PIE and MASH: a Lens For a Semantic Web

We are only a few weeks into the year and it already seems clear that one of the major trends will be integration activity to “orchestrate” information sources – to create lenses to MASH and focus information for our Personal Information Environments.

Activity Stream integration

 Social networks were a big factor in 2008 and social networkers were among the first off the blocks in 2009 to catch my attention with a meeting on  January 9th at the offices of Six Apart to discuss standards for activity streams. People belong to different social networks but cannot easily (if at all) communicate between these networks – solving this problem will be like the day when email users on different email systems could email each other.

News Stream Integration

Another early set of activities that caught my attention were the discussions about RSS overload and the need to deal with this somehow. RSS is an essential tool for pulling information into your environment but with the dramatic growth of the web even RSS has trouble coping. Michael Kowalchik describes how our feed readers and our use of them are based on the older email paradigm of inboxes and a must read all items attitude. Kowalchik says that both feed readers and our attitudes to information need to change -  ” people will increasingly want to experience information, not be slaves to it”. Kowalchik describes Mike Winner’s the “River of News Concept” which informed many news aggregators including Grazr – “the name “grazr” comes from, grazing information, not drowning in it.”

Activity and News Stream MASHING

Another item that caught my attention was the way the way on-line social media responded to the Hudson River Plane Crash. There have been many stories of the way news breaks first on social networks and about how the major news corporations make use of material from people camera phones but what caught my attention this time was the way in which social media itself could offer coverage. Kevin Sablan’s Almighty Link used storytlr to gather feeds from Twitter, Flickr, YouTube and Vimeo to create an aggregated “real-time “story”. He describes “the hard part was editing, or what Tim Windsor calls curating, the approximately 700 bits of information into some semblance of a disjointed story”. The result was “a stream of moments captured by individual storytellers, the  ”lifestream” not of a person, but an event.”  There was also a Hudsonplane Friendfeed room which could be regarded as a “web2.0 viralism mashup” equivalent of a newsroom of the event.

Beyond Google – The Real Time Web

Writing for RWW Bernard Lunn uses the web 2.0 response to the Hudson Plane Crash to illustrate the way in which the web has moved from IBM (mainframe) to Microsoft (client-server) to Google (on-line) and is now moving beyond Google’s grasp and into real time. He argues that “It’s the Real-Time Web that will unseat Google. This idea has been percolating for a while, but it took a plane landing in the Hudson River to make it obvious. Google cannot be real-time. It indexes the historical web, and it does it better and faster than anyone else.”

PIE and MASH a Lens For a Semantic Web

With all the activity and news streams flooding into my on-line environment I feel my river of news is more like a rapid – I want something to pre-process the streams and present me a river instead of a torrent. I want to be able to search and define sources; aggregate them and sort their presentation according to my own criteria. For example, I would like to input items on Cloud Computing from Twitter; Youtube; blogs and traditional news sources and web sites. The part that I think will develop this year is the difficult next step of pre-processing the information sources. Quantitative pre-processing tools exist – tools like Postrank will exam social bookmarking statistics, blog hits, referrals and comment quantities  to rank feeds but what I would like is some form of qualitative pre-processing – this is the difficult part – for what do I mean by Qualitative. At the moment my qualitative assessment of information is associated with people and recommendations. To find news I check Twitter first and see what my network is talking about, then I check the RWW and Mashable etc for RSS feeds. In terms of Quality I would need a way to weight feeds according to mentions of sources and people – not just numbers of hits.

In order to apply qualitative criteria to information sources either the information sources must carry additional information (meta data like tags,statistics, Microformats and RDFa) or a tool must be able to extract data from the context of the information source – how it is associated in the web – how richly it is associated and with what. I seem to be talking about the semantic web and this is not surprising as semantics (meaning) is largely about associations and relationships between things – the more meaningful something is the more deeply and richly it is associated with other things and meanings.

People are getting used to Personal Information Environments (PIE) – systems like iGoogle or Netvibes where you can suck in various information and display it in various ways.However, PIE tools look set for a revolution in 2009 if

 Marc Canter’s DiSo Dashboard proposal gains traction. By implementing DiSo dashboard  proposals popular PIEs could extend and integrate across social networks and Lifestream activity as well as RSS mega aggregation.

 

I’m hoping that tools will become smarter in 2009 and help me manage my information sources more meaningfully – I will be keeping an eye on the DiSo project in general and the DiSo Dashboard  idea in particular,

I Never make Predictions and Never Will: IT Predictions For 2009

William Gibson’s quote “The Future is Already Here – It’s Just Not Evenly Distributed” is a powerful and practical idea for working out what is going to happen in the short term – extrapolate from current edge and current trends. Using my crystal ball to throw the light of the recent past into the near future I see network effects creating exponential growth in certain areas and it is on these areas I have focused on below.

