Redcatco » InnovationEdge http://redcatco.com Connecting People With Technology Sat, 13 Mar 2010 17:25:30 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.2 en hourly 1 Future of The Web – Part II – The Future http://redcatco.com/blog/technology/future-of-the-web-part-ii-the-future/ http://redcatco.com/blog/technology/future-of-the-web-part-ii-the-future/#comments Mon, 14 Jul 2008 22:07:11 +0000 Benjamin http://redcatco.com/blog/?p=531

A minutely belated followup to “Future of The Web – Part I – A History“, these are the rest of my thoughts on the NESTA “Future of the Web“ session. The videos of the event are here - you’ll need to be able to play Windows Media files.

Unsurprisingly, there were some parallels with the previous session (see Tim Berners-Lee @ The Innovation Edge). It was a shame that it didn’t touch on many of the things that came up in the Wordle cloud (Communicating Feelings on the Future of the Web), as there were some interesting items there. Lloyd Davis’ post “Tim Berners-Lee at NESTA on the Future of the Web” says the unsaid well. Sir Tim’s talk was about 20 minutes. I don’t think anyone there would have complained if it had been 3 hours, especially the topics around the Web Science Research Initiative.

Sir Tim’s current baby is the semantic web, which has been incubating (or should that be gestating?) for a long long while. It seems suitably meta to use the talk as an example of how the semantic web would change the Internet. During the talk I was concentrating hard, so I missed the Twitter conversation. This might have been because I was in the front row, opposite Sir Tim, with two video cameras watching my every move – yes, that is my fat head bobbing up and down in the videos, sorry! I felt like a bunny stuck in the proverbial headlights.

Anyway, I missed the back-channel conversation. I knew a fair number of people there would be tweeting (got to love that term), so I wanted to see what had been said. Summize is a tool that searches the Twitter public-time-line [Note, as I posted this, Twitter announced their intent to acquire Summize]. In tradition web style, I would have used search terms like “Sir Tim”, “Future”, and a number of other things. However, most of these phrases would have missed messages and others would have resulted in the search equivalent of “overspray” – catching messages that were irrelevant.

Enter Hash tags. If hash tags are new to you, don’t panic. It is all above board and quite simple. Hash tags make use of the hash symbol (#) to indicate a tag. This is a little like semantic information, in that it provides some context about the message. People can tag messages (in the same way that blog posts and wiki pages can be tagged). This transforms the discoverability of information.

It does require users to manually tag their messages, which leaves it vulnerable to human fallibility/laziness. Automating this process is a key part of building the semantic web. I can go to summize and search for #futureofweb (the tag for the event) and see the conversation. Here is a little hand-picked selection of highlights:

PaulWalsh: Ah NESTA is using #futureofweb hash tag for the event with TimBL. Personally I hate the tags.
JeremyGould: #futureofweb Reflecting how wonderful that TBL still as passionate about web 20 years on Hope I can maintain that level of interest- in …
Nico_Macdonald: Re NESTA TB-L talk… Hope for Web future: bootstrapping human ingenuity. Fears: fooling ourselves Web can solve all problems. #futureofweb
keibro: Generic Answers #futureofweb = CL: Keep it open. AD: Put stuff back based on what you take out.
timd:  TBL: “In terms of humanity, we should make sure we don’t expect too little” #futureofweb
Nico_Macdonald:  Tim Berners-Lee event: Berners-Lee’s answer: Web is about connections between people. Can we expect this much of _humanity_?! #futureofweb
emmalwallace: When TBL speaks you can see the pictures he draws in his head. Da Vinci brain genius in action. When science and art collide. #futureofweb
deirdre: also heartening 2 knw TBL shares my obsession w/ persistence. internet so often is transient, too many things lost & destroyed #futureofweb

That’s a tiny sample of the comments, but it paints the picture. The most comprehensive write up on Sir Tim’s talk is on Mia Ridge’s blog (Open Objects) and you can download the slides via the w3 site: http://www.w3.org/2008/Talks/0708-ws-30min-tbl/.

