ETech Preview: Why LCD is the Cool New Technology All Over Again

In an early test of the OLPC XO in Nigeria, the student users dropped every laptop several times a day. Despite the laptops' rugged construction, they occasionally needed fixing, and a group of six-year-old girls opened up a "hospital" to reseat cables and do other simpler repairs. Mary Lou Jepson, One Laptop Per Child project's CTO, had this response: "I put extra screws underneath the battery cover so that if they lost one, they could have an extra one. And kids trade them almost like marbles, when they want to try to get something fixed in their laptop."

Mary Lou led the development of the OLPC's breakthrough low-power transflective display, combining a traditional backlit color display with a black and white display that could be used outdoors. She left OLPC to form Pixel Qi, and bring the revolutionary engineering used in the XO to the broader consumer market. In this interview, she discusses lessons learned from OLPC and shares her vision of "cool screens that can ship in high volume, really quickly, at price points that are equivalent to what you pay for standard liquid crystal displays."

At ETech, Mary Lou's keynote presentation delves further into Low-Cost, Low-Power Computing.

JAMES TURNER: I'm speaking today with Mary Lou Jepsen, Founder and CEO of Pixel Qi. Dr. Jepsen previously served as chief technology officer for the One Laptop per Child program where she was an instrumental player in the development of the OLPC's revolutionary hybrid screen. She also previously served as CTO of Intel's display division. Dr. Jepsen was also named by Time Magazine recently as one of the 100 most influential people in the world for 2008. She'll be speaking at the O'Reilly Emerging Technologies Conference in March, and we're pleased she's taken the time to talk to us. Good evening.

MARY LOU JEPSEN: Hi. Nice to speak with you tonight.

JT: So in some ways, you're kind of uniquely qualified to comment on the current travails of the OLPC since you've been in highly influential positions both in the OLPC effort itself and at Intel, who some believe tried to sabotage the OLPC. Do you think that the OLPC would've had wider acceptance if the Intel Classmate wasn't competing against it?

MLJ: It is interesting. I think the OLPC, and I haven't seen the latest numbers, sold a lot more than the Classmate. I think head-to-head there's no comparison which is the better machine, and I'm not saying that just because I'm the architect. But what's really happened has been extraordinary. I think OLPC's impact in sort of spearheading the movement to Netbooks is fairly undisputed, although OLPC is not the best selling Netbook; 17 million Netbooks shipped in 2008 and that's through companies like Acer, Asus, MSI, HP, Dell. And that impact on the world is starting to be felt.

JT: What were the factors that led you to leave the OLPC program and start Pixel Qi?

MLJ: You know, I started OLPC with Nicholas in his office in the beginning, in January of 2005. And at that point, right after that Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Michael Dell, all said it was impossible. So it became my job to sort of take that, create an architecture, invent a few things, convince the manufacturers to work with me to develop it, get a team together, and take it into high-volume mass production. And then it got to the point where my days were spent getting safety certifications for various countries.

And I just realized, it's time for me to continue doing this; this is the best job I've ever done, but to keep going, why not make these components that are inside of the XO and let everybody buy them rather than just exclusively making and designing them for the OLPC laptop. If you make more of something, you can sell it for less. So rather than just serving the bottom of the pyramid, why not take the fantastic technology that we developed at OLPC and serve the whole pyramid? Everybody wants their batteries to last a lot longer. Everybody wants screens that are e-paper-like and high resolution and sunlight readable. So why not make these for the whole world?

(continue reading)

Four short links: 11.5 Feb 2009

This second Feb 11 post was brought to you by the intersection of timezones and technology. If there's a third Feb 11 post, I'm changing my name to Bill Murray.

