Wireless Quilts Locally

This week's Independent has good coverage of the public wireless situation in the Triangle and about the ways things have gotten complicated down in Laurinburg, NC.
See this entry in my blog for links and more

Long Tail - Chris Anderson's blog

http://longtail.typepad.com/ is Wired Editor-in-Chief, Chris Anderson's ongoing blog that came from his article, The Long Tail (Wired, October 2004), and is going toward his proposed book to published by Hyperion, in early 2006.
You may also be interested in the Wikipedia article on The Long Tail as well.

Some new announcements from eTech Conference

Chris DiBona, who is now OpenSource Project manager at Google, announced http://code.google.com. Note that Google is using SourceForge to host their open projects. Chris named SourceForge back in the day. We still run a SourceForge download mirror on ibiblio.org

Larry Lessig announced that his book, Code, will be available for update via wiki beginning today (hosted by JotSpot)

Odeo the podcasting company presented (but not live or even in Beta quite yet).

BBC's Paula Le Dieu will be heading up the Creative Commons International efforts from London. Le Dieu has been working on BBS's very large Creative Archive project which will continue.

Jeff Bezos announced and demoed A9.com's openSearch.

Yahoo Tech Labs announced the Tech Buzz Market Game.

O'Reilly announced their new Where Conference to take place June 29 - 30 in SFO. It will:

explore the emerging consumer and enterprise ecosystems around location-aware technologies--ecosystems that increasingly impact the way we work and play. Location-determining technologies like GPS, RFID, WLAN, cellular networks and networked sensors enable an ever-growing array of capabilities from local search, mapping, and business analytics to enterprise integration, commercial applications, and software infrastructure.

Bloglines/Ask Jeeves purchase explained. (in more details that the article that I linked to there).

Big p2p move in Microsoft's near future

Today Microsoft bought Groove Networks, the p2p software being used by our troops in Iraq. Along with the purchase came Ray Ozzie who created Lotus Notes and Groove. Ozzie will become the Chief Technical Officer of Microsoft reporting directly to Bill Gates and bypassing Steve Ballmer.
Expect big changes and very new products from Microsoft soon. Changes that will bring more p2p, more blogging, more futures like those predicted by the Museum of Media History.

Museum of Media History (2014)

In case you haven't seen this 8 minute movie that follows the development of the Web, Google, Amazon, Blogger, Friendster, Newsbot and others to their logical conclusions, you will enjoy their projections of a future for the next 10 years.

Las Preguntas para Miércoles

1. Rheingold mentions the development of “distributed reputation systems for ad-hoc wearable computer communities.” How do you feel about this prospect? Think about it in terms of RFID tags as discussed in Monday’s class: what do you think of the possibility that anyone with a cellphone or PDA might one day be able to pull up your “reputation” score on the spot by interfacing with an RFID tag stored in your personal device or credit card? How would this effect social interaction in general?

2. The chapter points out the emergence of systems where reputation serves as a social reward in itself, perhaps granting the user esteem, personal gratification, or making it easier to interface with other people in the community. Do you think that people would participate in a system that did not feature a reputation system of some sort, where there was no way for them to enjoy any personal effects? For example, do you think a community where every user listed as anonymous would survive?

3. In a similar vein, do you think it would be at all possible to have a commercial community that functioned and grew without an underlying reputation system? That is to say, could websites like eBay exist if there was no way to check a seller’s reputation? Rheingold says no, but what do you personally think? Can you think of an example?

4. When someone has an opinion of someone else in the “real world,” we can easily evaluate that opinion based on what we know of the beholder – i.e. if Bob says that Jack is a liar and a horse-thief, we might brush it off, since we might also know that Bob himself is a convicted felon and notorious liar. Similarly, Bob might never make such a statement to begin with, knowing full well that Jack is a trained cage-fighter and would kick him in the face. Online communities, however, have the added attribute of anonymity. Bob could create a new user account, slander Jack, and then disappear, either creating a new account or leaving the site in general. Thus, Jack’s reputation is harmed, while Bob skips off without fear of retribution. Based on this example and on human ficklness in general, can one really trust an online reputation system? Similarly, how can new users starting with no reputation gain trust to begin with?

Blogging as Journalism, with nods to Dan Gillmor

Slashdot is pimping yet another article regarding the Apple/Think Secret court case. This time the discussion is based around the court's refusal to extend journalistic protection to those involved. What's really cool about the article, however, is that it mentions postings by our new-found homeboy, Dan Gillmor. According to his blog, Dan's gone and filed declarations of support in the court case; tear 'em up, D!

-Bertito

Evolution of Reputation

Pattie Maes
Alexa
Brewster Kahle (2004)
ePinions
Slashdot
Paul Resnick
GroupLens
MovieLens
Reputations Research Network
Chris Dellarocas
Marc Smith at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference
Technorati Top 100

The Era of Sentient Things

VR at UNC
Elumens
Steve Mann
Cooltown is now Bazaar
Warren Robinett
Websigns
Smart Dust at Berkeley
Roadblocks to RFIDs in Cnet 2/19/04
Steve Bellovin
Marcel Waldvogel
FDA on RFID for Drugs
RFID Journal
Wikipedia on RFID
Wikipedia on Smart Dust
Center for Bits and Atoms
Neil Gershenfeld

World Community Grid

No sooner than I get my office back from the rewiring folks, I get a note from a researcher at IBM asking for faculty who have proposals that might like use the World Community Grid for their work.
Just like many of the projects that Rheingold writes about in today's chapter, the WCG project uses idle computer cycles for grid computer work. The difference is that WCG is designed to be flexible rather than special purpose (it could do SETI or Folding or whatever). Their smallpox case study is particularly interesting -- good to read of a success.
Imagine that you had a complex problem that you wanted to solve using WCG, what would it be?

Computation Nation and Swarm Supercomputers

Cory Doctorow
SETI@home
Folding@home
MGM v Grokster
Dan Bricklin
Cornucopia of the Commons
Gnutella
OpenCOLA
Larry Smarr
Larry Smarr at CIT
Doubts in California (about Smarr ad CITRIS)