Opening Up the WebOS

I realise I am a little late to this, but I have to say that YubNub really is the bee's knees:

YubNub is a command-line for the web. After setting it up on your browser, you simply type "gim porsche 911" to do a Google Image Search for pictures of Porsche 911 sports cars. Type "random 49" to return random numbers between 1 and 49, courtesy of random.org. And best of all, you can make a new command by giving YubNub an appropriate URL.

The most important bit is the last: it allows this command-line to be extended in any way; moreover, there is a wonderfully Darwinian element to which of these extensions "survives", in the sense of being used.

I can't help feeling that something really big will come out of this one day. Web 3.0? Web 4.0? I don't mind waiting....

Akkadian and the Opens

Any post that manages to link Akkadian with openness gets my cuneiform inscription.

Virtually a Real Currency

And so the line between what is a "real" and "virtual currency" blurs yet further:

Tencent, QQ.com's parent company, is being sued by an angry user for impersonating a friend and getting him to link through to a contest site. Damages sought: 40,000 Q coins, and 445 5-digit QQ numbers (see previous post on the value of QQ numbers). Is this the first time that a court of law has been asked to award virtual currency in a settlement? It all points to the way that Q coins are increasingly being used as an alternative to the [Chinese] RMB for online economic transactions. It makes sense, given that a) so few Chinese have credit cards with which to pay for online goods and services; b) the vast majority DO have QQ accounts and Q coins with which to purchase online goods and services; and c) You can accumulate Q coins by playing online QQ games.

The post also links to this useful introduction to the world of QQ coins.

Open MMORPGs: Hope Shifts to PlaneShift

So the hope that Ryzom.org might turn into a major open source MMORPG didn't work out (although there are discussions about building on the momentum behind the attempt). Meanwhile, here's PlaneShift, another MMORPG, already releasing code under the GNU GPL.

Mozilla Maketh Mucho Moolah

Free software is not something you associated with money rolling in, but Mozilla seems to be in this enviable position:

In 2005 the Mozilla Foundation and Mozilla Corporation combined had revenue from all sources of $52.9M. $29.8M of this was associated with the Foundation (both before and after the creation of the Corporation). The bulk of this revenue was related to our search engine relationships, with the remainder coming from a combination of contributions, sales from the Mozilla store, interest income, and other sources. These figures compare with 2003 and 2004 revenues of $2.4M and $5.8M respectively, and reflect the tremendous growth in the popularity of Firefox after its launch in November 2004.

But, as I've just written elsewhere, Mozilla needs urgently to spend this money on a big task: making Firefox 3.0 really rock.

Platform-Independent Petitioners

One of the great things about the Internet is that it lets people take the initiative in all sorts of ways. Take, for example, the current brouhaha over the live streaming service of the Council of the European Union - or rather, the lack of it for certain users:

On which platforms can I view the live streaming media service of the Council of the European Union?

The live streaming media service of the Council of the European Union can be viewed on Microsoft Windows and Macintosh platforms. We cannot support Linux in a legal way. So the answer is: No support for Linux.

The question is, what can be done? The answer - maybe not a lot, but petitions have a long and honourable history in the democratic tradition; such things certainly won't hurt, and at the very least provide a practical demonstration that some people care. If you're an EU taxpayer, I urge you to add your voice - all you need to give is a name and an email, and the latter is not displayed.

And remember: the Internet is platform independent, so there's no excuse not to....

ObjectWeb of Desire

Unless you're deep into middleware, you've probably never heard of ObjectWare, creators of the JOnAS software. But something interesting is happening: ObjectWare is merging with OrientWare:

an open organization that integrates the mature results achieved by the 863 Program in the domain of middleware by universities and institutes such as Beihang University, Peking University, the Institute of software for Chinese Science Academie and National University of Defense Technology etc. Orientware code base is a collaborative composition of various middleware platforms, such as CORBA, J2EE, TP-Monitor, Portal and Workflow built on open and standard technical specifications. The goal is to provide a comprehensive middleware platform for the Chinese national information infrastructure that could challenge its foreign counterparties with respect to performance and functionality.

Global middleware (globalware?): sounds good to me.

Theonemillion(master)piece

Now, I wonder where they got the idea for this?

We are asking you to draw a small square image using software on our website. You don't need to be an artist or be able to draw - you can make patterns, write words, doodle - what-ever you want. Your image will be one of one million images that will make up the entire picture - The One Million Masterpiece.

You can choose to make your picture fit in with the surrounding pieces, or make it stand out, by using a preview feature that shows your image with the context of your neighbours. You can change your image at any time if you don't feel happy with it, and you can exchange messages with your fellow artists using our community pages.

All in a good cause and that, but it has to be said that pooling a million images does not make an image a million times "better". Interestingly, that Other Page looks rather more artistic.... (Via eHub.)

Public Domain Day

An interesting list of works that have come into the public domain this year - in some places, depending on how idiotic the term of copyright is (50 years after death, 70 years etc.).