1. Hacking the Earth -- an environmental futurist looks at "geoengineering", deliberately interfering with the Earth's systems to terraform the planet. Radical solution to global warming, unwise hubris and immoral act of the highest folly, or all of the above? (via Matt Jones)
2. Reinvention Draws Near for Newsweek -- fascinating look at how Newsweek are refocusing their magazine. "If we don't have something original to say, we won't. The drill of chasing the week's news to add a couple of hard-fought new details is not sustainable." gives me hope. Newsweek are hoping to target fewer but richer advertisers, essentially a business strategy of tapping existing customers for more. This feels like they're ceding the contested parts of their business (commodity news stories) and doubling down on the bits that nobody else is fighting for yet (their columnists, pictures, whitespace). What else could they do? Possibly nothing (see Innovator's Dilemma), but the alternative is figuring out something new that people want and giving them that. Easy to say, hard for anyone to do.
3. Tinkerkit - a physical computing kit for designers. Arduino-compatible components for rapid prototyping. Sweet!
4. Stanford University YouTube Channel -- short interesting talks by Stanford researchers. Brains on chips, stem cells to fight deafness, and brain imagery are some of the first up there. The talks aren't condescending or vague, they're aimed at "a bright and curious audience", as the Mind Hacks blog post about them put it.

Ask... no, wait... TELL Tim

Yes, there he is... our glorious thought-leader, riding a jet ski. But Tim needs your help... seriously. Here's the problem:

A few weeks ago, I was chatting with Tim. He mentioned that he'd recently taken his first ride on a Jet Ski. Several torturous minutes later, he got off, still alive and capable of detecting faint signals. But his back was suffering... badly.

Tim, as Tim is prone to do, let the ski rental place know of his pains. The instructor/rental guy looked at Tim, and simply said, "Oh. You need to lean forward."

At this point in our conversation, Tim rolled his eyes, gave a half-wave of his hand, and said, "Oh, thanks. That would have been nice to know before I got on the ski." Obviously, if the instructor had told TIm to lean forward before he took on the Old Man of the Sea, Tim's back would have been saved a lot of hardship.

Or would it?

Along with all the other instruction Tim would have received, he'd have been told, "Oh, and be sure and lean forward." Would this have stuck with Tim? Would it have been held up in his brain as important as, say, "Keep a tight grip on the handlebars?" Would it have competed with, "Look here... this is the ignition key. Turn it to start, turn it again to stop."

Would simply telling Tim ahead of time to lean forward been enough to save Tim's back?

Better yet, how would you have prevented Tim's back pain? Here's the question, broken down for easy answering...

1. WHEN would you have told Tim, "Lean forward?"
2. HOW would you have told Tim?
3. Free response: what else would you have done/not done to ensure Tim got off the jet ski happy, healthy, and not hurting?

Come on... Tim's back is counting on you figuring out how humans learn... how best to communicate... and what our brain does with information that is important, but maybe non-obvious in application or significance.

Come to ETech; Experiment with Physical Computing and RFIDs

RFID's are associated with credit cards, passports and inventory systems. However, they can also be used to add a proximity interaction to a service like entering a subway via a passkey (Jan Chipchase has several posts describing these interactions around the world). By linking yourself to an RFID tag you can let a device know who you are. If you add in a link to an online, personal profile the interaction can be very personal.

By having your information at the ready an RFID tag can give you a much simpler interaction with technology. It is very easy to conceptualize the possibilities, but to really get a feel for how RFIDs can effect your interaction It's an area that has to be explored physically.

That's why we are giving all of the attendees at ETech RFID tags (See the tag art to the right) that can be linked to their conference profiles (opt-in). With these tags you can interact with several projects we'll have at the conference. BTW, ETech is happening March 9-12 in San Jose. Use et09pd30 at checkout for 30% off.

We were inspired to do this after I attended PICNIC in 2008 (Radar post) and got to experience first-hand the many, many uses of an RFID badge. Mediamatic linked your profile to it and that information was used to record your experiences. We got help from Mediamatic on our implementation and even used the same vendor.

If you make it to ETech here are the projects you can play with:

Lensley's Photobooth: Leonard Lin's new project is Lensley, a high-end photobooth with online photo-services integration. He's creating a special version just for ETech that will tag photos with your name and tweet that you've just had one taken.

Personal Calendar: Radar's own Edd Dumbill is the fellow behind the profile APIs. He is going to create a project that will show attendees their personal calendar at a public kiosk.

