Musings & Meanderings

…please count me out. I’m a stubborn believer in the wisdom of people being necessary to harness, and benefit from, the power of machines. An increase in combined and collaborative knowledge? Great. Crowds in the cloud with the wizard standing behind a curtain? Not so much. As long as people don’t really want to know how any of it works, though, the wizards will remain.

Twine is the ‘Facebook killer’ hopeful, an invite only beta social network
launched by Nova Spivack’s Radar Networks.
Nick Carr likes it better than Freebase.

This social network proposes to make sense of all your personal information. The aim is to deliver benefits to you in the form of better tools for organizing your personal data and sharing it with others. Could it be that one of the ultimate goals is to create targeted advertising effective enough to make it impossible to distinguish from personal recommendation?

Read the Terms of Use page on Twine before you sign up. Rights to all information you contribute to Twine are granted in perpetuity, which is pretty standard. You retain, of course, all responsibility for inaccuracy and illegality, and so on. I read everything I could find on the site. One of the many things I did not find was any mention of delineation between personal and non-personal information, or any mention of user rights at all.

Most any publishing of information on the web can be deemed, under what will eventually be understood as common law use, to constitute the granting of redistribution licenses of some type. All of us who venture out here have personal responsibility for what we do and say in public. There are very few of us both knowledgeable and fortunate enough to remain totally anonymous on the internet forever. Anyone whose true goal is total anonymity avoids public places.

Personal privacy is not about having something to hide. It is an essential component of freedom, autonomy, and simple human dignity, as well as an important element in personal and family safety and security.

My wish for the day is to see the buzzword ‘transparency’ replaced with a more traditional and meaningful word, namely ‘responsibility’.
A perpetual wish is for linking ‘benefits’ to ‘respect’.

There is so much that we users could accomplish and benefit from, together, on a semantic web. Yesterday I read Tara Hunt’s post on The Brown Act of 1953, and was struck, as always, by the casualness with which many embrace these online tools, and also by the unspoken characterization of older, more cautious generations as an obstacle to progress. Much of that caution has a sound basis.

When I first started blogging in 2006, there was much public discussion about trust, especially following the ground breaking sale of MySpace. Trust is essential to human communication and interaction. Trusting a corporate entity is different from trusting a person. I, for one, am much more likely to trust you with my data if you recognize and respect my ownership of it.

Millions trust Facebook enough to submit their birthdate, a fact connected to their driver’s license, social insurance number, etc., online. Hundreds of millions have an account of some sort with Google, which has relatively comprehensive privacy policies and offers snail mail access to communication in case of problems. Millions of you may also join in making Twine one of the next hot destinations. As Danah Boyd says, “read those contracts!”.

Semantics being about relationships and meaning, I’m attempting to apply the term in a personal, communal, and resultant way as I see tools being actively developed. By us, I mean the users, consumers, constituents, or any other term currently being applied to hundreds of millions of non-enterprise users.

From semantic search engines such as Powerset to ontological database tools such as Snap Logic, the next generation of functionality would seem to be approaching. I do take note of the w3.org site statement on the summary of OWL flavors… “It is unlikely that any reasoning software will be able to support complete reasoning for every feature of OWL Full.”, and also note that there is little reference to the full potential for individual and societal use of and benefit from the semantic web now under construction.

The machine quest for meaning still seems to be about extracting more useful information from and about us.

Would we all benefit from better search? Certainly. Powerset, Hakia, and others, aim to compete with Google.

Would our use of social networks, blogs, etc., be enhanced by better ways of organizing data? Undoubtedly. Snap Logic can play a role in social network integration at an enterprise level and Aperture could be an integral component of, say, a Facebook or its successor. (Both of these are, I believe, open source based.)

Where, though, are the plans to put semantic computing power, such as it will be, in our hands?

Tim O’Reilly, in his recent post on the topic, writes that the semantic web means…
“the design of applications that don’t require people to think at all about ontology or document structure”
and that…
“Rather than there being a single specification capturing all the information about relationships between people, there will be many overlapping (and gapping) applications, and an opportunity for someone to aggregate the available information into something more meaningful.”

Who is that someone? A Google, whose real customers are advertisers? A Microsoft, as unlikely as that may be, whose aim is to remain one of our dominant connections to the internet?

My abiding question is why those opportunities can’t belong to a lot of ’someones’, namely us.

The usual and obvious answer to that is that someone has to pay for all this development, and for the servers and data storage and bandwidth, and the someone paying is invariably a VC or 3 driven by the goal of capturing market share first, and monetizing second. There appear to be few business models in which we participate directly in the Semantic Web.

Why? The most successful web projects, in terms of real profitability (rather than stock valuations based on media industry multiples of eyeballs), are still eBay and Amazon, businesses based on consumer activities that far exceed the scope of many current start ups.

Reading Nova Spivack’s response to Tim O’Reilly’s post, I come to his term folktologies, which he illustrates using the example of Freebase.

