Cohere

I went to my first SuperHappyDevHouse -- the sixth and last this year. A very productive evening that I left around 4 am. SuperHappyDevHouse is scheduled to go until 7 am |).

I met and talked to several people; some I had just met briefly before like factoryjoe, aka Chris Messina, and many I talked to for the first time. The only distracting incongruence were the guys from Meetro. The Meetro product looks like a fun, interesting and useful tool. But they came in promoting, promoting, promoting while everyone else was there to learn and get work done. I suggest they find out what an event is about and see how to make their product fits into that environment.

Among the ideas and products demonstrated I found fascinating was iGlance, an open source real time collaboration system. And Rhyzomatic, a service to create a personal permalink that unites all your identities in one place.

I'm going to start working on ideas for features and capabilities in video based on the conversations and information presented .

"The Medium is the Message"

"In a culture like ours, long accustomed to splitting and dividing all things as a means of control, it is sometimes a bit of a shock to be reminded that, in operational and practical fact, the medium is the message. This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium - that is, of any extension of ourselves - result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology."

-- Marshall McLuhan

IRC is not blogging.

Mena Trott, president of Six Apart which organized Les Blogs, was speaking on civility and accountability when she pointed out an example of rudeness on the IRC back channel projected behind the speakers. Mena apparently confused the media of blogging which is often related to newspaper editorializing with IRC chat which is related to chatting with a group of friends and passing notes in class. They are different mediums of expressions with different rules. One doesn't project the notes students pass in class during a lecture onto an overhead projector without editing. Or put the gossip of students over the school PA system without moderating them. The same goes for projecting an IRC back channel during the Les Blogs sessions. The fault was not with the IRC participants but with the lack of appropriate moderation.

Unfortunately this mix-up seems to have gone mostly unnoticed and bloggers continued talking past each other. Dave joined in, disagreeing with Ben Metcalfe and Tara's positive assessment of him. Both pointing to broad concepts of net accountability and the individual being the determinant of the net. These ideas don't contradict each other or compete. And the confusion of misidentifying the nature of the mediums remained in the background.

I've been reading 37signal's Signal vs. Noise weblog which I find useful for challenging potential Web 2.0 hyperbole. Also recently I listened to the IT Conversations podcast by James Surowieki: "Independent Individuals and Wise Crowds". Surowieki speaks about studies that show the advantage of a diverse population of independent individuals reaching better conclusions than the advise of a population of only those with expert knowledge. That some randomness and noise evolves to better results.

This means that a degree of diversity and noise is important to getting good signal. That it's not a noise or signal proposition, but that a level of noise is necessary for a deap, rich, meaningful signal. Too much noise and the signal is indistinguishable. To little noise and the signal is flat, monotone, narrowly applicable and uninteresting. So a flux of amount of signal and noise makes for rich, valueable information.

When the supr.c.ilio.us blog became active, I delighted in it. Here was biting humor for an industry that sometimes...often takes itself too seriously to the point of doing some ridiculous things. On the other hand, the sting of the dot.com bust is still with many of us. So some snark is undue pessimism and software politics such as the posts on Dave Winer.

But humor and critical sites like Geek Entertainment Television and 37 Signals' Signal to Noise blog serve an important purpose of

• Deflating overzealous Web 2.0 descriptions and predictions
• Chiding the industry to make their language accessible to the uniniated

The big challenge is not only to create compelling and useful technology. But to make it comprehensible to those outside the biz. That's what Steve Jobs excels at in helping develop and promoting products like the iPod. And that is what Web 2.0 evangelists need to do when describing the net developments.

The other aspect is people's sight tends to be linear and short. They either see great happenings in the last few years or very little has changed. Whereas technology tends to be exponential in it's impact, but has a long period of algorithmic increase until it "explodes". Ray Kurzweil shows data on this in his book, "The Singularity is Near". In "The S-Curve of a technology as Expressed in Its Life Cycle" section of Chapter 2, Kurzweil identifies the technology life cycles as:

1. During the precursor stage, the prerequisites of a technology exist, and dreamers may contemplate these elements coming together...
2. The next stage, one highly celebrated in our culture, is invention, a very brief stage, similar in some respects to the process of birth after an extended period of labor...
3. The next stage is development, during which the invention is protected and supported by doting guardians (who may include the original inventor)...
4. The fourth stage is maturity. Although continuing to evolve, the technology now has a life of its own and has become an established part of the community...
5. Here an upstart threatens to eclipse the older technology. Its enthusiasts prematurely predict victory...
6. This is a short-lived victory for the aging technology. Shortly thereafter, another new technology typically does succeed in rendering the original technology to the stage of obsolescence...
7. In this stage, which may comprise 5 to 10 percent of a technology's life cycle, it finally yields to antiquity (as did the horse and buggy, the harpsichord, the vinyl record, and the manual typewriter.)

Kurzweil goes on to explain these life cycles for the phonograph, compact disc, piano, book, etc.

My view is that net technology is in the third stage of self-protection. That prior dot.com period was the invention of net technology with irrational exuberance. The current place is a self-protective development of the technology on the way to maturity and widespread use.

The next point is not a simpler, more intuitive web -- AJAX and such -- but being untethered from the desktop and laptop. This is where the iPod is pointing to and the challenge ahead. It is the ability to work anywhere without having to give full attention to the computer. A device that works naturaly with human beings like the iPod starts to do and has all the capabilities of a desktop system.

Practically this means mobile devices that you can talk and talk back to and have natural input touch devices. A prototype early example of this is TechCrunch's review of Ajay Juneja voice controlled car.

The significance to being untethered is an exponential capability in daily activity. Being able to look up information at the spot where one is when about to give a lecture, contacting someone associated on your network that can deliver a service needed now ("Are you at Fry's computer store?" "Can you pickup a USB cable and we can meet along the way?" "I've authorized you $40 on paypal.") Then people will be able to deliver services to each other as either barter or payment, rather than advertising being the main web model.

This may seem mundane but how much time and effort is used up doing things on ones own waiting to get to the right place and time? The result is an exponential ability to focus and achieve ones goals.