Transportation Metaphor for Media

An essay on the future of media, using a transpportation metaphor (and comparison...)

Summary: From the perspective of mobility, the automobile is the mass-customization post-industrial technology. Railroads are industrial transportation -- they follow specific fixed paths and travel on time s...

URL: http://www.personalbee.com/bee_article.php?grpno=1211&artno=2526386

Google Building AI

Could Google co-founder Larry Page be right (read this report from London) in saying that Google can succeed in building true artificial intelligence "within a few years?"? Late last year I wrote about an excellent speech by George Dyson republished at Edge.org (and still worth reading if you haven't already). To excerpt just one comment again:

"When our machines overtook us, too complex and efficient for us to control, they did it so fast and so smoothly and so usefully, only a fool or a prophet would have dared complain."

The development of strong artificial intelligence by anyone - country or company - will be a worldchanging event. It seems that Google really is hard at work on this task. Assuming that such an effort succeeds in developing a system which works for the betterment of its creators, one can appreciate why Google doesn't worry much about competition from Microsoft or Yahoo. Google is playing an entirely different game.

Where everyone else in the tech industry is pursuing linear technical development strategies, Google is pursuing a corner-cutting strategy of building a better tool -- a tool that (if successful) will change the entire basis for competition. How can any group of engineers at Microsoft hope to compete against the development resources of a world-wide artificial intelligence?

Time to buy Google stock?

Watch Newsom Run

Last night I had the opportunity to attend a fundraising event for San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom. As luck would have it, I ended up standing right next to him as he addressed the crowd of 40 or 50 local business people that had gathered to help him pay off the last of the campaign debt from his successful mayoral campaign 2 1/2 years ago.

Newsom was articulate, knowledgable, and (for me) struck the right balance between progressive social consciousness and grounded pro-business realism. It was hard not to be impressed. In fact, the question I most wanted to ask Gavin (but respectfully did not) was "are you going to make a stop at the state house or head straight to Washington?"

When Senator Feinstein is ready to step aside, I hope our state gives Gavin a chance to represent our views, and a progressive option for our nation. I know I will be campaigning for him.

Peak Oil will change our lives

One of the most important articles you can read today (or even this week) is Erik Curran's "Peak Oil will change our lives" published on Monday in the Energy Bulletin.

Dozens of leading petroleum geologists as well others in the oil industry and in government have agreed that we are nearing the twilight of cheap oil. Chevron has launched a campaign to inform the public that oil is depleting. The U.S. Army is planning for permanent oil shortages. Even the U.S. Department of Energy put out a 91-page report on the subject in February 2005.

"As (oil) peaking is approached," the report said, "liquid fuel prices and price volatility will increase dramatically, and, without timely mitigation, the economic, social and political costs will be unprecedented. Viable mitigation options exist on both the supply and demand sides, but to have substantial impact, they must be initiated more than a decade in advance of peaking."

Read the whole article. And also check out the "Peak Oil Primer" that the folks at the Energy Bulletin have put together.

A Modest Proposal - Gasoline Taxes

Everyone is talking about how "high" gasoline prices are now in the US. One brave soul testifying to congress yesterday actually suggested that the best way to reduce America's dependency on foreign oil would be an increase in gasoline taxes. Yes, raise the price of gasoline. Think congress would consider this? Not if they want to be re-elected.

But lets take a quick look at the numbers. We are spending $10 billion per month fighting George's war in Iraq. According to the US Government Energy Information Administration we consume roughly 20 million barrels per day. A barrel is about 42 gallons of gas. So that 840 million gallons of gas per day. Or 25 billion gallons per month. So a $0.50 per gallon fuel tax would pay for the Iraq war and have money left over to rebuild New Orleans.

Question for Runners

I run fairly in the morning here in Berkeley, so (on a good morning) I often don't see anyone at all. But sometimes I see other runners. Invariably if the runner is male he will make some gesture in greeting, usually a wave. However if the runner is female, she will refuse to even make eye contact much less wave. Assuming my experience is similar to other male runners (and is not just because I look scary...) here is the question -- do female runners wave to other female runners? Is it that waving in greeting is something only male runners do or is it a separation of the sexes issues?

Personal Bee Beta Launched

It has taken longer than I had originally wanted. And we aren't as far along as I would have liked. And there are 2 or 3 bugs that are really nagging at me to go fix... BUT, we have done it - pushed the new look and feel of The Personal Bee live out to the world. You can read what Dan Brekke has to say about the launch over here on the Bee Blog.

The biggest thing missing from this release, which I hope to rectify by the first week of May, is the ability to create new Bee editions -- this is still in a private beta. There are two primary reasons for this -- (1) the wizards we have under development which will make it easy to create a new Bee aren't ready yet and (2) we want to get a new phrase parser into production to handle significant increases in the number of bees that we will be handling...

