Before we kick in a new year of post, I want to take a quick look back at things I covered on 2011 as I still believe many of those represent important trends and inform some of my thinking.

I kicked off the year with the usual prediction list (and closed it out with a review) and was surprised by how many of the themes I highlighted ended up making their way through other entries.

I had set a goal for myself to do a post a week and decide to create a framework that allowed me to do so efficiently. My process is to capture simple ideas in a backlog and then dig through them once a week, sometimes tying the story to a recent development. Every Friday night or Saturday, I then crank out a post that covers that top in as broad a way as I could.

I write mostly for myself, as a way to get a better sense of my own thinking on a topic and then get feedback on how wrong (or occasionally, right) I am. This allows me to refine the strategy behind Keepskor and get a better sense of where our industry is heading.

While I never set a narrative for what is being covered on TNL.net, one seems to emerge when I look at the work I produced over the last year.

An emerging New York

I kicked off the year by making a bold prediction about a re-emerging and re-invigorated New York technology scene.  A year later, I feel ever more strongly about the things I highlighted in that series of posts: New York has emerged as a major player and I suspect that, within a generation or two, New York has a chance to displace the valley as the center of the US tech industry (note that the longer view is something I articulated later in the year but has been a dominant theme on this site for a decade).

The series created quite a stir when it came out and was one of the most trafficked group of entries this year (in fact, it still gets a decent amount of traffic a year later.)

If you’re on the East coast, you no longer have to relocate south of San Francisco to make it. New York provides an environment that rivals San Francisco and has a few extra advantages I had not covered in that series. For example, being halfway between London and the Valley, New York is the perfect place to manage a business that is not solely aimed at the US.

Myth-busting in startup land

This feeling from the ground, as I started re-entering the startup world, got me in the direction of thinking about the broader trends relating to startups. I a series about startup myths, I debunked the ideas that startups are risky, expensive, idea-based, smooth rides where everyone makes money.

My reason for doing this series of post was to archive thoughts on this that I could send to people when they brought up those myths (and as someone who spend too much time on Wall St., I’ve been exposed to quite a few of those people.)

Financial Markets

Using some of the skills I did pick up on Wall St., I’ve been trying to make sense of the financial markets and get a better understanding of the overall economic picture. This first led me to analyze whether internet valuations were getting over-inflated (they weren’t.)

As internet companies started testing the IPO waters again, I checked to see if LinkedIn was overvalued and highlighted some concerns around the GroupOn offering and later in the year, I started thinking writing more about digital currency.

The Internet War

The concept of digital currency is but one of the hot flashpoint between the current world and the internet one. Over the past year, we’ve seen increased activity from hacker groups and the rise of the internet as a political philosophy. Calling for an end to apathy on the part of our industry when it comes to policy making, I tried to make the case for the creation of a new set of definitions and protocols to control the internet of the future.

This is in reaction to an increasing privatization of large parts of the web, balkanizing the open web,  as companies try to monetize their user base to return value to their investors or counter suspected threats by new entrants. Along the way, those companies are redefining identity ownership through surprising terms of service agreements.

A resurgent Microsoft

Meanwhile, another story that has made its way through my narrative has been a massive comeback: Over the last few years, Microsoft has become a symbol of technology decline. But 2011 has shown us a resurgent company, first in its agreement with Nokia, which will bear fruits in 2012; then with the bets its placing on the web as a core component of the next version of Windows; and then through the success of its revolutionary Kinect device.

Microsoft’s bet on the web as the core of Windows is a smart one. HTML5 is enjoying wider support and new technologies like WebGL are bringing the web to new levels, levels that could be matching native apps soon. I will probably write more about these trends in 2012.

Internet and TV Colliding

Another item I have covered extensively in 2011 is the merging of television and the internet. Last year, I looked at where 2010 box office winners were streaming, how available popular TV shows were, and whether there was a delay in availability.I also looked into why live TV streams were not available online, explaining how some of the missing pieces of the puzzle could fit together. This provided readers with a stronger understanding of where the market stood. At the time, the results showed that availability was getting better but still had a long way to go.

I will start revisiting a lot of this information next week to gauge how much progress has been made in making movies and TV shows available on the internet.

My interest in this as a trend is that it provides us with a better view into whether internet TV is ready for primetime as a new internet channel (Netflix getting into the content production business was a major event in that direction, opening the door for other internet companies to offer something on that third screen… and for a few players to become new gatekeepers if we are not careful.)

I suspect this collision is part of the reason we have seen the entertainment industry rally behind SOPA, as it has seen first the music and now the book industry getting impacted in radical ways as media increasingly become mobile and can be consumed on phones and tablets.

Other trends

However, I was surprised that I had not spent more time covering some other trends I’m seeing emerging.

My archives did not include any mentions of bitcoin, though I think that virtual currencies are one of the hot topics currently sitting below the surface. While I am not convinced that bitcoin is the one that will win in the future, I do believe that we will see increasing traffic in that arena soon.

I also strongly believe that a new manufacturing age is upon us. The revolution behind 3D printing, 3D scanning and more customized and micro-produced materials is something that we will see on the edge this year and probably in the mainstream by end of year or early next year. This will have a substantial impact on our economy in the long run and I will keep an eye on it.

Conclusion

While I have deliberately chosen not to focus my writing on a narrow area, it appears there are broad topics that I return to on a regular basis. The intersection of media, technology, business and politics are part of the broad trends I follow around here and generally form the core of what I write about. My friend Anil defines his own writing as being about culture and I believe that broadly, he and I write about some of the same things.

Over the next year, I will revisit a lot of the work I did in 2011 as I wanted to establish a few foundational posts from a trending standpoint. But as we become more public about Keepskor, I will also write about some of the things that led to its creation and some of the thinking behind it. As someone who spent a lot of time dealing a dual life as blogger and Wall Streeter, I haven’t really said much about what I’m working on but I’m sure that readers will be interested as it taps into some of the trends highlighted above and a few that I haven’t talked about yet.

2012 is going to be a very exciting year and I will try to have a body of work at the end of it that matches what I’ve accomplished in 2011.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title 2011: The year that was. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

With a new year kicking in, it’s time for a new batch of predictions.

Business

One of the easiest predictions to make is that Facebook will go public this year, and it will manage to do so in a very successful IPO. I suspect that this may actually be the high watermark for the current boom cycle as Facebook is the most successful of the companies that were born of the Web 2.0 cycle. In a fashion similar to what happened with the Netscape IPO in 1995, the Facebook IPO may create a small window of opportunity for many other companies to go public.

On the private end of the spectrum, I think we will see the following companies see some form of liquidity event via either acquisition or IPO: Twitter has a strong chance of being acquired by Apple, which will quickly merge the offering into all of its products; Another possibility is that Twitter and Tumblr merge to create a mico-blogging powerhouse spanning both ends of the country. Meanwhile, Foursquare will either IPO or be acquired by Facebook or GroupOn in a share-only deal. Meetup will go public, creating another great story for the New York technology scene.

When it comes to Google, we will see the company continue its integration of Google+ into everything it does, with the biggest impact being the move to migrate all Orkut users to the new service. This will create an outcry in countries like India and Brazil, where Orkut has been popular but will leave many in the American media to wonder what the big deal is as Us customers have mostly left already.

Meanwhile, a lot of the companies that went public in 2011 will meet some strong headwinds as the rigor of the public market make it much more difficult for them to maneuver. Expect some changes at GroupOn and Zynga, with many people questioning their business models and long term viability.

Media

For a couple of years, there’s been a slow ramp up to the integration of the Internet with television. The rise (and to some extent fall) of Netflix, along with the entrance of new players like Hulu and Amazon, have made video distribution on the big screen one of the areas where the Internet and television have already intersected.

However, other areas of interaction have, so far, not been quite as successful. Apple is still treating AppleTV as a hobby, Google has mostly failed so far with GoogleTV, and other players like Roku and Boxee have, to date, been only adopted on the fringe.

In 2012 all that changes as the TV screen takes center stage in a way that a new generation of smart phones arose after the 2007 iPhone announcement. First of all, we will see some increased standardization around how to deliver content to TV screens, with agreements from TV set manufacturers like Samsung, Panasonic, Sony, and Vizio agreeing to some level of standardization. Apple will also announce a large screen product it will position in the TV market: The set will have AppleTV’s technology built-in, be accessible over WiFi, and connect directly to the iTunes store as well as integrate with the iPhone and iPad and other Airplay compatible devices. The set will run iOS and will be managed by a remote that runs on iPod touch, iPhones and iPads.

Meanwhile, cable companies will start opening up their platforms with some software development kits allowing to access content on the set top boxes they use. Once the Motorola acquisition is completed, Google will start transitioning the Motorola set-top boxes, which are a large part of the cableTV market, to GoogleTV, increasing the footprint of the service in the marketplace. Along the way, we will also see GoogleTV become more streamlined and less ambitious, focusing on delivering Android apps to the big screen instead of trying to rebuild the whole TV industry.

The concept of cord-cutting will continue to gain support but will not yet jump into the mainstream consciousness. With shows now being available exclusively on the likes of Netflix, we might see some interesting positioning whereas some TV carrier will offer Netflix as a premium service.

Politics

Social media will dominate the political cycle in 2012, with Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Tumblr, and Meetup becoming part of the political operative tool belt. However, traditional electoral models will continue to be disrupted by the rise of distributed networked organizations like Occupy Wall Street, Wikileaks, or Anonymous. Except those players and new ones built on a similar model to have a substantial impact in terms of registering new voters and getting those voters to the polls in elections in Europe, the Middle East, and the United States.

In the US, the 2012 electoral cycle will see Republicans select Mitt Romney, a candidate most of their electorate is not very excited about, to run against Barack Obama. With the unexpected support of Occupy Wall Street and its splinter organization, Obama will win re-election as issues around economic disparities and job creation continue to be big topics of discussion.

In Europe, expect to see incumbents toppled in many countries: with major elections coming up in France, Spain, Russia, and Finland, it is possible that we will see a major change in political alignments across most of Europe, along with an increase chance of protest in those different countries. In Russia, in particular, we may see the internet play a crucial role in organizing protest if there are questions regarding voting irregularities.

The continuing protests in the middle east region may also lead to substantial changes in governance in several countries including Bahrain, Syria, and Saudi Arabia. During the presidential elections in Iran, we will see increasing clampdowns on internet sites as the government tries to shut any means of communication available to large groups of protesters.

… and of course, the easiest prediction to make is that the media industry will continue to push for more restrictions on the Internet, leading to more activists pushing back.

Technology

2012 is going to be an explosive year for technology.

First of all, we will see HTML5 roaring back, as many companies realize that it is cheaper to build in HTML5 and that the gap between platform specific code and HTML5 is shrinking. The introduction of WebGL, and proper implementation of geolocation and caching within mobile devices will give developers the ability to develop applications in HTML5 that can rival some of the offerings of native code. This is a move that will be resisted by platform makers like Apple and Google as it will loosen their stranglehold on their respective platforms; however, the split side of this is that effort is that some large companies will look to free themselves from said control by creating HTML5 instances of their own products.

On the mobile end, the Microsoft/Nokia will get some real traction with Windows Phone becoming a strong third player in the mobile market. Apple and Android will continue dominating the market with Microsoft still being a distant third. RIM’s position in the market will substantially worsen and will either be sold or go into bankruptcy.

Enterprise cloud strategies will continue to grow, leading to a growing divide between companies that can get efficiencies through the use of cloud computing and companies that are kept by different regulatory frameworks from being able to realize the financial gains offered by such model.

3D will be a hot buzzword, with the introduction of consumer-oriented 3D scanners and 3D printers that will push the idea of scanning and printing your own plastic parts. This will lead to some controversy around the concept of 3D objects piracy popping up in the media, with little actual evidence to back those fears. On the 3D projection end, we will see the rise of designer 3D glasses and the first glasses-free 3D television hitting the market, as we as a few consumer-grade 3D cameras. At the same time, we will see more and more technology to upscale 2D to 3D, in an attempt to develop a larger consumer market for 3D technology.

