Definition: What I mean by web

It appears that, as time moves on, many people have different definition of the web. Some look at it as a substitute for the word internet, others look at it as the sites that are sitting at a web address. My definition is a little more technical: to me, the web is a system that serves up HTML, CSS, and Javascript over the HTTP (or HTTPS) protocol.

Under that definition, it means that Facebook or Google cannot be seen as “the web” any more than iphone or android phone apps are.

Definition: What I mean by Open

Open is another tricky word to define.

Some people look to open as interoperable. To those people, an open web only exists when a site or page is accessible by everyone without requiring any kind of extra registration. In those people’s views, sites like Facebook are not open because they require a username and password to access them.

To others, open means that it can be accessed by all. Those people look to country firewalls or bandwidth caps as examples of the kind of restriction that keep the web from open. To some, as long as access to the internet is unfettered, then the internet remains open.

A third camp looks at open as relating to open source, meaning that the underlying code can be viewed and reviewed by anyone who so chooses.

When he created the first web browser, Tim Berners-Lee added one small world-changing (and I’m not using the term lightly here as you will see later) feature: View Source. This item, which allows any web browser user to pull up the HTML source code of any pages on the web. 20 years later, view source is still available in most web browser, still allowing anyone who cares to examine the HTML, CSS, and Javascript code that compose most of the interactions with a website. Some of the best web developers in the world initially learned their craft through this component and it is still one of the best way to learn how web pages are built.

In my view, the last two items are what represents open. Unfettered access AND ability to look at the innards.

Today’s world

Much of the interest around the internet field centers on two factors: social media and mobile access.

In the case of social media, people look to the ability to leverage one’s offline or online connections to augment the value of an application. In that sense, services like Twitter, Facebook, Zynga and Foursquare have created applications that would not be terribly interesting without people and their connection.

In the case of the mobile space, Apple has launched an explosion of access through mobile devices that was then followed by Google, with its Android operating system. When it first introduced the iPhone, Steve Jobs asked developers to develop for the web, telling them that it was the best way to interact with the iPhone. However, the next year, he introduced the App Store and asked developers to start looking at developing native applications for devices running what came to be known as iOS.

Google followed suit, pushing developers to develop for their own operating system, Android.

The net result is that a lot of companies have developed applications that are running exclusively on those platforms, bypassing the web altogether.

An open web

Proponents of the open web, however, did not rest on their laurels and introduced html5 and css3, a set of changes to the building blocks of the web that can make it easier to developers richer, more interactive applications. Modern web browsers (ie. those that came out since 2010) tend to have some form of support for those changes.

Because html5 represents an evolution of html, css, and javascript, it goes without saying that the view-source element that Tim Berners-Lee had added to browsers 20 years ago can still be used to see how particular things were implemented.

To date, however, few of the startups that have committed to developing applications for mobile devices have leveraged the power of html5.

Why an open web matters: Education

For a generation, web developers have learned their craft through a tradition of enforced sharing: the open web, through its view-source ability, allowed anyone who wanted to learn how to develop like the masters to study their code and, in some case, mimic it before evolving it in their own way.

This has created a virtuous cycle, where good ideas are evolved and bad ones fall by the wayside. It’s also made it an interesting challenge as the ability to learn from the basic code has also led to people copying the code.

Why an open web matters: Evolved business model

The net result of such copying can be businesses that are basically xerox copies of an original. However, if you believe that the web is only but a component of a solid business offering, then copying of one’s website would not necessarily result in a total copy of a business.

If your business is so sensitive that making a xerox of your website will kill it, it is not yet a viable business. So the web, because it equalizes code forces businesses to improve themselves by building business advantages that are not fully dependent on the code. This is a good thing because it results in more reliant businesses.

Why an open web matters: Accessibility

The open web is generally easier to make accessible to people with disabilities. HTML, in itself, has certain built-in facilities that make it simpler to create sites that can be used by people with disabilities. Text-readers can actually read web-pages and/or interact with some web applications.

Furthermore, today’s web can often be backward compatible, meaning that older generation web browser can still interact with a lot of the content that is published there or deal with experiences that may be a little degraded compared to the latest offering but still working. For example, one can use gmail on a browser from a decade ago. That’s a testament to how endurable an open web can be, that it can be used on devices that stopped being produced BEFORE an application was made.

Why an open web matters: Freedom

Recently, the Financial Times decided to implement a web version of their app, leveraging html5 to bypass restrictions enforced in the Apple app store. The decision was hailed by many as a sign of things to come because it presented a rich offering outside of the traditional Apple ecosystem.

At a recent conference, someone said (and if you remember who it is, please tell as I couldn’t find the exact quote) that developers are essentially captive of the platforms they develop on. As a result, any changes in that platform and a developer could find his/her livelihood or product endangered.

Why an open web matters: Shaping the agenda

But no one owns the open web, as a result, few changes to the underlying platform can endanger web-based products. So it may make business sense, as a hedge against some of the things that could happen on a closed platform, to develop a business that runs on the open web as well as running as an app.

Last but not least, when it comes to freedom, is the ability to help influence the agenda.

If you develop for iOS or Android, most of the decisions as to where the OS is going are being made by either Apple or Google. If you develop for the open web, most of the decisions are being made by Apple, Google, Microsoft, the Firefox foundation, and Opera. As a result, it’s more likely that one of them will support new features in the open web as a business advantage. With 5 major players, there isn’t one that has a chance of becoming dominant for very long. By comparison, with 2 major players in the mobile market, it is likely that the community doesn’t get as much of a voice in shaping the agenda.