Cloud Applications Get Very, Very Good

Google Apps became serious in 2008 and improved as the year passed – they demonstrate the potential of on-line applications with new abilities that come naturally from being on-line (collaboration, web integration and data lookup), platform neutrality (work on Mac, Linux, Microsoft) and are free!

In 2009 Microsoft will be releasing some form of on-line application – the probable result will be to validate the model and expand the market. Microsoft’s activities will be influential and important to bring the cloud to the awareness of mainstream users. The next version of Office is expected to have “cloud additions” like Office Live – which allows you to store and share files in the cloud but you still need local Microsoft application software to use them -Software plus Service (Microsoft software plus Internet service). This approach is useful -Microsoft will be able to sell software (and this would be a compelling upgrade) and the “normal” Office user will get cloud access within the comfort zone of their familiar Office environment – the common Microsoft extend and embrace strategy. More interesting will be the browser based Microsoft office that is due out in 2009 although Microsoft say it will offer “light editing” of office files many expect it to be a very slick operator.

We need competition in the cloud but the scale and resources required needs major investment and infrastructure – competition in this area really needs to be among the really big companies (apologies to Zoho who have a very extensive and nice cloud suite). The competition between Google and Microsoft will be good for cloud applications and the expectation is that Google have major improvements planned as a response to Microsoft’s moves.

Although Google apps are already very good my expectation is that by the end of 2009 cloud applications will be very, very good.

Lifestreaming Becomes Mainstream

During 2008 Twitter achieved its billionth message (tweet) went exponential and was adopted almost everywhere e.g. in  Government, Politics, business.  Like many major developments Twitter is relatively simple and this is what has driven its growth – it is easy to start, easy to use, easy to use in different ways and is highly extendable, for example the Twitter API carries 10 times the traffic of the visible Twitter site – this is used by 3^rd party twitter user interfaces but also for systems interfaces – e.g. to feed into Facebook. A suggestion of what of what to expect is the way web sites and blogs are now embedding twitter streams and for a change Twitter themselves even produced Twitter badges to assist with this. Increasing participation is speeding up the Internet and simple lifestreaming systems like twitter give people a foot in the door and an important presence in a “Global Village” of 1.5 Billion that is growing at 20% per year. Whenever I come across someone I expect them to have Net presence – I expect them to have a Lifestreaming and a Blog. Network effects are important and as more people use Lifestreaming and Twitter in particular the more important it will become and the bigger it will become.

Devices Get And Use Senses

The Graphical User Interface (GUI) enriched and enhanced computing – it liberated us from the command line with a more natural mode of working and allowed “normal” people to work with computers. However, the very success of the GUI has blinkered our vision of other approaches.  As computers permeate our everyday lives and environments they need to be more responsive to our daily lives and environments. The Wii and the iPhone – both are less powerful in hardware terms than similar products but both have been wildly successful due to the new way they interact with the user and the environment and both have brought in a new set of users. The Google Mobile App for iPhone is already pretty amazing but even more suggests what will be possible. Consider the impressive list of interfaces already present on the iPhone – location (GPS), visual (screen, camera), audio (speaker, microphone), touch, tilt, proximity, vibration – we should expect further exploitation of these. Other manufacturers will be seeking to catch up and improve upon the iPhone – I think we will see some very impressive sensory applications for mobile devices in 2009 – I’m looking forward to be able to talk to and listen to the net e.g. “Phone – is there a traffic problem around here” and have it search traffic reports in my location and respond “yes – burst water main 1 mile ahead” for example. Microsoft tag and Amazon’s iPhone application suggest some ways in which we can use sensors in our smartphones. 

The Web Gets More Programmable

With the web getting more participative information is generated at a higher speed and in greater quantities – tools to manage and cope are essential and those tools need to get smarter – this could be more a wish than a prediction but there are signs that smarter tools (agents) will become available to us. The “ecology” developing around Twitter gives some good examples. Twitter provides only a simple web interface but the Twitter API is heavily exploited by third parties to provide a huge range of applications based around Twitter. These applications indicate what can be done for users –  Twitchboard which listens to your twitter account, and forwards messages on to other internet services based on what it hears or Shozu which provides a system to integrate many of your services from your mobile.  The more adventurous user may like to try Microsoft’s simple MASH creator Popfly while more advanced users may which to try Yahoo Pipes, the Yahoo Application Platform, Google App engine  or Microsoft’s Azure to create their own applications like this Twitter search using Google App engine or this Twitter search using Microsoft Azure. By the end of 2009 I am expecting to see more people using RSS, Integration services and even programming services.

Netbooks Go Massive

Small used to mean expensive but now small means affordable – the combination of economic problems and the need for mobility means that netbooks will be overwhelmingly popular – everyone I meet just loves them. The Asus Eee was like the punks who set a new fashion trend which was appropriated by the major fashion houses so that it became mainstream, now every manufacturer offers netbooks and there is now more of a continuum of models from the smallest to the largest so that the concept of netbook starts t lose meaning – is a 12in netbook really a netbook?