On the PC end, netbooks will disappear as a category and the hot new trend will be to offer thinbooks that mirror much of what Apple is offering with the Macbook Air product line.  Solid State Drive will aso increasingly become standard on new computers and we will see Apple actually announce they are getting rid of traditional hard-drive in all their product offerings. This will lead to their being able to announce that all their hardware can now run for at least 7 hours on a single charge.

Any which way, we will be revisiting those predictions at the end of the year and see how well (or badly) I did. I wish you, dear reader, a very happy new year and look forward to a continued dialogue in 2012.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title The 2012 Crystal ball. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

Every year, I make a set of predictions as to what the new year is going to bring. At the end of year, I also review how close or far off the mark I’ve come. It is now time to review the 2011 edition of predictions, which I made on the 3rd of January of this year.

Politics

Last year’s leading internet political story was the rise of wikileaks and, as such, my views were impacted by it. Surprisingly, there has not been that many wikileaks-like organizations arising on the internet. This may be due to the fact that there just aren’t that many people leaking information.

The power of wikileaks, however, could not be denied, and my predictions of protests arising out of cablegate were right on the mark. This year, cablegate highlighted some of the abuse of governments in Tunisia and Egypt and some of that evidence was part (but only part) of what led to radical changes in those northern African countries.

On the regulation end, the FCC has indeed gotten more aggressive, with its more visible move being its attempt to block the acquisition of T-mobile by AT&T. However, to my surprise, there hasn’t been that much complaining from either political party about this rejuvenated enforcement effort.

Meanwhile, the rise of SOPA is clearly in line with the prediction that the entertainment industry will push for more internet regulation.  However, it is relatively easy to predict such thing as it appears the entertainment industry is forever locked into the concept of a more regulated internet. They basically see the internet as competition and would love nothing more than to strangle it to death.

So looking at the political end of the spectrum, I’ll give myself points for good prognostication.

Business

In that category, I decided to stick my neck out on the concept of a public-less IPO and while it was essentially something that happened with Facebook, the concept did not really take off for other companies as they decided to go the public route instead. My expectations were really that IPOs would not come until very late into the year and I was surprised by the likes of LinkedIn, GroupOn, and Zynga managing to get into the market relatively early.

Furthermore, I was pretty much off the mark when it came to NFC. NFC is (and has been) a promising technology but 2011 was not a breakout year for the technology. At this point, only a few select Android models seem to support it and there seems to be little traction from the market around it. While Intel invested in NFC, it may be a technology that grows into usage without having a particular breakout year.

The rise of cord-cutters did happen but not in as large an amount as I suspected. While this is a trend that continue to grow, it is still sitting on the edge and hasn’t gone mainstream yet. However, its a trend I will continue to monitor closely as I suspect this will move to the mainstream in relatively short order.

All and all, my predictions on business were off the mark. Maybe I’ll do better next year.

Technology

Gamification continues to grow but did not really have the big breakout year I expected. While more and more companies are continuing to integrate game-like behavior in their applications and workflows, we are starting to experience a period of consolidation in the space, with bunchball being one of the larger players. This seems to highlight that this space is one where only a couple of major players will arise and smaller players are already running out of steam. The focus around developing gamification models for computer-based applications may be part of the reason for this failing to move forward as the trend is increasingly to more and more applications moving to a mobile-first model.

The scan and shoot revolution I predicted quietly made its ways into the mainstream, with smart phones being the new weapon in every shoppers’ belt this christmas season. It’s one of those quiet revolution that arrived in 2011.

And finally, the big bet I had made on a Microsoft Nokia partnership came in mid-february, when Nokia announced that it would focus all its efforts on developing exclusively for the Microsoft platform.

The internet backlash I was expecting for this year did not come to pass. There may yet be more power in the current positive cycle that has been covering our industry and, as such, it appears that the possibility of a backlash against our industry remains a remote but slim possibility at this time.

So all and all, I’d get a barely pass on the technology side.

Arts and Entertainment

The recent multi-billion contract extensions for NFL broadcast rights are in line with my prediction that big event entertainment is becoming the core focus of the broadcast entertainment world. The continuing effort to support the existing model will increase this trend, giving more and more power to producers of real-time events.

Remixing, and Danish coolness, did not come of age in the past year, however. While groundbreaking on Bjarke Ingels first American project happened in New York, Danes haven’t really moved to the center of popular consciousness. The same is true of remixing: while supercuts are still making their way through youtube but, as a whole, remixing is still not something that has made it into the mainstream.

Maybe I should keep to the margins when it comes to making big predictions around arts and entertainment.

All and all, for this year, my performance at predictions has been average. I will try to do better for the 2012 year.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title 2011 Predictions: The scorecard. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

What is digital currency?

At its core, digital currency is a type of currency that only exists electronically. It is not traded as coins or paper but rather as electronic exchanges on computers and computer networks.

Since the early 1990s, a wide mix of libertarian and cypherpunk thinkers have been trying to figure out a way to make an electronic version of cash, complete with its anonymity and liquidity features available. While the anonymity part had, for the most part, been resolved by the early 1990s (cryptographer David Chaum, who founded Digicash, the pioneer in the field, had research papers on those aspects as early as the late 1980s and had implemented the core basis of an anonymous currency by the very early 1990s), the challenge for digital currency has been one of transaction volume.

With some small changes, systems that were originally planned for all-digital currencies were eventually adapted to support existing legacy currencies like dollars and euros, leading to the rise of companies like Paypal, with a centralized clearing system not dissimilar to those in more traditional payment systems like Honk Kong’s Felica–based Octopus smart card payment system, which is probably the most successful implementation of a store-and-forward payment system in the world.

Similarly, in the US and Europe, recent deployment of store-value cards and NFC technologies have established a potential infrastructure for building out a possible way to eliminate physical cash over the long run. Over the last decade, the rise of internet payments, electronic deposits, and electronic debits has lowered the reliance individuals and corporations have had on paper checks, leading to a substantial drop in the amount of business done around check-related product lines. It is assumed by many in the financial industry that checks are on their last legs.

So what about cash?

Cash has a very long history and seems to have gone from one technological revolution to the other without being drastically impacted. In fact, a history of cash seems to point to cash being closer to a concept that can attach itself like a remora to the latest technology. So while coins used to be the only way to transact cash prior to the invention of the printing press, cash eventually came through the first information revolution stronger as currency became something printed on bills and thus became easier to carry around.

With the advent of the telegraph system, cash started being delivered more as a concept, using a store and forward approach whereas one could go to a telegraph office and send a promissory note over the air. The sender would pay the telegraph operator and the telegraph operator would then work out credits and debits between the different offices, only moving physical cash when actually needed. The same concept basically moved from telegraph to telephone to fax machines to the internet and now to mobile phones. Different modes of distributions but fundamentally the same concept.

The introduction prepaid cards (also known as stored-value cards) in the last decade has made it possible to move cash into a fairly anonymous plastic container that can then be used to make payments wherever the currency it has been filled with is accepted. With players like Visa and Mastercard in the game, it is easy to find networks that support such offerings.

Back to the Euro crisis

For countries in the Euro-zone, there is now a choice: either agree to a more centralized management of their economy from the European Union or decide to strike out on their own.

The former would lead those countries to become more like states in the United States, where they have some level of autonomy but also must ensure alignment with a larger federal entity. The net result, in the long run, for the countries that decide to go down that route, is that they will help forge a United States of Europe, with closer cooperation and eventually a concept similar to federation making its way through that union (I’d put the probability of this happening as fairly high within the next 25 years)

The latter is a more interesting case, from a technological standpoint, because it would mean figuring out how to fill the gap and this is where a digital currency makes sense. If you look at the USA, which came of age in a time when paper currency had become common-place, the vast majority of the cash being trafficked is through bills in denominations as low as $1 (there are $1 coins but they are not very commonly used.) By comparisons, Euros and other European currencies do not have a bill for a single unit of currency and still hang on to coins for that purpose: this is due to the psychological concept of money of more tangible and since the lower end of currency is handled more often, people may want to feel it in their hands.

So what if a country that decided on building (or rebuilding) a currency from the ground up were to do so in today’s day and age?

First of all, we are dealing with a world where electronic payment systems have become more common, with ATM and credit card readers reaching near ubiquity in everyday commerce. At the same time, we are dealing with a world where mobile phones are becoming something that everyone carries. Looking at those factors, is it too much of a leap to imagine a world where a currency could be added and subtracted from phones or pre-paid cards. Why would one need physical cash in today’s world? Are there use cases where the legal transfer of money from an individual to a company and vice-versa could not exist in an all-electronic world?

I’d warrant that no. There is no reason why cash needs to remain a physical component. For starters, the government could distribute e-wallets to any of its constituents relatively cheaply (today, the cost of a pre-paid card with no value on it would be measure in cents in the US) through bank networks. Some ATM might have to be retrofitted reloading of cards but that would be about it (they can already read the cards today). And with just such a move, a whole country would have moved from a physical currency to a digital one.

So the question now remains as to which country will be bold enough to make that first move. To go electronic would probably be substantially cheaper than any other alternatives a country would have to consider if it decides to create or relaunch a currency… and that’s why this option should be the top on the implemetation table for countries that are leaning in that direction.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title From Euro to e-uro. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

It’s been two months since about 100 people started occupying a small park near Wall Street and from there, the seeds of what appears to be a growing movement has hatched. I’ve written in the past about the Occupy Wall Street movement but have continued following it since. Strip out the political content and what you have here is one of the fastest growing startups in America and one that could redefine how business is run.

The active class

As many people have mentioned, the movement was initially made up of younger people, primarily recent college graduates who could not find jobs. But what none of the commentary appreciated (and something I was also not fully aware of) was that this was the first massive movement led by a generation that had not known a time when the internet did not exist. In my previous note on the subject, I had highlighted how much of that movement had the feel of internet philosophy brought into the real world but it wasn’t until more recently that I realize that #OWS is a breakdown of the boundary between virtual and real world.

As a whole generation has learned to chat, exchange ideas, create content, and spread messages over the online medium, they have been affected in a way that many had prognosticated but few had seen: one of the fascinating thing about the internet’s lack of ownership is the fact that it leaves all of us as owners of the internet.

Whereas some activists, myself included, once worried that it was only left up to a few to protect this wonderful public sphere that had been created, the truth is that support for an open internet, and by extension a more open society, is strong. Witness, for example, what happened last week when SOPA threatened this opennesss: not only did net people rise up and confronted their lawmakers on this but users of those services also did, generating thousands of calls to Congress.

Two things happen when someone makes that first call to Congress: first, they feel a sense of kinship with the other people who are fighting for the same cause, and secondly they feel they have a say and can have an impact in changing the system, making them more likely to be socially and politically active in the future.

For over a decade now, many have talked of internet activism but we also need to think about the longer impact that such thing has. I’d venture that the activism created by the ability of quickly sharing political stories or quickly reaching out to politicians is creating a more active political class on all sides of the spectrum: on the right, we’ve seen the rise of the Tea Party, and on the other side, we’re seeing the rise of #OWS.

What has traditionally been known as the left (the side that wants a more active government instead of a less active one) is also more in line with the model set in place by the early founders of the internet. Remember that the net has largely been administered as a common, with all parties involved being given more or less equal rights. There has been tensions when some parties have tried to reach for more rights, as can be witnessed in the recent fight over SOPA.

The people’s microphone

So what does this all have to do with #OWS? Well, let me get to that. In order to do so, we must look at the people’s microphone. What started as a way to get around laws requiring a permit to use amplification equipment has become a key component of this new movement.

A few days ago, I tweeted that “Mic Check is the RT of #OWS”. What I meant by that is that it’s becoming clearer to me is that through those words, #OWS are asking the rest of the crowd to spread a message.

