation should take, we can identify several of its general properties. Documentation can be complete or partial (for instance, when the computation has not terminated yet); it can be accurate or inaccurate; it can present conflicting or consensual views of the actors involved; it can be detailed or not.

Open Science or Free Science?

The open science meme is rather in vogue at the moment. But Bill Hooker raises an interesting point (in a post that kindly links to a couple items on this blog):

should we be calling the campaign to free up scientific information (text, data and software) "Free Science", for the same reasons Stallman insists on "Free Software"?

Interestingly, there is another parallel here:

Just as free software gained the alternative name "open source" at the Freeware Summit in 1998, so free open scholarship (FOS), as it was called until then by the main newsletter that covered it - written by Peter Suber, professor of philosophy at Earlham College - was renamed "open access" as part of the Budapest Open Access Initiative in December 2001. Suber's newsletter turned into Open Access News and became one of the earliest blogs; it remains the definitive record of the open access movement, and Suber has become its semi-official chronicler (the Eric Raymond of open access - without the guns).

Brits Get the Net - and Net Ads

I remember well during the heady Web 1.0 days worrying about business models (I know, this made me something of an oddity). Because it was clear to me that the banner advertising then in vogue just wasn't going to cut it. Net advertising - it'll never catch on, I thought.

Close. Not.

The second Net boom/bubble has been largely driven by Google and its targeted ads. The knock-on effect is that Net advertising is thriving, and no more so than in the UK, apparently. This article has some interesting figures on the differences between the UK and US markets, tying them in to techno-socio-economic factors.

Towards a Post-Copyright World

One of the heartening things about fighting the inequities of the current system of intellectual monopolies is that there are a growing number of like-minded people and sites doing it. One, for example, is Moving to Freedom, and from here I learned about another, called Questioncopyright.org.

I can particularly recommend the essay there entitled "The promise of a post-copyright world". As well as a thorough, and unusually illuminating history of copyright (yes, it's all the fault of us Brits again), it closes with this important insight:

As the stream of freely available material gets bigger, its stigma will slowly vanish. It used to be that the difference between a published author and an unpublished one was that you could obtain the former's books, but not the latter's. Being published meant something. It had an aura of respectability; it implied that someone had judged your work and given it an institutional stamp of approval. But now the difference between published and unpublished is narrowing. Soon, being published will mean nothing more than that an editor somewhere found your work worthy of a large-scale print run, and possibly a marketing campaign.

Bill Gates's Virtual Wealth

Here's a very sharp post from Urizenus Sklar, which is a comment on Wagner James Au's post, which in turn was commenting on the news that Second Life has its first (dollar) millionaire:

Anshe Chung has become the first online personality to achieve a net worth exceeding one million US dollars from profits entirely earned inside a virtual world.

As Au points out, Chung doesn't really have this million dollars: her ability to realise it is contingent on all sorts of factors:

If Anshe Chung gradually sold all her Second Life assets over the span of a year or two to prevent market devaluation, and if all the assets actually in the inventory of various avatars working for Anshe were successfully transferred back to her, and if throughout that time the in-world economy remained stable and the population continued growing, and if Second Life did not suffer any serious interruptions of service either through hacking, scalability failures, sale of the company, or other unforeseen acts of God-- why, Anshe Chung's account holder would have, at the end of that long and arduous process, well over $1,000,000.

But as Sklar brilliant notes, Bill Gates's wealth is equally chimerical and contingent:

If he started slowly selling his stock, but not so fast that the value tanked, and IF open source software doesn’t wipe him out before he sells and IF Google doesn’t wipe him out before he sells, and IF a lawsuit doesn’t wipe him out first, and IF his business doesn’t get dismantled for anti-trust violations, and IF he doesn’t get shot, and If as soon as he gets his money out he doesn’t put it in financial derivatives and they tank and IF as soon as he gets it out his wife doesn’t make him spend it on starving children in Africa before he gets to stuff his mattress with it, then I suppose he is a billionaire. But what are the chances of that?

Beyond the wit, what this post serves to underline is that there is no substantive difference between "virtual" wealth made in the "virtual" world, and "real" wealth made in the "real" world.

The Big IP Lie

A very interesting transcript of a conversation between Reuters and Warner Music Chief Executive Edgar Bronfman. The latter is clearly trying to come across as a hip, reasonable chap:

Adam Reuters: How has the music industry, from production to marketing to distribution, changed in the MySpace, YouTube era we find ourselves in?

Edgar Bronfman: It really is all about the sense of community. There used to be a sense of community if you remember a really great record store where you could go through all the albums and talk about your records. Now you can have that sort of sharing in a virtual community or on an Internet community, and therefore do it much more broadly.

But later on, he is revealed for what he is when he slips in the Big IP Lie:

Intellectual property is intellectual property, whether it’s in the form of an avatar or a song or any such thing. These are the creations of someone’s mind, and it’s property as real as real estate.

