Here at MIX06 in Las Vegas we’ve learned that the MS vision of Web 2.0 remains…. unclear. Bill Gates shared his enthusiasm for upcoming MS products like the Vista OS, and now Dean H is talking up IE7.
O’Reilly asked great Web 2.0 questions but I’m not clear that Bill sees this as the new world – more as a rapidly evolving extension of the world MS helped pioneer over the past decades.
No Mom it’s NOT about the glitz, glamour, and free huge nightclub tabs picked up by Microsoft! It’s WORK and SOMEBODY darn well better get down to Las Vegas and do what has to be done!
MIX06 starts tomorrow morning with keynote by Bill Gates and leads into a large number of concurrent sessions which appear to be focused almost exclusively on how MS applications and future developments can be used in online applications. That’s OK because this is put on by MS, but somewhat ironically I think the concept here was to have a very “open” environment that tried to get feedback from the community about what they need, want, and where they are going. I’m anxious to see if MS is sincerely interested in ….. us.
Yahoo and Google certainly are interested as evidenced by the way they interact at other conferences. I think part of their corporate culture is to say “damn the torpedos, full speed ahead!” even when that approach could threaten some aspect of the company’s revenue. I’m not expecting this from MS but I’m hoping for greater responsiveness than they’ve shown the web community in the past.
I was sorry to see Bill Gates bashing MIT’s $100 Laptop project
Gates’ credentials as an advocate for the developing world are unsurpassed, but I’d guess he’s reacting more to the fact this is a Google sponsored project than legitimate concerns about it’s viability.
I love the $100 Laptop Project not so much because it will bring tech to the poor, especially children (though it will do that), but because it will help to rapidly and aggressively break down what I see as the key barrier to development which is the lack of communication and exchange between “them” and “us”.
A dictator’s tyranny or a famine in Nigeria will take on a whole new relevance when THEIR kids are all playing video games and instant messaging with OUR kids.
Bill, you got this one wrong, dawg. But the Gates Foundation remains the world’s most heroic development effort.
Time Magazine notes:
From politics to movie-making, from NASA to NASCAR, exciting new changes are occurring — and so is the very process of innovation. For one thing, corporations and universities no longer dominate the world of new ideas. Instead, we’re living in an age of individual innovation spurred on by the Internet as well as a form of group project best represented by resources like Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that is edited by the masses instead of an elite cadre of professional editors.
I like it. I’m big on the implications of the explosive growth of global online communities, the programmable web and all the other cool things that happen when the notion of social and corporate networking is extended to an increasingly robust global information network (aka “the internet”).
How the money will flow in this brave new networked world extravaganza is less clear than how the information and innovation will flow. Wall street still views and invests as if heavily capitalized, large corporations will dominate the landscape for some time, though they are again warming up to the idea that little companies can make a big difference. Myspace.com’s 580 million valuation and Skype’s even higher number give even the humblest small biz programming people cause to work a bit harder to find “the next big thing”.
I’m sure there is some virtuous stuff amidst the current swirl of motivationally spoken self-helping new ageified banter, but I can’t [self] help but think “hey, this is mostly just a license for people to feel comfortable about doing whatever they darn well please”.
At least with much of the bible thumping old time religion there is an undercurrent of helpfulness and broad social responsibility. Also the new and improved and globilized business models are paying more than lip service to the idea that business responsibility goes far beyond profits for shareholders. This includes the big beneficiaries of big biz. One needs look no farther than the Gates Foundation or Google.org or the Omidyar (Ebay founder) efforts with Microloans to see how powerful this new business ethic has become in solving real world problems.
Many new age folks would suggest that there is some form of collective consciousness and that participating at that level does much good for the world. I’m very skeptical. Tell that to the kid in Africa with AIDs or Malaria or no clean water. They’ll (correctly) choose water purification to soul purification, and we should all get that set of priorities straight.
Wow. I was about to elaborate on my notion that Craigslist is a great example of what most 2.0 companies are lacking (community and simple access to tons of relevant info).
But there’s an amazing new 2.0 company in town (actually it’s based in SEATTLE rather than a Silicon City). Newsvine.com
I’m still digging into the site details, but this is looking like EXACTLY the type of 2.0 effort that uses the power of the internet to leverage existing resources (news feeds) and a potentially HUGE user base (news junkies) to create abundant new content and a NEW community.
Danah Boyd is a social networking researcher who also works at Yahoo. Easily one of the brightest observers in this space though I’m not yet convinced that she is a *wise* observer of these things. I’d read her blog and realized she’d have valuable perspectives on Myspace. Here is a great summary of her perspective, though I’m concerned that there may be a generational issue of “parents have the RIGHT and OBLIGATION to know about those tracking and marketing to their kids (e.g. Myspace.com)” that she can’t see cuz….she’s young and has not yet had the shot ‘o wisdom and insight that comes from having children running around in potentially dangerous environments.
On CNN a child psychologist warned that NO child should have a “web page”, and that Myspace.com, a social networking site popular mostly among teens, was a dangerous environment that could be used by predators to “profile” potential victims.