From a messaging standpoint, there are a few components at play here. First, there is the use of simple words to trigger attention. To paraphrase Will Rogers, belonging to the left is not belonging to any organized movement. But the “mic check” changes that: it opens up a request for the crowd to lower their message and agree to amplify someone else’s. A basic assumption here is that while there may not be agreement as to what is being talked about, there is an agreement that the message will be relayed forward.

This is in line with the current principle of “net neutrality” many fights have arisen about online: there is a general agreement between all parties on the internet that no matter what the traffic is, every internet service provider agrees to carry it without discrimination. So “Mic Check” can be seen as a request to open a web page or application on the internet, with the assumption that communication will continue until the message has been communicated.

Psychologically, this type of agreement already primes the brain to be more receptive to an idea. The next step in what happens with the people’s microphone is the amplification, or the repeating of that other message one has agreed to carry. Here again, some interesting components happen: Because the message is to be repeating by a large crowd, who repeats it to the people behind them, it enforces an oratory style that requires something in line with the type of pithy statement that would fit in the 140 characters allowed for a tweet.

By repeating the idea, however, something else might happen in people’s brain (and this is based on the kind of psychological primers that are used in many videogames): having opened up to a mike check (and thus agreed to carry the message), the brain is more receptive to the message being amplified. When the message is repeated, a certain sense of ownership of the message is conferred on the person amplifying the message.

That sense of ownership is something that probably translates into a sense of belonging and lasts longer than the meeting the person has attended. I suspect that, through the use of the people’s microphone, #OWS is increasing the overall number of converts to its movement.

Large orgs and #OWS

Having built a relatively leaderless movement and managed to get a large amount of supporters, #OWS has attracted the attention of many established players in the political world. And on this part Thursday’s anniversary events at Foley Square, many organized labor members could be seen with placards for their own causes.

However, what is becoming increasingly clear is that while #OWS is a very inclusive movement, it is not a movement that will be easily hijacked. The unions may be allowed to voice their message but they will not be allowed to lead the leaderless movement, nor will anyone else. Partnerships and inclusive behavior is something that has been more common in the technology industry (though that is, unfortunately, starting to change among some of the bigger players) and there may be a lesson here for all organizations as to how to balance their own interest while working together with other groups (Yes, Wall Street, even you can learn from #OWS!)

Foley square may have been an organized event for the second anniversary of #OWS but the use of amplified equipment seemed to have given it less fervor, with more people milling about and having different discussions about different topics. The cohesion that arose out of gatherings of thousands at Zuccotti Park did not appear to be there at Foley Square and seemed more in line with what traditional political rallies look like than the kind of effort seen around #OWS.

However, political organization of all stripes have a lot to learn from #OWS. For example, looking at the people’s microphone I mentioned above, there may be value in considering how to drop amplified equipment from smaller gatherings (sub-10,000 people). In an age of retweeting and sharing, political images and hashtags are also extremely important. The hashtag, that weird # symbol before a specific term is a unifying force between different efforts. It has been widely adopted across most content sharing services and can serve as a way to aggregate and integrate content from many different services into a single place (or allow users to search for said content in a consistent fashion). Here, #OWS did some of its own learning: in its early days, they were gathering around the tag #occupywallstreet, which is fairly lengthy and thus steals away from the rest of the message when dealing with a service with limited character availability, the shorter #OWS has allowed the movement to recapture precious characters. How that learning was incorporated into their ongoing efforts could be seen with the selection of #N17 as the date of November 17 to celebrate their anniversary.

The tents may be gone from Zuccotti Park and many other #OWS encampments but I suspect that the movement will continue growing because, at the end of the day, what made it strong was not a set of tents and tarps but a sense of ownership of the future by all its members and that, as a society, is something we all need more of.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Re:Occupied. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

As any TNL.net readers know, there has long been a battle between two groups on the Internet: those who believe that copyright holders should be given preferential treatment and those who believe the internet should be a level-playing ground. I am firmly in the latter camp, even though I produce large amounts of content online.

A few years ago, Congress passed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (aka DMCA), a law that, while somewhat more aggressive than I’d like it, manages to strike a balance between the interests of both copyright holders and online sites by requiring that a takedown notice be sent to a site if you see infringing content. The site then needs to honor or fight the takedown notice in court. The DMCA turned out to be a decent compromise protecting the interests of most people and things should probably have stopped there.

But the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA for short) goes substantially farther. It looks to assume guilt on the part of the site hosting content and looks to provide a system that would put control of internet domain names in the hands of the government.

Today, when you type TNL.net in your browser, that gets translated into a set of numbers known as an IP address (this is similar to you looking up contacts in your address book instead of having to remember that contact’s phone number). What SOPA calls for is that if a copyright owner finds one piece of infringing content on a site, they could go to the government and ask them to block that address. People would still be able to access the site if they knew the IP address (and most pirates would)  but the regular public would not be able to access the site by typing its name. Sites like Facebook, Google, Twitter, Flickr, and other could immediately disappear from the internet for a single presumed act of copyright sharing.

So I would urge you to contact your congressperson in opposition of SOPA today. Sendwrite has created a helpful online tool to send physical letters to your congressperson. The few minutes you put in will make it possible for the internet to continue existing.

Before you go, imagine two futures: in one, the internet becomes like TV, you don’t get to choose what’s on, when it’s on and where it’s on; in the other, the internet remains as it is today, a place where you can choose what you want to see, when you want to see and where you want to see it. Which future do you want? If it’s the latter, contact your congressperson today.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Stopping SOPA. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

The Demands

At its core, it seems the message of Occupy Wall Street is one grounded in change. Much has been made about the lack of demands and the second issue of the “Occupied Wall Street Journal” seems to answer some of the questions: one article highlighted that they would not make a list of demands because

We are speaking to each other, and listening.
This occupation is first about participation.

This is an interesting development in that the focus here is on the network more than the leadership and, in that sense, Occupy Wall Street (or #OWS) is probably one of the first protest movement for our era, based on a leadership model that relies on networks instead of top down infrastructures, on participation instead of inaction, on sharing instead of agreeing.

Because of that model, #OWS is a rejection of the current institutions, with Wall Street probably serving as a stand-in for a lot of the top down hierarchies that have been controlling much of the political dialogue for decades. I had initially thought of them as being the left-wing equivalent to the right-wing led Tea Party but #OWS is substantially more important as a movement because it redefines engagement.

The movement is increasingly based on a simple message: “we are the 99 percent,” which highlights the movement’s right to exist and its willingness to find a way to help most. It ties, to a large extent to the American ideal of a country where we can always do better and, in that sense, seems to be politically aligned with every movement that has helped the country move forward in the past.

The Network

#OWS also reminds me a lot of the Internet and while most people focus on how the movement is using Internet tools to spread its message, what’s been interesting to me is how internet philosophy seems to be at the center of a lot of the movement’s approach to spreading its message.

Whether it is by design or not, the movement has taken an approach that is steeped into some of the core beliefs of the internet founders. For example, in 1993, John Gilmore was quoted by Time magazine as follows:

The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it

As the protest grows, it appears it has increasingly seen some of the laws as damaging and has managed to route around them.

For example, the protest was initially planning to set up camp near the JP Morgan Chase Tower but when it was turned back, it settled only a few blocks away, on a public/private park that happens to be open 24 hours a day (the status of public private open spaces has worked to the movement’s advantage as its usually hazy legal status, which is traditionally leveraged by corporations to justify locking things up is now one of the main reason for which the city cannot shut the protest down at this time).

Another example came earlier this week, when the owners of the park attempted to evict the protesters because it needed to clean the park, the protesters routed around the challenge by cleaning the park themselves.

And a third example is the practice of the human microphone, which allows the group to make announcements without the permits needed to operate amplifying equipment in a park. This ensures the group is able to make widespread announcements without breaking the law nor creating the possibility of having a permit denied, which may create a situation allowing the law to disband it.

Another way in which one can find similarities to the organizing principles of the internet, is the lack of leadership to define the movement. On the internet, no site has any precedence over any other, and no traffic is considered more important, thanks to a principle called net neutrality. This feature means that any point on the internet is as important as any other point on the internet in terms of moving traffic around. This has been dubbed the rise of stupid networks by David Isenberg, in comparison to the controlled environments of traditional telecommunication companies. Isenberg’s principles were derided by traditional network executives as simplistic and naive when they were first published but have come to become the way in which most telecommunication is happening today.

In the same way, the lack of leadership in the #OWS movement has been derided by the traditional powers that be, who have claimed that the group lacks organization because it fails to have the kind of command-control structure that has been the way things have been run over the last few centuries. The appropriate answer to that challenge is simply to ask about how a disorganized group could be accomplishing as much as this one is and extending as much as it has in as little an amount of time as it has.

Visiting Zucotti Park was a fascinating eye opener when it comes to self-organized systems. The park has communal planning with clearly delineated areas for living quarters, eating, communication, art, etc. There is also some level of organization around how the group manages its different activities, from direct actions to the internet. The leaderless feature seems to actually be an advantage for the environment as the chaos that exists consistently enables anyone to make logistical decisions quickly while matters of planning and speaking on behalf of the group require a substantial level of communication.

The lack of leaders seems to represent a substantial part of the clash between the police and the protesters. On one side, the police has a highly structured model and is trying to provoke the protesters into confrontation. A defining traits of the protests is how few people have taken the bait (it seems Gandhi’s principle of non-violent protest runs deep within the movement) and how many assaults and arrests the police seem to have pushed. It will be interesting to see if any charges will actually stick once they go through the legal system.

The protest

Where #OWS seems to have failed in leveraging internet technology is in the way it has spread its protests out. In the Tahir square confrontations earlier this year, the organizers decided to break their protests out in smaller protests all over the place. The goal there was to deal with the fact that each protest would get broken out and people would spread out from each of the small protests. What was not broadcast was that a smaller protest was designed completely offline to be fed by the breakout of all the other protests. The Tahir movement used Google Maps to then figure out the optimal path for that smaller protest so it could grow as each of the smaller ones was broken out, feeding into the main one.

#OWS has germinated into an occupy everywhere movement and continues to grow, with new protests arising daily. There appears to be some level of coordination globally, when it comes to dates and times but little is being done in terms of focused messaging for each effort.

The lack of central message has been the most frustrating part to traditional media. Media thrives on conflict and the lack of conflict has led most traditional outlets scratching their collective heads as to how to cover this. A few have focused on the police brutality but so far the protestors have done two things that are making it difficult for traditional media to cover them:

• They have refused to engage the police and have attempted to follow the letter of the law
• The have refused to take direct actions against any specific target other than “the system” as a whole.

Imagine what would happen if they decided to organize boycotts, as Bernie Sanders suggested. Imagine what would happen if, on a particular day, they were to announce that occupy wall street would “occupy” Wall Street by keeping them busy, due to a run on the banks, with hundreds or thousands of protesters pulling their money out of the largest banks and putting them into smaller community banks. Such a “run on the banks” would get wide coverage and probably provoke substantial confrontation, giving media a chance to deride the move as destabilizing. But the #OWS movement has been either smart enough or disorganized enough to avoid creating that kind of confrontation, which would probably lead it to either condemnation or failure.

If there seems to be a message behind the protest, it may that people still have the right to protest. A question I may have on this is how long this message can go on. It’s clear that people are unhappy (you don’t need to follow the antics of #OWS to understand that as poll numbers after poll numbers show discontent across the board) but what will come next?

To #OWS, it seems what is to come next is something better than what we have today. How one defines that is the secret to what this movement is about.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title An Occupation. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

A smaller book industry

Few people know that books are generally sold at a substantially lower cost than the printed one on the cover. I worked in a bookstore a long time ago (back in the pre-internet days) and books were then sold to bookstores for about half the cover price. I think what we’re now seeing is that e-books are sold by bookmakers at about the same price as they were before but it seems that less will be required to make and distribute books moving forward.

