Silicon Valley Watcher - reporting on the business of technology and media

The other day I got into trouble with Cisco's outside PR agency, the 463 because John Chambers, Cisco CEO continued to complain about education in the US, saying the same things he has been saying for many years. So I complained that I've been hearing these same things time and again. (Please see my TechNet post: John Chambers Marks Dull Innovation Summit Panel- Content Was"Slightly Less Useless" Than Prior Panels )

Among Mr Chambers comments, he said that our local school system is broken and can't be fixed.

I was on a panel with Mr Chambers two years ago. I spoke about how Silicon Valley's public schools are basketcases when they should be showcases.

It is embarrassing. Silicon Valley says to the world we are inventing the future yet our communities suffer from terrible public schools! Is this the future?!

He said Tom, we tried to tried but the system is broken and can't be fixed. And he said the same thing last Thursday too. Cisco was a big supporter for school vouchers, a controversial proposal designed to let parents help pay for private education with public school funds. I'm not sure if this initiative is what he was referring to.

I was told by his PR person that Mr Chambers has done a lot for education around the world. And I applaud his work and the medals and awards his work has earned. However, I'm surprised that he would give up so easily with improving Silicon Valley's local schools.

A "CraigsList" for schools

There are many things that could be done for schools, especially in applying the tools for building social media communities. This is a key emerging business for Cisco it would be a great demonstration of its tools and technologies.

Within walking distance of every local school in the Silicon Valley/Bay Area there is a tremendous amount of resources that could help raise the standard of education for all, regardless of income. This area is the 10th richest economic region in the world.

Why not build a type of "CraigsList" around every school? It would bring the local community closer to its local schools. If a teacher needs a box of pencils or a volunteer to explain rocket science, they could post it online.

This "CraigsList" for schools could also offer a collaborative platform for the teachers, students, and parents. It could offer online tutoring. It could fund free broadband for the schools. If set up as an independent venture, it could possibly fund these activities by offering commercial broadband services to local businesses. It might cost a few bucks more per month but the local businesses would know the money is going back into their communities.

Silicon Valley/Bay Area schools could very easily, and inexpensively become wonderful showcases for the transforming power of the technologies being developed here.

I refuse to believe that our local school system cannot be fixed. And I refuse to believe that John Chambers and our other local captains of industry cannot find a solution to this problem.

We have world class leaders here in the Bay Area, there is nothing that they cannot accomplish.

Where there is a will there is a way, and hopefully my humble post might renew Mr Chambers interest in revisiting this challenge.

Silicon Valley Watcher Challenge: $10K for schools

And in the meantime, I challenge my readers to help raise $10,000 for schools through a challenge on DonorsChoice.org. There are many classroom projects to choose from. This is part of the Lit Liberation challenge established by Tim Ferriss, the author of "The 4-Hour Work Week."

Tim asked Silicon Valley Watcher and a small group of other online publishers to help raise a total of $1m for schools around the world. More details are here, from Brian Solis:

Tim Ferriss Forms LitLiberation to Raise $1 Million in One Month

Take a look at some of the school projects on this page and help schools here and elsewhere:

Help Public School Kids by Funding Silicon Valley Watcher Challenge at DonorsChoose

Technorati Tags: litliberation, puppy

(From my ZDNet column: http://blogs.zdnet.com/Foremski/?p=188)

Sending out friend requests on LinkedIn or FaceBook is fairly easy for Americans but I bet it is less so for other, less gregarious cultures.

For example, I would guess that in Japan there would be fewer "friends" requests coming out of the blue. Same in Europe, especially in the UK, where I'm from.

Here in the US there is a culture of acquaintances which is not as developed as in other countries, or at least the countries I am familiar with. The culture of acquaintances is that I know a lot of people, and I like them, but I don't know them quite as well as my friends.

But that distinction doesn't matter much in the world of the social networks, and in the world of blogging, and Flickr, and Twitter--the whole trend to share oneself with the world...

But what if you are shy, what if you don't want to be AlwaysOn, always in conversation, what if you want to listen to your internal conversation, what if you value your privacy, your personal moments that you share carefully and uniquely? Will those people be at a disadvantage in this new world?

http://blogs.zdnet.com/Foremski/?p=188

The first sign of the dotcom dotbomb was when I saw a billboard with "your ad here." There were gasps in the office when I told my colleagues.

The other day I was at Matt Greeley's Second Friday when I met with an entrepreneur of what Matt calls: "Socially aware clothing."