His description of potential applications does seem to envision these tools in our hands, giving each of us the ability to ‘make each other smarter’, but Freebase is yet one more VC funded behemoth of a startup which makes no mention of an economic model.

I do prefer Nova’s view to Tim’s, if only because it envisions computer users capable of contributing to ontologies. The idea that non-techies can’t manage such an activity and wouldn’t want to anyway is hard to understand for anyone who watched eBay grow, who watched millions of non-tech users navigate hundreds of esoteric categories and figure out how to double and triple list items for the best exposure. Next time someone says that people can’t do classification, think of those millions of non-tech collectors and dealer in eBay’s glory days of Web 1.0.

Perhaps I am wrong, and the average users, the Us I refer to, are perfectly happy to accept whatever we are offered for free with no concern about responsibility for future access to the content we and others contribute, but I do not believe this. What I do believe is that we need far more entrepreneurial focus on economic models in which we can participate beyond putting ads on blogs.

Develop this proposition fully, and it can even, when built out, address the most basic issue of geographical access monopolies. We can make this place economically viable and much more so if we all participate.

Economic models which involve us, the participants who are, increasingly, the content providers, would distribute the control of this new world, control which is currently held in a very few hands. It would distribute risk and profit and the common good and a public trust, and it would truly enable free enterprise. It is a concept which can embrace the multitudinous goals and dreams of many for the benefit of ourselves and each other. It is a disruptive concept, and no doubt frightening to some and threatening to others, however it can be a basis for prosperity on every level. I also believe that it is our best hope of protecting our freedom.

There are many workable models of communal combined with private ownership in recent history that equate to both successful businesses and healthy communities. Examples include co-op high-rises in urban centers and successful franchises. These larger economic models are indicative of how elements such as small community business, home based businesses, home ownership, and the dynamics under which these co-exist integrate into the fabric of a healthy and free society. Such human scale enterprises are invariably connected to public resources and cultural riches to which we all contribute. They are supporting elements of those overlapping circles within community structures to which Tim O’Reilly refers.

Every type of human endeavor is already represented online, all striving in competition for traffic and a Google Page Rank. A true semantic web, in my definition, requires enabling and forging the natural connections and interactions of a healthy society. These are as central to human meaning as triplets are to ontological databases.

The internet should remain free. Free access to information and free speech are our greatest treasures, both individually and globally. The infrastructure, however, has to be built on an economic model. The ownership of that model goes hand in hand with control of it. I believe that, in order to fully develop a semantic web, we need to create more and better means of full human participation in it.

What say you?

One of my first posts on this blog last year included a link to Idee Inc, an exciting image recognition and visual search technology company here in Toronto. Leila Boujnane is CEO, and co-founder with CTO Paul Bloore, of.

Here’s an intro that explains the things you can do, such as tagging …and you can also just go directly here to play in their Visual Search Lab.

Try out some of the prototypes on the Metadata Research Program page. I arrived there via David Weinberger’s Everything Is Miscellaneous Blog. Over the years I’ve searched Library of Congress records for non-internet related stuff, so have some experience in how bad their search can be unless you are a pro at it.

The “DARPA Unfamiliar Metadata Project …builds directly on several years research …on improved searching techniques. The Classification Clustering technique developed by Professor Ray Larson for the CHESHIRE I system will be used with probabilistic document retrieval algorithms developed by Dr Gey with support from the National Science Foundation.”

If only we could access or apply a Classification Clustering technique through personal modules/portals. Talk about user created relevance.

Reading reports found in the research areas, though, gives me the impression that the natural desire to achieve a universal and manageable standardization predominates. Why? I wonder if, like most such projects, the construction of this one can be completed in my lifetime, and I wonder further if there isn’t an earlier point than is usually considered at which adoption and use could become part of the development process. What used to be man against nature here becomes man against machine.

Machines want standardization, but man wants individualization.

Yes, I understand about stability issues. Stability can also be viewed, in science and technology, from the standpoint of flexibility combined with durability.

Here’s a goal, as I see it, for all of us. Let’s build a way to ‘compile’ the data of which man is composed. That has to translate into an evolutionary process, since we pesky humans refuse to freeze and get ‘captured’, as well as a collaborative one requiring our consent and participation. Until we do that man will always be able to break the machines, and the machines will never be able to catch us.

I’ve read that programmers did not believe that tagging would be widely adopted. Since I started this blog, my tag selection has gradually changed, but what would I garner by spending the time to review and improve 130 posts worth of tags? Wouldn’t such processes be much further ahead if their use wasn’t presented as an optional afterthought …if learning to navigate them delivered immediate and constantly increasing benefits within one’s own ‘portal’ and all those which naturally connected and overlapped?

If greatest impact and adoption are used to define the big picture at each edition level, then what I see as the basis of 2.0 development are blogging and rss. Neither one by itself was 2.0. Even before the emergence and growth of large blogging platforms there were personal weblogs and anyone motivated to could afford to find a friend of a friend to help them set up their own site, although most who did quickly discovered that the complexities of seo and other ways of connecting were beyond them.