People who are currently employed managing the production and distribution of physical books will not be as essential as they once were. With fewer printed books going out the door, fewer people are needed to set the printers up, to provide ink, to make paper, to store books into warehouses for shipping, and to bring the books from one physical location to another. Book chains, which have worked as supermarkets for books will no longer be needed as printed books will only be sought after by people who want their book store to be staffed with like-minded people who care about books. While the independent bookstores will thrive again, the people who treated books as just another widget will mostly disappear from the book production value chain, with no new jobs to replace the ones that were displaced.

In other words, the industry of book creation and production is about to get radically smaller.

Distribution Concentration

A few weeks ago, I highlighted that a market-changing tablet would probably be priced in the $200–250 range so there is no doubt in my mind that Amazon, with its Kindle Fire will succeed in the marketplace. What I do worry about, however, is that the rise of e-reader is something that will leave control of mass market book distribution in the hands of only a few players: Apple, Amazon, and maybe Barnes & Noble (if they survive).

Longtime readers of TNL.net know that I worry about the lock-down of the internet by corporate entities. In my view, the openness of the internet has been a key to the explosion in innovation over the last couple of decades and the internet may be reaching an important crossroad.

But with the rise of e-readers, that debate may become substantially more urgent. If we are dealing with most of the public getting its content through devices that are controlled by a few companies, we may regress to a point where control of information will be substantially tighter. We already know, from recent history, that the government can ask TV stations to be “more careful” in its coverage, leaving a country in a state of war with few images about the sacrifices made by our armed forces. In a future when distribution of most reading material is concentrated in the hands of a few companies, and distribution of other media is also in the hands of a few conglomerates, should we worry about potential censorship?

What about readers?

And what will happen to readers. Anyone who has had school-aged children has learned that an important way to improve reading is to read at home. But in a world where e-readers are multi-purpose devices that can also be used to watch TV and movies or play games, how will parent send their kids the signal that they are reading? And will kids take use of laptops and tablets as signs that the printed word is dead?

Today, it is easy to curl up with a good book and send kids a clear signal that book reading is a form of entertainment. Little mimics that they are, children start reading their own books as a result and I’ve noticed that families that read have children that read and the inverse is true. If reading is an important part of education and growing, allowing kids to build up their understanding of the world, their literacy, and their imagination and creativity, what will happen if children don’t read?

Will future generations only consume video and audio content with little or no interest in printed materials? And, if that is the case, where will the printed words that sit as the scaffolding for video and audio come from? Those are all troubling questions for which I have no answer but, in a world where physical books will become the domain of the few, they could become questions with large societal impact.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title E-reader impact. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

There’s been so much noise over the past few days about the anniversary of 9/11 that even people living under a rock would have heard of it. A decade, in personal time, is a long time, a quarter of my life. But on a historical curve it is but a drop in the bucket.

And so today is a time to look back, past the horrors of that day, past the giant ball of fire that forever changed me, past the desperate people flinging themselves out the windows of the building, past the cloud of smoke that replaced what had once been the tallest human-created structure, past the smell that lingered on for weeks and months after, past the ways in which the US justified its own abuses with these terrible even, past the ways in which hateful rhetoric used the events of that day to justify their divisive behavior.

Today is a time to focus on the good things that came out of it, on the way firemen and other good samaritans rushed towards the towers instead of away from them in an attempt to save more lives, on the way those rushing in paid no attention to their own safety because they were more concerned about the safety of others, on the way thousands pushed back when people tried to paint this as a clash of civilization, on the way in which countless people pulled together to help each other, on the way many created their own memorials to the fallen, on the way  people tried to work together to heal some of the wounds that were left behind, on the way many heeded the call when this became a day of volunteering.

Today is a time to honor the dead by building for the future, to show that we cannot be swayed by the heresy of the few, to highlight all that is good in humankind, to show that standing together is stronger than standing alone, to point out that helping others is more important than helping oneself, to reach out to those who may be having a hard time and lend a shoulder to lean on, to be friendly, to be human, and to show that we are a country built on hope.

Today is time to show that our hope for the future cannot be destroyed by the madness of militants, whether they are foreign or domestic, to see that our hopes cannot be pushed down by adverse conditions, to recommit to the hopes of those before us who wanted to create a more perfect union, to point to a future where such hatred will not exist because it will not be needed, to reveal plans for rebuilding and recommitting to making the world a better place, to view the world and its future anew, as if for the first time, as children do.

Today is a time for rebirth, renewal, restoration, recovery, and reawakening; a time to rebuild, as we can now witness on ground zero where the hole in the city’s skyline is slowly being refilled even as the hole in our hearts may remain open; a time to rethink our views of others, extending a hand to those who may not agree with us in order to better understand their point of view; a time to restart the 21st century, leaving behind the psychological scars left by that horrible day and recommitting to what makes this country, and this world, an amazing place.

So turn off your TV, turn off your radio, turn off the noise and reach out to your neighbors, your friends, and total stranger and spend time focusing on how to make the world a better place instead of looking back at the time when some in the human race displayed our worst instinct.

Previous years

For a decade, I’ve marked the event with a specific post. Here is what I had to say on previous years:

• 2001: The Day After
• 2002: In Memoriam
• 2003: Two Years
• 2004: Rebirth
• 2005: 9/11 at 4
• 2006: 5 years
• 2007: 6 observations about 9/11
• 2008: 7
• 2009: Waiting
• 2010: Nine

In memoriam

Car­los Dominguez, Mark Ellis, Melissa Vin­cent, Michael DiPasquale, Cyn­thia Giugliano, Jeremy Glick, David Hal­der­man, Steve Wein­berg, Ger­ard Jean Bap­tiste, Tom McCann, David Vera.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title A decade. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

The beginning

In the early days of the computing revolution, hackers and regular computer users were often indistinguishable. Core to some of the early ethical tenets of the computer world was a certain sense for mischief and rebelliousness. In certain case, some of the early pioneers (Steve Jobs, for example) knowingly broke the law. Others would reserve their pranks for the 1st of April. But one thing that was constant was an understanding that the computer industry (and later, the internet industry) was a bit more mischievous and more willing to take risks

As the internet became more popular, the general public started bumping into some of those jokes and illegal acts. Early adopters understood them to be part of the culture of the internet but as the mainstream came online, tolerance for such events decreased and, as the net became a little more corporate, agreements regarding mischievous behavior that sometimes skirted the edges of the law disappeared.

Where unruly went next

But the unruly behavior didn’t completely disappear and took different forms.

On one side, rule-breaking was replaced with rule testing, resulting in companies like Napster, that took on the whole copyright regime and threw it under the bus, trying to build a business model based on what had been previously considered illegal. Of course, as often happens in those cases, they were sued in almost inexistence. But the genie was out of the bottle and the boundaries they broke were never truly re-established.

In other, darker corners, some of the rule and law breaking professionalized itself. As the net became more mainstream, everyone including criminals came online. And the criminals saw some of the hacking as a lucrative line of business, getting into areas phishing, corporate breaking and entering, reselling information or raiding financial data. All those types of behaviors were a corruption of the original unruly approach and turned it into something more sinister.

But yet another strand of the unruly behavior moved much farther, mutating as it met certain political ideologies. Attaching itself and merging with ideologies ranging from libertarianism to anarchism, this strand became much more unpredictable.

The rise of hacktivists

In the early 80s, groups of hackers started getting together and bring more of an ideology-bent approach to their attacks. One such early organization, the Chaos Computer Club, highlighted security issues in german banking system by hacking them in front of the media, taking large amounts of money out, and then returning it at press conferences the next day.

As internet rule-breaking became its own ideology, more groups started appearing, taking on battles with more traditional players online. Part internet communities, part memes, those groups were loosely formed, with participants often not knowing each others but leveraging online tools to organize themselves and select their targets.

In the early 21st century, a new group emerged from the 4Chan discussion board: Anonymous, an internet collective organizing rapid internet based protect actions, often taking the guise of denial of service attack, the practice of taking down web-based services by overloading them. Some of their initial efforts included increased actions in the continuing battle between the internet and the church of scientology. But they were just getting started.

Wikileaks and the rise of Anonymous

The Wikileaks releases, and subsequent attacks by governments which felt their reputation had been sullied by the releases, gave Anonymous a cause they would attach themselves to. In rising to wikileaks defense, the Anonymous collective started taking on the web infrastructure of organizations that had hurt wikileaks and its ability to operate. Because many in the online community felt the Wikileaks cause to be just, the actions of Anonymous were heralded as a positive counter-force to supra-legal approaches taken by opponents of the leaks site.

Their efforts led to an increased online battle between government-backed forces, corporations who want to sell their services by demonizing groups like Wikileaks, and the Anonymous collective. For example, HBGary Federal, a security company that targeted Anonymous and Wikileaks as the enemy, came to be a target.

A million little pieces

But as Anonymous’ reputation grew, so did disagreement within its ranks as to what to do and how to do it. At the same time, a number of copycat organizations started to emerge, bringing different causes as justifications for their efforts.

Over the last couple of months, LulzSec established itself as a strong contender in the field, hacking such organizations as Sony, the US Senate, the CIA, the Brazilian president’s site, etc… grabbing large amounts of information with each attacks and releasing it online.

And this is where we stand today: the idea of heavily publicized online hacking exploit as a form of protest has taken hold and is probably here to stay. And an idea is not something one can destroy that easily.

Let’s roll back the tape a little bit on what happened after Napster was pretty much shut down by the music industry. The concept of online music sharing didn’t die with Napster, it just took different forms, and that’s something the music industry never recovered from.

So organizations like Anonymous, LulzSec, and whoever comes next are here to stay. Their insurgent actions will probably work as a counterbalance to many efforts by corporations and government to increase their control of the internet. However, their actions will also result in governments and corporations using those efforts as an example of why there is a need for more centralized control of the internet.

So no matter where you stand on their efforts (whether you applaud or condemn them), the net result is that we are about to enter a long internet conflict between online hacktivists and established stakeholders.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title The Internet War. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

Twitter tweets expiration

The foundation story of Twitter claims that the first tweet was made by Jack Dorsey and was “Just setting up my twttr”. But what was his second tweet? Or his third one? What was his first @ message? Today, it’s impossible to answer any of those questions because neither the Twitter search engine nor scrolling through the complete list of tweets from someone will provide you with all the results.

The Twitter search engine apparently expires content after a few days. Tweets become inaccessible after 3200 tweets or roughly three and a half days if you are tweeting at the top rate allowed on the service (users of Twitter are allowed a maximum of 1,000 tweets, which may explain why there have been so few uses of Twitter as a fully interactive type of service).

With Twitter now claiming an important role in events like the 2009 Iranian uprising or the 2011 events in the rest of the middle east, it seems that expiring tweets is a bad idea as it deletes an important historical record. At the current time, Facebook claims that developers can access “all of a user’s status” which might imply that their retention policy is stronger that Twitter’s.

Fun with Google searches

But social media may be the exception and not the rule so I decided to start looking at web pages, which have been around for almost two decades now. Searching the internet of the past is an interesting thing. For example, let’s look at the tech industry:

The Netscape IPO seen as the first big internet IPO, happened on August 10, 1995. Doing a search the week before and after returns 7 results.

Microsoft’s introduction of Internet Explorer was in August 1995, with a second big announcement in December of that year. A search for “Microsoft introduces internet explorer” in 1995 returns 40 results.

Some may claim that I am being unfair, picking events that happened before Google’s creation. So I decided to look at events after 1999, at a time that would be contemporary with Google’s existence.

For example, the presidential election of 2000 was one of the hottest political contest in American history. It pitted Al Gore (421 Google results between January 1, 2000 and January 1, 2001) against George Bush (418 results for the same time period) and left the country wondering who was the winner for several days. There wasn’t a 24 hour news channel or newspaper in the country that did not cover the events extensively. And yet, we are left with less than a thousand pages from the period.