It's a T-Shirt that text messages, he told me. What do you mean, a T-Shirt that text messages?? I got to talk with the inventor and it is a T-Shirt that has an SMS address printed on it and if you are curious you can send a message to a stranger.

The T-shirts can be used by all sorts of people such as DJs in nightclubs I was told. I asked the inventor if the inks were UV reactive, no, but the rest of the shirt was, because it is cotton and has starch in it...

I generally dress up a bit when going to clubs, doesn't that renegade the T-shirt-with-a-text-message concept to sports bars and frat parties? I was told that in America things are different, people wear T-shirts to clubs all the time. (I don't think so.)

"I only need five percent of the market to be profitable," I was told and I've heard that line before. "Our templates for our T-Shirt designs are copyrighted," when I asked what was the secret sauce.

I said that you could put the same message on a business card, it doesn't have to be a T-shirt. I seems that that idea had already been nabbed by someone else.

Check out Reacted

I want to focus on content and not technology and yet I have been off-line for days because of hardware failures. And trying to learn the new worlds of "many-media"--how different types of media are prepared, produced, and then distributed.

These have been frustrating weeks but I am reassured with a vision of the future. We are almost at that cusp in history when technology will matter less. It'll be what we do that will matter more than how we do things. And then I'll be able to focus on content instead of technology.

A 1-click future

Right now, I am suffering the multiple agonies of dealing with resuscitating two notebooks, a failed external backup drive, and setting up up a completely new notebook--plus learning video and audio editing for Podtech.net related projects.

One of these days very soon, these types of things will be all one-click problems because we'll have pushed so much of our lives into the cloud where such problems are cheaply outsourced.

Standards get wrapped

Much of my week has been spent with either trying to revive my old hardware or getting to grips with new hardware such as Sony hi-defintion video camcorders. The puzzle is that Sony and Panasonic have adopted a high definition video compression format that has no editing support from the major video editing software vendors.

Are Sony and Panasonic so bad at evangelism that they couldn't get support for their video format from dozens of software companies a year before launch? It's been six months since the launch and there is only a trickle of low-end video editing software coming out. Corel's ULead DVD MovieFactory is one of the first to offer some limited support for AVCHD.

Lost in Video Translation

Because of my Podtech.net deal to produce a Silicon Valley Watcher show I've gotten to shoot lots of video but translating and publishing the video content takes hours of computer processing time, and that's without the editing time.

I would like a magic button that automatically takes the video from the camcorder and loads it into my editing software and then when I'm finished, in the time to make one-click it publishes my video interviews all over YouTube, PodTech, AppleTV, iPhone and wherever else. That's a fantasy because right now, just getting the video content out of the camera and into a format for the editing software takes about 7 to 8 hours per hour of footage. And then exporting it into different publishing formats can take another 3 to 4 hours per hour of footage. That's way too much time lost.

Why can't we have inexpensive video co-processors specifically designed to zip through such tasks? A general purpose microprocessor is good at many tasks but not as good as a specialized processor at specific tasks. We already have DSP chip technologies and powerful graphics co-processors that process many similar tasks within PCs. It would be good to get some video co-processors, too. I should thing there must be some on the way...

Over on New Rules Communications I was writing about Google's ad networks and the bad economics for media companies. 

Link to: This Is Why Online Ad Nets Can't Save Media Companies

I noticed that there is an interesting conflict of interest emerging at the heart of Google's business model.

Please check my reasoning:

Google makes almost all of its revenues from two ad networks:

-AdWords: Customers advertise on Google web sites.

-AdSense: Customers advertise on Google partner sites, which includes many media companies.

Google's revenue in 2004 was about evenly split between AdWords and AdSense.

Since then, Google's revenue from its own sites has grown by 24 percent to 62 percent of total revenues. AdSense has fallen.

And this makes sense because Google makes far more money from its own sites than from partner sites. It is better for Google's shareholders that it channel more of its revenues through its own sites because:

-Google gives back about 80 per cent of AdSense revenues to its partners.

-It keeps all of its AdWords money.

And this is where it has a mammoth conflict of interest:

Which advertising network should Google invest in?

-A dollar invested in its AdWords produces far more profit than invested in AdSense, its partner network. Management has a fiduciary duty to its shareholders to maximize profits.

-Google can boost overall profits by undercutting AdSense at anytime it wants, say  by offering a discount on AdWords compared with AdSense. A 20 percent discount on AdWords would make more money for Google than the corresponding loss of business through AdSense partners.