ETech Prophet: Josh and Tarikh of Uncommon Projects (they made the cool Yahoo! geo-bike) are adding an element of play to their project. They sent me a mail describing it as: "Essentially, we’d like to make an “Etech Prophet” a kind of mechanical turk idea (perhaps in another form factor)--you wave your RFID fob, it gesticulates, makes a noise and sends you your pithy fortune via twitter"

People Collector: This is a favorite of mine. Business cards are a waste of time and paper. I just want the person's email address. Nothing else. The People Collector will be a mobile device that people can use to exchange contact information with other attendees. When you meet someone just wave your fob over their People Collector and a message will be sent to both of you. The People Collector will be built in Tom Igoe and Brian Jepson's Hands-On RFID Workshop on 3/9.

Do you have something that you want to make? Let me know in the comments or find me on Twitter. We are still looking for projects.

O'Reilly Labs: RDF For All of Our Books, Plus Bookworm Ebook Reader

There's more details on the Labs blog, but timed with our Tools of Change for Publishing Conference, we've opened up RDF metadata for all of our books, and have also brought the open source Bookworm ebook reader into O'Reilly Labs. It's a great way to read any of our ebooks (more than 400 are now available as ebook bundles from oreilly.com) online and from a mobile phone:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<rdf:RDF xmlns:rdf="https://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#">
  <om:Product xmlns:om="https://purl.oreilly.com/ns/meta/" 
              rdf:about="urn:x-domain:oreilly.com:product:9780596521677.BOOK" 
              xmlns:dc="https://purl.org/dc/terms/"
              xml:lang="en">
    <dc:isFormatOf rdf:resource="urn:x-domain:oreilly.com:product:955988693.IP"/>
    <dc:issued>2008-08-13</dc:issued>
    <dc:creator>
      <rdf:Seq rdf:ID="creator">
        <rdf:li rdf:resource="urn:x-domain:oreilly.com:agent:pdb:350"/>
      </rdf:Seq>
    </dc:creator>
    <dc:rightsHolder>David Pogue</dc:rightsHolder>
    <dc:description>The new iPhone 3G is here, and bestselling author David Pogue 
      is back with a thoroughly updated edition of &lt;em&gt;iPhone: The Missing 
      Manual&lt;/em&gt;. With its faster downloads, touch-screen iPod, and best-ever 
      mobile Web browser, the new affordable iPhone is packed with possibilities.
      But without an objective guide like this one, you'll never unlock all it can
      do for you. Each custom designed page helps you accomplish specific tasks for
      everything from web browsing, to new apps, to watching videos.</dc:description>
    <dc:extent>376 pages</dc:extent>
    <dc:type rdf:resource="https://purl.org/dc/dcmitype/PhysicalObject"/>
    <dc:format>6 x 9 in</dc:format>
...

The URLs are structured by ISBN13. Once you have the ISBN13 for an O'Reilly book, you can get the full metadata via HTTP request to:

https://opmi.labs.oreilly.com/product/ISBN13

To get you started, here's direct links to the public RDF for our current top-5 bestsellers:

• Mac OS X Leopard: The Missing Manual
• iPhone: The Missing Manual, 2e
• iPod: The Missing Manual, 7e
• Head First HTML with CSS & XHTML
• Photoshop Elements 7: The Missing Manual

You can also follow @oreillylabs on twitter.

Four short links: 11 Feb 2009

Investment, search engines, iPhones, and a cool hardware hack. It could be notes from a pitch meeting last year but it's not, it's today's four short links:

1. The Mark Cuban Stimulus Plan, Open Source Funding -- lovely criteria for a company that he'll fund. "8. You must post your business plan here, or you can post it on slideshare.com , scribd.com or google docs, all completely public for anyone to see and/or download"
2. Introduction to Information Retrieval -- readable and real-world book on writing search engines, from three Stanford professors (one of whom happens to be the head of Yahoo! Research). Found via Greg Linden's glowing review.
3. The iPhone Becomes a Web Server (ReadWrite Web) -- I got a frisson reading this. There's something exciting in the idea that I can carry my web app around with me in my pocket. I can't say why, but I feel like having your mobile device offer services to other devices (be they mobile, laptop, desktop, or server) opens the door to different architectures. We played around with this a while ago with desktop web apps, but it didn't fly. I'll be watching this space.
4. Hemispherical Mirror Projection -- very cool, albeit non-trivial, hack to get a Mac's screen projected, with compensation for the distortion, inside a half-dome like a planetarium.

