Valentin's Blog

A great (non-technical) one hour presentation by Professor Jonathan Zittrain about the content of his forthcoming book "The Future of the Internet - And How To Stop It". The major theme of his talk is the dichotomy of steril (i.e. iPods, systems that can only do what their manufacturers intended) and generative systems (i.e. the PC or the Internet, systems that can be adapted by anyone). The starting point is that he sees the security problems on the Interent pushing the pendulum from generative to steril. His talk is followed by a shorter 20 min talk by Lawrence Lessig (without his famous slides, though) about the Privacy-Security trade-off.

In particular the talk by Zittrain is really a joy to watch, insightful and also quite funny (he manages to sneak in "Cats that look like Hitler" and his creative definition of best effort routing: "also known as send it and pray or every packet an adventure")

The video is embedded below, you can also see it at youtube.

Labels: Web

Techcrunch has highlighted an interesting presentation by Morgan Stanley about current Internet trends. The entire presentation is embedded below or here at Slideshare. The tidbits I found particular interesting:

• YouTube and Facebook together have more Page Views than google.com or yahoo.com
• 16% of online time is spend with 'social connections'
• More than 50% of Facebook users log in daily, 95% of Facebook users have used at least one third party application; 14 million photos are uploaded to Facebook every day
• In the US the money spend on direct telephone adds is still five times more than that spend on Internet advertising, money spend on newspapers ads is still more than double that spend on Internet advertising.
• Paid search accounts for 16% ($3billion) of the revenue generated on the Mobile Internet
• The majority of visitors to the US's main sites comes from outside the US (Except for Fox Interactive :) )
• More than twice as many mobile phone users as Internet users, the number of users in Asia+Africa has overtaken Europe+Americas in both cases.
• 6 of the top 10 Internet sites are social sites (YouTube, live.com, Facebook, hi5, Wikipedia, Orkut)

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Labels: Web

Well, at least until the 'Semantic Web Pipes' are ready for prime time: a webservice that allows to query sparql endpoints from within Yahoo Pipes. Look at the example below: It shows a simple pipe that takes a name as input, uses it to query the dblp sparql endpoint and returns the result as web page, JSON and RSS. You can try the pipe here. Surely getting an RSS feed for the publications from dblp could have been achieved without RDF-SPARQL-Pipes, however, we can now access all kinds of SPARQL endpoints and have the entire functionality of Yahoo Pipes at hand to combine it with other (possibly non-SemWeb) content.

Let me quickly explain the pipe: The 'Please enter the name' element defines the 'name' input to the pipe. The 'String Builder' block uses this name to build a sparql query and the 'Item Builder' combines the query and the endpoint URL (http://www4.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de/dblp/sparql, in this case) into an item that will be send to the web service. The web service (that lives at http://soboleo.fzi.de:8080/PipesSparqlr/sparql [1]) takes the query and endpoint URL, sends the query to the endpoint and translates the answer to a simpler JSON format[2]. Any error encountered is simple returned instead of a result - so you are able to see it in the debugger view of Yahoo Pipes.  The last operator, the Regex element, removes anything but characters from the item's title - sadly that's necessary because somewhere along the line the character encodings get mixed up and this is tripping up Yahoo Pipes so badly, that no result is returned as soon as one of the titles contains something like for example a German 'ä' or 'ö'. I'll try to fix this someday. The source code for the webservice (all ~100 lines of it ;) ) is available here - feel free to use it anyway you like. You'll need the JSON library and Java 1.5+ to compile, and some servlet container (I use tomcat 5.5.something) to run it. 

[1]: Feel free to use this webservice but don't count on it staying there forever.
[2]: Just passing through the SPARQL query result XML caused problems with Yahoo Pipes which expects either JSON or RSS.

