Podcast: Tim O'Reilly and John Battelle discuss the upcoming Web 2.0 Summit

Beginning on November 5th, 2008 a wide array of thought leaders and practitioners of Web 2.0 are converging on San Francisco to attend the 5th annual Web 2.0 Summit. This year's theme, "Web Meets World" reflects how much Web 2.0 has evolved over the past five years. I recorded an informal conversation with co-chairs Tim O'Reilly and John Battelle to discuss that theme, highlighted speakers and how to get invited to the Summit. Whether you plan on attending or not, the discussion provides insight into the state of Web 2.0 today.

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Experience Syndication: Powered by Zappos

I have been thinking a lot about the new Powered by Zappos service.

According to Zappos:

Powered by Zappos (PBZ) is a feature Zappos.com offers to its partners where we design, host, fulfill and own a partners web site. Our goal is to provide Zappos customers as well as our partner's customers with the best possible service experience. By building partnerships through PBZ we can deliver great service to more people. Ultimately if you are purchasing through a PBZ site you are making a purchase from Zappos, your package with free shipping will even arrive in a Zappos.com box and you will receive all the great benefits Zappos has to offer.

How the Hell Did Matt Get People to Dance With Him?

A couple of weeks ago Matt gave an Ignite talk at Gnomedex about his experiences dancing around the world. If you've seen the video you'll enjoy his talk - plus it ends with bonus footage of 100 of us dancing with him.

Book Review: Nudge

This year has seen a glut of books on topics in that strange area occupied awkwardly by behavioural economics, cognitive psychology, and experimental philosophy. Some fail to distinguish themselves, merely rehashing the many ways in which we aren't perfectly rational creatures. Others, however, find an original angle to tack the last 30 years of work since Daniel Kahneman first thought "but wait, real people don't make rational choices". Nudge (Thaler and Sunnstein, Yale University Press, 2008) is from two leading University of Chicago economists and takes a public policy angle that has been rewarded in the bestseller lists.

The authors (who refer to each other by their last names, even in the blog that accompanies the book, an awkward affectation that makes me picture two 1950s men in suits at a work cocktail party) have coined a new term: libertarian paternalism. By this they mean that policy makers can use your brain's decision-making shortcuts to steer you towards good behaviour while still leaving you free to choose bad. It's opt-out public policy.

Libertarian Paternalism is a brilliant phrase because it has something for everything: libertarianism for the Small Government suit, paternalism for the Smug Liberal. Nudge has been required reading in the halls of English and US power, because it promises that you can have your cake and eat it. You can make decisions for other people, but not be hated by the people who don't like you making decisions for other people! What's not to love?

The book has a simple structure: first the authors walk us through our cognitive biases, the flaws in our decision-making apparatus; then they take us through different real-world scenarios such as social security, healthcare, and education; and finally they deal with objections and suggest future avenues of exploration. In each subject area, the authors suggest "nudges" (the authors endow the word with the same near-religious air that accompanies "social graph" and "RoR" in Web 2.0 circles) that will gently encourage people to do the right thing. For example, we tend to fear losing things more than we anticipate gaining things, so the authors suggest we not immediately deduct money from salaries to increase retirement savings (which would be perceived as a loss) but instead reduce future raises and put the reduction towards retirement. Then backing out would require losing the retirement saving you were doing (a loss, felt more keenly than the gain of the spending money).

Inherent in this structure is the danger that the middle chapters become wishful fantasies divorced from reality ("I, an unbloodied economist, Know How To Solve All The World's Problems Without Pissing Anyone Off"). The authors attempt to avoid this by citing situations in which nudge-like techniques have worked, for example San Marcos, TX, solved the low college enrolment rate by requiring high schoolers to complete an application form to their local community college before they could graduate (in addition to this, kids were sold hard on the personal advantages of college, such as the earning potential to afford a flash car). See, nudges work! Despite these efforts, this reader was left dissatisfied—perhaps by the authors' advocacy of "our proposals" instead of a humble presentation of "what has worked for others".

I also remain dissatisfied with the authors' blithe dismissal of the dangers of bad nudges. After all, the same techniques could steer someone towards an action that's not in their self-interest. The authors shrug and say "sure, but transparency will help this" and provide two paragraphs of boil-the-ocean political reforms to encourage this. I'd be interested to see how many dubious nudges come about as a result of this book. Perhaps it's because of my time on the Internet, my first-hand appreciation of the very real difference between opt-in marketing and opt-out marketing, that I fear bad nudging is all-to-easy and transparency all-too-hard.