The Kindle and the End of the End of History

This morning I was absentmindedly checking out the New York Times' bits blog coverage of the Kindle 2 launch and saw this:

“Our vision is every book, ever printed, in any language, all available in less than 60 seconds.”

It wasn't the main story for sure. It was buried in the piece like an afterthought, but it was the big news to me. It certainly falls into the category of big hairy audacious goal, and I think it's a lot more interesting than the device Bezos was there to launch (which still can't flatten a colorful maple leaf). I mean, he didn't say "every book in our inventory" or "every book in the catalogues of the major publishers that we work with." Or even, "every book that has already been digitized." He said "every book ever printed."

When I'm working I tend to write random notes to myself on 3x5 cards. Sometimes they get transcribed into Evernote, but all too often they just end up in piles. I read that quote and immediately started digging into the closest pile looking for a card I had just scribbled about an hour earlier.

I had been doing some research this morning and was reading a book published in 1915. It's long out of print, and may have only had one printing, but I know from contemporary news clippings found tucked in its pages that the author had been well known and somewhat controversial back in his day. Yet, Google had barely a hint that he ever existed. I fared even worse looking for other people referenced in the text. Frustrated, I grabbed a 3x5 card and scribbled:

"Google and the end of history... History is no longer a continuum. The pre-digital past doesn't exist, at least not unless I walk away from this computer, get all old school, and find an actual library."

My house is filled with books, it's ridiculous really. They are piled up everywhere. I buy a lot of old used books because I like to see how people lived and how they thought in other eras, and I guess I figure someday I'll find time to read them all. For me, it's often less about the facts they contain and more about peeking into alternative world views. Which is how I originally came upon the book I mentioned a moment ago.

The problem is that old books reference people and other stuff that a contemporary reader would have known immediately, but that are a mystery to me today - a mystery that needs solving if I want to understand what the author is trying to say, and to get that sense of how they saw the world. If you want to see what I mean, try reading Winston Churchill's Second World War series.

Churchill speaks conversationally about people, events, and publications that a London resident in 1950 would have been familiar with. However, without a ready reference to all that minutiae you'll have no idea what he's talking about. Unfortunately, a lot of the stuff he references is really obscure today and today's search engines are hit and miss with it - they only know what a modern wikipedia editor or some other recent writer thinks is relevant today. Google is brilliant for things that have been invented or written about in the digital age, or that made enough of a splash in their day to still get digital now, but the rest of it just doesn't exist. It's B.G. (before Google) or P.D. (pre digital) or something like that.

To cut to the chase, if you read old books you get a sense for how thin the searchable veneer of the web is on our world. The web's view of our world is temporally compressed, biased toward the recent, and even when it does look back through time to events memorable enough to have been digitally remembered, it sees them through our digital-age lens. They are being digitally remembered with our world view overlaid on top.

I posted some of these thoughts to the Radar backchannel list and Nat responded with his usual insight. He pointed out that cultural artifacts have always been divided into popular culture (on the tips of our tongues), cached culture (readily available in an encyclopedia or at the local library) and archived culture (gotta put on your researcher hat and dig, but you can find it in a research library somewhere). The implication is that it's no worse now because of the web.

I like that trichotomy, and of course Nat's right. It's not like the web is burying the archive any deeper. It's right there in the research library where it has always been. Besides, history never really operates as a continuum anyway. It's always been lumpy for a bunch of reasons. But as habit and convenience make us more and more reliant on the web, the off-the-web archive doesn't just seem hard to find, it becomes effectively invisible. In the A.G. era, the deep archive is looking more and more like those charts used by early explorers, with whole blank regions labeled "there be dragons".

