Web 2.0 Expo NYC CFP is Open Plus Webcast For Submission Tips This Week

The Web 2.0 Expo is returning to NYC this fall for a third year. The Call For Proposals (CFP) opens today and will remain so until 4/12/10. We are accepting talk proposals aimed at developers, designers, marketers and business folks. We are looking for

Sarah Milstein and I will be returning as co-Chairs. After the CFP closes we will spend several weeks working with our East Coast-based program committee examining and rating the proposals. We will announce the schedule in the early summer/end of spring timeframe.

Every year we get hundreds of proposals for just over a hundred slots. With that many proposals it is hard to stand out. We want to make sure that you know how to best describe your awesome ideas and put your best foot forward. To aid you Sarah and I are hosting a free webcast on writing a good proposal this Thursday at 1PM PST (9am - London | 4pm - New York | 8pm - Sydney | 6pm - Tokyo | 5pm - Beijing | 1:30pm - Mumbai).

We'll talk for about 20 minutes through a variety of do's (tell us what attendees will learn) and don'ts (submit the proposal yourself and don't pitch your product). We'll remain online afterwards to answer questions. We think that the advice will be applicable to any conference (either O'Reilly or another event producers) - so feel free to attend even if you don't want to speak in NYC. A recording of the webcast will be made available at a later date.

Four short links: 23 March 2010

PM Plugs Tech, Science Bloggers, History Repeats, Beautiful Math

1. British Prime Minister's Speech -- a huge amount of the speech is given to digital issues, including the funding and founding of an "Institute for Web Science" headed by Sir Tim Berners-Lee. (via Rchards on Twitter)
2. Periodic Table of Science Bloggers -- a great way to explore the universe of science blogging. (via sciblogs)
3. For All The Tea in China -- a tale of industrial espionage from the 1800s. The man behind the theft was Robert Fortune, a Scottish-born botanist who donned mandarin garb, shaved the top of his head and attached a long braid as part of a disguise that allowed him to pass as Chinese so he could go to areas of the country that were off-limits to foreigners. He forged a token and stole IP, in some ways it's like the reverse of the Google-China breakin. (via danjite on Twitter)
4. Nature by Numbers -- relating numbers, geometry, and nature. Beautiful and educational. (via BoingBoing)

Four short links: 22 March 2010

Trading Software, Learning Programming Languages, Web Security Scanner, Learning as Game

1. Marketcetera -- open source trading platform.
2. Google Code University: Programming Languages -- video-based classes on C++, Python, Java, and Go.
3. Skipfish -- open sourced web application security scanner, from Google.
4. Professor Swaps Grades for XP -- divided class into guilds, awarded XP for achieving various solo, guild, and pickup quests. (via johnny723 on Twitter)

Architecture is Destiny: A Tale of Two Cities and Lessons for the Social Business

About three years ago my wife and I made the rash (and wise) decision to buy a 17th century home in Southwestern France . Puy L’Eveque is a 13th century medieval town situated on a hill overlooking the Lot River. Its narrow streets all lead upward to the summit - where the Mairie (the mayor’s office) and the church occupy the high ground (Puy L’Eveque translates as “Bishops Hill”). It is beautiful in the way of most towns built to withstand the long-passed threat of siege. But Puy L’Eveque is unmistakably struggling. Its shops are anemic and situated between empty storefronts. Its farmer’s markets and vidi greniers are lean affairs and it recently canceled its yearly medieval festival. Its population still remains below pre-World War One levels. From the tourist office brochure:

“In 1880 the community consisted of 2950 inhabitants, boasted 4 hotels, 6 bars, 9 café’s, a mounted brigade of gendarmes, a charity office, a city toll booth, a ferry-boat at Escafignoux, a flour mill and a suspension bridge! The 1999 census registered 2159 inhabitants.”

Three kilometers away lies the rather bland town of Prayssac; with ancient roots but clearly developed in the 19th century. Lying on the flat plain of the Lot valley, its nothing special to behold but its cafes, markets and festivals are bustling. It was something of a mystery to us when we moved here.