Labels: Mashup, SemanticWeb, Web

More than 50% of U.S. 21 year olds have created content on the web
More than 70% of the U.S. 4 year-olds have used a computer
Every day more text messages are send then are people on this planet

These numbers and many more are in a video titled "Did you Know" available here and embedded below:

(via information aesthetics)

Labels: Web

I used to think that the Internet was steadily and rapidly advancing towards one free global net, with the attempts of governments to control it being only very short lived and futile. These days I'm becoming more and more skeptical about this idea, take a look at these links:

• A while ago Iran banned fast Internet Links to cut west's influence.
• A German court has ordered an ISP to ban a large porn site, because it violates strict German laws on youth protection (the decision is being appealed).
• Tunisia is giving you fake 404 error screens when you try to access the wrong political pages.
• In America,  Comcast will secretly sabotage your peer2peer traffic while AT&T will serve you only as long as you don't criticize them publicly (they have since revoked this clause and apologized).
• All in all the last five years have seen a rapid rise both in the number of countries employing filtering techniques as well as the scope of these measures.
• And only 6 percent of Chinese links go out of the country (although the implications of this number is unclear, missing a lot of context - e.g. what percentage of  German links go out of the country? But even if this number is unrelated to the great firewall of china, it still gives an idea how much locality continues to matters).

(In the end I still think that the emergence of one truly global net is very likely, but the way to get there is longer than I thought and will include a number of detours)

Labels: Web

What would the Web look like it were build (more) according to the ideas of visionaries like Paul Otlet, Vannevar Bush or Ted Nelson? Alex Wright tries to answer this question in his Google Tech Talk here. He hopes that by looking at ideas preceding the current web we can look beyond the kind of hypertext we are so used to and maybe find solutions to some of the problems facing the web today. Really an interesting talk - in particular the stories about Paul Otlet who started to build the social web of data (on a big scale with dozens of employees and dedicated buildings!) even before computers were invented.

Labels: Web

As you probably know, a few weeks ago the Anti-Trust ruling of the European Commission against Microsoft was upheld by the European Court of First Instance.  On this occasion the Economist* made some interesting remarks that detail the possible future impact of this ruling on Google and open data:

[...] it largely endorsed the commission's legal reasoning. It argued, for instance, that withholding information that is needed for PCs and servers to work together constitutes and abuse of a dominant position if it keeps others from developing rival software for which there is potential consumer demand. In such cases, the information cannot be refused even if it is protected by intellectual property rights, as Microsoft had argued.

And if Google becomes a central storage vault for data such as users' location and identity, as some fear, European regulators may one day try to compel the firm to give rivals open access to this information - rather as they have now forced Microsoft to release its communication protocols.

*: Issue 38, September 22nd - 28th, sadly not freely available online.

Labels: Web

Radioheads decision to allow buyers to decide how much (if anything) they want to pay for their new album has lead to a flurry of interesting discussions on the future business model of the music industry. I think that there is a good chance that in the long run the price of music records will decrease dramatically and that artist will be making their money from limited editions, memorabilia and, above all, events (see this techcrunch article and the its comments for more).

This weeks time magazine adds another interesting tidbit to this discussion:

Even the most lucrative deals - the ones reserved for repeat, multiplatinum superstars - give artists less than 20% of the sales they generate, and that has to feed multiple band members. Meanwhile, as CD sales decline, the concert business is booming. In July, Prince, long underestimated for his business acumen, decided to turn his most valuable asset - a buzzed-about record - into a loss leader, flooding the U.K. with 3 million free copes of this Planet Earth CD through the Mail on Sunday newspaper. He was ridiculed for going down market, until he announced 21 London concert dates - and sold out every one at prices five times the suggested retail price of a CD. Not surprisingly, Radiohead has an extensive tour planned for 2008.

Update: Also read this later techcrunch article (and the comments, because there are some valid counter-arguments).

Labels: Web

From last weeks Economist (June 16th-22nd p.67): A group in Britain is soliciting small pledges from a large number of football (=soccer) fans to takeover a football club. Once a team is acquired, "every decision - from picking players for the squad to choosing tactics and identifying candidates for transfers - will be made by the syndicates members". A coach will create the proposals of what he thinks is right for the team and the community can then vote on these proposals - that's real dedication to Web 2.0 ideas and I'm really interested to see whether the "wisdom of crowd" ideas work here (in fact I could imagine they do).

A prosaic reader might notice that this isn't so different from normal stock ownership - afterall the stock owners also get to vote on company decisions. There are, however, two important distinction: (1) The votes seem to be more concrete, more frequent and immediate and (2) no return of investment is promised, there are no dividends and I don't think that the "shares" can be sold.

