Internet Alchemy

I’ve been looking at SmugMug for offsite photo storage based on some nice things I’ve been reading about them and some conversations in the office. They use Amazon’s S3 for very cost-effective storage which, being a geek, made me think that perhaps I could simply load my photos into S3 for storage. Yes of course, but then I’d lose the neat management tools and features that SmugMug provide. So my thought is: when are we going to see applications that let me use my own S3 account rather than theirs?

To all application providers thinking about using S3: I want to control my own data thank you, but I’d really like to be able to pay you to build features that I know you’d be great at providing. I’m quite likely to pay for several different applications that perform distinct functions on the same data. Just let me own my own data.

Over on Nodalities, my colleague Paul Miller asks how can we bridge the world of the semantic web theoreticians and the practitioners:

There are plenty of examples of big companies such as IBM, HP or BT that maintain well-resourced research groups and encourage them to engage with academic processes and ways of working, but how much of the innovation we all need to know about is actually happening in far smaller organisations such as my own? How many of those smaller organisations can seriously look to invest the effort in writing lengthy papers on their real-world implementations of the Semantic Web so far ahead of the date on which they may – or may not – be invited to speak? The conference poster session is little better; one of many crammed into a room, trying to attract the attention of delegates more intent on their coffee, discussing the last presentation they saw, or catching up with friends they haven’t seen since last year’s event? The barrier isn’t the preparation and delivery of a compelling, engaging and informative plenary presentation. The barrier is the hurdle of the printed paper, and the requirement that it be delivered so far ahead of time for ‘publication’ in a locked box to which neither your employer nor your peers are likely to subscribe.

Having had the good fortune of recently attending both the recent Semantic Web and the Web 2.0 conference the division between the two worlds has been at the forefront of my mind. To my mind XTech has always been the conference where these worlds pass closest in their orbits, but Paul makes an interesting suggestion: is ESWC a place to build a better bridge?

My question is: What would need to change for this to happen?

Steve Coast from the OpenStreetMap project:

People have stopped asking me if OSM will ever work. They’ve stopped telling me that it will only work in this or that circumstance. What I’m being asked now is when will OSM map the UK. I’ve been semi-flippantly retorting with ‘mid-2008′. Its not that far away (30 months or so?) so it’s a little daunting but it’s also achievable by looking at what’s happened in the last 2 years. Whether or not it’s realistic or not, I propose it as a challenge. A grand challenge for OSMers in the UK and a general focus for the conference – how are we going to map the planet in a reasonable timeframe?

Great stuff – nothing like being bold. I’ve been telling people it’s a 20 year project, about twice the time it took to build a free operating system that people would actually want to use and about five times the period to build a free encyclopedia of the world’s knowledge. It looks like it’s now going to be a lot quicker than I thought to get the base mapping done. Of course, the work will never be done but getting close to 100% coverage of public rights of way is a major milestone and one that, I think, will trigger a significant shift in policy from the incumbent data providers. For years the incumbents have been safe in the knowledge that their business models were protected by the sheer replication cost. In their world, if it’s a thousand Man-years of effort to collect, analyse and curate the data then they might have 200 people working for 5 years. In the open-source/open-data world the same results can be achieved by 10,000 people donating 5% of their time for a couple of years (and it doesn’t have to be the same 10,000 people continuously over that period). The economics completely change and pricing levels shift dramatically toward the intrinsic value of the data – which makes it very difficult to justify those existing business models.

So, I’m looking forward to the OSM conference, the uptake of the challenge by the community and the continued disruption of incumbent geodata institutions. We live in interesting times indeed.

Over on the O’Reilly Radar Tim O’Reilly has a post entitled Insight into Future Business Models which looks at how the loss-making PS3 is another indicator of the new business model of giving away the hardware to promote information services (iPod/iTunes being the other significant example). I’m not convinced. As far as I know, every console loses money in its first three years. For example the XBox 360 apparently costs $715 to make with an expected loss of about $125 on each system.

To explain this you have to look at the overall market in the long term. When a new console is launched it has to be quantitatively better than the competition (including the manufacturer’s own existing console) which means it needs to use bleeding edge hardware. New plants, fabrication techniques and specialist circuitry all push initial costs up sky high but over 2 or 3 years the costs fall radically as volumes and reliability increase. Those consoles will be profitable in their own right in 3 years.