Why is picturesque Puy L’Eveque struggling while Prayssac thrives?

This is the topic of many dinner discussions among the expatriates here. Usually the blame is laid at the hands of incapable administrators. I believe the problem goes deeper. It is a question of architecture and urban planning. Puy L’Eveque’s siege architecture just isn’t built for the modern age. Its positioning on a hillside was chosen for its unassailability. The medieval town privileges control of all traffic (human and material) with choke points at top and bottom. Until very recently there was a single, one-way street leading up to the summit; a stoplight at top and bottom alternated the flow of traffic - for five minutes traffic led upward - the next five minutes, down. The prime vantage points are held by church and state. Puy L’Eveque is lovely but it is relic of the past: privilege of place, control from the top, constricted material flows, and strict regulation of its borders.

Prayssac makes no such assumptions or attempt to control - people and goods move freely in and out of its borders. Prayssac is a social town - it welcomes outsiders. Its hierarchies form naturally through assembly at any of a number of town squares and the town dissolves naturally into the surrounding countryside. There are no fortress walls. The Mairie and Church are discreetly nestled amidst the other edifices.

In short, Puy L’Eveque was not architected for the modern world where goods and people follow an accelerated flow… where commerce privileges open exchange and more porous, natural borders between town and countryside. The very thing that made Puy L’Eveque thrive in the 14th century makes it hard to survive in the 21st; its architecture.

Many of our 20th century behemoths resemble Puy L’Eveque . They are closed fortresses with strict, forbidding hierarchies. While information flow outside has radically accelerated (everyone has a real-time broadcast tower) the modern organization is marked by glacial response times and chokeholds on who is an “authorized” spokesperson. The world is divided between those inside (employees) with very fixed roles and responsibilities and those “outside” (everyone else) who can’t be trusted.

Hendrik Hertzberg’s insightful comment on healthcare as a by-product of the system of legislation rather than Obama, Nancy Pelosi or even (or especially) Joe Lieberman, provides a lesson not just for government but for business on how architecture is destiny:

"The American government has its human aspects—it is staffed by human beings, mostly—but its atomized, at-odds-with-itself legislative structure (House and Senate, each with its arcane rules, its semi-feudal committee chairs, and its independently elected members, none of whom are accountable or fully responsible for outcomes) makes it more like an inanimate object."

We tend to blame people and let architecture off the hook. But the structures we live within shape our behavior and govern what is possible just as the physical architecture of our towns both emerge from and reinforce the way we see world.

As the social norms set by the Social Web - openness, sharing, participation, become the norms of business (this to me is the key insight behind the new term “social business”) and as the information flow outside accelerates, organizations will need rethink their structures. They will need to think about whether or not they are designed like Puy L’Eveque or Prayssac.

Architecture is destiny.

Current activities at the Electronic Privacy Information Center

When Marc Rotenberg founded the Electronic Privacy Information Center in 1994, I doubt he realized how fast their scope would swell as more and more of our lives became digitized and networked. Now it seems like everything that happens in society has an electronic component and a privacy component. I had the chance to drop in to their office on Monday and heard about the front-burner items they're working on.

(continue reading)

Trapping content on the iPad won't work, even if it's pretty

Wired's latest iPad demo looks great, but the app doesn't want you to leave

Wired is one of the few magazines I read cover to cover. It consistently exposes me to new ideas and topics. For that, I'm grateful (and a longtime subscriber).

But when it comes to the iPad, I really don't understand what the Wired crew is doing.

Design-wise, Wired's iPad demo looks beautiful. Take a look:

Yet, reading over this analysis piece by Reuters' Felix Salmon, I'm dismayed to see a return to the days of silos and closed content. Here's how Salmon puts it:

Wired doesn’t want to allow simple links in ads or stories which would open up in the iPad web browser, since opening the browser means closing the Wired app. Instead, web links will open in a pop-up window within the iPad app, which then gets closed, returning you to the position in the magazine that you came from. The whole ethos is a magazine-like one of a closed system with lots of control -- the exact opposite, really, of the internet, which is an open system where it’s very hard indeed to control the user experience. [Emphasis added.]