-Google can undercut AdSense in other ways, and is already doing it, by investing in technology that improves AdWords conversions over AdSense. Google can apply technologies to its own sites that make them more efficient at selling ads. It can't do that with partner sites. And partner sites don't have the resources to improve their advertising conversions at a similar pace.

Which means AdSense revenues for media companies will continue to fall because AdWords is more efficient.

---

Media companies that partner with Google in its AdSense program do it because they don't know what else to do. The economics of partnering with Google are poor and the relationship is unsustainable because of the inherent conflict of interest.

Why Would GOOG Maintain AdSense?

-There are strategic purposes, it forces media companies in its network to compete with its far more profitable business model which weakens them as potential competitors.

-Also, it keeps third-party sites out of rival ad networks.

-AdSense is a great "cookie jar" because if GOOG ever needs to meet its numbers for its quarter, it can push more ads through its own sites rather than through partners.

UPDATE: Independent Advertising Network Advantage 

Independent advertising networks, which don't compete with their publisher partners, such as Blue Lithium, Federated Media, and others, will be able to attract partner sites away from Google because they can invest in technologies to improve revenues for the entire network.

But how much freedom do large publishers have in leaving the Google network? Some have contracts with Google that could tie their hands for years.

Last year, in the wake of the LonelyGirl15 mystery, I asked:

LonelyGirl15 was found out to be a fake video blogger--scripted by a Hollywood production team--many millions had watched it, and many thousands tried to find out who was behind it.

What happens in a future world where phishing is applied to news sources rather than spoofing banking sites? And where there aren't enough watchdogs to spot the fakes?

Today's LA Times has a front page story about the "new lonelygirl15."

GreenTeaGirlie innocent vidblogger or sinister marketing hoax - Los Angeles Times

Again, my son Matthew Foremski was involved in this story. But this time in another way, testing the viral nature of trust and mistrust. It's a fascinating account pulled together by Los Angeles Times staff writer David Sarno.

In late March, a striking young brunette going by the nom-de-Tube of 'GreenTeaGirlie' posted a 10-second video on YouTube.
"Hey YouTube viewers!" said the hopeful ingénue, "I'm new. I hope you welcome me. I'm actually going to be making some videos, and I hope they're going to be really neat, so I hope you check 'em out."
Before anyone knew what was going on, "I'm New" had rocketed to the front page of YouTube's daily Most Viewed section, where it raked in more than 170,000 hits on its first day — an extraordinary showing for a maiden video blog.

Again, it is worth asking the question, what happens when there aren't enougth watchdogs to spot fakes and test the veracity of online content?

Will the viral nature of mistrust be our only protection? Or should there be a clear way to test the source of anything published online?  Is it even possible?

I just got back from HP's Gaming Summit at Dogpatch Studios, which showcased some rather nifty gaming technologies from HP Labs (video is coming.)

During a panel discussion, Rahul Sood, chief technology officer at HP Gaming, and founder of Voodoo PC said that next generation PC games based on Microsoft's new DirectX 10 technology will do more to drive sales of Vista than anything else.

"DirectX 10 is going to provide a dramatically improved gaming experience that will drive adoption of Vista," said Mr Sood.

Some of the technologies on display or discussed were:

... a curved, seamless display that fills a gamer's field of view for an incredibly immersive visual experience and a way to superimpose multimedia digital experiences on physical landscapes so people could, for example, play a game throughout a city using wireless handheld devices. The company also demonstrated a "super projector" capable of high resolution, brightness, deep contrast and a wide color gamut, ideal for projecting games for multiple players on a big screen.

Panoply and Pluribus- using multiple projectors to create a seamless giant screen for game playing or other "immersive" applications. It doesn't require precise projector positioning, all the calibration and focusing is by computer.

Memory Spot - This is an intriguing technology, a small coin sized device that can store about 4MB of data and can be read by a computer. That's about all HP was willing to say about this technology, but promised more information and applications later this year.

Coffee Table Display - Imagine a large rectangular coffee table with a huge high definition touchscreen that lets users manipulate images, drag around virtual puzzle pieces, and also transforms into a virtual aquarium! Where do the coffee cups go, I asked Susie Wee, Lab Director of the HP Labs Mobile and Media Systems Lab (video will be posted soon.)