So, back to Bezo's big goal... I'd love it to come true, because a comprehensive archive that is accessible in 60 seconds is an archive that is still part of history.

The Kindle Hardware Tax

There's a lot of news about Amazon's new Kindle 2 today, and it does look like a nice upgrade. I still don't want one, though. What I want is Kindle software. I'm hoping the early suggestions that Amazon is thinking that way prove true.

I use my iPhone for ebooks all the time now. I buy through Stanza, a very nice app, which is backended into Fictionwise. The buying experience between the two is pretty much terrible -- syncing down to the phone is painful, and having to enter your full credit card number to "unlock" the DRM makes me angry and frustrated at the same time -- but it's certainly good enough to make me excited about ebooks. I recently found myself wetting my fingers to turn the pages of a Stanza book I was reading -- the illusion that I'm reading a book is convincing.

Amazon has an interesting set of choices to make about how to proceed. This market seems like a pretty clear case of Tim's core Web 2.0 idea of "software above the level of a single device" -- do they really believe they can own the ebook device market and the ebook format market? do I really want to buy their hardware to read all the ebooks I read? I'm skeptical. I think if Amazon really makes Kindle books available on any hardware, including their own, they'll win. If I have to buy a $350 device -- or even a $99 device -- carry it, charge it, pay for otherwise free blogs on it, and so on, that won't work for me and someone else will win instead.

My devices have a history of merging or dying. I was an early adopter of the Palm Pilot, but stopped upgrading after the Palm V, which kind of worked for me, until the Treo came out, merging my phone with the PalmOS. That won out until the iPhone, which merged my phone, organizer, and iPod. The Kindle asks me to separate out a merged-in app for the benefit of -- well, what benefit? The display? It's nice, but not nice enough to take on the cost and the bother of a separate piece of hardware.

Amazon has every opportunity to trump the Fictionwise/Stanza book-buying experience -- Stanza's experience certainly isn't "One-Click." Worse, the prices in Fictionwise are higher than Kindle -- not to mention print -- for many of the books I've compared. For example: the last book I read on Stanza, The Art of Racing in the Rain, works out as follows (highest price to lowest):

[UPDATE: after posting this, I noticed that the price on Fictionwise for Stanza (stanza.fictionwise.com) is $2.84 more than the main Fictionwise site (www.fictionwise.com) price. Weird! I've updated the table and comments below.]

Kindle prices in that one case are beating both new and used print prices, and are trouncing the Fictionwise/Stanza price for apples-to-apples comparison. A number of other books I checked are substantially more expensive on Stanza than they are in hardcover, paperback, used, or Kindle.

I'm already paying for cell phone service, so it might well cost Amazon less to sell me a Kindle book than it would to sell the same Kindle book to a Kindle owner, assuming their profits aren't all in the device itself. Presumably they have better price negotiation power with the publishers, based on their existing print book sales, so they might well be able to compete on price for some time. Oh, and: I would totally pay $20 for a well-made Amazon Kindle iPhone app if it gave me access to books at Kindle prices. It seems like costs add up well on Amazon's side.

While the new Kindle upgrade is nice, owning another device is a kind of a tax. They need to care a lot less about the hardware business than they do about the software service. They're positioned to win on the latter and lose on the former.

ETech Preview: Living the Technomadic Life

One of the themes at this year's Emerging Technology Conference is nomadism, and there is no better example of technomads than Chris Dunphy and Cherie Ve Ard. Traveling around the country in a custom 17' trailer towed by a Diesel Jeep Liberty, they manage to run a consulting firm while satisfying their desire to see new places and meet new people. In this preview of Chris and Cherie's ETech presentation, Tales from Technomadia, we talk to them about what it takes technologically to make it work, and what a life on the road is like. Listen to the full interview, or read the transcript below.