In short, Nudge is an interesting take on cognitive biases and behavioural economics but the long, detailed, and ever-optimistic unveiling of the authors' plans to solve the burning questions in money, health, and even same-sex marriages, turn the work into a study of hubris. And that's before it falls into the hands of someone whose political ends you don't agree with ....

Where Camp PDX 2008

For the past two years the geo community has hosted WhereCamp right after Where 2.0 to discuss the events of the conference. Now it looks like WhereCamp is going regional! Portland will be hosting their own geo-oriented unconference called WhereCamp PDX from 10/18-19. As they describe it:

An unconference is a conference planned by the participants, we all convene together, plan sessions, and have break-outs into sessions. This gives everybody an opportunity to bring to the table the things that interest them the most and lets us talk about new topics that are still new and exploratory. Part of what is important to hearing new voices and getting new ideas is lowering barriers to participation - this event is free and it is driven by the participants.

What kinds of people and topics will be discussed?

This event is community driven and is what you make it. It provide cross pollination between many different kinds of folks from all walks of life. Topics may include remote sensing, geoinformatics, forestry and agriculture, food chain transparency, civil engineering, emergency disaster relief, urban planning, local search, context awareness, place hacking, social cartography, citizen journalism, locative gaming, psychogeography, locative art, and beyond. Expect to participate in conversations on the nature of place as described in pixels, with rays, on paper, and by social practice!

RSVP if you can make it. I'll be on a plane to Berlin for the Web 2.0 Expo Europe and will not be able to attend.

Auckland University Bioengineering Institute

I am an industry advisor to the Auckland University Bioengineering Institute and got a tour on Tuesday. It was inspirational! They sprawl over several floors of a tall concrete building in Auckland, expanding from their cramped one-floor presence. Everywhere you look there are people with soldering irons, laptops, and batteries working on devices that sit between hardware and biology.

I've been advising on their Physiome project, which seeks to computationally model human bodies at various levels including genes, proteins, muscles, skeleton, and skin. The idea is to develop a model such that you can "sample" a person's key physical trait, plug it into the model, and predict the details of their body's structure and response. I like to think of it as the OSI 7-layer stack of the human body.

You can see a list of their projects online. I saw the telemetry group's work on powering heart pumps, which assist a failing heart while the patient waits for a transplant. At the moment, heart pump patients have power cables sticking out of their chest and consequently many die from infection before they can receive the transplant. The telemetry group is working on wireless power transfer to the devices. It's the same inductive power ideas that made a splash last month when Intel demoed wireless power devices at their developers forum.

I also saw a lot of very sexy hardware. They have a 3D printer, a laser cutter, and a monstrously heavy metal machining tool that had to be delivered through the window by a crane (and which required multiple engineering checks of the floor's capability to hold it up). All these take designs from CAD diagrams, so the researchers can conceive of a part, design it, and produce it without the lengthy turnaround times and erratic tolerances of traditional machine shops. They're actively expanding their metal shop.

I also saw an artificial muscle in the biomimetics group. It was flapping at an adjustable rate, needing a high-voltage low-current power which can be made quite small and efficient. They were still trying to find an application--candidates they're investigating include moving small devices (the way some organisms use cilia to move around), and using may of them to form a crowd-surfing type of conveyor belt (pictured).

They have programmers, too—modelling is a big part of their work, and every model needs lots of sexy outputs. One of their coders, Duane Malcolm, came to Kiwi Foo earlier this year. He's an open source hacker, with Sparkfun Arduino kits at home, who has been hacking in XUL, RDF databases and Ruby on Rails lately. I didn't get to meet the programmer beside him, but she had a copy of one of O'Reilly's Python books on her desk—good to see!

I realize medical devices aren't new, but underlying these medical devices are sophisticated models and a lot of computational crunching. It reinforced for me the revelation I had at Science Foo Camp in August—science has always had theoreticians and experimentalists, but the days of being primarily one or the other have passed in many fields. Increasingly we're seeing a new class of data crunching scientist, someone who can make sense of the enormous volumes of data that can now be gathered, someone who connects theory and practice with software. There's a lot of that at the Bioengineering Institute and it was very exciting to see up-close and personal.

PICNIC Network 2008

The week of September 22nd I am going to be flying across the Atlantic for the third PICNIC Network. Ever since i heard about the conference last fall I've wanted to attend. My friends' stories last year focused on the many RFID-enabled art pieces. As discussed in this interview these were developed by Mediamatic, a digital art lab.

Last year Mediamatic offers PICNIC delegates some fun and intriguing services. An RFID-tag was added to the PICNIC badges, and linked to the delegates profile on the PICNIC network. A team of top notch hackers, developers and dreamers got involved and came up with cute, fun and relevant new services. Remind us!.