Also:

HP TouchSmart PC
» Fact sheet
» Image

»
HP Labs Gaming Demonstrations

HP Labs researcher Mike Harville tries out a race car video game on a special curved screen designed to increase the realism and immersive experience for gamers.
» Image

Notes: Interestingly, I tried to video a panel discussion between representatives of Intel, HP, NVIDIA, Trion World, and Microsoft but after a few minutes I was told no videos were allowed. I asked why and was told that video camera made some of the panelists uncomfortable, yet they were in front of about 80 journalists(!)

Carnegie Mellon University and the University of California, Berkeley have joined together for a one day conference on April 30th in Mountain View. Academics and industry leaders will discuss issues and trends for "the new software industry."

They promise that there will be no product demos (how about no PowerPoints too...)

"The software industry is consistently in a state of flux, yet developments such as globalization and outsourcing are altering both the tempo and the type of change taking place," said James Morris, dean of Carnegie Mellon West. "We are entering a period of profound change, and we all need to know what's happening and what we can expect going forward. This conference draws on some of the best and brightest minds in academe and the software industry to answer those questions."

Added Jack Grantham, executive director of the Haas School 's Fisher Information Technology Center , "This conference presents a rare opportunity for vendors to check their sales and marketing hats at the door and settle into discussion and debate over the future of the industry with attendees, academics, and other industry thought leaders."

For more information on the conference, visit http://west.cmu.edu/sofcon/5404216.html and at http://west.cmu.edu/west_connect/events_news/news/6731936.html.

 

It seems clear to me where the software industry is headed:

•  it is about software as a service.
•  it is about moving away from running apps on your own hardware.
• it is about roll your own apps.
• it is about offshoring as much development as you can get away with.
• it is about integrating as much open source software as you can.
• it is about moving away from a database model of software towards a search-based apps type of approach.
• it is about creating apps for the small and medium business sector.

To register for the "The New Software Industry: Forces at Play, Business in Motion," go to http://www.acteva.com/booking.cfm?bevaid=128819. The early registration fee of $395 is available until Friday, April 6, 2007.

Warsaw University's team  won the 31st annual World Finals of the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest, sponsored by IBM and held at IBM Tokyo Research Lab.

There were 6,099 teams on 6 continents in regional contests and 88 teams qualified for the finals. 25 teams were from North America, 2 from Africa/Middle East, 10 from Latin America, 20 from Europe and Russia, 31 from Asia/South Pacific.

Warsaw University solved 8 problem sets, in second place was Tsinghua University with 7 solved, the rest solved 6 or less. Highest scoring US team was MIT in fourth place behind St. Petersburg University.

Warsaw won the 2003 championship.

Polish programmers have won many international programming contests, reflecting the country's strong history in math and cryptography. Poland is becoming a favored site for many US company development centers.

Contest Standings - The 2007 ACM-ICPC World Finals

The Problem Sets

Link to ACM Contest

Technorati tags: warsaw university, ACM-ICPC

Andy Plesser over at Beet.TV has an interesting interview with Alex Laats from Defense contractor BBN about using advanced technologies to analyze and transcribe YouTube videos with 80 per cent accuracy.

A major defense department contractor, BBN of Cambridge, Massachusetts, has applied a national security technology application, developed to fight terrorism, to "crawl" the audio tracks of public Internet videos through its Podzinger subsidiary. 

Podzinger has analyzed, transcribed and organized some 1.5 million YouTube clips since December and is crawling many thousand every day, according to Alex Laats, who heads the unit.

It is interesting that government agencies have this technology and it means that Big Brother is here and now, so let's get used to it.

I love all the widgets that are coming out. There are some excellent services that offer search, headlines, and many other services.

Web site owners can customize these widgets and drop the Javascript code onto their servers. When a visitor comes to their site, part of the page occupied by the widget loads data, text, or images. You can see a widget in action in my side column showing recent visitors and their photos.

Widgets can be tiny, for example, at the end of my posts you can see how many blog responses Technorati has found to each article. And it is easy to make them yourself, I'll probably put together an SVW headlines widget that other sites can use.

But I wonder about the extra load on servers and bandwidth around the Internet as thousands of new types of widgets offer various services, and are deployed on tens of millions of web pages. Each time a widget containing page is viewed in a web browser, it collects data to display in that page.

So, in the above example, Technorati initiates a search for related blog posts whether it was requested or not. This creates a load on Technorati servers which slows down the user experience for anyone initiating a manual search. And it also taxes data bandwidth to move data that wasn't directly requested.

This could add up to a "load" tax on the overall Internet as widget mania proliferates.