Some of those pages in the Google index may not even be from that time period. For example, the last page in my search for “George Bush” in the time range of January 1, 2000 to January 1, 2001 returned a site called celebritytweet.com. Considering that twitter wouldn’t exist for a few more years, I have doubt that the site existed in 2000.

If politics may be too narrow a topic, maybe something like the attacks on the World Trade Center might have more impact. So doing a search for pages relating to the week it happened (I did a search with a date range between September 10, 2001 and September 18, 2001) would probably returns TONS of pages. The result, according to Google is 461 pages.

Let me repeat that figure: 461 pages of historical record for what is widely agreed as one of the most important historical event in our lifetime.

For a quick comparison, I decided to take a somewhat less important event from the past week. Sure, I could have gone for the raid on Bin Laden but instead I decided to go for something a little more inconsequential: Lady Gaga’s deal with Zynga. A search limited to the last week has returned 477 results.

So if Google is the arbitrer of what’s important and the repository of most of our collective memory, a visitor from another planet looking at it could easily conclude that Lady Gaga cutting a deal with Zynga was more important that the attacks of 9/11. I’m not one to pass judgment on the cultural importance of Lady Gaga but something tells me that either the Google algorithm is wrong here or the Internet tends to be a very forgetful place.

Conclusion

As more an more media becomes digital, the concept of media retention is becoming increasingly important. It should become a growing area of concern for most historian and archivists to see that large portion of the late 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century may be leaving behind a smaller footprint of data than previous era. Efforts like the Google Book Search project are making great strike making things like physical books more accessible by creating digital reproductions of that content but they should also start considering making more recent, already digitized data archived in some fashion. Otherwise, the lack of a past may make us more susceptible to creating a less perfect future.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Forever is a long time. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

The following are based on observations of how people I know have handled the issues around content ownership and online presence. I’m not going to endorse any of them in particular as I think that those type of things differ based on many social factors, including but not limited to your work situation (some people may, by law, not have a choice), your age (it appears to me that, the younger you are, the more comfortable you are with disclosing more), the country you live in (my European and Asian friends tend to be more reserved).

So, without further ado, here are five ways I’ve witnessed people and companies using to manage their online presence:

1. Obscurity: No participation is a form of management
2. Controlled: Heavy use of controlling mechanism to parse communication.
3. Broadcasting: Mainly using the services as tools to market one’s content in other areas.
4. Additive: Sharing content on social networks that is not shared in other realms.
5. All-in: Abandoning other forms of media distribution and exclusively leveraging social networks

Obscurity

We are now roughly half a decade to a decade into the social web phenomenon so few people or companies can claim to not have heard of the phenomenon. And yet, some do not appear on social networks. In my discussion with people or companies that do not participate, it seems that many people are simply choosing to not participate. In some cases, it is because they do not see the value: for example, Tina Fey recently explained that she’s not using Twitter by saying “I guess I feel if I had any jokes, I would just hold them”.

So the people who are not present on social network by choice often decide on that lack of presence for economic reason (figuring they may not want to share their content with the services’ owners).

Others have decided on obscurity as a way to avoid dealing with any issue that could arise out of conflicts due to their social media presence. This category of people may actually create more problems for themselves as they let others define them in the online social realm.

Last but not least is the pseudo-obscurity used by some, for example hiding their identity behind a pseudonym or something that does not link them to the non-online world. Many teens, for example, no longer use their real names on the likes of Facebook, for fear that college admission bureaus or potential employers could find them. This group is acutely aware of the fact that online records tend to be pretty permanents and that whatever is posted online by or about them can have a long term impact. This sub-group is an interesting one to observe because it shows a high level of engagement with social media while maintaining a similarly high level of anonymity.

Controlled

This category of users tend to be more sophisticated when it comes to articulating arguments about their handling of social media. Some define broad categories and associated rules based on the services they use (for example, one may consider that LinkedIn is for work only but refuse to “friend” co-workers on Facebook or follow them on Twitter). A lot of teenagers also fall in that category, using finely tuned privacy controls on facebook, for example, to decide on who does and doesn’t see what they are up to.

This group of people is acutely aware of the image they want to project in the online world and works hard on sculpting a presence that is finely tuned to each of the micro-audiences they are trying to reach, whether they are friends, colleagues, schoolmates, or other communities of interest.

The level to which one does or does not exert that level of control over their online persona is often hard to discern as people who claim to belong to one of the other categories may actually be sculpting an image of themselves that mirrors the attributes of that category.

Broadcasting

In the real world, one might called this persona a self-promoter. Any information they publish is related to themselves or their own product: come see my presentation, test out my product, buy my book, read my blog entry, vote for me in such and such poll, etc…

This also appears to be the model generally taken on by a lot of established corporation. The engagement here is not engagement but marketing, spewing out messages that barely differ from the type of marketing one might do with a billboard or a TV commercial (but, as some of the proponents of this approach would say, social media is cheaper than those other forms).

Sometimes, this behavior is merely the first sign of a beginner, trying to figure out the new medium but clinging to old models. Over time, one hopes, this persona can abandon the relentless me-me-me focus of their offerings and start participating in conversations with other actors in the space, while at the same time providing information from other sources in the community.

Additive

This persona tries to extend their offering by leveraging social media in a brand new way. For example, Andy Carvin appears to be pioneering a new form of journalism through Twitter, less based on his own reporting and more focused on curating and aggregating topic-specific content (in his case, the current uprisings in the middle east).

In the past, such a persona may have written pieces on blogs that would present a rounded view of a day’s event but now, thanks to services like Twitter or the Facebook status stream, providing pointers to content has become easier than ever.

In other cases, the social media services become a way to share things that may not fit anywhere else, maybe because they are not organized in a particular way or they are too small to share in a different forum.

For example, in my own use, a lot of what I initially posted on Twitter was links to stories or blog posts I had found interesting. Because I have a wide number of things I’m interested in, there is no overriding organizing principles to those links beyond the fact that I found them interesting. This can be frustrating to some of the people who try to follow as the lack of correlation may make the content unclear.

All-in

Think of this persona as the social media equivalent of Tourette syndrome. The idea here is that this persona engages in radical transparency by sharing everything, from where they are at any given time (using Foursquare and the likes), to what they’re eating, to how their bodily functions are doing. People in this category are often seen as oversharing by some of their readers.

One question that I have is whether this category truly exist or whether it is not more of a subset of a controlled experience. For example, it is fascinating to see how people who claim to be part of that category bristle at the idea of sharing some particular details of their lives: everyone has a line they will not cross when it comes to transparency. For some, it is about money; for others, it is about sex; for yet another group, it is about certain friends.

I’d venture that the all-in persona is mostly an invented one, pretending to create a high level of intimacy with followers/friends (fofriends?) in order to extract financial value out of that pseudo-intimacy. It is the kind of things that allows media stars to entertain their fans and retain them in the period between two revenue generating events, whether they are talks, conferences, concerts, books, movies, or other. It gives the fans a sense of closeness to the stars, while keeping them well at a distance.

Bonus category: Mixed

Ultimately, I suspect that a lot of people end up in a space that is actually a mix of the different personas I’ve highlighted above. For example, I’ve seen some people who are opting for obscurity in certain realms become broadcasters in others. And I’ve seen people pretending to be all-in pull back when it comes to certain subjects.

I suspect that there will be a continued discussion in the online space for the next decade at least as more people trying to define and understand what online personas are and where they would like to stand when it comes to their own persona in the online realm.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Five social media presence strategies. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

Twitter and your content

Twitter, one of the most popular social services today, has one of the most enlightened Terms of services: They try hard to give you as many rights as possible and to take as few things as possible for themselves… and yet, you find things like this (emphasis is mine):

By submitting, posting or displaying Content on or through the Services, you grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute such Content in any and all media or distribution methods (now known or later developed).

So, if Twitter decides, in the future that all private tweets are now public, they can legally do so. Or if they want to compile a book of your tweets and sell it without giving you a dime, you’ve granted them those rights too. And then (emphasis mine again)…

You agree that this license includes the right for Twitter to make such Content available to other companies, organizations or individuals who partner with Twitter for the syndication, broadcast, distribution or publication of such Content on other media and services, subject to our terms and conditions for such Content use.

So if you said you liked a particular product on Twitter, the company can then partner with the maker of that product to use your endorsement in their ads, once again without giving you anything for is. In fact, the matter of compensation is clearly stated in that TOS:

You agree that this license includes the right for Twitter to make such Content available to other companies, organizations or individuals who partner with Twitter for the syndication, broadcast, distribution or publication of such Content on other media and services, subject to our terms and conditions for such Content use.

… and of course, Twitter is making sure that anything they’ve given you can be taken back:

We reserve the right at all times (but will not have an obligation) to remove or refuse to distribute any Content on the Services and to terminate users or reclaim usernames

… and all this from one of the friendlier services out there (for the record, I picked Twitter because it’s often been painted as a friendly service compared to Facebook.

Did Facebook become the good guy?

So this brings up to the big difference between Twitter and Facebook. Many have decried Facebook’s push to shatter privacy settings for users of the service. So let’s take a look at their TOS.

Facebook initially seems to point to a policy that seems to give you more control of your content until you re-read the statement (emphasis mine):

For content that is covered by intellectual property rights, like photos and videos (“IP content”), you specifically give us the following permission, subject to your privacy and application settings: you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook (“IP License”). This IP License ends when you delete your IP content or your account unless your content has been shared with others, and they have not deleted it.

First of all, I want to say thank you to Facebook for limiting their rights to the current times and not getting rights for method of distribution that could be created in the future. However, this portion about “unless your content has been shared with others” destroys the rest of the argument: one posts content to Facebook to share it with others so what you seem to be saying here is that if it’s been on Facebook, we can use it.

The rest of the contract actually seems to offer friendlier terms than Twitter does and of course, highlights that they can turn your access to service off at any time (once again, emphasis is mine):

If you violate the letter or spirit of this Statement, or otherwise create risk or possible legal exposure for us, we can stop providing all or part of Facebook to you

Any lawyer will tell you that possible legal exposure can be created in a lot of cases, so this seems to give an almost blank check to Facebook to turn off your access.

Compare and Contrast

What was most interesting to me, in reading the terms of both Facebook and Twitter is that it seems we, as users, are giving up more rights when we are using Twitter than when we are using Facebook. Whether this is a function of Facebook having been at the center of a few firestorms regarding user rights and therefore forced to change its terms to make them friendlier to users or some other factor regarding corporate culture is not something I can assess. All I can tell is that it seems that one gives up more by publishing content on Twitter than they do by doing so on Facebook.

Does that mean that Facebook should get a free pass? Absolutely not. The pressures consumers have exercised on the service have probably had some impact. What it does mean, however, is that Twitter may have been getting by with an easier treatment than Facebook and I suspect that, as its user-base grows and its impact increases, the service may find itself forced to revise some of the terms of its services.

I am no lawyer but I suspect there is wording that could be friendlier to users of the service and I would encourage the company to look at that wording before it becomes a firestorm.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Your rights on Twitter and Facebook. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

I’ve decided to explore this in a 3 part series: In this entry, I present a brief history of online identity ownership; in the next entry, I will compare and contrast the Facebook and Twitter TOS agreements; and in the last entry, I will look at the different approach people and companies are taking to managing those issues.

Online identity before the web

In the early days of the commercial internet, online identity was largely defined by which handle you were using on a variety of community-related services. You may have discussed things on usenet, an internet-wide service for discussion, or chatted on IRC, an internet-wide chatroom, but the fact was that neither of those services were owned by corporations. As a results, the mores dictating behavior on such networks were more a question of community standards than anything else. Because the communities were “relatively” small (and by relatively, I mean in relation to the size of online communities today), things worked out mostly OK.