So what IS in this release?

A beautiful new look and feel, access to 40+ public Bees, the ability to discover articles within those topic areas that are interesting and then tag, comment, and email those articles. Also, the ability to export a "reading list" to another website or blog...

Discover, Share, Build -- these are the three legs of our stool. We have more work to do to lengthen those legs and make this a platform for all kinds of news aggregation and distribution, but we have the core of the idea in place. Enjoy.

Save the Mercury News?

Saving the Mercury News? This strikes me as a little like the "third rail" of our world -- talking about the future of print media in an online forum run by the very print business being discussed... But it is an important question that deserves a serious answer.

As anyone who knows me will tell you, I am a strong supporter of a free and independent media. I am in the camp that believes that democracy is only possible when the society supports and protects a free flow of information and ideas. I am strongly influenced by thinkers such as Richard Rorty ("Take care of freedom and truth will take care of itself").

But I am troubled by the notion that the Mercury News needs to be "saved." What exactly does this mean? A review of the "save the merc" website does not clarify the situation. On this site I read:

"We are apprehensive that a buyer who does not understand our community and value the journalism that we provide will adopt what one Wall Street analyst termed a "scorched earth" policy. Under this scenario, substantial cost-cutting and smaller staffs would follow a sale. The impact on our community of readers and advertisers would be severe."

If the impact on the "community of readers and advertisers" was severe, then this business strategy of destroying the value inherent in the community coverage would be counter-productive to the goal of running a profitable business. Why would a buyer destroy the asset that he or she purchased?

In the "State of the Media 2006" - a report out from The Project for Excellence in Journalism (stateofthemedia.org) we learn that newspapers are reducing local coverage all over the country. Philadelphia, offered as emblematic, has half as many reporters (24) covering the local community than they had in 1980 (46). Some of this attrition might be attributed to increasing productivity, but clearly some of it is due to a reduced editorial budget which comes as a direct result of dropping readership and advertising.

So it is not unreasonable for the Mercury News staff to worry that their paper may get leaner in the years to come. Especially if the current trends continue and readership of print continues to decline. And especially if the print mode is the primary focus of their enterprise.

But as Silicon Beat itself has shown, there is a vibrant community of interest online for the kinds of local coverage (tech industry in this case) that journalists at what we have come to call big city newspapers can offer. So perhaps the real challenge for "saving" the San Jose Mercury News and other daily papers is to learn how the new online media can prove to be a generator of readership and advertising as the old media of print declines into our memories.

Change is hard. People have a lot of trouble with change. But somehow we live in a world of flush toilets, jet airplanes, and the Internet anyway.

Stanley - DARPA Grand Challenge

Sam Perry and I just did a very cool thing -- he couldn't be here at the MediaX conference this afternoon, but we both have the new MacBook Pro which has a built in camera and iChat video... so I just turned the laptop around and gave him a personal webcast of Sebastian Thrun's presentation on how Stanford won the DARPA Grand Challenge.

technorati tags: MediaX, DARPAGrandChallenge

Harvesting Implicit Knowledge

Bernardo Huberman, Consulting Professor, Applied Physics is speaking here at MediaX on "Harvesting Implicit Knowledge" -- he proposes that a key differentiator of great organizations is their ability to extract, aggregate analyze and properly act on information quickly.

Today we need to discover communities of interest. We can do this by looking at the electronic communications that we use - tools like email and even powerpoint. People that communicate often tend to establish links that persist. Thus using the connections implicit in email communications it is possible to surface the connections between individuals in a company, uncovering implicit organizational structures.

One of the reasons we are talking about this at MediaX is that this effort is an example of how there can be cross-fertilization from adjacent fields. The way in which this group is developing the notion of implicit communities is by applying a concept from mathematics -- "betweenness centrality" -- in which a graph has community structure if it consists of groups of nodes with many more links within each group than between different groups.

technorati tags: MediaX

Hooray I am a Gen-Xer

According to the presentation currently under way here at the MediaX conference, Generation X started in 1965... phew! I just made it. The presentation is on Aging -- "50 is the new 35" -- sound good to me. Hopefully by the time I am 50, 60 will be the new 35. That way I can be 25 forever...

MediaX Conference At Stanford

Enormous congratulations to Ellen Levy, Director of Industry Research and Collaboration for MediaX at Stanford University. I am sitting in the audience now, listening to the opening comments from John Hennessey, President of the University. The fact that John is here, giving these opening remarks, is in itself an enormous endorsement for the incredible work that Ellen and her organization are doing to connect industry with research. And the program over the next day and a half speaks to the enormous breadth of the collaboration that is being nurtured by this organization.

