Net Control
Jarvis: We don’t need no regulation. We don’t need no thought control. – Leave our net alone! http://eicker.at/NetControl
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Gerrit Eicker
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Gerrit Eicker
The Open Web
The Internet and Web are, need, and will stay open – this gorgeous discussion proves it once again; http://eicker.at/OpenWeb
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Gerrit Eicker
Time: “Is Google In Danger of Being Shut Out of the Changing Internet? – The upcoming IPO of Facebook, the flak surrounding Twitter’s decision to censor some tweets, and Google’s weaker-than-expected 4th-quarter earnings all point to one of the big events of our times: The crazy, chaotic, idealistic days of the Internet are ending. … The old Internet on which Google has thrived is still there, of course, but like the wilderness it is shrinking. … The danger to Google, in other words, is that as social networking, smartphones and tablets increasingly come to dominate the Internet, Google’s chance to earn advertising revenues from searching will shrink along with its influence. … Don’t get me wrong: Google is still a force, just as Microsoft, Intel and IBM are. But they are no longer at the epicentre of the zeitgeist. Like Microsoft before it, Google can fight the good fight on many different fronts. Whether it can ever find an engine of growth capable of supplanting its core business is another question.”
Battelle: “It’s Not Wether Google’s Threatened. It’s Asking Ourselves: What Commons Do We Wish For? – If Facebook’s IPO filing does anything besides mint a lot of millionaires, it will be to shine a rather unsettling light on a fact most of us would rather not acknowledge: The web as we know it is rather like our polar ice caps: under severe, long-term attack by forces of our own creation. … We lose a commons, an ecosystem, a ‘tangled bank’ where serendipity, dirt, and iterative trial and error drive open innovation. … What kind of a world do we want to live in? As we increasingly leverage our lives through the world of digital platforms, what are the values we wish to hold in common? … No gatekeepers. The web is decentralized. Anyone can start a web site. … An ethos of the commons. The web developed over time under an ethos of community development, and most of its core software and protocols are royalty free or open source (or both). … No preset rules about how data is used. If one site collects information from or about a user of its site, that site has the right to do other things with that data… Neutrality. No one site on the web is any more or less accessible than any other site. If it’s on the web, you can find it and visit it. … Interoperability. Sites on the web share common protocols and principles, and determine independently how to work with each other. There is no centralized authority which decides who can work with who, in what way. … So, does that mean the Internet is going to become a series of walled gardens, each subject to the whims of that garden’s liege? – I don’t think so. Scroll up and look at that set of values again. I see absolutely no reason why they can not and should not be applied to how we live our lives inside the worlds of Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and the countless apps we have come to depend upon. … I believe in the open market of ideas, of companies and products and services which identify the problems I’ve outlined above, and begin to address them through innovative new approaches that solve for them. I believe in the Internet. Always have, and always will.”
Winer: “I don’t love Google but… John Battelle is right. Google defined the web that we like, and the web we like defined Google. Having Google break the contract is not just bad for Google, it’s bad for the web. – Two take-aways from this: 1. We should be more careful about who we get in bed with next time. 2. We probably should help Google survive, but only to the extent that they support the open web that we love.”
Scoble: “It’s too late for Dave Winer and John Battelle to save the common web – The lesson today, four years later, is that the common web is in grave threat, not just from Facebook’s data roach motel but from Apple’s and Amazon’s and, now, Google. … Now do you get why I really don’t care anymore? The time for a major fight was four years ago. – I understood then what was at stake. – Today? It’s too late. My wife is a great example of why: she’s addicted to Facebook and Zynga and her iPhone apps. – It’s too late to save the common web. It’s why, for the past year, I’ve given up and have put most of my blogging into Google+. I should have been spending that effort on the web commons and on RSS but it’s too late. … I’m not going back to the open web. Why? The juice isn’t there. … What’s Dave Winer’s answer? He deleted his Facebook account and is working hard to try to get people to adopt RSS again. Sorry, Dave, but Twitter is a better place to get tech news. … So, cry me a river. I’m a user. I tried to stick up for the common web in 2008. Where was the protest then? I was called an ‘edge case’ and someone who should be ignored. … Today? No, don’t put me on stage at conferences. Get regular people, like my wife, who could tell you why they don’t like the open web and, why, even, they are scared of it. … John, where were you? At least Dave has been consistently trying to keep us putting content on blogs and on RSS, which ARE the open common web. It’s just that it’s too late. We’re firmly locked back in the trunk and the day for blowing open the trunk has come and gone.”