Business decisions vs. intellectual purity

Of course, I hear people dismiss the argument. They might say “But Tristan, if you are so enamored with the open web, why is your company, Keepskor, designing for platforms that are not open?”

It may indeed seem odd that I would tell people the open web matters while at the same time developing on some of the more restraining platform. However, I’d counter that argument with two simple statements:

• First of all, open and closed is not a binary issues. In our case, we will be offering an html5 version of our product to serve in parallel to the Android and iOS client.
• Second, intellectual purity is a fine thing but, as a businessperson, I must make decisions that benefit our business and our shareholders. To go with an open-only product would be to limit the markets we can reach and that’s just short-sighted, from a business standpoint.

At the end of the day, it’s a tough dilema that most companies have to face. I first highlighted it the challenged faced by iOS developers before Keepskor existed and it seems it’s a challenge that still presents itself. The way I look at dealing with this challenge is to develop a web-based version of our tools that provides similar, if not exact, functionality to our iOS and Android clients. To do so is not just a matter of openness, it’s also a decision that makes business sense because it gives us a platform to support all the devices for which we do not offer a client. As such, it maximizes our market exposure at a relatively inexpensive extra cost. And THAT makes total business sense.

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

Some people have argued that its death was foretold by the introduction of the iPhone a the iPad but I would say that those were only components in a trend that has been going for a lot longer.

What is ubiquitous computing?

In the late eighties, researchers at the famed Xerox PARC research started thinking about the implication of the computer disappearing. In their views, information from computers would start melding into the surroundings without being thought of as part of a computer. In that sense, they saw the world we now live in 20 years ago.

Think of how you’re reading this. It may be on a computer, a tablet (like the iPad), a e-reader (yes, TNL.net is now on the Kindle), a mobile device (blackberry, android, or iPhone), or a TV. Each of those items provides a screen that can be connected today to access information from the Internet.

The increased numbers of sensors in our world is only furthering this trend. For example, at their most basic level, you have barcode on supplies in the grocery store. Every time these bar codes get scanned, their presence is translated into bites on a machine somewhere, to be tabulated and presented. You don’t generally think of the cash register at your local supermarket as a computer but it is one.

Your telephone (either wired or wireless) also provides tremendous amounts of data about you and what you’re doing. For example, your phone company probably has as good an understanding of your social graph as facebook does since it tracks who you call, how often, and for how long.

In New York, as in a lot of European cities, subway trains now have sensors allowing anyone to see where trains are, and get some estimate as to when they’re coming. Once again, bits of information presented in a computed form on a screen like this (Hat Tip to Second Avenue Saga):

Source: Second Avenue Saga

So information now surrounds us in a number of ways. This means that the computer, as an information device, will lose its prevalence since there are now other ways in which we can access the information.

But how will we interact with it?

Bye Bye Keyboard, Bye Bye Mouse

People in the mobile camp will argue that touch is the way to interact with information. The answer is correct but only partially so. While touch is the most efficient way to interact with a screen you hold (as proven by the iPad, iPhone, and now most smartphones), it is not so good when it comes to screens you are not holding. Steve Jobs, in the introduction of the new Macbook Air, said so himself.

So what is the rest of the world to do in order to interact with those other screens. Some solutions, like the new Android TV, look to interacting with those with new remotes that look like keyboards. They want to bring more of the computer to those other screens. For example, Google TV devices offer a wide range of keyb0ard-like remotes.

This is the wrong answer because the majority of consumers are not interested in that form factor (I am talking from experience here as I have a computer connected to my television with a Logitech DiNovo Mini keyboard and it has failed every single person who has come in. I’m the only one who can really get a show started on there.)

However, the right answer comes from a player everyone has all but dismissed: Microsoft.

A resurgent player

It’s been a rough decade for Microsoft. Badly singed by an Antitrust lawsuit, the company has become hesitant and tentative in its approach to the new post-PC world. It has also been saddled with a tough anchor: Windows. The problem Microsoft has is that it continues to hang on to the belief that everything needs to tie up to that platform.

And in doing so, it fails at most of its new efforts.

But there is one division at Microsoft that has somehow managed to avoid that curse: the gaming division. The Xbox has been a success because it hasn’t been saddled with the Windows background. The group threw out that mantle early on and developed a series of machines that were performing well in the environment they were designed for: the living room.

And now, they’ve introduced Kinect, a device that I would call as revolutionary as the iPhone was in the mobile market.

Source: Wikipedia

The revolution comes from the fact that the device introduces a new way to interact with a computer: without any physical devices. Their tagline (“You are the controller”) represents a brand new approach in defining interfaces for devices: whether it is voice or motion, the user is now brought closer inside the computer.

Extent the kinect to the next generation of screen and you now have non-portable computing devices you will interact without having to touch them. Wave your hand in the air and you can manipulate objects in those devices.

The end of the drive

This week, Verizon showed off their  technical prowess by showcasing how they could move files at a 10Gbps. To give you a sense of how fast that is, most computers today only operate at 100Mbps so what Verizon accomplished is roughly 100 times faster than the fastest network most people have experienced. The most advanced computers available on the market tend to top out at 1Gbps: they usually can move files at those speeds on local network but it’s rare to find networks that are connected to the internet at these types of speed. So what Verizon demonstrated is the future, a future where a 2 gigabyte file can be transfered in less than 5 seconds.