I was discussing widgets with Josh Hallett at the Newcomm Forum. Josh is an excellent example of what I call a "media engineer," he has built web sites for many large media companies, such as the New York Times, using publishing platforms such as Movable Type and Wordpress.

Josh pointed out that using a lot of widgets can compromise the performance of your web pages. "You are at the mercy of the widget publisher. If they are having a bad day and their server is down, your page won't load in the right way."

Josh also noted that the widget publisher gets a lot of useful data from each web page it is on. Granted, not every widget publisher is going to be mining that data but it is there nonetheless. That means the widget publisher could collect a lot of information on readers, IP addresses, etc.

BTW, this is exactly why I was against running advertising networks on my site when I first started publishing because of this spyware issue. The advertising networks such as Google AdSense don't pay much AND they collect a lot of data on my users.

Google (and other ad networks) can triangulate data from many sources and collect an amazing amount of information on users as they move from site to site and as each web page load triggers another data stream. The same is true for the widget publishers.

[Doesn't this mean that Google should be able to figure out who is running a spam site and who is committing click fraud to a fairly high degree...? Maybe Google's figures on click fraud are fairly accurate.]

...

Here is Josh's excellent blog Hyku.

I was discussing innovation Wednesday evening with my old buddy Tom Abate from The SF Chronicle. These chats always provide lots of fodder for posts.

And in talking about innovation I began to wonder if it was synonymous with disruption. I think it is, because if innovation is not disruptive it won't get funding, at least not here in Silicon Valley.

Is there a unit of disruption? I'll propose one: a $1Billion unit of disruption reached over 5 years (BUD).

1 BUD = A business process that has the potential to generate $1bn in annual sales within five years.

That's about the minimum upside that a Silicon Valley startup needs to show in order to get funding. More is better, a five BUD would be stellar.

And 1 BUD = 1 Innovation Unit. Because Innovation has to be disruptive, imho.

Tom Abate: MiniMediaGuy

About 15 miles south of San Jose, down a country lane, and hidden behind one of the scenic rolling hills of "Steinbeck country" is IBM's Silicon Valley research and development labs.

It used to be called Santa Teresa Labs, opened in 1977 with about 3,000 square feet, housing about 1300 researchers, mostly working on software projects.

It is miles from Silicon Valley and out in the middle of nowhere, but this is one of IBM's top research labs. Clearly, IBM renamed the labs because it wanted it to be associated closely with Silicon Valley, and with innovation - the life blood of Silicon Valley.

I was there recently for an event that showcased some of IBM's customers (EBay, Yahoo)  and IBM's technologies. I heard a lot about innovation. Innovation was by far the most commonly used term by the presenters. I also heard a lot about IBM's "Innovation Jam."

This is an event that takes place once a year and was started in 2001, bringing together tens of thousands of IBM people, and customers, in a three-day brainstorming festival.

I had two questions: The first was "what is innovation?"

I was told that it means bringing people together to create new ways of thinking and of doing things. I was told that Innovation Jam created a whole pipeline of projects and that some of those became significant businesses, etc.

But what I really heard between the lines, was that IBM was using collaborative technologies to create business ideas and that it was the collaborative technologies of blogs and wikis and online forums that were the real innovation technologies.

My second question was: "Why does innovation only happen once per year at IBM?"

I was told that the Innovation Jam happened once per year but that the threads started there would continue throughout the year and that it took time to weed out the great ideas. Once the best ideas were discovered and tagged they would be placed into IBM's "Innovation Factory" where people would figure out how to monetise them for IBM's clients.

It was an interesting afternoon and it made me realize how much thirst there is for "innovation" among companies, and how IBM is hoping to monetise that thirst by getting companies to outsource their innovation needs to Big Blue.

I guess if IBM can say "innovation" enough times, and append "innovation" to as many things as possible, it has a good chance to make lots of money. After all, it runs the largest computer R&D labs in the world, and those researchers need to get paid. If IBM can provide "innovation" to others, then that is a good thing for all.

But the term innovation is getting so very broadly defined that I fear it is becoming over used and doesn't have much meaning.

One of the IBM executives told me that increasingly, a lot of large companies have been appointing executives with "innovation" in their titles. Such as a VP of innovation, or a chief innovation officer, and it is not clear what those jobs mean.

A little while ago I got into an online debate with Geoffrey Moore, Silicon Valley's top IT and business consultant,  on this subject of innovation. He had put together a list of different types of innovation and had said that innovation does not have to be disruptive.