JAMES TURNER: This is James Turner for O'Reilly Media. Today I'm talking to Chris Dunphy and Cherie Ve Ard, self-proclaimed technomadics, who travel around the country towing an ecologically tricked-out trailer. In addition to their vagabond life, they also run the consulting firm Two Steps Beyond. They'll be speaking at O'Reilly's Emerging Technology Conference in March. Thank you for taking the time to talk to us.

CHRIS DUNPHY: Good morning, James, good to talk to you.

CHERIE VE ARD: Good morning.

JT: So why don't you start by giving a brief background for each of you and how you came to be traveling around the country together.

CD: I guess I'll start it out. I've been living technomadically for just about three years now. This has always been a dream of mine. I was with Palm and PalmSource for 5+ years, and when PalmSource decided to go off in the direction of doing embedded operating systems in Japan, I set about evicting myself from my San Francisco apartment, bought a small trailer, started traveling with it, upgraded it to solar, and then along the way I met Cherie, and, she can give her side of the story.

CV: Chris and I actually met on a Prius forum online, because he had owned a Prius and traded it in for a Jeep to pull his new home, and I had just bought my second Prius, so that's where we first encountered each other and we started the online "getting to know you" process. And finally we met up in between both of our travels and instantly hit it off. And I think it was about six months later that I had decided to join him on the road. And I've always found that my technology vision was being very mobile and with the ability to travel, so it was a trial for the first seven months. It was a very small 16-foot trailer, which we've now upgraded to a much larger 17-foot trailer.

(continue reading)

Four short links: 10 Feb 2009

Happy Monday! Kid coding and web-powered political transparency form the artisanal wholewheat organic bread slices around a sandwich filling of meaty (or tofuy) web travel APIs and blogly angst:

1. Art and Code -- conference on programming environments for "artists, young people, and the rest of us". Alice! Hackety Hack! Scratch! Processing! And more! March 7-9 at CMU. Want! (I've written before about my ongoing experiences teaching kids to program)
2. TripIt API -- clever, they're building a single point where hotels, airlines, travel agents, mobile apps, etc. can access your integrated booking (use case: flight delayed, which hotel and mobile car rentals learn and react to by not assuming you've bailed on them) (disclaimer: OATV has invested in TripIt).
3. Organically Grown Audiences (Danny O'Brien) -- good point from Danny that I've been thinking about for a while: maintaining an audience is hard work, and the audience isn't necessarily comprised of people you'd choose to hang out with. Perhaps the answer is to grow the audience slowly, but I'm not convinced. I'd say that unreciprocated intimacy from your audience is a sign that you're doing things wrong, but it's how fame works: the things people say to people in the public eye, on and off the web, are astonishingly presumptuous and familiar. Then again perhaps I should retreat back to the British Isles from which my frosty social distance comes and tend my tweed elbow patch farm until I die from bad teeth, bad beer, or a surfeit of Benny Hill.
4. Promoting Open Government (Economist) -- state and central governments are making expenditure public, in varyingly useful ways. Links to Missouri Accountability Portal and ReadTheStimulus.org (the former as well-designed, the latter as crowd-sourcing).

For-Profit, Non-Profit, and Scary Humor

Guest blogger Michael Jon Jensen, Director of Strategic Web Communications for the Office of Communications of the National Academies and National Academies Press, has been at the interface between digital technologies and scholarly/academic publishing since the late 1980s.

Tim was kind enough to suggest that I expand on a longish comment I made on his recent post Stuff That Matters: Non-profit to For-profit.

Two threads wove my argument: first, I pushed back at his conventional framing of the non-profit vs. for-profit sectors. But what I think caught his attention most was my description of a project that's trying to "find the funny" in the grinding, slo-motion collapse of our natural world.

An easy knee-slapper, eh?

I'll get back to that second theme after some musings on non-profit vs. for-profit:

Tim: The heart of my message is that work on stuff that matters is a great hedge in down times: even if there isn't a huge monetary payoff, you've done something that needs doing. And it's certainly true that non-profit enterprises are often a good way to tackle hard problems that the marketplace doesn't seem to be addressing.

