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18 December 2006

Robert Scoble interviews Marc Lucovsky

Podtech Marc Lucovsky Google Thumb

The Podtech network is assembling a good body of podcast content on their site, and they're well worth keeping an eye on.

They also offer video interviews, and some of those Robert Scoble has been doing recently have been great. Unfortunately, as reported before, I tend to listen to podcasts in the car and I'm not sure how well the police would take to me watching videos whilst driving. So although the videos are great, I tend to queue them up and not actually get around to watching very often. Indeed, I frequently wish there were an audio-only version for me to treat as a podcast; does a picture of a talking head really add much to what the head is saying, and would it not be better for me to just hear it rather than never quite getting around to watching? With show notes containing a set of pointers, I could then find and view any of the sites shown during the video... if what I heard interested me.

Anyway, Ben Toth sent me an email over the weekend that caused me to actually sit down and watch one of the videos in my queue.

In the video, Robert talks to Marc Lucovsky. Marc, formerly involved with Microsoft's Hailstorm, is now at Google and working with their AJAX Search API.

It's an interesting interview, with loads of pointers to some of the ways in which a Platform provider can make themselves invaluable to a broad constituency, and Marc has a lot to say about how - and why - one might want to take a service (like Google search) and make it easy to embed within someone else's application in ways that meet their needs rather than Google's.

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14 December 2006

The 3D Internet

If you have been reading Nodalities' sister blog Panlibus recently you cannot have failed to have missed that we at Talis have not only been watching Second Life with interest, but are actively involved in aiding the library community experiment with it and understand what it is all about.

Most of the chatter in those postings, and many others on the subject, was around how you interact with people, represent your organization inside a virtual world. I attended a Second Life event in London yesterday to hopefully find out more about it and how it might influence what Talis is doing in Second Life. The presentations were slanted at the marketing fraternity, educating the audience on how/why they can represent their brands within Second Life. The main speaker was Glenn Fisher, Director, Marketing Programs for Linden Lab [The organization that runs Second Life], followed by a presentation from Rivers Run Red [a London branding agency helping to shape Second Life] 'Creating successful brand presence in Second Life - Integrating Second Life in to your marketing offerings' - see what I mean.

Nevertheless it was an interesting session which reflected the experience of introducing Adidas, BBC Radio 1, and others in to the virtual world. It was unfortunate that a demonstration of how to create stuff inside Second Life was spoiled by a combination of lack of Mac experience from the demonstrator and what looked like a fairly serious system crash. - The joys of live demonstrations, tell me about it!

What I found most interesting, and prompted this posting, can be summed up in a throw away line from Glenn near the end - "We want Second Life to become The 3D Internet" (my emphasis)

There was much questioning and discussion in the session about the quality of the experience for users of Second Life, and the addition of new capabilities such as the integration of mobile phone messaging, VOIP, and TV channel streaming in to the world. After a while a theme started to emerge, when the fact that Linden had announced that the Open Sourcing of the client and the Second Life APIs - soon was used as the answer to many questions both in and after the sessions.

  • Are you working on the graphical side of SL, to compete with things like World of Warcraft? - No, but once we have OS'd the client and the APIs we fully expect others to build both cut-down and enhanced clients.
  • Will it be possible to simply scan documents in to software in the real world, and have them appear as objects in SL? - With access to the OS Client & APIs, many things like this will be possible.
  • Could SL actions, purchases etc., be fully integrated with a user's real world? - Yes, by using the OS client and APIs ........

In answers to questions about current performance, or lack of it, issues it was clear that Linden are concentrating upon the robustness and scalability of the SL Platform - not just as a short term strategy but as a business model. By opening up the Platform APIs and the client source code, we will attract others to build on our platform to add value for themselves and the community within SL. - not sure if those were the exact words, but you get the gist of it. With the odd word changed here and there, you could hear that same statement from, Amazon, eBay, Salesforce.com, the WindowsLive division of Microsoft, Talis and many others, each providing a Platform approach to facilitate the delivery of solutions which add value to all solutions built on that Platform.