While the internet itself had some internet-wide community tools, a few smaller micro-communities existed within that wider realm. Groups like the west-coast based WELL (Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link) or the east-coast based ECHO (East Coast Hang Out) were even smaller groups without legal contracts but with established community norms for behavior. With communities numbering in the thousands, things were still manageable without contracting.

Enters the web

But then came the web and things got a little fuzzier. With the development of the web, two major new things happened: first, it became easier to navigate the internet, increasing the number of people with access to internet resources from the low millions numbers to several billions today. Secondly, and probably because of this increase in population, the number of corporate interest wanting a web presence exploded to the point of near ubiquity.

But with this came a first set of challenges. Internet Service Providers, the companies that offered access to the internet started providing individual users with the right to publish on the internet. However, along with those rights came the concept of “Terms of Services” (TOS for short) which defined what could and couldn’t be said on the services. These types of restrictions led some people to start thinking about what they needed to do to publish content on servers other than those ISPs.

Most of the people from that generation found the answer in ownership of a domain name. But ownership is an incorrect word as it is impossible to own a domain name. Today, one registers a domain, which means an individual or corporation is given the right to lease that domain name for a period of time from an accredited entity. So, for example, if I die and no one renews the lease on TNL.net, someone else could take it over.

This is far from an ideal scenario but it is, unfortunately, the best scenario currently available in terms of controlling one’s identity on the internet. Domain name registration is the closest thing anyone has to being able to owning their identity on the internet.

On to hosted services

While owning one’s domain name increases the level of control over what and how a person is represented online, it also means an increased amount of work in terms of ensuring that all the back-end pieces that make this stuff works are working. An average presence on the internet probably includes an email address and a web server. This means that someone who wants that basic set of services will need a system to run an email server to send and receive emails, and, at a minimum, a web server to serve pages, and a connection to the network. If the person wants to use software for a blog, he/she may also need a database and other components to make things work.

Unless you’re a massive geek or a large corporation, you’re unlikely to own all those components yourself. The amount of work required to keep such systems running is often higher than could be justified for a single user.

So a new group of service providers emerge to provide increasingly turn-key solutions to put behind one’s own domain name. Those companies, called hosted providers, can provide one with email services, web services, telecom services, etc… and all come with sets of legal contracts that highlight how those components can and cannot be used. This represent a return to the Terms of Services approach provided by ISPs in the 1990s and, while the contracts are generally fine for most people, they can have impact on services that are sitting on the bleeding edge of speech.

For example, it was the TOS put in place for Paypal and Amazon that were cited by those respective companies when they decided to cut off Wikileaks. Whether or not wikileaks actions were legal in the United States didn’t matter in those cases as the companies decided to make their own value judgements as to what to do with such a company. To say that such actions can have a chilling effect on free speech is merely to point out the obvious.

… and on to the social web

For many years, I’ve restricted my participation in a lot of social web components and warned others about what I see as an area that is ripe for abuse. Much as domain names were the way  to sidestep some of the issues associated being hosted on a particular ISP’s website, I worry that the “gated community” approach to a lot of web services is an area that ought to concern more people. A quick look at the Terms of Services of two of the more popular social services out there can raise some red flags (my next entry looks at Twitter and Facebook and their treatment of users).

At issue here is the fact that social services are largely hosting you. You, as an individual or corporation, get a complete infrastructure and, in exchange, only have to supply content. The services then can reuse that content in a number of ways and decide whether you are worthy or not.

This represents some pretty legal tricky grounds as individuals and corporations are now forced to swim in the same waters and the social services probably should study the corpus of laws established around domain names to figure out a model based on legal precedence. While that system is not perfect, it is the closest thing we have to a working model that balances out temporary ownership with high level of rights for holder of that temporary ownership.

Ultimately, identity ownership is bound to become one of the hot topic in the internet space as it touches on so many facets that there is no silver bullet solution that will make every happy: the challenge is in finding a compromise that will be agreeable by a majority of people.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Who owns your identity?. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

But beyond a statement about the internet infrastructure, this is also about figuring out a solution to avoid losing the internet. So to help it, we need to define a way to build the atomic components that will help it become resilient to any attack, whether they are from repressive dictators or over-reaching corporations.

Fortunately, the internet happens to be at a key point in terms of its evolution, with the transition from IPv4 to IPv6 being upon us. With one major effort to upgrade large part of the infrastructure, it seems that new efforts could help us increase the overall resilience of the net.

A few years ago, I put together some basic requirements for a tool that I would like to see, something I had called a “Personal Relationship Manager.” A few years later, there are several of those so I’m thinking that I can start planting similar ideas into the ground for possible implementations by people who understand protocols much better than I do. The following are imperfect thoughts based on my understanding of core internet protocols and discussions I’ve had around them with several people over the last couple of years.

A lot of this, of course, has substantial precedence. For example, the idea of completely rewiring connectivity is not really a new one. Here’s Doc Searls, about 3 years ago:

Connectivity-as-infrastructure is soft in several senses. One is that you don’t need a big utility company to provide it. Another is that data and its protocols are soft. They have no physical substance, yet they have supportive qualities that are substantive in the extreme. That’s because the Net is a way of connecting. It is not the wires and waves that do the connecting.

.. and there has been a lot of work put into making the internet protocols faster and more reliable but few have taken the radical approach of making the net completely self-reliant.

So without further ado, here are some basic requirements:

• Open
• Light
• Easy to use
• End-less

I will now go into the thinking behind each of these points.

Open

Wikipedia defines a protocol as:

a set of guidelines or rules.

The challenge then becomes who is responsible for setting those guidelines or rules. Ownership of the responsibility for setting the guidelines or rules should be diffused around the community of interest on the internet. In that sense, the particle protocol should be a protocol without a head group. Decisions around what to include and exclude in its core should come from the community as a whole, with no central office, no central committee, no central individual, ultimately responsible for it.

Open is the way of the net, where ideas are given dominance based on their individual value and not based on the value of the individuals that brought them forth.

Because it is headless, open is uncontrollable. One could argue that peer-to-peer networks are the closest thing we have to open networks as every node in the network serves and routes things for every other node and the disappearance of an individual node does not impact the network as a whole for very long.

A corollary to open then seems to be that the network will be peer-to-peer, making it impossible to shutdown the network altogether. Peer to peer networks have been the bane of the music and movie industry for a decade because they cannot be shut down and it seems that if we are to build a network that cannot be shut down, we can learn from that model.

Open also means unencumbered from any pre-existing patent. The particle protocol should be something that is owned by absolutely everyone and by no one in particular. The reason for this is that lack of ownership means that the owners cannot be leaned on by any organization or government. With that point of friction removed, the ability to create backdoors or shut down such a protocol would be more limited and require substantial efforts on the part of the people trying to do the shutting down.

Open also means that the particle protocol should be sitting at the lowest level of the infrastructure stack with little or nothing below it. Once again, this is to ensure its resilience as the closer it is to the foundation, the harder it is to remove.

Last but not least, is that open is not about money.  That is because the core portions of the particle protocol should be free in a monetary sense too. However, beyond the core, innovation should be allowed so anyone can build (and make money) by providing extra components for the particle protocol. However, the people doing so must realize that any changes they decide to make to the core are dictated by the underlying principles regarding the protocol and must be redistributed in the same open fashion.

Light

The particle protocol should have the lightest CPU and memory footprint possible. Some may feel it is too much of a constraint but the particle protocol should be so light that it can run on most devices. For its initial version, I think that the ability to run, without impacting their pre-existing operations, on mobile phones, computers, and devices with as low a footprint as a 400Mhz CPU and 128Mb of RAM (Apple watchers may recognize this as the original specification behind the first iPhone: it is no accident as I believe the particle protocol should run on any smartphone in the future).

Light, in my view, also means unattached, which means that the particle protocol would be wireless by default. Sure, devices could be created to connect some points of the network to some wired network (and this could turn into a whole new sector for the telecom infrastructure industry).

Finally, light also means unencumbered of extras. The problem to be solved here is resilience (ie. it can’t be shutdown). Anything beyond that is extra. So the particle protocol should allow for TCP/IP to run on top of it but things like extra security, guarantee of services, and so on, should not be part of its core. However, I’d like to see some kind of a plug-in approach that could allow that protocol to be extended with such features by anyone who wants to.

Easy to Use

The first dotcom boom taught me an important lesson about technology: if it is not easy to use, people won’t use it. The internet was around for a long time prior to 1995 but it wasn’t until then that people adopted it. Why was that? I think it was due to two factors: first, Microsoft built a TCP/IP stack into their operating system, making internet access a question of configuration and AOL started splattering the world with their disks, making access to the online world just a question of setting up a username and password and handing out your credit card information to them. The rest was automated.

In order for the particle protocol to succeed, it should be easy to install and easy to use. By easy to install, I mean that it should be a question of downloading it and, if needed, clicking on an icon to install it but that would be it. The software would install itself, look for ways to connect to its peers, identify any peers nearby, and automatically connect, becoming another node in the network.

By easy to use, I mean that there ought to be no actual work to use it once installed. The first thing the protocol installer would look for is all the ways in which it can connect to other devices (wired: eg. via a modem or ethernet / wireless: eg. WiFi, Bluetooth, EDGE, 3G, 4G, etc…) and attach itself to all the available modes without disturbing the other software attached to those. There should be, embedded in the protocol itself, a logic as to how it would prioritize its connectivity, based on how many nodes are available in a particular connectivity mode and how reliant other nodes are on its connectivity to more than one connection (eg. tying 3G communication to WiFi links).

By being completely invisible, the protocol would become something that can exist without being acknowledged and can be installed without much notice after installation. So, if you were to take Libya as an example again, hacktivist could work to install the particle protocol on every communication devices the government owns, and protesters would leverage those installation for their own communication.

The only way to stop such a protocol would be to completely shutdown every electronic device available in an area/country. While it is not impossible that some strongmen could go down that route (I’m thinking of places like North Korea, maybe), the impact would be that the only way to shut things down is to shut down your own communications line. While it is theoretically possible, such a shutdown could create a race as to who is bringing their own network back up in order to communicate. If we were to take into account network theory, this is basically creating resilience by ensuring that the information assymetry created by a network shutdown forces ALL the players to rush back to restoring it, thus restoring nodes for all sides at the same time. In a perverse way, it leverages the assymetry to get rid of it.

End-less

Many years ago, my good friends Doc Searls and David Weinberger argued that the internet was a World of Ends. The principles were sound but unfortunately, by creating a view based on ends, they opened the possibility for creating points of controls.

If the internet has ends, it can be closed down.

But what if it didn’t have end-point. What if it had addresses that changed on a more random basis. Then exerting control over one point would not necessarily work. What if the addressing were to change on a time and location basis as well as some other factors based on sudden changes in traffic (spikes or drops) with violent drops in traffic resulting in a complete re-assignement of the addressing space along with a drastic change in how long devices would attach to that space before changing address again.

Without those ends, and by creating a network protocol that would carry traffic while seeing radical changes in its addressing space could create a situation where an attack against a portion of the network would be seen as an attack against the network as a whole and solutions would be handled on a global basis.

So whether that network is shutdown because a political strongman decides to do or an earthquake damages a region, the network as a whole would have some form of self-healing capacity to start rearranging the damaged parts quickly and without any involvement from the users in the affected areas (network management should be the least of people’s problems in a time of crisis).

Beyond the principles: Addressing

Since this would be a relatively new protocol, I would throw some backward compatibility away. As protocol development takes place, I can only assume that it won’t be until 2012 that we would see the first implementations of this. As a result, I would go as far as to venture that the particle protocol should not have to worry about IPv4 addressing and should focus on working with IPv6 instead. The reason behind such an approach is that IPv6 will increasingly be the new standard for addressing beginning in 2012. IPv4 support, as a result, would be great to support legacy systems but this is about fixing problems in the future so let’s support the systems that are future proof.