But I want to make clear that I'm not just talking about charity work. I'm talking about the creation of real economic value. There are huge opportunities for entrepreneurs in solving hard problems, and in so doing creating new markets that can be exploited not just by themselves but by those that follow in their footsteps.

I certainly can't disagree with most of that statement -- but we need to do better at clarifying the roles and mission-driven goals underlying the nonprofit and the for-profit worlds, especially on "stuff that matters."

Non-profits vs. For-profits

Tim comes to his benign perspective on the for-profit sector honestly: O'Reilly has historically been a responsible for-profit, building immense social value at the same time that it profits from its actions. But O'Reilly Media is a somewhat exceptional company.

On the main, the for-profit world has a different "maturation goal" than the non-profit world has, and it affects nearly every decision made in either kind of enterprise.

I heard my favorite summation of the distinction from Peter Likens at an Online Computer Library Center conference years ago. He was then President of the University of Arizona; I first used this quote more than a decade ago, in a presentation I gave entitled "Entrepreneurs of Social Value":

"A for-profit's mission is to create as much value for its stockholders as possible, within the constraints of society. The non-profit's mission is to create as much value for society as possible, within the constraints of its money."

Of course there are, as Tim mentions, great overlaps betwixt the two, and the more that the for-profit world addresses the "stuff that matters," the better. But quite frequently -- at least in publishing, and online, and in the "public good" sector -- when a for-profit takes advantage of that overlap, the pattern has been to decrease the public good.

Take a look at, for example, scientific publishing: in the post-WWII economy, most non-profit scientific journals were bought up by a handful of smart for-profit publishers who, over the following decades, began to ratchet up the prices far beyond what university libraries could afford, producing a dramatic shift in library resource use: an increasing share of nonprofit money went to for-profit scholarly publishing. One could argue that $50,000 a year is a fair price for a really important specialty journal, but it's not an argument that fits into the "stuff that matters" or "social value" meme.

In that instance, smart, rapacious for-profit cherry-picking decreased the means that nonprofit publishers had to fund their other, less profitable work in the humanities, the social sciences, or even the sciences themselves.

A for-profit takeover of formerly nonprofit work could also describe what has happened with Blackwater, and the privatization of the military in general -- higher costs, less accountability, and unintended consequences.

I've worked in nonprofit publishing for more than 20 years, and while I recognize the need for a risk-reward economy, some care needs to be taken to acknowledge that the "public good" rarely is profit-making. It can be sustainable, but is rarely super-profitable.

That said, over those 20+ years, I've always had side projects of some kind -- "stuff that matters" projects that I hoped would end up being profitable, or potentially commercial ones that might be fabulously so.

My hoped-for goals for those projects have changed over time, and recently shifted drastically. For the last 18 months my side project has been with my oldest, bestest friend -- a project which has changed my entire thinking on "what *really* matters," and what "breakthroughs" we need in the next decade -- from the Web 2.0 community, from myself, and from the world at large.

Yeah, it's time for phase II of this guest blog: about trying to turn the onrushing apocalypses into laughter -- or at least a knowing grin.

(continue reading)

Security and Data Risk in the Age of Social Networks

Subscribe to this video podcast via iTunes. Or, you may download the file.

Over the past four years we have seen an explosion in the volume of personally identifiable information (PII) online as social software and user generated content have allowed millions of people to create, manage and share their data in the cloud. While the rewards have been pretty clear (lower barriers to participation and collaboration) the risks have not been understood so clearly.

But where there is risk, insurance is sure to follow…

Drew Bartkiewicz of The Hartford has been considering these trends and has helped create the first security product around online data risk, “CyberChoice 2.0.” Drew sums up much of his thinking when he says, “Credit is to the financial markets what privacy and trust are to Web 2.0” (you can’t have one without the other). Fittingly, we spoke in New York City the morning after Lehman Brothers went under.

Part two of this interview is available here.

Recent Posts

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• Open Source NG Databases (mailing list summary) | by Nat Torkington on February 2, 2009
• Stuff That Matters: Non-profit to For-profit | by Tim O'Reilly on February 1, 2009