Labels: Web

If you try to find pictures of the European Semantic Web Conference on Flickr using the tag eswc2007 all you currently find are hundreds of pictures from the Electronic Sports World Cup 2007 - an event sharing the same acronym and hence the same tag. Oh the irony..

Labels: SemanticWeb, SOBOLEO, Web

There was an annonyingly inprecise piece over at ReadWrite Web about Google as "The Ultimate Money Making Machine" .. but thinking about it brought me to two conclusions:

1) If you look at what really matters - money - then Google is first and foremost an advertisment brokering company. By "Our goal is to organize the worlds information" Google actually means: "Our goal is to place ads next to the worlds information" ;)

2) Hence any challenger to Google will most likely not be a better search engine but a better ad broker. And if I can speculate a bit more: this challenger will not succeed by challenging Google on "traditional" AdSense like adds, but by brokering ads in games, virtual worlds, to mobile phones (based on location), internet video .. or by better integrating old ad channels like print, tv ads, product placement ....

Of course, Google knows that - thats why they bought YouTube and a company that specializes in in-game advertisment; that's why they experiment with TV-ads and ads in print. But unlike with "traditional web ads" they don't dominate the market in this areas (yet) and hence there's a much better chance for competitors.

But well, all this brings us back to the question of Semantic Web Advertisments ;)

Labels: SemanticWeb, Web

Google Video has a talk about Yahoo Pipes. In general its a nice and gentle introduction to pipes, I found four tidbits of information mainly about the future plans of Pipes very interesting:

• In the new future they plan to allow you to add your own webservices as modules. 
• They are looking into ways to allow you to safely build Pipes on your private, password protected data (such as emails, calendars etc). Although it sounded like this is still quite a bit off.
• Yahoo Pipes is internally build on top of XML; its agnostic to whether its RSS or XML/RDF.  In the beginning they put the focus on RSS to make the tools easier to understand.  Not sure whether this is good news - processing RDF as XML really is neither easy nor powerful (compared to processing it as RDF).
• In general they struggle with the Power vs. Simplicity tradeoff; for example that led them to postpone the release of a database like "join" module for XML files.

Sadly they did not speak about the business case behind Yahoo Pipes, how Yahoo plans to earn money with this service.

Labels: Mashup, SemanticWeb, Web

From I, Cringely about Neokast - an application that makes broadcasting of streams several magnitudes cheaper by creating a peer2peer network between the computers receiving the stream.

Had there been no peers up and running other than mine, the video would have streamed straight from the server in Chicago, but with enough peers operating, the load on the originating server is several orders of magnitude less than for typical one-stream-per-user distribution.

For content creators this is key: the more people who watch your Neokast the more efficiently will your server bandwidth be utilized. According to Birrer, under normal circumstances the server bandwidth should plateau at 3-4 times that of a single stream NO MATTER HOW MANY VIEWERS ARE BEING SERVED.

But the news implications of somebody setting up a webcam from their window in Baghdad or Darfur and serving a truly global audience is what appeals to me.

That - the live broadcasting of events to a large audience from your home computer - really was the last (technical) frontier for citizen journalism. Now add a server that takes video calls from UMTS phones and sets up a Neokast for whatever is send  and for a few hundred dollars we can all have "portable news links" - and the next revolution in citizen journalism.  

Update: Alright, after reading through the comments at Cringely's site I must admit that similar technologies have been around for a while (for example PeerCast) - but still, Neokast looks like an idea who's time has come and that might move into the IT and blogging mainstream.

Labels: Web

--

FZI Forschungszentrum Informatik an der Universität Karlsruhe Haid-und-Neu-Str. 10-14
D-76131 Karlsruhe
Tel.: +49-721-9654-0
Fax: +49-721-9654-959

Stiftung des bürgerlichen Rechts
Stiftung Az: 14-0500.1 Regierungspräsidium Karlsruhe

Vorstand:
Prof. Dr.-Ing. Rüdiger Dillmann
Dipl. Wi.-Ing. Michael Flor
Prof. Dr. Dr.-Ing. Jivka Ovtcharova
Prof. Dr. rer. nat. Rudi Studer

Vorsitzender des Kuratoriums:
Ministerialdirigent Günther Leßnerkraus

Name of the company, address, form of organization, organization registration location and number, names of the directors and the head of the supervisory board. This, in short, is what I and every employee in Germany has to append to every (business) email send - mandated by law. Not kidding here - in a striking show of just how little they know about electronic communication the German government made a law equating business emails with snail-mail (where this kind of information used to be included in small print in the footer). The definition of business mail is so broad that it has to be understood as every email send by an employee of a company to someone on the outside. Not including this kind of information results in a fine for the company. It is still unclear whether this laws applies to SMS (like status SMS send by mobile phone providers) ... And no, it is not allowed to append a vcard (not every application can read them) or include a link to a website with this information.