I respectfully disagreed, I said innovation had to be disruptive, anything less was just an incremental improvement on how things are done. Without disruptive innovation most of the companies in SIlicon Valley would not exist, would never get funding. Who would fund a company that had a technology that just improved on an existing process?

Innovation dramatically improves a process or creates something that is capable of wresting away a huge chunk of market, valued in the $1bn plus range. Anything less is not innovation and is not disruptive.

But I shouldn't throw too many stones because I do live in a glass house. I publish "Silicon Valley Watcher - Reporting on the business and culture of innovation."

But maybe I should change my tagline to this: "Silicon Valley Watcher -Reporting on the business and culture of disruption." That way I can continue throwing stones...

- - -

Additional Info:

Geoffrey Moore: Disrupting myths of disruptive innovation

By Tom Foremski for SiliconValleyWatcher.

Geoffrey Moore, one of Silicon Valley's top IT consultants has published a column disrupting the notion of ...
www.SiliconValleyWatcher.com/mt/archives/2006/02/geoffrey_moore.php - 47k -

Dealing_with_Darwin: What do we mean by Innovate?

This blog entry is in reply to Tom Foremski's challenge to one of the points ... Geoffrey Moore’s blogging dialogue with Tom Foremski highlighted to me my ...
geoffmoore.blogs.com/my_weblog/2006/02/what_do_we_mean.html - 25k -

Andrew Nordley

The Harvard Business Review has a list of top 20 "Breakthrough Ideas for 2007." Some interesting, ideas here that are counter-culture in that they challenge accepted thinking in many different areas. Siobhan Ford from HBR says that the list is free to read for all of February and that the most popular ones so far are:

• The Accidental Influentials—Forget the Tipping Point. New research shows that ordinary people, not influentials, are the best word-of-mouth marketers.
• Living with Continuous Partial Attention—The increased “coping mechanism” we’ve adapted to keep up with information flying across our radar 24/7, thanks to the endless bandwidth of technology. Can a backlash be far off?
• An Emerging Hotbed of User-Centered Innovation—Customers aren’t just voicing their needs to companies that are willing to listen; they’re inventing and often building what they want.
• The Folly of Accountabilism—Accountability has gone horribly wrong, tricking people to believe they can control their lives by adhering to specific rules of right and wrong.
• The HBR List Breakthrough Ideas for 2007

I also found #2, #9, #10, #11 and #14 fascinating.

Here is the list with links to the individual articles.

From the UK newspaper The Guardian: (Hat tip to Phil Manchester) 

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the Briton who founded the Web in the early 1990s, says that if the internet is left to develop unchecked, "bad phenomena" will erode its usefulness.

His creation has transformed the way millions of people work, do business, and entertain themselves.

But he warns that "there is a great danger that it becomes a place where untruths start to spread more than truths or it becomes a place which becomes increasingly unfair in some way." He singles out the rise of blogging as one of the most difficult areas for the continuing development of the web, because of the risks associated with inaccurate, defamatory and uncheckable information.

Sir Tim believes devotees of blogging sites take too much information on trust: "The blogging world works by people reading blogs and linking to them. You're taking suggestions of what you read from people you trust. That, if you like, is a very simple system, but in fact the technology must help us express much more complicated feelings about who we'll trust with what." The next generation of the Internet needs to be able to reassure users that they can establish the original source of the information they digest.

Creator of web warns of fraudsters and cheats The Guardian Guardian Unlimited

Sir Tim is right, but it is a problem that is not confined to blogging; it is a problem that affects the entire Web. This is why we need a "trust trackback" or a TrustBack.

In the same way that a trackback lists who has linked to a specific online article, a TrustBack would verify the original source of online information, such as a press release or news story, and show that it is not from a "phishing" site.

On September 17, 2006, I published this post on the lessons from the LonelyGirl15 saga.

We badly need a way to verify sources of online content - we need a "trust trackback"

To save you a click or two, here is an excerpt:

What happens in a future world where phishing is applied to news sources rather than spoofing banking sites? And where there aren't enough watchdogs to spot the fakes?

A little while ago, Google News was carrying a hacked headline that was anti-US and anti-Israel. That was easy to spot; but what if Google News, or some other large news aggregator, were carrying a Reuters story that might have been more subtlety altered? . . .

 

. . .This ability to know that a news source - an individual, a company, an organization, a community, or a government - really said what it is said to have said in a news story, an online post, email, or any other distribution channel, is incredibly important. Otherwise there will be others who will sow misinformation in very sophisticated ways, for commercial gain.