Blogging platforms, especially the ground breaking MySpace (on the heels of Friendster), have become the basis of all the current social networks and communities. Rss is basically the automation and customization of mailing lists, brilliant in itself, but not complex in terms of behavioral change. In fact, every successful component of 2.0 so far is simply enhanced enabling of what people have always done and wanted to do before most of them knew computers existed: talk about themselves and/or their ideas, converse, choose topics and conversational partners, show off, sell stuff, work with others, etc.

Some additional enabling using 2.0 tools and ideas can be and is realized by individuals, small businesses, and sole proprietors, as well as enterprise users, but in many cases the growth of change is slowing as it hits barriers beyond which it cannot yet travel. I don’t believe those barriers are technological, though, but rather a product of our conception or lack thereof. The rather foggy collective idea of where we are and what to do next, it seems to me, is often floundering. The best analogy I can come up with for what I’m seeing is a mass of bumper cars, of many sizes in terms of capacity, constantly impacting against the inherent barriers of their separate structures. Frequent users occupy space in multiple cars and get increasingly frustrated with having to jump back and forth.

Some of the old definitions of 2.0 included building common passageways and links between many or even all of these bumper cars. I’ve seen the path to this building proposition expressed from a variety of perspectives, including compatibility between systems, languages, and/or architectures, common programming and coding standards, and user profile integration through a variety of methods such as open Id and customized search. I believe that some combination of all these perspectives, however limited, is one of the reasons Google is in the position of prominence that it is.

An emerging common access and connectivity solution idea is referred to as the cloud, where by having data and systems residing in a commonly accessible domain we will somehow dissolve those bumper cars altogether. In some ways, the cloud concept does make sense. It could be a bit like creating a giant virtual bumper car emporium where the properties of all the cars are broken down into a huge a la carte buffet. (yes, I’m forever mixing metaphors …treat them as little bridges, please)

I’ve now progressed to where most people pondering web 3.0 are, and am moving into the direction of my own dream or wish list. Remember what I said about Google? That I believe the key to their success is in combining perspectives? On that basis, I could name my vision of what the future could be ‘Beyond Google’.

The next paragraph is for those who subscribe to the notion that anything worth saying or doing can be expressed in one or two sentences, which is sort of true, except that most people don’t have a clue what those sentences mean until they’ve seen the elephant from the other side of time. Simple tools that we take for granted, such as a telephone, would not exist if one or more breakthrough theories had not been developed and proven scientifically, but no one actually pictured things such as telephones at the time that the theories were first proposed.

Beyond Google is the convergence of different viewpoints. Convergence is achieved through collaboration. Successful collaboration combines multiple viewpoints of multiple parties.

In January, before my extended absence, I wrote a post titled There Are 3 Sides To Every Relationship. It was based on an extremely simplistic description of the multi-faceted and multi-dimensional way that I see things. The over simplification still makes me wince at its clumsiness, but the surprise was that quite a number of people personally responded to me, mostly in understanding. Essentially, what I was saying is that in every interaction there is your side and my side, and then there is the whole picture, and that this view of all dimensions and perspectives at once is also the best tool for conflict resolution. The same view can be applied to the requirements of successful collaboration as I see them.

Both on a personal and societal level, we naturally classify ourselves and each other constantly. She’s a loner; he’s a party animal. They are a mom and pop business; we are a large corporate entity. We further constantly observe properties and assign values to them. This guy’s cool; that guy’s lame. These people are knowledgeable; those are ignorant. This gal’s nurturing; that one’s selfish. This is how we function, and no amount of political correctness or sensitivity is going to change this basic functionality. It is how we learn, through identification, observation, evaluation, judgment. On the level in which we need to share this world and co-exist in peace, only mutual respect and civility are required. On the level where we can collaborate, and thereby progress and evolve, the entirety of our views and motivations must be apprehended and integrated.

This applies as naturally to a small isolated group or community, to personal relationships or regular business engagement, as it does to large societies, and to all of humanity. There will always be conflicts, just as there will always be natural laws that apply to them, whether we’ve discovered and understood those laws yet or not.

Over the past 25 years, I have many times been asked for my opinion on their projects by entrepreneurs, which I am happy to offer. Certainly there are some who are essentially seeking only validation of their own ideas. Nevertheless, I’m usually game to offer a simplistic overview analysis, together with a few pointed questions, partly because entrepreneurial energy, ideas, and problem-solving are my personal fuel. The responses I am most used to getting are “I never thought of that” and “I’d have never looked at it that way”. This is not to say that my way of looking at things is superior to anyone else’s. My point is that very few of us look at any situation from more than a narrow sampling of perspectives.

So my dream, or wish, and my focus of energies as well, is toward greater and even full integration of perspectives in all we do. If, indeed, we can manage to understand natural laws and principles from an integration of perspectives viewpoint, perhaps the very idea of bumper cars will come to seem downright primitive instead of just a bit silly.