A few weeks ago, I told TNL.net readers that we were witnessing the beginning of the end for local storage. However, since then, I’ve come back a bit on that idea: local storage will continue to exist but mostly for caching purpose. In a world where you can move several gigs in a few seconds, it is more efficient to move data to the cloud, where it can be accessed from any device.

The rise of Work Computers

Based on all these trends, there is a more limited need for PCs. While the Personal computer was a great transitional device to the ubiquitous computing world, it is a device which suffers from some limitations.

For starters, there are the input methods. There is a clear reason why Apple didn’t make their devices any smaller than 11 inches and touted the fact that the Airbook had a full size keyboard: our hands don’t get any smaller.  So the keyboard and mouse, as entry device are gated by this fact and will be stuck in that mode for as long as we live.

But most people will not need a keyboard or mouse in the future. Except where text is concerned, the existing computer is getting close to having run its course: writers will keep using them (until the point where voice dictation software is good enough to replace the need for a keyboard) and programmers will continue to use a keyboard as an input device to program. Most every other people will interact with the devices either via direct touch (like the iPad) or via motion (like the Kinect).

Those uses will be primarily for “work” or pro-sumer type of purpose and other people will not have computers at home.

One gating factor: Power

The main challenge for most devices will, however, continue to be how to power them. To date, there has been some improvements in the battery space but those are not moving as fast as the rest of the technology world.

And we’re becoming more demanding of our devices.

For example, most smartphone users complain that their device lasts only a day or so on a full charge. But think of a decade ago. Back then, a device with a 1 Ghz process, 10–20 Gb of disk space, and about 128 Mb of RAM might have worked on a battery charge for about 2 hours. Those were powerful laptop back then but we didn’t seem to expect them to run all day.

Today, there is a lot of work going on around trying to get more out of the batteries we have and companies like Apple have worked on reducing the amount of power a device may ask from a battery: for example, the Macbook Air is a marvel in trying to figure out what to remove in order to ensure the devices squeezes more out of the battery.

Will the work computer disappear?

The last bastion of the computer will be the office. At this time, it is difficult to imagine people gesturing in front of their computers as a way to interact with them. More likely, tilted touch displays will become the new norm in offices (and by tilted, I mean that the screen would be on the desk at an angle of no more than 20–25 degrees). Those types of changes will take some time to make their ways into cubicles and may force business to even rethink the concept of the cubicle. The ones that have already will get a head start on their competitor.

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

Televisions: Connected and Flat

It’s been 15 years since the Internet revolution started to take hold and about 3 since video on the Internet has become a more viable option. With the rise of devices connecting portions of the Internet video space to your television (for example, allowing to buy movies or TV shows from the iTunes store or download video streams from Netflix), we’re seeing more ways to connect the Internet to television without requiring a computer. I suspect this trend will only continue and expect this year to mark a turning point with some of the first ethernet-enabled televisions appearing. This type of connection will be available first from Samsung and LG, who have already built such connectivity into their BluRay players so I would expect them to port those capabilities to TV sets shortly.

The other improvements in the TV space will include the introduction of more OLED screens on the high end, providing a third option in the flat screen space ( LCD and Plasma being the other two.)

The economy will pressure many of the companies in the space to drop their margins on televisions and I wouldn’t be surprised if flat screens start dropping under $500 by year end. This will force some of the last CRTs off the market, leaving Plasma as the cheap choice, LCD as the average one, and OLED as the high end one.

BluRay: Losing to Downloads

2009 ought to have been a good year for BluRay. Having killed its main competitor in the next generation physical disk format (HD-DVD), BluRay appeared to have the field open to itself.

But through both blunders on the part of people in the media and consumer electronics space, BluRay has succeeded at painting itself in a corner: having priced disks at a premium, executives have to justify the advantage. The approach they took was that BluRay was a higher video and audio quality experience than regular DVD. But this has represented a major hurdle for them as most consumers are fairly happy with the quality they are getting from their existing DVDs.

The other issue is that the war for a next generation format was not about a physical medium, as they had expected. Sure, Sony and Toshiba tried hard to make it about that, because royalties on selling rights to such formats can go in the billions of dollars over several years, but truth be told, the market bypassed physical as a medium almost half a decade ago.

With the rise of the iPod, people have grown more comfortable with the idea that they could buy a media asset (a song, a TV show, or a movie) electronically without having to deal with the piece of plastic that carries it. The revolution started with music because those files were smaller but, as bandwith availability increases, the amount of time required to download a TV show or movie is dropping. Along with the availability of streaming video, this has changed the level of expectations when it comes to media consumption in such a way that, increasingly, people want access to their media without having to deal with a physical component to carry it (one could argue that the on-demand shows provided first in hotel rooms in the 90s and on most cable boxes in the last few years fall in the same space.)

So downloads are going to be the thing that undoes BluRay. As a result, I expect Sony to start touting downloadable media more heavily than BluRay in its PS3 marketing. I also expect most BluRay players to offer some way to access internet media either through direct partnerships with the providers (Netflix, for example) or through the creation of an open format content providers could leverage.

Mobile Phones: Smart is in but so is Simple

The recent success of the iPhone has gotten every phone providers to focus on developing more smarts for their phones, essentially turning them into multi-use devices. This trend is hardly new (I’ve owned a smartphone since around 2000, starting with the first Treo) but its acceptance by the general public is.