One thing is different though with Linden's proposition. Their Platform is one on which you can build an equivalent of every major Internet user interaction, but in a 3D world. Search, Chat, Messaging, Information dissemination, Blogging, Social Tagging/Networking/Interaction, Entertainment, Media streaming, Advertising, Retailing, eCommerce, Customer support, are all thing that could be replicated in [and in most cases be enhanced by] a 3D equivalent. Instead of clicking on your web browser favorite to be taken to view the local electrical retailer's web site, you could activate your avatar's favorite and be teleported to the retailer's virtual storefront where you could not only satisfy your query but also opt to interact with other customers you find there. Suspend your disbelief (resulting from using Linden's current UI) for a moment, and project forward a few years - I might just be describing the new metaphor for human Internet interaction

Yeah, so what you say - its only like projecting forward Tim Berners-Lee's Web vision from the mid nineties to now. Well yes it is BUT, up until now nobody as such has owned the Platform people use to interact. Once you have paid providers to access the Internet's resource's is mostly open and free, and definitely not in the hands of one controlling body. Whereas the Linden Platform that runs Second Life, complete with its own currency, is owned by them. From a financial point of view Second Life is more like a Country than a commercial software application. Project it forward and we could all end up online-living in the same country under the governance of the owners of that Country

So today I think I might have seen a vision of one possible online future - The 3D Internet. [Now that would really warrant the use of the Web 3.0 label]. One which may cause some science-fiction writers to take the Google logo off their State Police uniforms and replace it with a Linden one

Or maybe I've had too much coffee...



(Second Life - Platform image taken by Eric RiceEr displayed in Flickr)

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13 December 2006

Paul Walsh of Segala talks with Talis on Search Thresher and the Semantic Web

Paul Walsh
In our latest Talking with Talis podcast, I spoke to Paul Walsh, CEO of Segala. We discuss some of the history behind Segala and their involvement with web accessibility testing activities. We then move on to explore the topic of 'trust' and assertions of trustworthiness online, focussing specifically upon some recent work by Segala that has resulted in a visible example of the Semantic Web at work; their Search Thresher extension to the Firefox web browser.

Paul and I are members of the World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C) new Semantic Web Education & Outreach (SWEO) activity, and we finish the call discussing some of the ways in which the very real potential of the Semantic Web could be made apparent to its detractors.

Have a listen, and let us know what you think.



Listen Now | Download MP3 [44 mins, 30 Mb]

During the conversation, we refer to the following significant resources;

Paul's biography from the Segala web site follows;

“Paul Walsh is the co-founder and CEO of Segala, an authority and worldwide provider for web accessibility and mobile testing and certification services. Paul is responsible for setting the company's strategic goals and direction and has grown the company to become one of the world's most widely recognised and respected Trustmarks for web accessibility standards compliance.

Paul is an experienced public speaker and chair/moderator on topics such as accessibility, Mobile Web, Web 2.0 and enabling Trust on the internet using content labelling and is in demand at conferences and seminars around the world.

Prior to Segala, Paul was an executive at Eqos, a pioneer in the development of Web technologies for the B2B retail industry. In 1995 he became one of the first employees for AOL in Europe. He was a key member of the team developing AOL's UK presence and assisted with the launch of other AOL European territories.

He is Segala's W3C advisory committee representative, a founding member of the Mobile Web Initiative steering council and sponsor of the W3C's first incubator activity initiative to develop content labelling standards for the Web.

Paul was elected Chair of the British Interactive Media Association (BIMA), a trade association for the interactive industry, in May 2006. Founded in 1985, BIMA is the longest standing trade association for the British interactive industry, supporting the interactive media sector as a whole, and the commercial development of its members.”

This conversation was conducted by telephone on Wednesday 13 December 2006. Audacity was used to edit the audio, with Levelator automatically balancing levels on the finished file.

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7 December 2006

Off we go up the learning curve once more

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I've been at Talis for over a year now, and it's been both great fun and a challenging learning experience throughout. Although I'm certainly not leaving the company, it's time for a change of direction as from January I shift my attention toward something we're calling 'Project Calypso'.