Winer: “Scoble: I’ll go down with the ship – Then I saw the web. It meant everything to me, because now there was no Apple in my way telling me I couldn’t make programming tools because that’s something they had an exclusive on. I was able to make web content tools, and evolve them, and get them to users, and learn from our experiences, without the supervision of any corporate guys, who see our communities as nothing more than a business model. – So Scoble, you can go enjoy whatever it is you like about Facebook. I can’t imagine what that might be. I don’t use it because that would be like going back to the system that didn’t work. I’d rather work for a very small minority of free users, than try to be an approved vendor in a world controlled by a bunch of suits. For me that’s the end. I’d rather go make pottery in Italy or Slovenia. … To me Facebook already feels over. I really don’t feel like I’m missing anything. Look at it this way. There’s lots of stuff going on right now that I’m not part of. That’s the way it goes. Me and Facebook are over. It’s going to stay that way. And if I’m on a ship that’s sinking, well I’ve had a good run, and I can afford to go down with the ship, along with people who share my values. It’s a cause, I’ve discovered, that’s worth giving something up for.”
Boyd: “Facebook is the new AOL, despite the market cap. But it’s headed for a hard landing for other reasons than Winer is pushing. Facebook will fail because of the imminent rise of social operating systems – future versions of iOS, Mac OS X, and Android – which will break the Facebook monolith to bits.”
Dyson: “Is the Open Web Doomed? Open Your Eyes and Relax – I’m wading into an argument that I think may be overblown. With Facebook going public and Google threatened by apps and closed services such as FB, is the open web doomed? You might think so after reading the dueling blog posts of John Battelle, Robert Scoble and Dave Winer in the past few days. But things are a bit more complicated. … So what’s the difference between paternalism and our duty to save people from tyrants or from companies whose privacy statements are incomprehensible? If people are happy with Facebook, why should we disturb them? If the Iraqis weren’t going to topple Saddam Hussein, what right – or obligation – did we outsiders have to do so? … Of course, we can also be part of the backlash…I’m not saying don’t be part of the backlash; I’m just suggesting that the backlash will work – abetted by the march of technology and user neophilia. … Right now, we’re moving slowly from open data and APIs and standards, to a world of Facebook and apps. We’re likely to see abandonment of the DNS by consumers both because of those apps, and a tragedy of the commons where new Top-Level Domain names (.whatevers and .brands) confuse users and lead to more use of the search box or links within apps. … I don’t actually think we’re facing a world of no choices. In fact, we all have many choices … and it’s up to us to make them. Yes, many people make choices I despise, but this is the world of the long tail. Of course, the short, fat front is always more popular; it all gets homogenized and each individual gets either one central broadcast, or something so tailored he never learns anything new, as in Eli Pariser’s filter bubble… That’s exactly when some fearless entrepreneur will come along with something wild and crazy that will totally dominate everything 10 years later.”
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Gerrit Eicker
Computable Document Format (CDF)
Wolfram has released the Computable Document Format (CDF): bringing interactivity via computation; http://eicker.at/CDF
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Gerrit Eicker
Wolfram: “Today we launched our Computable Document Format, or CDF, to bring documents to life with the power of computation. – CDF binds together and refines lots of technologies and ideas from our last 20+ years into a single standard—knowledge apps, symbolic documents, automation layering, and democratized computation, to name a few. – Disparate though these might appear, they come together in one coherent aim for CDF: connecting authors and readers much better than ever before. … With CDFs we’re broadening this communication pipe with computation-powered interactivity, expanding the document medium’s richness a good deal.”
RWW: “It isn’t simply readers who are meant to benefit from having more interactive publications. Wolfram says that the CDF is also designed to make it easier for authors and publishers to create and incorporate these knowledge apps into documents, arguing that up until now, these sorts of things have often required a knowledge of programming. CDFs can be created using the Mathematica software, and Wolfram insists that building a knowledge app is as easy as writing a macro in Excel.”