What I expect to happen in the space this year is a continued drop in prices as new contenders enter the space. Palm will make a play at the space with a new net-centric phone and operating system that will come with a under $100 price-tag to follow the recent success of their Centro offering. This will, in turn, force Windows-mobile and Google Android-based phones to come down to the same price range, with some of them even being offered by carriers for free with 2 years contracts. Apple, on the other hand, will keep its $199 price tag and may offer a software upgrade that would turn on video recording on the iPhone. RIMM, with its Blackberry offering, will continue to be the darling of the business world but most of its efforts in the consumer space will be rebuffed.

Meanwhile, on the other end of the spectrum, we might see the rise of phones that have a single feature: making phone calls. Those phones will be marketed to two different segments of the market: elderly people, who barely use computers and want something that has as little complexity as possible and the first grade set, with some level of parental control being available on the devices.

Computers: Smaller, Cheaper, and More Wireless

Netbooks started making the news last year. Sporting a web-browser and generally less power than traditional computers, PC makers have discovered that there is a large audience for such devices. This is a problem with chip makers like Intel and AMD who have relied on Moore’s Law to get faster and beefier processors out the door at heavier costs to consumer. The problem they are faced with today is that most processors are good enough for what people want to do (ie. read email, go on the web, and maybe edit a few documents). So I expect netbooks to be the only real growth sector for PC makers. This represents quite a challenge as margins on such devices are low and the business model around them is a volume one.

The market is now fragmenting into 4 segments:

• Netbooks, which are probably good enough for most people.
• Powerhouse machines, which are used primarily by computer gamers.
• Office machines, which will demand more security features (eg. Lenovo)
• Luxury machines, which are more in line with the fashion space than the electronics one (eg. Apple MacBooks)

I expect a slowdown in the number of machines sold in the computer games market and a flattening in the office market. This leaves netbooks as the growth area and I would put a question mark on the luxury machine market as I’m not sure it could see more growth if the economic climate continues turning sour.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title 2009 Predictions: Hardware. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

Tim O’reilly, in his description of Web 2.0 said that

The central principle behind the success of the giants born in the Web 1.0 era who have survived to lead the Web 2.0 era appears to be this, that they have embraced the power of the web to harness collective intelligence

This insight defines the success of Web 2.0 companies as reliant on a new development in the software design world: the value of a system that increases as its users increase. The network effects realized for those types of systems provide a fair amount of value but what is important here is that the user becomes part of the application. In O’Reilly’s example, flickr can’t work without users tagging picture, Google can’t work without people creating web pages, etc… These participatory applications will have a large impact in the way we interface with systems and may represent the first breakthrough in terms of adding intelligence to our systems in a proper way.

As we all know, computers are not particularly smart. However, they are very good at processing large amounts of information. What has been missing, up to this point is the idea of what information to feed them and how to help them head in the right direction. With concepts surrounding web 2.0, these cues are no longer computer cues but they are human ones. No one programmed del.icio.us to figure out how to create a taxonomy of pages. However, every user of the system has helped create some level of taxonomy in the system.

Amazon’s Mechanical Turk system took the next logical step, which was to provide a software platform to automate such interactions. It is similar, in nature, to the way computing work was distributed on efforts like SETI@Home but adding the human element to it. As such, as the boundaries between human interaction and software systems get softer, it is becoming increasingly difficult to tell how smart (or dumb) a system really is. People are part of the application but are applications part of the people too? When I google something I don’t know, do I enhance myself by discovering the new information and then storing it in my brain? Where is the line?

Virtual Worlds

Virtual Worlds, like SecondLife or World of Warcraft represent another logical step in this evolution: creating virtual economies out of thin air. as I write this, there are tens or even hundreds of thousands of people working on creating financial value within virtual communities. They may be selling things within games but, ever since those games started becoming more involved, people have been willing to pay real money to get virtual goods. Seeing such developments, some companies have set up worlds where actual trades are happening and are integrated with the rest of the financial world.

A couple of weeks ago, one of those games, Project Entropia, announced they would issue an ATM card to take virtual currencies into the real world.
Edward Castronova, the leading researcher on that subject, considers this “a blurring of the distinction between the game economy and the real one.”

As computing power continues to increase, this blurring is going to become more and more scary. At the current time, videogame platforms like the Xbox360 or the PS3 are presenting us with videogames that look close to reality. When those types of things start appearing in online community models, the lines will become so hazy that it will be difficult to tell what is the real world and what is a virtual one.

This is the fifth article in a 6 part series. You can read the following parts here:

• Part 1: Intro
• Part 2: Always on
• Part 3: IPzation
• Part 4: Sensors
• Part 5: Participatory Applications
• Part 6: Conclusion

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

The problem is one of, well, scale. Let’s say that I want to make a movie that will rival Star Wars in terms of special effects and will have a plot that will take the story all over the world. So I can look at the aggregated model to make that movie. I’ll put the word out on my site and, hopefully, people will contribute money and/or services. Granted, this process will take time as I’m not a movie insider and have no proven track record in terms of making movies. So, I now have to limit my ambition and make a short demo.

I do that and it’s good enough to convince some people but not good enough to convince enough people to raise the funds. Let’s assume, for argument’s sake that I manage to aggregate 10,000 people and they are all willing to chip in $100 towards making the giant movie. That’s really great, I now have a fund of $1 million. However, the ambitious project needs 10 times that. What do I do then?