In some ways, this is a return to issues with which I was involved in an earlier life, before becoming increasingly embroiled in all things library. It takes me back toward RDF and the Semantic Web, to my rather faded copy of that Scientific American article from 2001, and to seeing the huge distances thinking and doing have moved since the 'Miller Datamodel twins' sat down in a (Washington DC, I seem to remember) hotel room with Dan Brickley to write this.

Colleagues such as Ian Davis on the Platform team here have remained closer to these things in the intervening years than I, and I am somewhat daunted by the prospect of the mountains of physical and virtual paper heading my way to get me caught up.

It's challenging, exciting, a little scary, and definitely the right way to go. Watch out for more on Project Calypso here on Nodalities and elsewhere.

I thought I might start things off gently, though, using the next few posts to share some of my changing perspectives and new findings as I offload existing commitments and work to get myself up to speed in this area. I look forward to having those perspectives challenged, and to having those reading this blog chip in with their own views on the things I should be reading and thinking about, and the people I should be finding time to sit down with.

Come along as I ascend the steeply curving slopes of Mt. Learning. It'll be fun...

Image of Mount Everest by Thomas Wanhoff, downloaded from Flickr where it's CC licensed; Attribution-Sharealike.

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5 December 2006

An Internet Archive for Data? A YouTube for data? Or something else?

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Over on TechCrunch, Mike Arrington has a piece on a new service called Swivel.

Variously described as “The Internet Archive for Data”, or “YouTube for Data”, the premise is absolutely fascinating.

“...the site allows users to upload data - any data - and display it to other users visually”
“Uploaded data can be rated, commented and bookmarked by other users, helping to sort the interesting (and accurate) wheat from the chaff. And graphs of data can be embedded into websites. So it is in fact a bit like a YouTube for Data.

But then the real fun begins. You and other users can then compare that data to other data sets to find possible correlation (or lack thereof). Compare gas prices to presidential approval ratings or UFO sightings to iPod sales. Track your page views against weather reports in Silicon Valley. See if something interesting occurs.”

Great as this sounds, the potential for deliberate mischief or innocent confusion is truly immense. I remember the palpitations that fellow researchers in the GIS world used to suffer whenever anyone proposed overlaying two pieces of map data of (slightly) differing scale. Imagine the possibilities for discovering that nine out of ten cat owners have a cat, or that 'everyone' who voted for Bush lives in Florida... Just because you can combine two sets of data and produce an 'answer', doesn't mean that answer has any value or meaning whatsoever. And at one or more removes from the data, who's to know what's 'true' and what isn't?

Important as the capability to re-use data most certainly is, various scientific archives around the world are investing quite vast chunks of their budgets in documenting the detail and the premises behind each data set; when was it collected?; by whom?; why?; according to what method?; was there a sampling strategy?; what proportion of any given population was sampled?; how - if at all - were results normalised? And so on. And on. And, yes, on. Collecting data is hard. Manipulating data properly is also hard.

All of that said, I am truly intrigued by the possibilities when people are given a capability such as this to experiment and to explore their own data along with that contributed by others. The test, in my view, will be to see whether or not Swivel and its participants can find ways to meaningfully and accessibly answer the sorts of questions that will allow others to combine and recombine with confidence.

A further missing piece is, of course, the way in which data are adequately and properly attributed. Might something like the TCL play a part there, giving the owners of potentially valuable data the confidence to contribute it to the pool?

I look forward to seeing where this particular idea goes. Having worked with large - and often tightly controlled - sets of data at various points in my career, I've always pushed to make them more accessible. Maybe Swivel is what I was searching for all along. Maybe. I'll not be able to say more until I've had an opportunity to try it for myself, but I certainly look forward to that day.

Looking at the comments on Mike's post, can I echo 'Dave' in asking;

“if the founders are reading this, i’d love to add one critical request (though it might already be in there) - user driven reviews of data integrity and reliability (e.g. ‘this data set has been marked ‘riddled with errors’ by 42 users)…likewise, will there be indications that the data set has come from an authority or expert resource (a la google coop)?”

[and yes, the founders were listening...]

And, in echoing some thoughts of my own, they're clearly clever people...

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