"Last year we had the first version of the hackers camp where we built some cool physical interfaces for the PICNIC social network. We had the Photobooth, Badger, The Friend-Drink station, I-tea and of course a whole range of inspiring designs that we only could realise later."

Mediamatic is going to be hosting another hacking workshop and I'll be volunteering. Additionally there are a number of sessions and day long minitracks:

Surprising Africa has a great selection of content. I've never been to Africa, but there is an increasing amount of tech heading there. Google, Nokia and Vodafone are going to be describing their initiatives. Ethan Zuckerman will be discussing citizen journalism in Africa; Ethan gave an amazing talk at last year's ETech on this topic (Radar post).

Visible City is exploring the data available from cities. As their page states "What if an entire city could be visible from above, like we see it from an airplane? Not simply buildings and squares, but also the aggregation of people who populate it, outdoor as well as indoor. We could detect public gatherings and traffic jams, estimate which neighborhoods are most crowded, reconstruct commuting patterns during the day." This is very relevant for this year's ETech.

In the Internet of Things speakers from SAP, OpenSpime, and ThingM (amongst others) will be discussing how they are moving devices and objects online. This session makes me think of the soon-to-be released Fitbit, a personal web-enabled activity tracker. Soon it won't be just things online, but our passive data as well.

Perhaps the most significant event of the week be the Green Challenge. The winner will get €500,000 from Sir Richard Branson. Last year's winner was Qurrent, an energy consumption monitoring company.

If you're going to be there drop me a line.

Portable Contacts API Starts to Get Real

This evening Joseph and John of Plaxo and I have been hosting a hackathon at Six Apart for the Portable Contacts API (video about PorC). The Portable Contacts API is designed "to make it easier for developers to give their users a secure way to access the address books and friends lists they have built up all over the web."

We originally expected a handful of people to show up and hack on implementing bits of the specification, but so far have been blown away at the progress made and about the twenty people that came. Tomorrow is a summit style meeting hosted by MySpace also in San Francisco to try to finalize the specification among a wide range of providers and consumers. I'm expecting a handful of interesting demos, but wanted to share two that have already come together tonight.

Joseph Smarr and Kevin Marks of Google hacked together a web transformer that integrates Microformats, vCard, and the Portable Contacts API. Given Kevin's homepage which is full of Microformats, they've built an API that extracts his profile information from hCard, uses a public API from Technorati to transform it to vCard, and then exposes it as a Portable Contacts API endpoint. Not only does this work on Kevin's own page, but his Twitter profile as well which contains basic profile information such as name, homepage, and a short bio.

Brian Ellin of JanRain has successfully combined OpenID, XRDS-Simple, OAuth, and the Portable Contacts API to start showing how each of these building blocks should come together. Upon visiting his demo site he logs in using his OpenID. From there, the site discovers that Plaxo hosts his address book and requests access to it via OAuth. Finishing the flow, his demo site uses the Portable Contacts API to access information about his contacts directly from Plaxo. End to end, login with an OpenID and finish by giving the site access to your address book without having to fork over your password.

While the individual building blocks are fairly geeky themselves, pulling them together like has been happening tonight shows that we're only at the beginning of building the next generation of social networks. When the pieces work together, people won't have to know what's going on under the hood; it will just work--and will be almost like magic. John has more photos up on his blog.

Ignite NYC II: Energy, Cupcakes, and Alley vs. Valley

On the night before the Web 2.0 Expo NY Ignite is coming back to NYC! On September 15th we will have 10 Ignite speakers who each get just five minutes on stage. Bre Pettis, the co-creator of Ignite will be hosting a cupcake decorating contest. Ignite is going to be at New World Stages (340 West 50th Street) where we are a guest of the New York Television Festival. They are providing us a ~400 person theatre and free beer (during the cupcake contest).

Krikorian Raffi - holmz : open database for energy consumption
Deb Schultz - Alley vs Valley
Jennifer Pahlka - Technology Anxiety: Jello and Web 3.0
Sam Lessin - A very brief history of privacy in our data-deluged world
Nichelle Stephens - Cupcakes: The iPhone of Desserts
Don Carli - The Carbon Footprint of Banner Ads, Emails and Websites and why you should care
Nate Westheimer - Magic at the Democratic National Convention
Andrew Schneider - Experimental Devices for Performance
Audacia Ray - Porn as a front runner in technology innovations... With a twist

Here is a rough schedule for how the night will go.
7:15 Door & Bar opens
7:30 Cupcake Contest Begins
8:15 Cupcakes Contest Ends
8:45 Ignite Talks Begin

9:45 Ignite talks end; upstairs bar opens

If you plan on entering the cupcake decorating competition plan on bringing your own decorations. We will have some on-hand but if you are going to be the cupcake decorating champion of NYC then you'll need to bring something unique. You will not be required to use our cupcakes; feel free to bring your own.