In the scale world, one of the people who sees the demo is a development person for a major studio. They like the demo, believe that there’s an audience for the story and throw $10 million behind the project. Somehow, I manage to get this project done on that budget and have a completed movie. The next thing is marketing it… Generally it takes a lot of money to market but, there’s one thing: if you’re with a movie studio, it’s likely that the studio already has pre-established relationships with media and can get me interviews, which help promote the product. It’s also very possible, in these days of media consolidation, that the studio which sponsors my movie actually owns some other media and can use those for cross-promotional effort, therefore lowering the cost of marketing.

Granted, I used a movie as an example but what about retail. I want to get a product out. This means designing the product, putting it together, marketing it, and selling it. I could aggregate those functions (and in many cases, it is being done) but it depends on the market. For example, if I wanted to introduce a new computer, would I be more successful as an independent player starting from the ground up or as a player within an established organization (let’s say Dell or Apple, for example) which already has all the parts?

Going beyond computing, would I be more successful introducing a new cereal as an independent firm, aggregating relationships across several industries, or as someone working for a large scale player, which already has all the parts?

Telecommunication actually works within the model Jeff proposes but more because it is a single service/technology built on top of other tech (ie. the Internet infrastructure is enough to support it and has been built and VoIP can now ride as an extra on a multi-use network)

Labor may look like a perfect model for aggregation but the maintenance part and tracking needs to be emphasized here. Also to be taken into account is the level of experience of the laborers. For example, I can aggregate and offshore an IT project but I can’t ask the same people to do my taxes or build a car. Why? Because of a skill gap. Offshoring is interesting but, in every offshoring project I’ve heard of or have been involved in, one of the key success or failure factor has been skills and training… and on a small project, aggregation is more expensive than dedicated workers.

Politics could be a place where the model works but that one will depend on which country you are dealing with. A good example of the failure of an aggregate model was the French presidential election, where the left decided to present many candidates and many messages. The right, on the other hand, presented two large-scale choices: a center-right candidate, and an extreme right one. In an open primary model (where the top two candidates are the one to go on to the next round), the right defeated the left, leaving the main event as a choice between center-right and extreme right.

In the US, because of the way most primaries are set (on a per-party basis), aggregation doesn’t work as well as scale. The last presidential campaign showed two large scale organizations (Democrats vs. Republican) and a billion small scale groups that could aggregate (or not). 99+ percent of the votes went to the large scale organizations, which both offered a different “one-size-fits-all” message.

I believe there is some truth to the aggregation model for non-tangible assets industries. For example, in the digital assets world, aggregation makes sense. If your product has already been built and is only needing distribution, aggregation works (one of my concerns around the long tail is that it doesn’t seem to take into account the cost of production and efficiency of return on investment), then scale may not matter as much but, in a lot of case, scale can accelerate work because it does not require to take the extra step of actually generating and managing aggregated models. In a lot of way, scale is about pre-aggregate models you can just plug into.

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

• Europe and the United States are now moving forward on two different paths when it comes to technology and its uses. I’m still working on sorting some thoughts on this and will post more on the subject in the future.
• While we believe that the Internet is accelerating the speed of change, our fundamental assumptions of the impact of new communication tools may be wrong. This thought is due to the fact that I’ve now realized that the great shift of the renaissance happened over the course of only a couple of decade, a radical shift that was much quicker than I had previously thought. My trip, coupled with reading The Confusion by Neal Stephenson, which covers a similar stretch of time prior to the enlightment, leads me to thing that all great historical changes are made over a one to two decade period. If you consider the Internet just a natural evolution of the computer evolution, we are now looking at a movement that lasted about as long. Will the impact of computing be as radical as the changes made during the renaissance and the enlightenment? I don’t know for sure but do believe this to be true. Need more data to formulate a longer theory.
• When presented with two much data, your brain needs rest to process information. I started to suffer from a mild case of Stendhal’s Syndrome during my visit, which required a little brain rest.

All and all, though, I must say that this was a great vacation. I’m now tanned, rested, and ready to join the conversation again.

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

Often, geeks like myself tend to jump on technology for technology’s sake. An example of this is the recent hubbub over (n)echo, which has left many people wondering whether RSS is broken. The truth is that it isn’t and that whatever new format comes up will live nicely in parallel to RSS for years to come.

When estimating technology, one should ask himself/herself whether it is the right tool for the job. I could write a calculator program to calculate the sum of one and one but that does not mean that I should (especially on such a small thing). So why is it that we get so blinded by technology? Why is it that the old axiom “to someone with a hammer, everything looks like a nail” holds true so often when it comes to technology projects?

Part of it is what I would call institutional blindness. It is the kind of thing that sits at the source of most of the big conflicts in the technology space: platform wars like Windows vs. Mac, Windows vs. Linux, Internet Explorer vs. Netscape, RSS vs. (n)echo are often rooted into a set view of how the world is, not how it could be. Some of the most vocal people in those discussions are set on a particular approach and refuse to see the value in the other way.

For example, I’ve recently made the switch from Microsoft windows to Linux as the underlying operating system for TNL.net. There was no acrimony on my part regarding Microsoft. I think Microsoft is a good company when it comes to building desktop operating systems that people use. While many assign sinister motives to Microsoft moves, I do not believe that the company is inherently evil. What I do believe is that the company has a certain view of computing and that this view no longer aligns with my own. Companies, in and of themselves, do not have any motives. They are merely legal entities created to market products and services.