(continue reading)

Four short links: 19 March 2010

Load Testing, Chinese Manufacturing, Heroic Forking, and Ubicomp

1. Tsung -- GPLed multi-protocol (HTTP, PostgreSQL, MySQL, WebDAV, SOAP, XMPP) load tester written in Erlang.
2. Myth of China's Manufacturing Prowess -- The latest data shows [...] that the United States is still the largest manufacturer in the world. In 2008, U.S. manufacturing output was $1.8 trillion, compared to $1.4 trillion in China (UN data. China’s data do not separate manufacturing from mining and utilities. So the actual Chinese manufacturing number should be much smaller). Also contains pointers to an interesting discussion of lack of opportunities for college grads in China.
3. OpenSSO and the Value of Open Source -- Oracle are removing all open source downloads and wiki mentions, leaving only the enterprise OpenSSO product on their web site. A Norwegian company has stepped in and will continue the open source project. This is essentially a fork, but for the forces of good. (via normnz on Twitter)
4. The Internet of Things -- 5m video on sensor networks, etc. (via imran on Twitter)

Four short links: 18 March 2010

DIY Newspapers, Saviour Algorithms, Baseline Removal, and Web Scripting

1. Newspaper Club Launches (BBC) -- the uses it has been put to make for good reading: Among the Newspaper Club's first clients were the BBC, Wired UK and Last.fm. Penguin used it to debut a preview of the fifth chapter of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, written by Eoin Colfer.
2. Machine Learning Algorithm with a Capital A -- It’s claimed to be close to the way the brain learns/recognizes patterns and to be a general model of intelligence and it will work for EVERYTHING. This reminded me of a few other things I’ve come across in the past years that claim to be the new Machine Learning algorithm with Capital A, i.e. the algorithm to end all other ML work, which will work on all problems, and so on. Here is a small collection of the three most interesting ones I remembered.
3. fityk -- GPL program for nonlinear fitting of analytical functions (especially peak-shaped) to data (usually experimental data). There are also people using it to remove the baseline from data, or to display data only. (via straup on delicious)
4. Chickenfoot -- Firefox plugin to let you script and manipulate web pages. Useful for automation, like Greasemonkey, but acts on the rendered page and not the HTML source.

Launchpad SF Submissions Are Open Until 3/31

Startups! The Web 2.0 Expo is in two months. We want to highlight your work. Each year we put five of you onstage in a Launchpad session. The deadline for submitting your company is 3/31. The criteria is below.

• Entrants do not need to launch their company or a major product/service to qualify.
• All proposals will be reviewed before Web 2.0 Expo by our panel.
• The judging panel will be comprised of industry experts who will review Launch Pad companies for their value to their market (consumer, enterprise, etc.).
• Judges will select about five finalists, each of whom will have five minutes to pitch on stage, in front of the Web 2.0 Expo audience (the largest gathering of the innovators in the Internet industry) and the panel.
• Each company will receive feedback on its presentation from both the panel and the audience.

Five companies will be chosen by a panel to present on stage at Web 2.0 Expo San Francisco on May 5, 2010. Each will have five minutes to present their company or product and will receive real-time feedback from a panel of industry experts and the audience. Submit Your Company For Consideration—entries are due by March 31, 2010.

Google Buzz and hybrid blogging

Long form posts and informal conversation find a home in Google Buzz

Tim O'Reilly and DeWitt Clinton are both experimenting with Google Buzz as a long form -- well, longer form -- publishing tool. It's an interesting adaptation for Buzz, and I think they're on to something.

Here's why: Blogs are great for getting people to a site. Twitter is great for tossing around short-form ideas and quips. Facebook is great for talking with a defined community.