It sure seemed to be an exaggeration, and since I actively encourage my own 16 year old to develop websites I thought I better find out a bit more. The buzz in the industry is that Myspace and friendster are getting replaced by facebook, which I understand is more popular for college students looking for dates. Partly for this reason I hadn’t been paying … enough … attention to myspace.
But indeed my son had a page and so did many of his friends. Nothing too provocative from that group, but the psychologists concerns were justified in other respects as I learned browsing the listings and content and by signing up for my own Myspace account. Here are the interesting features that I guarantee few parents are aware of and would concern many greatly:
* Extensive personal information, often including pictures and names of friends, crushes, school and city specifics.
* Discription of sexual orientation. This includes the term “swinger”.
* Easy picture upload.
* Crappy age verification. Easy to make up things to “get in”, so many of the age listings are almost certainly false. This fact or ALONE raises many serious legal issues as minors are posting volumes of suggestive material with no oversight.
* Advertising for adult sites. I didn’t see any ads (yet) for x rated material, but prominent were ads for “intimate dating” which is euphemistic for sex match services. I don’t object to these ads in the adult space, but actively advertising sex dating to teens and preteens should be of concern to any clear thinking parent.
There’s more but I’d urge any parent to browse the site. An upside to the detail is that you can learn about your own kid’s friends and other aspects of their life they might not share at the dinner table. I’d argue that the most important factor is whether this environment is getting abused rather than whether it *could* be abused. For that I’ll need to research a bit.
Provocative thought for the day:
Change is coming from the WRONG set of ideas. It’s coming from both the positive and negative “exciting” stuff like wars and conflict, concerts and rich people. Change SHOULD be coming from a careful examination of what is working the middle class mundane lives that most people in the developed world lead – the tried and true stuff. How do we bring this boring but workable stuff to the rest of the world?
*Bringing mediocrity to the world* is going to require great thinking and great innovation – wild and speculative innovation included. I sure like projects like Dean Kamen’s power/water devices which are a great way to make boring mundane but ESSENTIAL change happen in the 3rd world.
…. jeez, he introduced it at the TED conference a few years back… maybe I’m WRONG about TED. If it’s spreading this kind of innovation I’m….WRONG.
FOCUS defines a LOT of the world. What we as people, nations, groups, businesses choose to focus on defines a lot about us.
It’s much easier to focus on big controversies or big positive events than it is to focus on the mundane, daily grind events. YET, it’s our own mundane daily grinds where the stuff is happening that we need to pass along to those for whom the daily grind is …. life threatening.
More about Privacy, Free Speech, and the oxymoron known as Fox “News”.
I’ve been surprised by how complacent the Religious right has been about online porn, so maybe the battle over censoring porn won’t be coming soon, though I think this DOJ action is the shot over the bow by GW, Gonzales et al.
I’m hoping the online community handles self-censorship better than the movie industry or, far worse, video game industry. I’m not optimistic about it though and expect a lot of chest thumping in the near future as people line up to be for/against “porn”/”free speech” depending on their points of view.
I think there are several interesting forces involved in the coming privacy debate war:
First is the basic freedom of speech, which we value highly in America but pretend to value more than we actually do. Money talks loudly in America as the recent D.C. lobby scandals and huge money politics make clear. Simply prohibiting paid speech obviously won’t work, but money threatens the quality of free speech more than any other factor and far more than any Govt in this country ever will.
Another force at play is the battle between right wing and left wing ideologues. Called the “culture wars” by the conservatives, both right and left claim the high ground on freedom issues and speak mostly to those who can’t think for themselves. Meanwhile the polarization dumbs down many of the issues to a state of irrelevance.
Always ironic is how quickly those of any political persuasion are to “shout down” or even violently repress competing speech. We’ve got right wing entertainer-zealots like Anne Coulter [updated scandalous comments on Donny Deutsch Show] and Sean Hannity dispicably making the case that many forms of criticism of the Govt are “treason”, while their left wing counterparts like Michael Moore pander propagandistic nonsense to the gullible. Both deflect from the spirited and intelligent debates we should be having about many polarizing issues like Iraq, massive Govt overspending, and helping save the developing world from itself.
Other challenges to the quality of free speech in America are the rise of the right-wing commercial propaganda arm of the Govt (aka “Fox News”) and the administration’s policy of reporter “embedding” which has cleverly created a system where reporters will tend to report favorably on the American war effort without any censorship at all. You are hardly going to be overly critical of the guys who are protecting you from untimely death. (yes, this is a simplification – a strong counter-argument is the world class reporting of formerly embedded Kevin Sites).
Although it used to be true that there were more “liberals” than “conservatives” in the media they were far, far, far more objective than the media stars of today who are entertainers before patriots and patriots before journalists. It also appears to me FOX may have reversed the trend leading to a net “conservative” voice in overall American journalism, but more importantly has taken greater strides than any liberal ever dreamed in morphing “journalistic objectivity” into “my country, right or wrong”.
Another significant force in play in the privacy debate is the fact few mainstream folks understand how the internet works and how sophisticated an average 15 year old is about finding online material. If every teacher and mother of a teen in America did a handful of image searches for highly objectionable porn terms you’d see a groundswell of new legislation, but few teachers and even fewer parents have any sense of what’s up online.
It won’t be pretty but it sure will be interesting…
Joe Duck 