The same can be said of projects. Many people are saying that Dave Winer is inflexible in his stewardship of RSS. However, what they fail to realize is that, while Dave did come up with the initial RSS 2.0 specification, he specifically said that

while these copyright restrictions apply to the written RSS specification, no claim of ownership is made by UserLand to the format it describes

By doing so, he essentially gave anyone a right to extend RSS. So why come up with another format? And why fight over it?

It seems to me that the discussions over the restoration of David are no more academic than the recent discussions over RSS and (n)echo. In both cases, we have people who have done some great work. In both cases, we have disagreement as to how to move forward. In both cases, we will end up with something that will leave some people unhappy.

However, in the case of online syndication, unlike in restoration, there is a way to have your cake and eat it too. Based on my cursory experience of (n)echo to date, I am not yet seeing much value. I do know, however, that RSS is driving large amounts of traffic to my site, and thus, helps me have interesting discussions with a lot of people. RSS 2.0 is highly extensible, if that’s what you want. Some people say it is stuck but I can’t help but think that it is they who are stuck. Stuck on personal conflicts that, in the end, accomplish little in terms of moving standards forward but end up irritating everyone (while Dave and I do not always agree on implementation, and while I have often been on the receiving end of some of his flames, I do value his technical input and his past accomplishments. At the same time, I am willing to go with what I feel is right, whether he or anyone else agrees (as can be attested from my own offering of RSS 1.0 feeds on the TNL.net site))

The question to all participants in the current RSS/(n)echo flame wars (as this entry is largely targeted at them) is where is the value? and will your format stand in the long run. I suspect RSS will be in use for years to come. I also suspect that, for the most part, it will change. I do believe that all those involved in this fight need to take some time off and figure out what is best for the format. Sure, people can make fun and attack each other but how does that help anyone? At the end of the day, I wish that we all had a Ruby filter in all our discussions.

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 David to Dave. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

For the past few years, Microsoft has been trying to figure out how to remain relevant in an era of increasing openness. The rise of HTML and of HTTP as the underlying protocol for distribution on the Internet have challenged the level of control that Microsoft had on the computing world. The initial control was borne out of a partnership between Intel and Microsoft, which allowed them to establish both companies as the essential players in the desktop computing world (the partnership often being recognized as the Wintel (Windows plus Intel) behemoth.

When the Internet started to rise, the network jeopardized that relationship as open standards offered the ability to move more of the software logic to servers and rely less on the client desktop, with HTML being pretty much the universal interface to those new systems. With the advent of Linux, a cheap alternative to Windows, Intel found itself remaining in a very strong position (as Linux can run on Intel boxes) and Microsoft sees the possibility of being increasingly marginalized. The problem comes from the fact that Microsoft, as holder of the software component is really only working as a middle tier in a relationship that involves processors, network bandwidth, software, and content. Let’s review why this development is significant in the new world.

Ten years ago, the big challenge in computing was processing power. Software was always coming out that needed to gobble up more processing power and more memory. In the last couple of years, though, the equation has shifted radically. Increasingly, users have more processing power on their desktop than they can use. Unless you are a hardcore gamer, the combination of Moore’s Law (which has pushed CPU speed to a point where any gain is of little relevance to most users) and the steady decline of prices for memory has meant that today’s user is finding himself/herself with a computer that is only gated by one factor: speed of access to the Internet. The challenge here is that, for most people, access to the Internet still happens over a regular modem, hence limiting what they can do online. While adoption of broadband access is growing, it still represents a gating factor in what most users can do. As a result, most people are now looking at how they can access the Internet faster, moving the discussion away from the desktop and onto that bit of the network that has traditionally been the realm of telephone companies.

With the rise of cable companies as access providers to the Internet, Microsoft now needs to find partners in two access camps: on the one hand, it needs to partner up with cable companies, and on the other, it needs to partner up with phone companies. For the first time in its life, Microsoft is actually forced to play in an arena where the monopoly players are somewhere else than in its own company.

With the AOL partnership, Microsoft is closing one part of the equation, by getting access to the pipes offered by Road Runner, the high speed access company offered by AOL/Time Warner. Coupled with relationship established with Verizon and Qwest, Microsoft has gained a foothold in the access space. However, this is potentially short-lived, as Microsoft could easily be replaced if any of those companies decided that they wanted to partner themselves with someone else.

So securing access to the pipe is one way to ensure continued relevance but it does not ensure the level of control that the desktop monopoly once allowed. In order to get that level of control, one must find a way to leverage the existing platform (windows) and create a lock-in with it. This is where partnerships on content can become useful.

In order to create a long term strategic control, Microsoft must ensure that it will be difficult to move away from its offering. This is where the Windows media strategy comes in. If Microsoft manages to get control of content created on the Internet, it will be much more difficult to unseat it in the future. With last week’s announcement that AOL would collaborate with Microsoft on digital media, the companies have started to establish something that may give Microsoft much more control in the future. Once content is encoded using the Microsoft Windows Media solution, it will be difficult to move away from it. A partnership on Digital Rights Management also ensures that Microsoft will hold the keys for content encoded using its solution, hence ensuring its tight control of a very lucrative market.