O’Reilly: “Wolfram’s tools create documents that can be shared on the Web, and are free for use by people who publish free documents. The tools can be licensed by organizations that charge for documents. Access to the tools can be on the Wolfram site (Software as a Service), or licensed and installed on your own server. – These tools look to me like a boon to educators, and I predict that all manner of publishers in the sciences and social sciences will license them. … Wolfram plans to release the format itself as what they call a ‘public standard.’ This is not the same as an open standard. … I assume Wolfram will keep strict control over the format, which draws a lot from the Mathematica language, and I doubt other companies will want to or be able to catch up to Wolfram in the sophistication of the tools they offer.”
Gerrit Eicker
Diaspora Summary
IEEE: The making of Diaspora. Four young coders are planting the seeds for the post-Facebook future; http://eicker.at/DiasporaSummary
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Gerrit Eicker
Wikipedia: “Diaspora (stylized DIASPORA*) is a free personal web server that implements a distributed social networking service, providing a decentralized alternative to social network services like Facebook. The project is currently under development by Dan Grippi, Maxwell Salzberg, Raphael Sofaer, and Ilya Zhitomirskiy, students at New York University’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences. The group received donations in excess of $200,000 via Kickstarter. A consumer alpha version was released on November 23, 2010. … Diaspora works by letting users set up their own server (or ‘pod’) to host content; pods can then interact to share status updates, photographs, and other social data. It allows its users to host their data with a traditional web host, a cloud based host, an ISP, or a friend. The framework, which is being built on Ruby on Rails, is free software and can be experimented with by external developers.”
IEEE: “Journalists and bloggers have called Diaspora ‘the Facebook killer,’ ‘the Facebook rival,’ ‘the anti-Facebook,’ ‘Facebook’s challenger,’ and ‘another Facebook wannabe.’ … The guys, however, don’t see themselves as competition. … They’re taking a stab at reengineering the way online socializing works by building an entire network of networks from the ground up. They hope that in the process they will help promote standards that other social sites … will use to bridge their services. … Choice, interoperability, and the chance to invent your own networking experience are what federated networks such the Diaspora pods are all about. … They don’t like that Facebook owns the data they share through the site and can mine or sell it to advertisers at will. … Above all, they don’t like that most ordinary people and many Web engineers have come to believe that seven-year-old Facebook represents the be-all and end-all of everything online socializing will ever be. … ‘The problem with Diaspora right now is it’s not designed to work with other providers out of the box,’ says Ben Zhao, a network security expert at the University of California, Santa Barbara [listen to an interview with Zhao].”
Diaspora Wiki: “Diaspora needs you! – Diaspora is an open source project, which means all our code and documentation is available for free to anyone online. It also means that, while there is a core team working on the project full time, it only thrives because we have a wonderful set of volunteer collaborators who help out in their free time. – Some of these volunteers are developers and help with the code, which is the ‘traditional’ way to help out an open source project, and is awesome. But many are not developers, and their contributions are awesome too. … Come talk to us. The best ways to get in touch in realtime are our Convore group, or IRC. Tell us what you’re interested in working on – code, tutorials, feature ideas, mockups, running a pod, helping with the wiki, other – and we can help you figure out how to get going.”