RSVP at Upcoming or Facebook to give us an idea of how many people to expect (but you do not have to).

After this Ignite the New York community will be taking on the event (though I will come back next summer to do some). They're already put up a community site; Tikva Morowati is on point if you are interested in being involved.

If you don't live in New York (or Seattle or Portland) or anywhere with an Ignite start your own! I urged people at Gnomedex last week and we will soon have new Ignites in Vancouver, Nashville, Dallas and DC (they'll soon be joining all of those logos to the right). Check out our community site for more information.

Open Trace and Yammer Shine

I'm at Techcrunch50 this week (and will be here for most of the conference). The Enterprise group of startups showed yesterday. It was an interesting cluster of startups to include in At first glance I would have included only one in the traditional Enterprise. When I think of Enterprise in the Web 2.0 space I usually narrow my classification to either platforms (like Salesforce) or taking consumer applications behind the firewall (like Zimbra). Instead this session included a consumer-data company, dev tools and a startup service.

The only company that fit my narrow profile was Yammer. It's a hosted Twitter that allows companies to have their own Twitter networks. I haven't played with it yet, but it seemed like a very solid app that could take hold in this space. I just learned from the Techcrunch50 site that companies pay to claim and administer their networks. It launched today.

Open Trace was the most novel company and did well in the judging because of this. Tokyo-based Open Trace aims to show you where your products come from and what their environmental impact is.

This site is all about the data. It's got to have a lot, it's got to be quality and its got to showcase it. Once launched the site will be editable by anyone. For the site to be affective however they will need large data sets. Some of these will come from users, but more of them will come from partnerships or clients. As Marc Benioff suggested on-stage, Open Trace could benefit from working with FairTrade or a similar organization. Companies could pay to have their products maintained in the Open Trace database. Not very enterprise, but it could definitely service the enterprise as a vendor.

Connective Logic offered up BluePrint, a graphical interface for Visual Studio 2005. It promises to assist with multi-core issues.

FairSoftware provides a method for companies to incorporate and manage their new business. Shares can be allocated to partners and employees.

Superstruct: Crowdsource the Future

Based on the results of a year-long supercomputer simulation, the Global Extinction Awareness System (GEAS) has reset the "survival horizon" for Homo sapiens - the human race - from "indefinite" to 23 years. - SEPTEMBER 22, 2019

This is the premise for Jane McGonigal's newest game, Superstruct. The game's goal is to crowdsource forecasting for the Institute For The Future. And based on that premise the IFTF is hoping that participants will do no less than help them find solutions to super-threats (climate refugees, water, carbon quotas and more are listed).

The game will launch September 22nd and will last for six weeks. During that time players will learn more information about the world in 2019. The players will share how they would deal with this new world. They'll be able to use a network of sites to write their thoughts, find examples in their town or upload a short documentary. A nice example of this is Mr. Judkins' photo of an empty shelf and a sign from a supermarket announcing a peanut shortage.

As with (almost) any game there is a point system. In this case participants with the most insight will get high-ratings and an ever increasing audience. Of course the points will also help the IFTF find some of the trends they are seeking. You can learn more about the game in Discover Magazine.

Jane developed the game in collaboration with Jamais Cascio and Kathi Van. Kathi is the IFTF's Director of the Ten-Year Forecast. This is an annual exercise done by the Institute and is funded by their many corporate customers.

Jane worked on a similarly-structured game entitled World Without Oil last year (Radar post). In it participants made pretend that they lived in a world with increasing oil costs. They shared energy-saving schemes with each other via blogs and forums. Others modified their lifestyle and did not use the car as often so that they could keep within their new gas budget. I am sure that some of those tips are coming in handy now. I hope Superstruct's scenarios don't also come true.

Ignite Boston 4 - Tonight!

Sponsored by:     

The fourth Ignite Boston is this Thursday, September 11, from 6 to 10pm at The Hooley House in the Faneuil Hall area of Boston. Don't miss out on hearing a special keynote by Tim O'Reilly. There is no cover charge or any sort of fee. The event is free as in 'Free Beer'. In fact, Microsoft is sponsoring the night and there will be a free beer for those of you who check in when you get there.

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