Friday, August 27, 2004

Shrödinger's cat takes the Turing test

So I'm hearing that QT's blog, to which I pointed yesterday, may or may not be fake.

There now the news

On IT Garage: Longhorn shrinks as its schedule lengthens. A list of links are growing over there. Here's Channel 9, and CNet, which now has an interview with Billg.

DIY Advertising

Marc Canter on Sell Side advertising (OpenListings?) ...this new model for online ads reverses the relationship between publishers and advertisers. I think it rocks.

Toward a culture of independence

Frank Paynter in IT Garage: Seeking the Metric for Independence. The impediment to opening a large organization to a good relationship with its own internal IT resources is strictly cultural.

Craig Burton often says there are two kinds of problems: technical and political. And that the technical problems are always much easier to solve.

To explain more, I just wrote The killer condition. More from Thomas Jefferson and John Perry Barlow.

There in spirit

Ed Cone's Piedmont Blog Conference will happen at the Weatherspoon Art Museum, at the corner of Spring Garden and Tate Street in Greensboro. This, coincidentally, is exactly where I lived, in a giant old house, back when I was a senior in college, thirty-five years ago.

In fact, there's a whole long creepy story about it.

Anyway, I really wish I was there. Especially since I'll be in North Carolina a week from now. (I'll speak at UNC on the 7th. Details later.)

Reading the G leaves

Matt Hicks of eWeek writes Google to Bloggers: Get Your Ad Share.

Its Blogger service this week put out a call to bloggers to share in advertising revenues by joining Google's AdSense program, which displays advertisements targeted to the keywords in a site's content. Through AdSense, Google returns a portion of the pay-per-click fees back to the site publisher.

I didn't know this was news, but I guess it is.

To Blogger members, the dashboard margin sez,

AdSense Invite

Did you know that you can turn your blog into a source of revenue with Google's AdSense program?

Would you like to sign up?

Seems pretty straightforward to me.

The more important document is Steve Gillmor's G-spot essay on ZDnet. An excerpt:

Once in the Gmail container, RSS feeds could be filtered according to Gmail’s Conversation view (where related messages are presented in a threaded format) tagged with useful metadata, and organized for sharing with collaborative groups as reassembled and redirected RSS feeds. The API would allow browser plug-ins to format and save favorite searches, create timers for announcing events and project updates, and so on. In short, the Gmail engine could be harnessed to build a collaborative platform for enterprise applications. From there, it’s an increasingly shorter leap to incorporate calendaring capabilities (see David Berlind’s post about RSS Calendar) automated multimedia delivery (see Adam Curry’s RSS-enclosure-to-iPod auto-update application), and connectors to enterprise CRM, SFA, and ERP applications.

Add an intelligent cache that sits between Google servers and the browser, such as the Alchemy framework Adam Bosworth developed for BEA before he jumped to Google, and you have a standards-based, offline storage capability for use with laptops and occasionally connected clients such as PDAs, iPods, and cell phones.

Piece-by-piece, RSS tools and services will work across a range of devices, operating systems, and server platforms, reducing switching costs and taking an increasingly larger bite out of legacy file formats such as Word, PDF, and proprietary multimedia formats....

In moving toward this software-as-a-service platform, Google has some interesting partners-in-waiting—-the carriers and their partners (Sun, Motorola, Nokia), the increasingly Web-focused broadband players (TiVo, SBC, Dish Network) who are circumventing cable and record companies with direct-from-Web downloads to personal video recorders, and micro-content creators (exercise left to the reader.) Add together this loosely-coupled group of companies and their aggregated market caps, and today’s price per share for Google starts to look like a bargain.

The bottom line: "platforms" matter less than environments, and the only one of those that matters now is the Web: civilizations' new commons. This last week, while I moved data around between hard disks old and new, and relocated more and more of my ouevre onto the Searls.com server at Rackspace (good guys, gotta plug 'em), I worked on three OS platforms on four boxes. Five or six OSes if you count the PDA and the cell phone (which serves as an occasional bluetooth bridge to the Net). What we've long called "platforms" are now just vehicles: ways to get around the large environment.

The roles played by service enablers within the Web are becoming critical for business, and many other things. The names of the biggest service enablers are Amazon, eBay, Yahoo and now Google. Not "platform" providers like Apple and Microsoft. Steve again:

The underlying fabric for enabling software-as-a-service is XML Web services, which are commoditizing the cost of integrating disparate hardware and software systems, and enabling a service-oriented architecture (SOA).

Think of the number of advertisers Google brings into that category. Does anybody else come close? How about the number of businesses eBay, Amazon and Yahoo support? It's pretty wild. And hardly recognized. The apparent businesses for those companies — search, auctions, retailing — are huge and distracting red herrings.

Throughout the new Web environment, the demand side is getting the power to supply. Right now big companies (named above) are making this possible at the back-end service level. Look for smaller ones to jump in too. Look for new NEA standards that nobody owns, everybody can use and anybody can improve.

And remember where RSS, which gives us The World Live Web, comes from. Not just the big guys. Without the independent little guys, it wouldn't be here.

Independence is key. The service fabrics that matter most in the long run will be those that enable, support, encourage and rely on the independence of those who participate. That's the new law of the new jungle.

Oh, by the way, I'm sure we'll be talking about all this and more on The Gillmor Gang today.