Gerrit Eicker
Twitter vs. UberMedia
UberMedia plans a Twitter competitor, Twitter plans to buy UberMedia’s TweetDeck. Any winners? http://eicker.at/TwitterUberMedia
Gerrit Eicker
Twitter’s Ecosystem
Loukide: Restricting developers undermines the ecology that made Twitter valuable; http://eicker.at/TwittersEcosystem
Gerrit Eicker
Proprietary Ecosystems
Making business and systemic risks in proprietary ecosystems: Twitter suspends UberMedia; http://eicker.at/ProprietaryEcosystems
Gerrit Eicker
Entertainment Platforms
GlobalWebIndex: Internet platforms are increasingly the entertainment platform of choice; http://eicker.at/PassiveExperience
Gerrit Eicker
Passive Experience
GlobalWebIndex: Open web turns to packaged internet, passive experience to rise; http://eicker.at/PassiveExperience (via @rww)
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Gerrit Eicker
GlobalWebIndex: “Social media has reached mass maturity. Today it’s no longer about massive growth but a shift of already active social consumers to ‘real-time’ technologies, such as status updates or tweets. The old view of text-based social media, defined by blogs and forums, is being surpassed, moving the impact of social media, from creating content and publishing to sharing other people’s content and ‘live’ opinions about real-world events. In short ‘real-time’ is re-orientating consumer from creator to distributor and moving the focus to traditional media and professional content. – The open browser-based web is losing out to packaged internet platforms such as mobile apps, internet connected TVs, tablets, e-readers, pc apps, gaming and video platforms. These packaged platforms are re-engineering the internet and destroying the notion of the internet being a singular entity. Crucially for the entertainment revolution, they provide professional media with the means to create sustainable internet business models, something the economics of the browser-based web totally failed to enable. – Professional ‘traditional style’ content is now a core part of the consumer online experience. Internet platforms, for hundreds of millions of consumers, are increasingly the entertainment platform of choice. This is due to continual growth of professional content in video sites (legal and illegal), the rise of ‘real-time’, and the growth of packaged platforms.”
RWW: “The report states that in the new era of social entertainment, traditional media holds the power – a change from the ‘web 2.0’ era, when the user ruled. The report argues that this will lead to a return to passive experiences by consumers. … ‘Professionals are back in the driving seat when it comes to content,’ states the report. This, it says, will lead to the Internet eventually becoming the primary mass entertainment and content delivery platform. – While that is undoubtedly true, it’s difficult to see how the author comes to this conclusion: ‘We as consumers are going back to traditional needs and demands and seeking a more passive experience.’ – The report explains that social entertainment is far more about content sharing, than creation. It goes on to suggest that this ‘light nature of interaction’ is moving the consumer back to the passive state they were in before the Internet came along. Further, that services like Facebook and Twitter turn consumers into ‘distributors.’“
Gerrit Eicker
Time: “The dream of Web 2.0 may be over. If a new report on internet usage is to be believed, social media has turned the internet into more of a passive experience again. … The change, the report suggests, is that social media is more about content sharing than content creation, turning users into passive consumers – or, worse, distributors – of others’ work. … Instead of a shift back towards professional/audience mode, this feels more like a blip as the landscape gets used to its new tools than anything else to me, but what do you think?”
Gerrit Eicker
The Internet: Lack of Competition
Schachinger: A lack of competition tramples our privacy, is closing the open Internet; http://eicker.at/Competition
Gerrit Eicker 19:17 on 27. February 2012 Permalink |
Jarvis: “The internet’s not broken. – So then why are there so many attempts to regulate it? Under the guises of piracy, privacy, pornography, predators, indecency, and security, not to mention censorship, tyranny, and civilization, governments from the U.S. to France to Germany to China to Iran to Canada – as well as the European Union and the United Nations – are trying to exert control over the internet. – Why? Is it not working? Is it presenting some new danger to society? Is it fundamentally operating any differently today than it was five or ten years ago? No, no, and no…”
We don’t need no regulation.
We dont need no thought control
No dark sarcasm in the network
Government: Leave our net alone
Hey! Government! Leave our net alone!
All in all it’s just another brick in the wall.
All in all you’re just another brick in the wall.
The Internet and Web are, need, and will stay open – this gorgeous discussion proves it once again; http://eicker.at/OpenWeb
The Web goes dark on January 18, 2012, protesting #SOPA/#PIPA: Wikipedia, BoingBoing, many more; http://eicker.at/J18 #J18
White House: Combating Online Piracy while Protecting an Open and Innovative Internet; http://eicker.at/PiracyInternet #SOPA
A UN report declared Internet access a human right last summer: Cerf argues why it’s not; http://eicker.at/InternetHumanRight
Petri on Judiciary Committee’s SOPA hearings: I just want the nightmare to be over; http://eicker.at/SOPAnightmare
Internet censorship made in the USA: SOPA and PIPA are a major attack on Internet freedom; http://eicker.at/InternetCensorship