I'm just happy that the responsible persons apparently did not yet hear of thing called "Instant Messaging" - it would just not be the same if every message had a 10 line signature ...

Labels: Web

This morning I spend some time trying to find Jim Gray. Jim Gray is renowned computer scientist that went missing after a solo trip with his sail boat. A group of people got together to organize a satellite run over the area where he is suspected, they separated the picture into many tiles and through Amazons Mechanical Turk site you can volunteer to analyze this data; try to find foreign objects on the satellite pictures. You can read more about it here.

Sadly I didn't find anything that looked really promising - I hope someone else has more luck.

However, I think that this kind of "crowdsourcing of surveillance" has a big future - the next time a large number of surveillance tapes need to be looked at fast after a terrorist attack - why not let volunteers do it? Have Israeli citizens see real time surveillance footage to look out for rocket launchers in Lebanon? Have relatives of soldiers back home monitor the perimeter of bases while the soldiers rest? US citizens can already help monitor the southern border from an Internet computer.

Labels: Web

From a BBC article summarizing the talk of Vint Cerf in Davos

Mr Cerf, who is one of the co-developers of the TCP/IP standard that underlies all Internet traffic and now works for Google, likened the spread of botnets to a "pandemic".

Of the 600 million computers currently on the Internet, between 100 and 150 million were already part of these botnets, Mr Cerf said.

Botnets are made up of large numbers of computers that malicious hackers have brought under their control after infecting them with so-called Trojan virus programs.

While most owners are oblivious to the infection, the networks of tens of thousands of computers are used to launch spam e-mail campaigns, denial-of-service attacks or online fraud schemes.

Technology writer John Markoff said: "It's as bad as you can imagine, it puts the whole Internet at risk."

I think likening the spread of botnets to a pandemic points in the right direction - some of the tradeoffs are similar to those faced in public health. For example the cost of protection (license for the virus scanner and the resulting lower performance of the computer) are born by the user of the computer, but we all benefit from less vulnerable computers, i.e. smaller botnets. Its very similar to vaccination - getting vaccinated caries some risk and the best case for each person is that she is the only one without a vaccination: No risk of getting the disease and it was not even necessary to take the small risk of vaccination.

It is for this reason that government involvement could make us all better off. The government could either reward the positive side effects of protecting a computer by giving away free licenses for virus scanners (the same kind of reasoning that lets governments often pay for vaccinations). Or it could regulate - similar to mandatory vaccinations. It could demand that PCs be sold only with virus scanners valid for at least five years, that each email provider must scan incoming emails and that ISP's must protect their costumers with firewalls... yes, it could make PC's, email accounts and Internet connection more expensive - but the cost for dealing with SPAM, DDOS  and other kinds of cybercrime would decrease.

Labels: Web

Enjoyable Google tech talk of Ted Nelson (famous for example for coining the terms hypertext and hypermedia) about how he thinks the web should be structured (his vision includes typed links ;-). I don't think the presented vision is realistic for a large part of the web - but the talk is worth the 40 minutes (plus 15 minutes discussion).   My favorite quote (taken a bit out of context):

You can read my apologies in [...] for any part I had in creating html links [...] I think its one of the worst thinks that has happened to the human race [...] 

Or watch it at Google Video.

Labels: Web

First an enjoyable and interesting Google Tech Talk about IP rights by James Boyle:

And then there is an interesting piece about the cost caused by Windows Vista's content protection here.  Really a shame. I actually like quite a bit of Microsoft's Software.  I love the new Office 2007 - courageous of Microsoft to change the UI so much - but it really turned out well! After seeing what they can achieve it's particularly sad to see these great engineers wasting their time trying to defend stupid IP ideas and making our lives as computer user miserable in the process.

Labels: Web