The ace card Microsoft holds in this is its installed base. By moving the dialogue from web servers (a battle it lost long ago) to video and audio servers (a battle that has yet to be fought), Microsoft is positioning itself for the future of the Internet. This early position will ensure that it will be able to offer Windows Servers that power the next generation of Internet content. The key in making its case is that, because it has control of the desktop, Microsoft can offer millions of users with a media player already running on their machines. This is an attractive public, and allows the company to make a strong case for an integrated suite of products and services (“here’s the player, here’s the server.. oh and while you’re using our streaming media server, how about using our rights management system… and you know all that stuff actually runs better on our windows platform…”)

So this is the worst case scenario. But, one can easily say, there are competitors and there’s no guarantee that this will work. Furthermore, the open standards are always creating a limit on the company’s power, right?

Well, that’s not even a guarantee. As we know, Microsoft came from behind in the browser wars. First, there was Netscape, and it was controlling 80% of the market. Then Microsoft launched IE but things didn’t really change much in the beginning. As Microsoft improved its browser (and Netscape, drunk on its own hype, believed it couldn’t be defeated), the percentage of control shifted.

AOL, with its established customer base of 30 million, and its ownership of the Netscape browser (bought as the company was already losing marketshares), was the only company that could have change the balance back. By bundling Mozilla first in Compuserve and then in the mac client for AOL, it indicated to Microsoft that this was something they might be willing to do, if Microsoft didn’t work with them. It quickly became obvious to Microsoft that they could be locked out of the browser market if they didn’t play nice with AOL. So they cut a deal and gave AOL a royalty free license to use the browser for the next seven years. That seemed to pretty much lock everything in place to keep tight control.

But the story doesn’t end here…

Apparently, Microsoft does not intend to build a standalone version of IE anymore. The relevant lines in that discussions are as follows:

Q: when / will there be the next version of IE?A: As part of the OS, IE will continue to evolve, but there will be no future standalone installations. IE6 SP1 is the final standalone installation.

Zeldman points out that IE will be built into future version of MSN for the mac but that otherwise, it will be part of the OS. This is an interesting development.

Let’s extend this concept out to beyond seven years: Microsoft and AOL are at the end of the current agreement. AOL did indeed use the Windows Media suite and is using the OS-embedded IE. Microsoft decides to renegotiate terms. AOL balks. Microsoft says that it will change its browser so that AOL doesn’t work on it. What happens then? What is AOL’s fallback position? On one hand, it’s got 7 years worth of media now encoded in Windows Media format (and would need to reformat all that in order to move off the Microsoft platform, a huge undertaking unto itself), and is locked into the Microsoft OS.

It seems that, unless AOL is keeping Mozilla alive, it is about to sign a deal that could eventually put it in a tough position on the browser end. It also seems that unless it hedges its best and encodes content in windows media and another format, it risks lock-in.

On the web development end, this also has huge repercussions. If we all develop solely to Microsoft, and agree to extensions they might make to HTML once its in the OS, we run the risk of all becoming windows developers, beholden to Microsoft.

This is a really all about a fight for the soul of the Internet. In the 90s, Microsoft announced a strategy of “embrace and extend”, which was often derided as “engulf and devour”. We’re now starting to see the extension happening, and it seems to point back to windows. Do we want to be locked in?

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

This is not exactly the way Deja.com presented themselves but ultimately, this may be what transpires from their recent attempt to put the Usenet archives on sale.

Usenet History

For those of you who have never heard of Usenet, here’s a quick definition from the Usenet FAQ:

Usenet is a world-wide distributed discussion system. It consists of a set of “newsgroups” with names that are classified hierarchically by subject. “Articles” or “messages” are “posted” to these newsgroups by people on computers with the appropriate software — these articles are then broadcast to other interconnected computer systems via a wide variety of networks.Some newsgroups are “moderated”; in these newsgroups, the articles are first sent to a moderator for approval before appearing in the newsgroup. Usenet is available on a wide variety of computer systems and networks, but the bulk of modern Usenet traffic is transported over either the Internet or UUCP.

To put it simply, prior to the web, Usenet was what defined the Internet as a community. It covers subjects ranging from politics to computing, arts to news, and everything in between. Usenet, to the old timers was the town square. It was the place where jobs were posted, discussions about technical standards were going on and the latest movies or TV shows were dissected. It was on Usenet that Tim Berners Lee first announced his development of the World Wide Web, and it was also there that Marc Andreesen announced the release of Mosaic (the PC and Mac browser that popularized the web) and the subsequent launch of Netscape.

To put it quite simply, Usenet archives document the early days of the Internet (well, 1981-present anyways) in a way that no other place on the Internet does. As a result, I would venture to say that they are historically significant documents that should be held in the public domain, much like other historical records are. The Usenet Archives are not something that should be a private property.

In the mid-90s, Deja.com, then known as DejaNews, took on the mission and started archiving Usenet materials. The community was happy to find someone willing to do so and let Deja.com do it, assuming that it would remain faithful to the original code of sharing that then existed on the Internet. The model was Usenet plus ads, which would, according to a popular view on the net, help conserve these historical documents while covering costs and making a modest profit.

But Deja.com decided to shed its original mission, refashioning itself as a consumer advice portal instead of going the non-profit route as the Internet Archive did, and here the trouble started. Now moving away from conservation, Deja.com first started pushing the Usenet archives to the back. Then, during a system upgrade, Deja.com decided to take those archives offline. And now we learn that they are going to sell them off to the highest bidder.

In fairness to Deja.com, they did a great job in preserving material that may have otherwise disappeared. However there are several legal questions to deal with when considering such a sale. Today, we take a look at those issues.

Copyright Issues

According to 10 Big Myths about Copyright, most of the content on Usenet is covered by copyright law. But it is unlikely Deja.com holds copyright on that content. They are selling the intellectual property of the millions of people who have posted to Usenet. In doing so, they are breaking several laws, both in the United States and abroad.