There will be many opportunities for such misinformation in the online world. With so many sources of information, and more coming our way, there won't be enough online sleuths to flag the fakesters as there were with LonelyGirl15.

This means we need to have a way to verify the source of specific chunks of content as originating from an individual, a company, an organization, a community, a government.

A reader should be able to click a "trust" button and have the content verified. . .

. . . For this next phase of the Internet, we badly need a mechanism to verify the source of information that we read online.

This is about creating a type of "trust trackback" that is part of the secure core infrastructure of the internet. Who is up to this task?

Sir Tim? Can you fix the Internet for us?!

LonelyGirl15 was found out to be a fake video blogger--scripted by a Hollywood production team--many millions had watched it, and many thousands tried to find out who was behind it.

What happens in a future world where phishing is applied to news sources rather than spoofing banking sites? And where there aren't enough watchdogs to spot the fakes?

A little while ago, Google News was carrying a hacked headline that was anti-US and anti-Israel. That was easy to spot; but what if Google News, or some other large news aggregator, were carrying a Reuters story that might have been more subtlety altered?

Google News, does not use humans to spot problems, it compiles the news stories using algorithms. But can those algorithms spot fakes? Clearly not in this case.

In the future, or even now, how can we know if a Microsoft press release really came from Microsoft? And the same goes for nearly every other piece of information we find on the internet. Tampered news stories might not be noticed for days or weeks.

Validating trusted sources of information is going to be very important. And part of that trust will be provided by going to web sites of long established media brands such as the New York Times, and through anti-phishing technologies such as OpenDNS, to make sure your browser is reading a valid site.

This ability to know that a news source --an individual, a company, an organisation, a community, or a government-- really said what it is said to have said in a news story, an online post, email, or any other distribution channel, is incredibly important. Otherwise there will be others who will sow misinformation in very sophisticated ways, for commercial gain.

There will be many opportunities for such misinformation in the online world. With so many sources of information, and more coming our way, there won't be enough online sleuths to flag the fakesters as there were with LonelyGirl15.

This means we need to have a way to verify the source of specific chunks of content as originating from an individual, a company, an organisation, a community, a government.

A reader should be able to click a "trust" button and have the content verified.

For example, in reading a news story: it consists of content from the journalist/news organization; there is content from the company (the ceo said..., our customers said..., the analyst said....,); and there is information from other sources, (the company stock price..., related announcements from other companies..., related stories..., etc). An online reader has to have the means of validating each of those sources of information.

This issue of sourcing also applies to the new media release project I've been working on with corporations and PR agencies. The new media release project is focused on ways of releasing company information onto the internet in many forms, such as vidcasts, podcasts, text press releases, etc.

Those companies/organisations have a duty to release their information in such a way that its origin can be verified, and that others cannot change the content surreptitiously.

For this next phase of the Internet, we badly need a mechanism to verify the source of information that we read online.

This is about creating a type of "trust trackback" that is part of the secure core infrastructure of the internet. Who is up to this task?

- - -

Coming up:

A report on my Sunday meeting with a delegation of Spanish technologists from the remote region of Asturias in northern Spain. This is a fascinating group of researchers, academics and business representatives, that are thinking in terms of community rather than technology. They are in town visiting with Silicon Valley's leading companies and research organisations.

My good buddy Om Malik has launched a new blog called WebWorkerDaily to chronicle the virtual nature of work and its always-on effect:

Connectivity is only part of the equation, for the virtual nature of work brings up lifestyle issues. It brings up questions about how to work, and when not to work.

Link to Introducing WebWorkerDaily.

Om cites a post called "Going Bedouin" by Greg Olsen in February 2006.

By focusing almost exclusively on service-based infrastructure options, a business could operate as a sort of neo-Bedouin clan - with workers as a roaming nomadic tribe carrying laptops & cell phones and able to set up shop wherever there is an Internet connection, chairs, tables, and sources of caffeine. "Going Bedouin" is an interesting concept . . .

This is an interesting concept and something I explored in an essay in October of 2005. I chose the word "nomadig" to describe the lifestyle made possible by our mobile technologies:

We seem to be going back to our roots and becoming nomadic peoples again--or rather "nomadig" people: living in digitally-enabled groups but not necessarily *technology* focused ...

And this time around, we are no longer tied to a particular geography, and nor is our thinking. Much of the culture of innovation is no longer tied to Silicon Valley, there are centers of innovation all over the planet.