Bad to see the UK doing so badly:

Even more sadly, in the United Kingdom, where millions of pages of archival documents on Canada and other former British possessions are held, not one will be public domain, no matter how old it is or when its author (if known) died, until January 1, 2039.

"Only" 32 years to go.... (Via Michael Geist's Blog.)

Finding Room for Placeblogs

Given that there are several zillion of the things, it's surprising that more vertical blog segments haven't emerged. One obvious cut is by location, and here's Placeblogger that acts as a central resource for this sector. (Via Boing Boing.)

Second Life Business Communicators Wiki

There's a lot of froth flying around about the business use of Second Life, but not many facts. Here's a good resource in the making: a wiki that aims to pull together concrete information about such activity. There's not much there are the moment, but you know what you can do about that....

Open Source War

The article may be old, but the issue of open source war - the kind currently being waged in Iraq, for example - is sadly bang up to date (so to speak):

It's possible, as Microsoft has found, that there is no good monopolistic solution to a mature open-source effort. In that case, the United States might be better off adopting I.B.M.'s embrace of open source. This solution would require renouncing the state's monopoly on violence by using Shiite and Kurdish militias as a counterinsurgency. This is similar to the strategy used to halt the insurgencies in El Salvador in the 1980's and Colombia in the 1990's. In those cases, these militias used local knowledge, unconstrained tactics and high levels of motivation to defeat insurgents (this is in contrast to the ineffectiveness of Iraq's paycheck military). This option will probably work in Iraq too.

In fact, it appears the American military is embracing it. In recent campaigns in Sunni areas, hastily uniformed peshmerga and Badr militia supplemented American troops; and in Basra, Shiite militias are the de facto military power.

The link came from a post on the blog of the author of this fascinating analysis, John Robb. Recommended.

Free Thinking about Free Culture

So the Free Culture Foundation has launched. That sounds good, but I can't really tell from the site what it's doing: the philosophy section contain essays that taken together are hardly coherent. Freedom is good, but not when it leads to confusion. Perhaps something will emerge with time.

Word the Day/Year: Computronium

It's not often I come across completely new and unsuspected words/concepts, so it must be a good omen that I happened upon this today: computronium. (Via Open the Future - a cheerful little number for the beginning of the year, I must say, Jamais.)

Welcome the Real and Virtual 2007

I won't add to all the other prognostications for this year - not least because some people have already done it so well:

let me start the year by commenting on a key trend that I believe will similarly take off in 2007 and become more widely accepted in the marketplace as the year progresses. I believe that highly visual interfaces and virtual worlds will become increasingly important for interacting with applications, communicating with people and engaging in commerce, - what we in IBM have started to call v-business.

And Irving Wladawsky-Berger - for it is he - then goes on to explain why:

In IBM, as in many companies, we spend a lot of our day in conference calls with people all around the world. The choice is not whether to have those meetings in person - but how to make the meetings more effective, more human. As many have been discovering, virtual world meetings might be one of the ways of significantly improving the quality and feeling of meetings involving multiple people in remote locations.

He concludes with an important caveat:

In the end, the market acceptance of virtual worlds, - as that of any other technology-based trend, - depends on whether it brings real value to whatever it is people want to do and are willing to pay for.

Warning: Taggers at Work (Again)

Over the New Year period I'll finish off tagging older posts to improve navigation on this site. So please excuse the RSS deluge that follows.

Banking on Benkler

Trust Yochai to give us a way forward - and some hope:

In the mass media environment, there was a general culture of "I saw it in print, therefore it must be true." This culture led to a relative atrophy of critical faculties, and made the public sphere highly manipulable, or simply prone to error. It is not, for example, that well-trained media critics could not point out the dozens of ways in which any given news report or television program were biased or incomplete. They could. But the readers, viewers, and listeners by and large adopted a trusting relationship to their media. We long spoke about the need to teach critical television watching. But that never happened, really. I think as a new generation grows up reading things that never have a clear voice of authority, that have only provisional status as inputs, we will begin to see a more critical, investigative form of reading, as well as listening and viewing. The act of reading will be more like an act of investigation, as one picks up pieces of evidence with variable levels of credibility, triangulates them, and arrives at a conclusion that continues, nonetheless, to be revisable and falsifiable. This is the essence of the scientific method. It is high time that people adopt it more broadly. I embrace this uncertainty, for with it comes critical reading. This trend is then strengthened by the widespread practices of cultural production, what I have characterized as the re-emergence of a new folk culture in the digital environment. People who create know how to be more critical users.

Those who Cannot Remember the Past...

...are condemned to release again it ten years later.