Beyond the principles: Implementations

Ultimately, protocols live and die by their implementation. The first step towards implementation would be a lightweight version of the particle protocol that could work on linux, android and iOS devices.

Why those first?

First, linux. Linux is available in a variety of forms, including as an embedded OS for devices. In the future, I think we could see the particle protocol as something that would be available over embedded devices (particle boxes) that could be assembled cheaply and connected to power sources and network sources. Such boxes should be relatively inexpensive to produce (in discussion with people, I’ve been using the price of $25 in parts as a stake in the ground) and all schematics should be open-sourced.

However, the challenge with the hardware only solution is that linux is not something the general population uses on a regular basis. So creating a mostly linux-based solution would attract the attention of people who want to disconnect things to those devices and get the to disconnect them.

More difficult to disconnect, however, is an overall telecom infrastructure and here are I am making some technical bets: that iOS and Android will be the major operating systems powering mobile phones in the future. Taking that approach, a version of the particle protocol working on those devices could turn every smartphone with those OSes on them into a network point. I’m sure that this might make some people unhappy (Apple would probably not approve) but I suspect that it could allow for quick deployment of devices in regions needing them.

Any other implementations would be welcome, of course.

Conclusion

Protocols are agreements and this set of concepts is only a proposed set. I’d like to see discusion around the concepts in the technical community but, at the core, the problem is simple: we need an communication network that works based on network effects, making the network much stronger with every node that joins it. Recent events, both geopolitical (Egypt, Libya) and environmental (earthquakes and tsunami in Japan) have shown that our networks are still brittle.

The particle protocol is the beginning of a discussion to strengthen the network at one of its lowest layers and ensure that disruption in one physical location can be healed by its proximity to other locations.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title The Particle Protocol. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

I would like to propose some basic principles to launch an effort to increase the resilience of the internet and help it grow beyond the current chokepoints that have been created for it.

The Infrastructure

The internet, in my view, is a combination of low-level infrastructures and protocols that allow us all to connect to each other. It is, above all, a set of agreements between all parties involved as to what is and isn’t acceptable across the board. Some may argue otherwise (Some see the net as the physical infrastructure that connect us; some see the net as only the web; some see it as only companies like Google, Facebook, etc… I don’t. I see it as all encompassing.)

The infrastructure of the internet, however, is one that is still largely held in private hands. I explored the subject at greater length last year but to make a long story short, access to the internet can be controlled in 3 areas: at the source (where the servers allowing for creating and sharing content are located), at the receiving end (where the computer or mobile device is receiving content) or in-between those two points (either using firewalls or shutting down the infrastructure altogether).

Repressive governments tend to work at all those points, often managing to block portions of the network through a variety of means. For example, China has been able to shut down sites located in China, block out sites located outside of China (through what is often referred to as the great firewall of China), and has fairly tight control of the telecom industry (the Red Army holds substantial shareholder stakes in anyone doing business in China, including the telcos), giving it almost full control on the end to end approach.

Activists have been moving sites outside of China and using a variety of tools (most notably, Tor) to bypass the great firewall of China but they will be left powerless if the Chinese government decides to unplug the network infrastructure.

At the end of the day, that infrastructure is currently the weakest point in the internet. The mess of wires and wireless services that sits between your access device and this site (or any other site) is what is making the internet a global network… and it is something that is largely outside the control of anyone but the richest and most powerful people, organizations, and governments. In the US, for example, it is mostly under the control of telephone and cable companies, which themselves are working in conjunction with local, state, and federal regulators.

A substantial part of the reason for that control by large operators is that building out and maintaining that infrastructure has been and still is a relatively expensive effort. Laying down and maintaining the cables and equipment used to distribute captioned pictures of cats or images from the latest revolt is something that has required investments in the billions, if not trillions of dollars globally. In developed countries, that infrastructure rebuilt happened mostly in the 1990s, one of the greatest benefits from the dotcom explosions as investments in the early internet startups helped subsidize one of the greatest buildouts in human history (in the US alone, I would consider the effort to be on par with the great pyramids).

However, we have now learned that wires are frail and the march of technology has fortunately allowed us to move to something that could help potentially move the infrastructure beyond its current state to a brand new world.

From cloud to atmosphere

With web 2.0, the idea of hosting content on remote servers shared by many and administered by few (Amazon, Google, etc..) has been commonly referred to as the cloud… and that analogy has been increasingly used to talk about the internet as an amorphous group, moving beyond the ground-based concepts of land lines and server farms to evoke something greater.

At the same time, devices, whether they are mobile phones, tablets, computers, or others, have increasingly moved away from using cables to connect to the internet, leveraging an alphabet soup of acronyms like EDGE, 3G, 4G, and Wi-Fi to access the internet wirelessly. For the purpose of further discussion, I would like to know refer to wireless internet access as the atmosphere.

Today, that space is still under the control of large entities, due to a combination of outdated intellectual property concepts and foreceful lobbying by established players. However, many before me have argued for opening up the wireless spectrum further. By using the atmosphere nomenclature, I would argue that locking down of the wireless space is a form of pollution that can be routed around.

The atmosphere is everything that surrounds the cloud. It is the space between the devices that are used for creation and consumption of content.

No one should own the atmosphere: It surrounds us and we all contribute to its well-being and decay in an almost equal fashion.

The atmosphere is the infrastructure that makes the cloud possible.

It is a public internet (or a virtual common) where the internet public (or all of us) can interact.

… and the atmosphere needs all of us to work together to ensure that a single party cannot poison it.

A breath of Fresh Air

Today’s internet atmosphere can be seen as largely divided between control in the wireless space and control in the landline space… and where control exists, the potential to cut off the air supply is stronger.

Mobile phones and mobile devices accessing the internet over GSM, 3G, 4G, EDGE, CDMA, WCDMA and other acronym the telecom industry can throw at us are generally controlled by wireless telephone companies. This is why one can seldom take a device from one country to the next without being forced to either switch carrier or be faced with relatively expensive fees for “roaming”.

The alternative for this is usually seen as WiFi, which allows anyone to set up a wireless hotspot as long as the upstream provider (the one the WiFi hotspot is connected to) agrees to it. So while few cable and phone companies have objected to WiFi hotspots being connected by individuals to date, they could easily shut down access to the internet at those end points.

What we now need is an infrastructure that would route around those end points and create a mesh network between different hotspot that are not connected to each other.

Cues From Nature

The net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it — John Gilmore

The atmosphere is resilient and tends to self-correct. For example, if a toxic particle shows up in the atmosphere, other components of the atmosphere can deal with it. And while an area of the atmosphere can be damaged at a time, all the other areas can help repair it over time.

So if there is pollution in Bhopal India, the overall atmosphere eventually dissipates that pollution and the system is restored.

All this happens without anyone pulling a trigger, or without any major catalytic event. It’s the work of billions or trillions of particles all working in conjunction with each other to keep things going. It’s a pattern that repeats itself in nature time and again.  Ants work together to repair their farms after it’s been flooded; bees work together to fend off attack by a hungry bear; the whole ecosystem works together to balance out preys and predators. It’s an evolutionary battle we can all take cues from.

And it is one that the internet needs to take its cues from. For the internet to survive in the long run, it needs a healthy atmosphere… and that’s where you come in.

As nature gives us cues about collective action to ensure the well being of all the group, even in the face of a threat against an individual, we must find a way to work collectively to ensure the well being of the net in future.

A global mesh

I believe that markets, by their own nature, can be one of the best route around censorship. My main reason for that belief is that every time a company closes a door in the marketplace, one of its competitors starts looking at keeping that door open as a competitive advantage.

So, in the wireless space, an uneasy peace has been struck between the operators where most of them agree to not shut down most of the internet, because it is in their best economic interest to do so.

As I’ve highlighted earlier, however, there are certain areas where the market does not help. For example, when a border is crossed, a device can lose its access to the net because the operator is not running services in that geographical area and therefore doesn’t care to establishing any kind of peering agreement with other companies in that country. Another extreme end of this is the current situation in several middle eastern countries, where dictators can go to the few operators of networks in their country and tell them to shut down or suffer the consequences.

So the only way around such issue is to distribute the control of the atmosphere as widely as possible: to create millions or billions of particles that allow all systems to breathe easily.

In other words, the way to route around any potential damage to the atmosphere is to create a set of protocols that will allow any device to talk to each other and agree to route traffic from and to each other when needed. In the next entry, I will introduce what I consider some of the basic principles to define such a set of protocols. I do not have all the technical solutions (but I expect that some my readers will be inspired to put the call to action and figure out the technical details) but I can provide a basic framework that people can build on.

Wrap-up

As the true embodiment of Jefferson’s marketplace of exchange of ideas, the Internet has now become a tool to increase democracy, improve lives, and hopefully make earth a better place for all of us. As such, it has also become a threat to established orders, and many are fighting to shut portions of it or all of it down.

Whether it is censorship in China, lockout in Lybia, blocking wikileaks, or denial of service attacks, the atmosphere should be resilient enough to route around and to ensure that internet public still has access to the public internet… and it is incumbent upon us all to figure out how to ensure the internet atmosphere is not polluted by the fumes of censorship.

A special thank you goes out to Doc Searls and Kevin Werbach for helping me tighten up this piece.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Internet Atmosphere. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

What matters

To people living largely in the future, the internet obviously matters but increasingly, matters of governance and politics are starting to pop up on radars. Whether it is the current state of rebellions in the middle east and their aftermath, or discussions around freedom of the press, the first skirmishes of internet and the established political structures are starting to happen.

In 1997, with the landmark ACLU vs. Reno legal win in the United States, those of us who were involved thought we had done most of the work that was needed to avert some bad lawmaking on the internet. Because many of us were relatively young, we had confused success in an early battle with total victory and surrender from the established order. Over the years, though, fighting has continued and the incumbents have slowly been regaining ground and momentum.

Unfortunately, whether it is due to ignorance or arrogance, most of the tech community has been staying out of the many discussions related to government regulations. A small cadre of dedicated activists has tried to work on this or that issue but nothing has been done on a coordinated basis to establish a net-friendly view of the world in Washington DC.

Meanwhile, in countries outside of the US, more progressive governments have established some basic principles of internet governance: for example, Finland made 1Mb broadband Internet access a human right and I’ve heard from several sources that internet access will be written as a right under the new Egyptian constitution.

With that background, you’d assume the US would eventually move in the same direction. However, with little outrage in the online community, a bill to create an internet kill switch in the United States is currently making its way through congress.

Or take the discussions around Wikileaks. Much of the debate last year over the cable release seem to bring politicians and the popular opinion to the view that Wikileaks had broken US laws and done irreparable damage to the US State Department. Now three months later, charges still have not been brought against Wikileaks… and State department officials who looked into the damage done by wikileaks reported back to the US Congress that it had caused little real and lasting damage to American diplomacy. Meanwhile, the revelations highlighted in the Wikileaks documents have been credited as one of the elements that helped launched the recent rebellions across the middle east.

But once again, few geeks came to Wikileaks’ defense initially, and fewer yet are still involved in the freedom of the press discussions launched by the Wikileaks dump. Meanwhile, in an attack on government whistle-blowing, some US congressmen are working to ensure that publications similar to the Wikileaks one (or the Pentagon papers in the past) would become illegal. Once again, few computer geeks are involved.

Those are but a couple of examples of why individuals whose livelihood depend on the Internet need to get involved.

A changing landscape

My first experience with internet policy-making was forged through the Clinton years, when incredible individuals came together to establish basic levels of protection for the then nascent Internet industry. I was fortunate enough to be a fly on the wall for several of those events, hashing out such boring issues as tax classifications for goods and services sold on the internet.

Policy makers in the Clinton administration were, for the most part, relatively friendly. While I thought it was because they were believers in the potential of the internet, a more cynical analysis could highlight than those discussions were happening when the commercial Internet was still a relative novelty and did not seem threatening in any way shape or form to traditional models. Viewed through that lens, to toss a few crumbs to the internet crowd seemed like a no-brainer to governmental institutions, and opposition to such idea was non-existent because the stakes seemed so small to any traditional players that it wasn’t even worth fighting for.