The Cloud Goes Massive

In the same way that mobile phones are given away as part of a network contract we see computers being given away as part of Internet contracts for what use is a computer without a network these days? With the Economic problems people will be choosing between computing (local compute power and applications) and networking – cloud computing is there at the right time to offer a solution with free (or relatively cheap) cloud services with free (or relatively cheap) local computing. Network effects will expend the cloud – as more people use it the more useful it becomes and the more people use it. Microsoft’s development of their Cloud services (Live), Office and Windows 7 will all “legitimise” the cloud for mainstream users and expand the market further.

I Never make Predictions and Never Will: Media Predictions For 2009

Many comment that in our on-line activities will leave little past, however it is certainly true that our recent past is better documented that ever before. You can access my twitter activity from this time last year here is my first tweet for example and you can see all my past blogs including my Predictions for 2008 to see how good, bad or ugly they were.

William Gibson’s quote “The Future is Already Here – It’s Just Not Evenly Distributed” is a powerful and practical idea for working out what is going to happen in the short term – extrapolate the current edge and current trends. Things usually get smaller, lighter, easier, cheaper and more functional and common place – computers and telephones are good examples of this. We must also beware of technological determinism – we have to consider the complex interaction of contextual factors (economy, culture etc) that can change the “trajectory” of any extrapolation.

Using my crystal ball to throw the light of the recent past into the near future – it all seems quite cloudy to me and everything I see is on-line. The big theme for the year will be on-line everything and as more go on line network effects will cause more to go on-line resulting in an explosive growth in on-line activity. Despite of (or maybe even due to) economic problems 2009 could be a significant year for the information age – when many 20^th century physical industrial activities are moved on-line.

Let’s try to focus some of this.

Media

The industrial processes of the 20^th century to represent, distribute and consume information will continue to disappear – information is intangible anyway and so is ideal for on-line virtualisation.

Audio: Audio set the example of how information can move away from the physical the stories of Napster and iTunes are now history and the Nokia music service of 12 months unlimited free perpetual but protected downloads takes this model almost as far as it can go. With music content “infinitely” copy-able and accessible monetization has to move to an incidental model of distribution deals and sponsorship.  The SeeqPod service indicates that on-line streaming/access could be a significant development. It will always be useful to have off-line copies of your favourite music but the advantages of streaming are there for everyone. For consumers there can be an “infinite” range to listen to on-demand without management – just search. For the industry on-line listens can be instrumented (pun intended) and monetised with “incidental” and direct marketing. There is of course better control – music can be published free at source (e.g. from Sony), with the publisher monetising through “incidental” services but also allowing 3^rd party API and streaming access for downstream services. I like the concept of on-line downstream “radio stations” such as Blip.fm, Lastfm and Pandora. Indeed Pandora offers an excellent example of the benefits of the on-line model in driving further interest by what could be described as audio surfing.

Video: Youtube and the iPlayer provides good examples of what we might expect in video. iPlayer has many advantages (on-demand view) especially with the BBC “transmitting” live on the net via iPlayer. Youtube in particular has become such a mainstream distribution method – standard TV channels, organisations, political parties and of course individuals are all there (e.g. BBC, Channel 4, Obama, Google and have a look at the Governator).

Words: Newspapers and magazines all have good on-line presence and for many their on-line activity is increasingly necessary and important. Pew research finds that the Internet has overtaken newspaper as a source of news for many people and for young people the Net is the main source of news. All the newspapers now offer excellent RSS feeds and various incidental services such as reader and journalist blogs, podcasts and various systems interfaces for systems such as Facebook and Twitter for example.  The New York Times indicates how “newspapers” may develop – with the news of their API development program to “make the NYT programmable. To start 2009 the NYT release Represent – it mashes geographical information with various web data to present information about the politicians who represent geographical areas in New York. Books I feel will also succumb eventually – the physicality of a book (cover, typeface etc) are much like the physicality of old vinyl records. During 2008 e-book readers became a lot better and the advantages for industry and consumers over paper became tangible. Although the e-book reader really is useable now it is another purchase and item to carry around and look after – I would prefer to access an books on my smartphone or laptop/netbook. I think that e-books will break the market in for consolidation onto standard equipment – a prediction for 2010 I recon.     

MASH Media

I can’t resist it but in 2009 “the medium is the message” (sorry). Possibly the biggest development in media will be the way it all gets mixed up – once they all share the same medium then they can mix and match. 2008 has seen the start of this and it is becoming increasingly common – 2009 will see a lot more of this. Already in 2008 we see newspapers with plenty of additional media content – the Guardian tech weekly for example has audio, video, blogs, Facebook, Twitter etc and text – the Bivings Report indicates just how active Newspapers are on the web – e.g. all have RSS feeds, 75% accept comments on articles and most now have free access.  Cross platform media outlet Current indicate how media may develop – in their US Election coverage they have been combining video coverage with input from Twitter, Digg and 12seconds.TV.

All this and I haven’t even covered how Youtube is going live and HD.

The message is – if you want media you need to get on-line.