John notes that "..increasingly Universities will be the place that basic research and core technologies are developed." He is laying out an ambition program for evolving the educational initiatives as well as the research agendas that Stanford is undertaking. Examples that John offers for questions a University is uniquely suited to asking:

"How would you design the Internet today, if you could start with a clean state."

"What are the implications when people live not 10 years past their retirement age, but 20, 30, even 40?"

He closes with a quotation: "We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used to create those problems" - Albert Einstein

technorati tags: MediaX, Stanford, EllenLevy, JohnHennessy

Oakland Fuel Cell Busses

Some time ago I wrote about seeing a fuel cell bus on a flat bed truck headed for Oakland. Today comes news of these fuel cell busses going into service.

Integrating the UTC Power fuel cell with a hybrid-electric drive system has enabled us to achieve twice the fuel efficiency of diesel.

For the planet's sake, lets hope this trial is successful and brings more fuel cells to market quickly.

Yellow Machine Rocks

I rarely endorse products, but once in awhile I am blown away by how great a company, service, or product is -- so I want to tell everyone I know. Such is the case with Anthology Solutions which makes a terrific networked storage solution called Yellow Machine. I bought one for my home network, but they are focused on the small business market right now. For less than $2 per gigabyte I got a 680 gigabyte networked home storage solution that worked right out of the box with minimal setup (and nothing very technical). I bought their 1 terabyte version which, running RAID 5, comes out to the 680 gb of usable space. Now everyone in the family can safely back up files. More importantly, we are now running iTunes (which drives our stereo 90% of the time) from any computer in the house, accessing a shared iTunes music directory on the Yellow Machine.

A few other notable features -- the Yellow Machine ships with a VPN router with double firewall and an 8-port LAN switch and WAN gateway. So not only is this a RAID 5 storage solution, but it is also your network hub and firewall to the outside world. All for $1,299!

The company has 1.6 and 2 terabyte models planned as well.

The coolest thing? 1 terabyte tucked under my arm when I left work on Friday to go home and set it up. Geesh, I remember when the first commercial 1 terabyte data storage facility was turned on (to much fanfare)... oh well, I guess I am getting old!

Mighty Tots

There are 168 preschools within 5 miles of my house, at least according to Mighty Tots, a new web site launched by my friend (and Bee collaborator) Nick Chim. The site promises to become a valuable resource for parents of preschool aged children. The first feature, naturally enough, is a tool for finding preschools in your area. The hope is that directors of these preschools will fill out the information so that it can be a useful comparison tool. And that parents will write reviews... And what will the next resource for parents be? Stay tuned!

Transparency in Engineering

It is an interesting experiment -- develop a new product in the full light of day. Well, we don't release every bug-strewn version of The Personal Bee out into the wild, but we have been pretty close to our goal of a 2-week release cycle. The details of our latest release are here on the Bee Blog. Mostly we are hammering out bugs but cool features are sneaking in. But I can't wait for us to get this current nuts and bolts phase over with and start moving forward with work on the user experience. That will be exciting!

Talking to Larry Lessig at Mashup Camp

mashup_62.JPG,
originally uploaded by dsearls.

Mashup Camp was one of the best conferences I have ever attended. I wish I could go down again today, but we need to get a new release of the Bee out the door... In the meantime, it is fun to see all of the Flickr photos of the conference showing up -- here is one that Doc Searls took of me talking to Larry Lessig about the future of software copyrights...

Larry Lessig at Mashup Camp

A long time ago (and I'll go and dig up the blog post link later) I had an extended debate with Larry Lessig about software copyright. It was great to hear him speak today at Mashup Camp and to hear how his thinking has evolved. Or maybe I just misunderstood him... The core of the debate was about whether when someone asserts a copyright claim over software, whether there should be a published human readable form of that software provided to the marketplace. I pointed out that if software companies were compelled to do so, it would gut the value that copyright might offer in the first place.

Today, Lessig offered a similar point, but with the clarity that such human readable form could be provided in a "time-encrypted" format, such that it could only be readable at the point that the copyright had expired. Now that idea makes sense.

technorati tags: mashupcamp

"Type O" - Mashup

Doc Searls made the comment, I think on the fly, that we are all "type O" here at Mashup camp -- which is to say, the blood type that can mix with any other... I have to say I am positively impressed with the results so far. 300 smart people in a room will result in interesting conversations, productive relationship development, and (I bet) a whole bunch of cool new ideas unleashed on the rest of the world...

technorati tags: mashupcamp

Bee About Mashup Camp

I am using Personal Bee to track the blog posts coming out of Mashup Camp -- check it out here

technorati tags: mashupcamp