But, that not to say that there isn’t more to it. Every game produced for the Playstation generates a licence revenue for Sony. Each game sells for about $60 to $80 and during the lifetime of a console the owner might buy 10-15 games which could more than make up for the loss on the sale of the console. So I don’t think we’re going to see free consoles any time soon, and this is much more a traditional razor and razorblades type of model than something novel for the information age.

Wesabe, the personal finance startup, launched today and as hinted last week they have a Data Bill of Rights linked prominently off of their home page. Very satisfying to see a company commit to an open and honest data policy.

As the introduction to their privacy page says: People want control over their own information. And they want their data to be protected.. More background is available on their blog which gives our own community licence ideas a mention too.

It’s clearly SOAP-beating day. Here’s Nelson Minar’s view:

The deeper problem with SOAP is strong typing. WSDL accomplishes its magic via XML Schema and strongly typed messages. But strong typing is a bad choice for loosely coupled distributed systems. The moment you need to change anything, the type signature changes and all the clients that were built to your earlier protocol spec break. And I don’t just mean major semantic changes break things, but cosmetic things like accepting a 64 bit int where you use used to only accept 32 bit ints, or making a parameter optional. SOAP, in practice, is incredibly brittle. If you’re building a web service for the world to use, you need to make it flexible and loose and a bit sloppy. Strong typing is the wrong choice.

via Tim Bray

I thought this was deliciously funny:

My favorite part of Wii Sports, though, is the boxing game. My [9 year old] daughter and I had created avatars that looked like us and we used these avatars to box with each other. We each held a controller in out fists and punched at the air, making our little avatars punch at the same time. When the bell rang, I started pummeling my daughter. Yes, it felt a little funny hitting a cute cartoon avatar of my daughter wearing glasses and pigtails, but after losing to her so many times in MonkeyBall, I wasn’t going to let the fact that I was her father get in the way of my chance to get revenge.

Finally it looks as though us older types can stand up to the tyranny of our children and their complete mastery of console games!

In related news it looks like the Playstation 3 is going to be the most powerful console system ever. I’ve not been following it very carefully but even the mention of things like IBM’s Cell Broadband Engine which apparently provides the equivalent computing power of eight microprocessors sounds exciting. Then there’s the neat way the console is designed to be backwards compatible with the PS2: by including one on the motherboard!

If you haven’t seen Pete Lacey’s socratic dialogue on the evolution of SOAP then please go and read it straight away. An excerpt to whet your whistle:

Dev: Okay, where’s the spec on this?

SG: Oh, there is no spec. This is just what Microsoft seems to be doing. Looked like a good idea, so now all the cool kids are doing it. However, there is this new thing. I think you’re gonna like it. It’s called the Web Services Interoperability Group, or the WS-I. What they’re doing is trying to remove a lot of the ambiguity in the SOAP and WSDL specs. I know how you like specs.

Dev: So, in other words, the specs were so bad you need a standards body to standardize the standards. Lord. Well, will this solve my interoperability problems?

SG: Oh, yeah. So long as you use a WS-I compliant SOAP stack, avoid using 8/10ths of XML Schema, don’t use any unusual data types, and don’t count on working with WebSphere and Apache Axis.

There must be something in the air because Duncan Cragg has also written some fun and informative articles in the same style for a new series called the REST dialogues: Getting Data and Setting Data. If you want to get a better view of what it means to be resource-oriented then this series looks to be the business.

Some of the veil of secrecy is dropping around the venice project, a kind of TV-over-IP system. I’ve been playing with the beta and there’s a glimmer of something very interesting there, possibly a game-changer in the broadcast arena. While playing with the beta I’d noticed that some familiar names were being credited on the splash screen but I hadn’t realised how deep the use of RDF was in the project! One to watch for sure.

Greg Linden, who Sam and I had the good fortune to meet at the Web 2.0 Summit this year, has posted a link to some excellent class notes on data mining. Lots of interesting topics on clustering and relevancy analysis usefully condensed and summarised. I highly recommend Greg’s blog if you’re interested at all in large-scale search and recommendation systems in general.