I was interest to read that Sun has launched its Looking Glass interface. Not just because it's yet another 3D-ish approach, with some interesting applications coming through. But also because Sun seems to be blithely unaware of the history of the Looking Glass moniker. As I wrote in Rebel Code:

Caldera was set up in October 1994, and released betas of its first product, the Caldera Network Desktop (CND) in 1995. The final version came out in February 1996, and offered a novel graphical desktop rather like Windows 95. This "Looking Glass" desktop, as it was called, was proprietary, as were several other applications that Caldera bundled with the package."

Caldera, of course, eventually metamorphosed (hello, Kafka) into SCO....

Enter the Metaverse/Matrix/Neuronet

An eagle-eyed Mark Wallace spotted the International Association of Virtual Reality Technologies (IAVRT), a new Web site/organisation, with its intriguing - and possibly redundant - Neuronet:

IAVRT is working with its VR member peers and the global community to create and govern a new real-time virtual reality network, separate and distinct from the Internet, which will be called the Neuronet. The Neuronet will be designed from the ground up as the world's first - and only - network designed specifically for the transmission of virtual reality and next generation gaming data. The Neuronet will organize the virtual reality world and ensure its safety, reliability, and functionality.

The purpose of the Neurornet will be to facilitate cinematic and immersive virtual reality experiences across distances. These will include almost every type of experience imaginable with some of the most obvious being real-time video chat, video streaming, virtual reality travel, history, adventure, gaming, entertainment, sports, hobbies, business, education, medicine and training to name just a few.

The Neuronet will function similarly to the Internet in its ability connect users in different locations, but instead of the user interface mechanisms associated with the Internet, it will use Virtual reality (VR) technologies to facilitate cinematic and immersive virtual reality experiences for end-users.

Sick in the Genome

From the nation that brought you whaleburgers:

The breeder told Mr. Sasaki that he had bred a dog with three generations of offspring — in human terms, first with its daughter, then a granddaughter and then a great-granddaughter — until Keika was born. The other four puppies in the litter were so hideously deformed that they were killed right after birth.

(Via Boing Boing.)

Google's Open Airbag

Google-watchers of the world, arise: a new name to add to the list of Googly things: Airbag.

In many cases trying to determine the exact cause of the crash can be as frustrating as the crash itself. Identifying the causality for crashes is a critical aspect of fixing the crash condition and making sure it doesn't re-occur.

That's where Google's open source Airbag project comes in. According to Google, Airbag is a set of client and server components that implements a crash-reporting system.

(Via Linux Today.)

Free Software's Rottweiler

I've noted before that FSF is changing; Bruce Byfield has noticed too, and written a good summary of what the new FSF has done in 2006 - and what lies in store:

Looking ahead to 2007, [executive director of the FSF] Brown sees only more of the same activism for the FSF. Both the BadVista and Defective By Design campaigns will continue, and he suggests that other campaigns in the coming year will probably focus on hardware drivers for GNU/Linux and software patents.

"It's going to be a busy year," Brown predicts. "2006 was great, but 2007 is going to be huge."

I can't wait.

Against Anti-Anti-Copyright

There's an interesting piece in the Reg by the photojournalist Sion Touhig, entitled "How the anti-copyright lobby makes big business richer." It's well worth reading, even though I think its attacks on the "anti-copyright lobby" are misguided.

The main problem according to the article seems to be big business taking copyrighted material from the Web, or employing user-generated material without paying for it. Addressing both of these seems a better solution than simply hankering for a past that will never return now that the Web 2.0 genie is out of the bottle.

If photographers can't afford to sue - another problem that needs to be sorted - they can at least name and shame: a central Web site for the purpose would do very nicely. And as for the exploitation of user-generated content, the solution here is education. If people were more aware of the cc licences, and used them, then the situation would be more regulated, if not controlled.

At the end of the day, though, photo-journalists will need to adapt, and find new ways of generating money from their work - maybe quite radical ones - just as we writers have had to adapt over the last decade. Perhaps that's regrettable, but it's also the way things are.

Your (Second) Life Flashes Past You

Although not quite on the level of LWN's comprehensive review of the year, Giff Constable's Second Life timeline is a handy summary of what happened when in undoubtedly crucial year for SL. And for all those getting their knickers in a twist over the issue of SL's user base (you know who you are) he makes an important observation:

There has been a lot of questions and skepticism around the numbers, and retention rates, which Linden Lab estimates around 10% - 15%, but if you just look at concurrent users, a year ago max concurrent users was around 5 thousand. Today it is around 20 thousand, a 300% growth rate, although still a fairly small pond.

I'd underline that this is concurrent users, so the total number in a given day is some multiple of this: if I had to guess, I'd say around six to eight times. This would give an active user base of around 150,000, which is consistent with a 10% retention rate and two million signups.

Let's Go 3D

As perceptive readers of this blog may have noticed, there's been an increasing number of stories about the rise of 3D technologies in computing, particularly in terms of the interface we use. Well, here's another one - a short but well-written piece about the different strategies of Google and Microsoft in this sphere from my favourite news magazine, Der Spiegel. (Via Ogle Earth.)