We are mobile and seemingly in constant motion, travelling thousands of miles in a day, in a week, in a month, yet we remain rooted within our online worlds as if we hadn't budged an inch. Our physical address changes more often than our online address.

And our digital technology is disappearing into our surroundings, becoming embedded and almost invisible; as the word "digital" is embedded and almost invisible in the word "nomadig."

The essay is here.

Nomadig is the basis for SVW's future arts and culture magazine that we spoke about late last year, and mentioned in early August.

It was to be called diggrz but that name will probably be changed to avoid association with Digg - the news aggregator. I wanted to make the connection with the Diggers, the 17th century English revolutionary group that advocated a defense of the commons, and despised wealth and privilege; sentiments often expressed in today's software engineer culture.

By Tom Foremski for Silicon Valley Watcher

In thinking about Google handing over identifiable information about users of its Orkut service to Brazilian authorities, and disclosures by Yahoo in China, couldn't such things be avoided fairly easily?

For example, Enron set up huge numbers of off-shore companies to hide its debt and obscure its financial reports. Why couldn't such a method be used by Google, for example, to hide and obscure its data collections? 

Those offshore companies could be made responsible for administration of parts of its services. They could pass back data to GOOG but that data would be only data that was needed for specific tasks.

If there were hundreds of such off-shore companies, maybe independent, handling various aspects of GOOG's services around the world, it would be very difficult for anyone to access, or force access, to personal data on many millions of users.

Contractual agreements between GOOG and the off-shore companies could further prohibit disclosure of personal information to GOOG and others.

Authorities in any country would be hard pressed to chase down or subpoena private data from large numbers of off-shore companies if the data were to be fragmented in this way. It is easy targeting just one big player.

Maybe there is an opportunity for the off-shore financial centers around the world to move into this kind of business?  After all, places such as Bermuda, Switzerland, etc, have strong laws protecting the identity of bank customers. It would be a small shift in the law to protect the identities of Internet users.

The Internet giants could still have their behavioral data on users but it would first be collected and  laundered by the offshore companies to remove identifiable information. There would be nothing to hand over if authorities were to pressure Google, Yahoo,  YouTube or any other web services provider.

Please also see:

DARPA TinyOS developers get $5m from Intel and others

By Tom Foremski for SiliconValleyWatcher Who says Big Brother/Sister isn't coming? It is but under a different guise...

Posted in Silicon Valley Watcher--on March 27, 2006 05:25 AM

Big Brother brings business opportunities

With all the chatter about Big Brother, and government subpoenas for internet usage data, there are business opportunities to be had...

UPDATE: A reader points out that it looks like the Irish Medical Times newspaper was hacked and then picked up by Google. I had posted this hack from Google News with an anti-Israeli message and I asked how GOOG could stop other such incidents and guarantee the integrity of the content.

Google News is one of the world's most popular web sites and a trusted brand. This means it has a responsibility to its community if it is to retain the trusted brand relationship--which Google has managed to maintain despite its super-star status.

http://72.14.203.104/search?q=cache:rX8_ZjbMpf4J:www.imt.ie/displayinterview.asp%3FWID%3D250%26CAT%3D19

Since Google does not employ any human editors, (it is all harvested by machines) the hack hasn't been filtered from Google News.

This calls for a Digg-type credibility system. GOOG can still use machines to harvest content, (more scalable than humans) and the readers can flag potential news hacks. The entire community benefits.

But that's if the community can detect false or doctored stories. A slight doctoring of a company earnings announcement could translate into market advantages for some, and could be difficult to spot in a timely manner by even the most vigilante citizen press corp.

Citizen journalists will be very important unless we figure out viable business models for the profession of journalism; they will be the public's prime media sources, but with the potential for misinformation too.

Private groups will increasingly finance professional journalists and collect and share the information in select groups to gain competitive advantages. Ted Shelton points out that this is the way the Venetian princes won at overseas trade.

Information about ships and prices of goods was valuable to those that had it. It was so valuable, that the Venetians managed to beat out competing trade centers--and also fund the Renaissance.

This transformed the entire known world. The Renaissance was a cultural and scientific revelation, it was the rediscovery of rationalism. This propelled humanity out of a millennium of Dark Ages and into the Age of Enlightenment, and led to our modern world. Not too shabby.

I know that there will be a new generation of Venetian princes from this next phase of the Internet. If it also brings a cultural revolution on a Renaissance scale, that would be interesting. I would certainly welcome a rediscovery of rationalism and the secular society.