No, Ed, no, no, no. What you call "intellectual property" is really an intellectual monopoly: it is a limited privilege, granted by the state, to encourage creativity. It is not property, however much you might like to claim it implicity. It is a bargain, with a quid pro quo: it has to allow reasonable "fair use", and it has to be given up after a reasonable time. You and your industry seem to have forgotten both aspects.

Might I suggest you start talking about intellectual monopolies rather than "intellectual property" to help remind you about your obligations under this bargain?

Fight for Net and Mobile Neutrality

As if it isn't enough having to fight for Net neutrality, now it looks like in Europe we've got to do the same for Mobile neutrality:

This study undertaken by Booz Allen Hamilton, on behalf of the UMTS Forum, considers the impact on mobile consumers and the overall industry ecosystem of two alternative spectrum management scenarios for wide area communications. Firstly, continuation of the current harmonised approach, which is based on internationally agreed band plans using a designated group of technology standards. Secondly, the liberalised scenario, which advocates flexibility through generalised technology neutrality.

The report concludes, through qualitative and quantitative analysis, that consumers and the overall industry ecosystem are best served through continuation of the current harmonised approach. The qualitative analysis demonstrates that in a harmonised environment consumers benefit from the increased penetration of end-user services due to the speed of innovation and network effects (i.e. Metcalfe’s Law); while the industry ecosystem benefits from the improved cost structure provided by the large market size, and scale effects resulting from a harmonised environment. Finally, the quantitative analysis suggests that spectrum harmonisation will benefit end-users through greater usage of end-user services, at lower ARPU, with a larger consumer surplus.

So, a report commissioned by opponents of mobile neutrality - the "liberalised scenario" - comes out against it: what a coincidence.

But all the arguments in favour of Net neutrality - level playing field, the ability to introduce new services without asking permission from network operators etc. etc. - apply here too. Don't be fooled by this arrant nonsense: long live the wireless commons. (Via openspectrum.info.)

Enter the WikiMatrix

Confused by all the wikis out there? You will be, once you've worked your way through the dozens listed on this amazing site, which lets you compare them in minutest detail. (Via Quoi9.)

Brum Not So Glum

Some fine reporting from Matthew Broersma on Techworld has dug up some interesting stuff about the so-called "failed" open source desktop implementation in Birmingham:

Birmingham City Council has defended its year-long trial of desktop Linux, claiming it to be a success, despite an independent report showing it would have been cheaper to install Windows XP.

In an exclusive interview with Techworld, head of IT for the council, Glyn Evans, argued that the higher cost resulted from the council having to experiment with the new technology and build up a depth of technical understanding, as well as fit it with the complex system already in place.

The £105,000 saving that the report says would have resulted from going with Windows XP has also come under question as it was calculated using the special discounted licence rate that Microsoft offers councils - something critics argue is a calculated effort to prevent public bodies from building up technical knowledge of open source offerings.

Fishier and fishier - good work, Matthew.

Sun Opts for GNU GPL v2.5

I've written elsewhere about my pleasant surprise at Sun choosing the GNU GPL for Java. But an obvious question that follows on from that news is: which GPL? B

This is a highly political question, with no easy answer. And yet Simon Phipps, Mr Open Source at Sun, has given a good 'un:

the very first question Richard asked me about OpenJDK was "GPL v2 or later" or "GPL v2 only"? I explained that Sun could not in good faith commit to using a license sight-unseen for such an important code-base. It's used on 4 billion devices, there are more than 5 million developers dependent on it for their living, and the risk - however slight - that the GPL v3 might prove harmful to them can't be taken. So while we are very positive about the GPL v3, committing to using it when it's not finished does not seem responsible stewardship. I hope we can use it, but I can't express that hope by committing in advance. So for now, the Java platform will be licensed under just the GPL v2.

Sounds fair enough to me.

The Digital Library of India

There's plenty of noise in the press (and blogs) about the Google Book project, or the Million Book Project. These are all interesting and laudable (well, those bits of it in the public domain, at least), but what about elsewhere?

Here's an interesting piece about the Digital Library of India (DLI) initiative. Here, for example, is an issue I bet you've never considered before - I know I haven't:

Designing an accurate OCR in the Indian languages is one of the greatest challenges in computer science. Unlike European languages, Indian languages have more than 300 characters to distinguish, a task that is an order of magnitude greater than distinguishing 26 characters. This also means that the training set needed is significantly larger for Indian languages. It is estimated that at least a ten million-word corpus would be needed in any font to recognize Indian languages with an acceptable level of accuracy. DLI is expected to provide such a phenomenally large amount of data for training and testing of OCRs in Indian Languages. Many of the contents, besides scanned images, have been manually entered for this purpose. Using this extremely large repertoire of data, a Kannada OCR has been developed.

(Via Open Access News.)