But blogs are not inherently social. They try to be, with comments and RSS, but they're still built in silos. Twitter is unbelievably social, no doubt about that, but it's also shorthand. It's very hard to have an engaging conversation in 140 characters. And Facebook is like a ping-pong match: lots of back and forth excitement, but very little substance.

Buzz could be the missing link here. It's a hybrid option that's not particularly good at being a blog, or a microblog, or a social network, but it's a good tool for starting conversations and noodling on topics. (Keith Crawford picked up on this early on.) Tim noted during a recent conversation that Buzz is a throwback to blogging's early days, when informal posts were the norm.

Buzz in many ways occupies the same domain as Tumblr and Posterous. All of these services let you dip a bucket in the social/content stream and pour the catch into your own trough. But Because Buzz is constructed in a social environment, as opposed to a publishing environment, it's a bit more natural to share all that conversation and information.

A lot of people just like to get on with it, which is why Twitter and Facebook will always be more popular. And I'm not saying -- nor am I even hinting -- that blogs are dead. Far from it. You need a hub for all those social media spokes, and blogs make great hubs. DeWitt Clinton, in a Buzz update, actually predicts a time when posts and comments from blogs, Buzz, and other networks will "flow seamlessly back and forth between them, such that the syndication will no longer be in only a single direction, but rather a network of threads woven together." That functionality is still a ways off (and I hope it arrives sooner rather than later), but in the interim it looks like Buzz has opened yet another content channel; a social space where you can toss an idea into a pool of willing conversationalists and see what happens.

One last thing ... because a blog post lauding Buzz for its conversation tools carries a hint of hypocrisy, here's my own attempt at a related Buzz conversation starter.

Google's New Marketplace Has over a Thousand Apps

One week^† into its public launch, the Google Apps Marketplace has just under 1,500 (enterprise) apps. Combined with Salesfore.com's app exchange (also with over a thousand apps), enterprises interested in moving to cloud apps have an increasing number of software tools to choose from.

Popular apps (measured in terms of # of installs) includes graphic design and office integration apps (aviary design suite and offisync), a collaboration and project management tool (manymoon), a free travel planner (tripit), a basic ERP app (myerp.com), and a CRM application (Zoho CRM).

The typical supplier has about 2 offerings in the Google Apps Marketplace. Below are the suppliers with the most number of unique apps:

(†) Data for this post was through 2/16/2010.

Four short links: 17 March 2010

MySQL, MySociety, NoSQL DB, and NoSQL Conference Notes

1. Common MySQL Queries -- a useful reference.
2. MySociety's Next 12 Months -- two new projects, FixMyTransport and "Project Fosbury". The latter is a more general tool to help people organise their own campaigns for change.
3. riak -- scalable key-value store with JSON interface. (via joshua on Delicious)
4. Notes from NoSQL Live Boston -- full of juicy nuggets of info from the NoSQL conference.

Recent Posts

• SkyHook and SimpleGeo Present SpotRank, Now You Can Always Find Where The People Are | by Brady Forrest on March 17, 2010
• Google Fiber and the FCC National Broadband Plan | by Mike Loukides on March 16, 2010
• Four short links: 16 March 2010 | by Nat Torkington on March 16, 2010
• Open Data Pointers | by Nat Torkington on March 16, 2010
• The Second Netflix Challenge and Privacy Research | by Marc Hedlund on March 15, 2010
• Why HTML5 is worth your time | by Mac Slocum on March 15, 2010
• Four short links: 15 March 2010 | by Nat Torkington on March 15, 2010
• Four short links: 12 March 2010 | by Nat Torkington on March 12, 2010
• NHIN Direct: Open Healthcare Records and Government as a Platform | by Tim O'Reilly on March 11, 2010
• Personalization and the future of Digg | by James Turner on March 11, 2010
• How crowdsourcing helped Haiti's relief efforts | by Lukas Biewald on March 11, 2010
• Four short links: 11 March 2010 | by Nat Torkington on March 11, 2010