Since then, of course, the internet has moved out of stealth mode, slaying a few established players along the way. Internet issues are no longer considered small potatoes by any industry. In fact, for many, they are the main issues. It is in that new climate that the future of the internet is being fought.

At the same time, the internet itself continues to expand. Only a few years ago, most people accessed the internet via a computer. Nowadays, an increasing portion of the population is starting to access the internet through mobile devices, running IP packet on the network of mobile operators who have looked at portion of their landline business being decimated by decisions they made in the 90s regarding letting the net. Back then, because they could not envision the net as becoming a major economic force, they agreed to giving anyone full access to it at a relatively low cost. The explosion in use put that unmetered access to the test and those players now want to reverse what they see as a costly mistake. Their goal is to throttle wireless access or at least make it more expensive so they can return more profits to their own bottom line.  This also means they could balkanize portion of the internet based on special monetary deals, tipping the balance away from small players and towards the people who can pay the most. This imbalance would have a substantial negative impact on the innovation explosion engendered by inexpensive and unfettered internet access.

Network philosophy and governments

For the most part we, in the internet industry, tend to look at structures made out of networks, where each node in the network has a similar say and amplification only happens as a reward mechanism based on the validity of the content being created. It is something we measure in page-views, referral links, subscribers, and twitter followers. It is a model where a 15 year old kid with good ideas can provide opinions in a similar forum as an retired US congressman and both opinions are treated by the network in the same fashion initially.

The content is there for all to see and to be judged on its own merit. Sure, there is some element of filtering happening as people look to follower counts, or subscribers, or longevity as social proof of value but that social validation changes in a dynamic environment and yesterday’s unknown can become today’s superstar as quickly as today’s superstar can become tomorrow’s has-been.

Our governmental institutions, however, has largely based on a more traditional system of top-down command and control, where vision is created at the top, communicated to the lower rungs, and executed within the frame of what the leadership wants. A government, like any organism, tend to be resistant to change.

Evolution has taught us that it is not the strongest of the species that survive but the most adaptable to change. And changes created by network philosophy will have a direct impact on the current state of government. How well that impact is managed is dependent on how well each side is prepared. If preparations are lopsided to one side or the other, the clash will be extremely violent (think Libya) and the outcome will kill the unprepared side. If the preparations are of relatively equal measure, the clash itself will be relatively painless (think Egypt or Tunisia) but there will still be a lot of things to hash out afterwards.

Incremental AND Revolutionary

So to put things simply: it’s time for geeks to get involved in policy making. Refusing to do so is equivalent to signing a death penalty for the current state of the Internet.

Let me simplify that: You can either get involved or give up on the internet.

Over the next decade, the legal framework and the way government will run for the next century or more will be defined. Your role in defining it will help decide whether we live in as free a society (or even freer) as we do today or whether we end up in a more controlled environment.

In order to facilitate the transition, there is a need for both incremental and revolutionary approaches. The incremental model is one where one works within the established framework (so working with government organizations, for example) to steer it in the direction of change through a series of small, seemingly painless, sets of changes. It is akin to moving everything off by a single degree 180 times to completely reverse course. In that model, the secret is to establish the appropriate partnerships, build the appropriate coalitions between all parties and help everyone understand that change takes time but that each step forward brings us one step closer to the future.

In that model, one can do simple things like supporting pro-internet candidates through donations and volunteering of time, or educating current politicians on certain issues. The incremental model puts the focus on the rules of law and uses the current model to move from status quo to a longer term change over a long period.

Meanwhile, the revolutionary model looks to break down the existing system and, through its attack, forces the system to change itself in order to co-opt the revolutionary elements and get them to stop the attacks. The revolutionary model looks at the edge of changes as the beginning while the incrementalist look at it as the end of the process. Because the revolutionary generally looks much farther, he/she is pulled back from where they want to be and continues to push for more reform on an ongoing basis, always being the early test case and always pushing the dialogue a little further out.

Interestingly enough, both models have the same aims, forward motion and change, and the people from each side tend to be the ones that work together in the post evolutionary state.

So, while I myself am very much in the incrementalist camp, I want to put out a call to everyone out there to choose a side and get involved: If you’re reading this, you care about the internet. And if you care about the internet, you now have to go out and get involved in shaping its future, which will ultimately be defined through new laws over the next decade.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Geeks: Get Involved. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

The rise of New York to prominence is, first and foremost, due to a series of happy accidents. While the technology world was long dominated by hardware and algorithms, the current phase (often referred to as “the social web”) is all about people.

In order to full back those assumptions, I’ve created five lenses, each with its own post:

1. Monocultures have negative impact. Polycultures take longer to create powerful organisms but inherently build ones that are more adaptable.
2. Living in a city is inherently a social experience. Living in a car-driven society isn’t.
3. Everyone poaches techies — the New York tech scene was born of those people that can’t be poached and found ways to attract like-minds.
4. Don’t look at adversity as something that can be overcome with brute force, deal with it as a normal condition and you will find innovative workarounds.
5. Businesses are ultimately about money so to continue fostering success, valley startup might do well to act a little more like New York ones if they want to build sustainable futures.

A historical setting

The New York dotcom scene of the 1990s was vibrant but ultimately flawed. Its own hubris killed it (and I should know as I was one of those people) and along with it killed the chance of New York displacing Silicon Valley as the epicenter of the technology world. A decade after its implosion, New York is being given a new chance to pick up the mantle, along with some distinct advantages this time around.

With many veterans still being part of the scene, it seems the lessons of the past have not been forgotten so the challenge to Silicon Valley’s supremacy will be substantially stronger than it has been in the past. I hope this series will give both groups chances to think about the different issues facing their own environment and work on dealing with those.

At the end of the day, if both Silicon Valley and New York were to emerge stronger than they are today, this conflict could leave the US more prepared for the next set of challenges that will push both coast to pull together and fight against the rise of cities in foreign locale to try to take the leadership away from the USA. If you are reading this, you probably have a dog in that fight and it is up to you, as well as everyone else in the field, to ensure that this competition ends up turning each location into the best it can be.

Note: This post is part of a series of why New York may gain the top position in the tech world, displacing Silicon Valley. The whole series is now online: Intro, Culture Part 1, Culture Part 2, Talent, Adversity, Business. Please read the whole series before making snarky comments (once you have, you’re free to make those comments).

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title New York to displace Silicon Valley. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

New York is not always an easy place to live in. Poor bandwidth, inadequate mobile networks, and massive population breed adversity. New Yorkers have learned to deal with it and leverage it to create new experiences.

Adversity is Potential

But where some people look at gaps as an example of why something or someone cannot fulfill its full potential, entrepreneurs look at those as opportunities to create new businesses. So things like making it impossible to open sample sale places in multiple locations around the globe led to the creation of Gilt, creating a whole new model for online commerce; issues around improving government efficiency led to see-click-fix; or more efficient ways to locate where your friends have gathered led to FourSquare.

Another aspect of the advantage of adversity is that it forces New Yorkers to think about solutions that are adverse-condition resistant. So while many look at inappropriate bandwidth being an issue, it’s led New Yorker to create solutions that can work in the US as well as overseas, in markets where bandwidth is more constrained.

I was recently chatting with a New York based founder who told me that he was relocating his technical team from Ukraine to Estonia because, beyond the cost of employees, Estonian users tend to use slower computers and have less bandwidth. I was confused as to why that would be a good thing so he explained to me that since his company was developing software for mobile devices, it was better to have programmers who knew how to wring every single bit of performance out of a 5 to 10 year old computer because that’s the kind of processor you get on a mobile device today. Estonian programmers have been doing that for a long time and it has now become a valuable skill, one he couldn’t find in US markets.

I, not unlike many people in both the valley and New York, have often called for more bandwidth as something that is essential to future growth but that entrepreneur showed to me that such a call may not be necessary: smarter use of limited resources may be a more efficient approach and only when we have have wrung out every little bit we could out of the bandwidth and processing power we have should we start begging for more.

Because investments in large-scale ambitious technological projects have been successful in the past, money in Silicon Valley tends to be less scared when it comes to investing heavily in creating brand new infrastructures. So when an adverse condition arises out of constraints, there is a natural tendency to address the constraint by throwing more resources at it. This brute force approach may not always be the best way to handle it (although, in some cases, it could be: for example, digging up the existing electric grid and replacing it with a smart grid would be something to look at).

So whereas the valley looks at a way to steamroll a constraint, New Yorkers look at a way to mine it.

Takeaway: Don’t look at adversity as something that can be overcome with brute force, deal with it as a normal condition and you will find innovative workarounds.

Update: This post is part of a series of why New York may gain the top position in the tech world, displacing Silicon Valley. The whole series is now online: Intro, Culture Part 1, Culture Part 2, Talent, Adversity, Business

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Silicon Valley vs. New York: Adversity. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

In order to fully understand the concept of people at the center, you must immerse yourself in the subject. You must meet people outside of your own circle, outside of your own economic sphere, outside of your industry. And you can’t do that if you’re living in an area with a single dominant industry, commuting largely via personal car and interacting primarily, either at work or after work, with people in your own industry.

Monoculture vs. Polyculture

The first challenge Silicon Valley will have to overcome in order to retain its supremacy is that it will need to diversify beyond technology.

New York doesn’t have that problem because technology has never been its primary industry (and probably never will be as New York seems to abhor the ideas of a single culture or group being dominant. Sure, Wall Street has had some power in the city but so has the media space, and the fashion industry, and the horse-drawn carriage industry. But each of those industries eventually found itself confronted with some setback, eroding its power base further (in historical terms, the power of Wall Street started eroding in the 1960s, with the fight over the creation of the World Trade Center, and while it has seen ups and downs over the last 50 years, it is no longer the dominant force in New York).

The existence of multiple industries in New York has forced the New York technology field to think about building products that are attractive to people outside of the technology field. As a result, a large part of the tech field has been blindsided by the success of products like meetup, etsy, and and gilt because they were not solutions based on heavy algorithms but based on input outside of technology.

As Brady Forrest recently pointed out, one of the great think about New York is that “it’s never about technology only, it’s always tech and something else”. And that something else is something that would be very hard to reproduce for the valley. The cross-germination that happens here will, as evolution has always told us, bring up new models and new businesses that could not possibly sprout out of a mono-cultural system.

Another aspect of this is that there seems to be an inherent pendulum in the technology world, moving from times of great innovations that arise out of innovation for innovation’s sake, great feats of engineering which arise with no pre-existing use for them. When the pendulum is on that side, the Valley shines. For example, there was no pre-existing use for semiconductors when engineers at Fairchild Semi came up with them. The Fairchild leadership failed to see this opportunity and left it to others to mine. This was typical valley-like world-changing type of innovation that New York-type leaders failed to see.

However, the pendulum often has to swing from that space where radical technological innovation happens to a place where business integration (and eventually business innovation) arises. When the pendulum switches to that end, having companies that mix expertise in the technological field sitting side by side with expertise in a specific business field helps create the new generation of companies.

We are now in that second part of the cycle and New York has the lead because of its overlap with many other industries. For the valley, this can be a dangerous time unless it finds the next big radical algorithmic-based technical change. For New York, it is an opportunistic time as it can foster the creation of some startups that are working on that next set of radical innovations while at the same time mine the expertise inherent to its position as a dominant commercial center.

Takeaway: Monocultures have negative impact. Polycultures take longer to create powerful organisms but inherently build ones that are more adaptable.

Update: This post is part of a series of why New York may gain the top position in the tech world, displacing Silicon Valley. The whole series is now online: Intro, Culture Part 1, Culture Part 2, Talent, Adversity, Business

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Valley vs. New York: Culture. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.