For starters, they are in violation of Title 17 of the US Code, which covers copyright and copyright transfers in the United States and Title I of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which extends copyright protection to digital works. Under the provisions of both those acts, no one can profit from a Usenet post unless they have received an express grant to do so from the author of that post. As far as I know, I have never formally granted Deja a right to carry my Usenet postings and the people I surveyed had not done so either. I don’t want to over-generalize but it would be my guess that most of the people who have posted articles to Usenet have never granted Deja the right to reproduce them and, as such, there are hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people who are owed by Deja.com.

Going to an international level, they are in violation of Article 9 of the Berne Convention on Copyrights, Annex 1c of the 1994 WTO Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, Article 5 of the Universal Copyright Convention. Those essentially all cover the same thing, which is the issue of copyright transfer (getting the right to reproduce content from the content creator) and the right to redistribute those copies.

Under both US and International status, Deja.com would be in violation of so many copyright rules that it would cost them more to defend a lawsuit arising from the violation than whatever proceeds they made from the sale. In order to fully comply with copyright law, Deja.com would have to obtain approval from every single person to have posted to Usenet during the period covered by the archives… or from their heirs if the person has died. See, the problem is that Copyright extends to 50 years beyond the life of a person. As we know, Usenet is less than 50 years old, which means that EVERY post on it is covered under copyright law. The exercise, though, seems to be one in futility as people may have changed email addresses or disappeared altogether from the net. As a result, it is impossible for Deja.com or the purchaser to be in compliance with copyright law. Seems to me that this is a class action lawsuit in waiting.

Privacy Law

In the United States, consumer data is not as well protected as it is in Europe. Germany and France, for example, have policies that forbid gathering any kind of data from consumers without their prior approval. This includes data that would be entered in a form as well as data that would be gathered through the use of a cookie.

The 1995 European Directive on Data Protection was enacted to control the use of personal information gathered on European citizens. It has already been put into law by eight of the fifteen European Union countries. The law does not allow American companies to gather any data on European consumers because there is a lack of protection for personal data in the United States. This means that any data gathered about Europeans has to stay in Europe. If you transfer that information from a customer based in Europe to a server based in the United States, you are in violation of that directive. Technically, each of the signatory countries could take you to court over that gathered data.

Since Usenet is a worldwide system, Deja.com is already in trouble for transferring information from Europe to the US. As far as the net was concerned, it was fine when Deja was collecting archives as a public service but now that money is involved, this could become a legal quagmire for the potential new owner.

Under the Directive, European consumers are also granted a number of important rights and may appeal to their local government if they consider their rights are not being respected. Among the rights covered are:

• The right to know what the data will be used for, including who will use it and how it will be used
• The right to access personal information upon request.
• The right to rectify information. This means that the customer must be able to change the information if it is incorrect.

The directive also says that in the case of sensitive data, such as an individual’s ethnic or racial origin, political or religious beliefs, trade union membership or data concerning health or sexual life, the Directive establishes that such data can only be processed with the explicit consent of the individual, subject to a number of exemptions for specific cases such as consent of the data subject or where there is an important public interest where alternative safeguards have to be established.

Now, what does this have to do with Usenet News? Well, based on the content that is posted to Usenet, a lot of personal data can be culled. This information can then be used for purposes other than originally planned. Under the European privacy dictums, the data on Usenet could be protected by privacy rules and represents another legal minefield.

Defamation and Linking Issues

Beyond the possible privacy implications at hand here, users could also complain about defamation of character in a Usenet newsgroup. A question that I have for the legal scholars on this list is whether Deja.com could be cited as a co-plaintiff in a lawsuit arising out of a defamatory post. Based on my cursory knowledge of the law, I think they could argue that they are covered under Lunney v. Prodigy Servs. Co., which said that Prodigy was just a common carrier and could not be held accountable for carrying defamatory content as long as it wasn’t editing the content. However, Brown v. City College of San Francisco, which arose out of the linking to defamatory comments could be and issue for Deja’s archives and their linking to defamatory comment.

Also of concern is DecSS. Buried deep inside Deja’s archives are links to sites that allow for DecSS to be downloaded. In the first interpretation of the DMCA, a judge ruled that linking to illegal code is a violation of copyright law. As a result, could Deja be held accountable for linking to DecSS download sites? Could they possibly be sued for not cutting those pages out of the archive? Once again, we are talking about tricky legal issues covering the right to link to certain software and the common carrier provisions. And that’s not even talking about links to illegal software emanating from the Deja.com site. By providing news groups that offer illegal passwords and links to copies of cracked software, doesn’t Deja break the law? Considering that Deja.com does not carry ALL newsgroups (for example, notice the missing talk.rumors newsgroup which is listed in Lizst but not Deja.com), does its selection of the newsgroups it support imply an endorsement of those newsgroups? And if that is the case, isn’t Deja.com then responsible for the content of those newsgroup?

All and all, it looks like Deja.com may be getting itself in hot water from a legal standpoint. Should it transfer the archive to a public organization, it might be able to sidestep a number of those issues by having the archives be held for the public good. However, a public institution will probably not be the highest bidder and the new owner may end up with more than it’s bargained for when making the purchase.

On the other hand, Deja.com could try to spin the archive into a non-profit organization and ask for immunity from prosecution in exchange for maintenance of an important historical entity.

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