Even though we didn’t meet at that event, in a strange act of serendipity, I met Mia this evening, at a completely unrelated event. I recognised her from her twitter avatar and blog picture, and had a really interesting conversation. The power of the web…

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]]> http://redcatco.com/blog/technology/future-of-the-web-part-ii-the-future/feed/ 3 Future of The Web – Part I – A History http://redcatco.com/blog/technology/future-of-the-web-part-i/ http://redcatco.com/blog/technology/future-of-the-web-part-i/#comments Wed, 09 Jul 2008 21:45:51 +0000 Benjamin http://redcatco.com/blog/?p=522


Last night NESTA played host to Tim Berners-Lee, with a talk under the title “Future of the Web“, followed by a Q&A and panel discussion. I’ll come back to the talk, because I want to start somewhere else first: in the past. The history of the web may well provide the best insight into its future. During the Q&A, Bill Thompson, asked a question that reminded me of a meeting I missed a few decades ago.

My brain is great at holding complex, interconnected models, pulling up random associated facts and remembering faces, but my episodic memory is awful. Seriously, ask me what I had for breakfast. I have no idea. May be you have no idea too? Ok, you don’t know what I had for breakfast, but you know what I am driving at. So, when my brain reminds me of things from three decades ago, I pay attention. 

A long, long time ago, I opened a very large package. A very, very large package. In one part was something that looked like a typewriter, except for a sad lack of space to put paper or ink in it. In the other was something that looked like a television, but it was completely unable to receive even BBC1 (in the days when we had less than 4 TV channels in the UK). My dad told me it was going to change the world, and that I should figure out how to use it. My dad was smart like that. He still is.

So, I got to work. I fell in love with that box. Most people that know me will tell you I am still in love with its offspring and distant relatives today. However, there is something in particular that captivated me about it. It wasn’t the ability to type in words and get it to do things – although I did use that capability a lot, and made some very good money in the process, thank you. No, the magic moment for me was when I got another, inauspicious beige box, called a MODEM. A clever box of tricks that allowed the computer to abuse a BT telephone line to talk to other computers.  That might have seemed a little pointless to most around me back then, but connecting computers together was rocket science. And everyone knows that boys love rocket science.

I could dial into something called a PAD, and from there, I could hop to another pad (landing pad, get it?) and so on, until I arrived at a big computer on the other side of the world. This was in the days when international phone calls were inconceivably expensive, and when the only americans I had seen were in movies. In fact, even the local phone calls to those PADs resulted in a £1,000 phone bill.

Now, strictly speaking, I shouldn’t have been on that system. In fact, I’d been a little creative in getting the numbers and codes to access it. That sort of creativity wasn’t illegal back then, and truth be told, the administrators knew that I was there and seemed quite ok about it. What harm was a kid like me going to do? They sent me nice messages, and we got on ok.

Later, they did start to get a little fussy. So I, and many others like me, started to write programs for our little machines to do some of the things that those big machines did. And much more too. Some of us got a couple of phone lines and  MODEMs. We made our systems available for others to dial in to, creating places where they could leave messages for each other and exchange programs. A kind of electronic bulletin board system, or BBS for short. Those phone lines ran at about 1/1000 the speed of the first version of bluetooth – if you think moving pictures off of your phone is slow, you’ll know why there weren’t any pictures at all.

Now, of course, we could have got in our cars and met up, but many of us didn’t have cars. To be frank, many of us weren’t the kind to strike up a conversation with a stranger, or to go out and find people to get to know. We weren’t in the social ‘in crowd’. We didn’t know it yet, but we were geeks. Real geeks.

We exchanged ideas, we explored new ways of using these machines and were generally pretty excited about what we found to do with them. So excited, that we started to meet up face to face, to talk about it all and to swap programs. Then we started to connect our machines together, so that our conversations weren’t isolated in little islands, but flowed like rivers around the world. Mostly, all of this all happened for free, powered by volunteers.

A little while later, I got dragged back to that world of PADs and the systems that belonged to the big people. This time, I was on the inside, as a student and then a lecturer. Those systems were connected together too. A sort of network of networks, or inter-net. Some years later, that was where I first came across hypertext (I’ve written about that before). One of my friends even wrote a program that bypassed the electronic message system and let you send messages directly to another user’s terminal. This was all before the thing that we call the worldwide web.

There’s something about that story. It was all about the people, not about the systems. Together, we steered what happened with the technology, both consciously and unconsciously. A few decades from now, this system I have in front of me, and the Internet it is connected to right now, will seem as alien as that first PC and those early bulletin boards seem now.

Last night Charlie Leadbeater drew some parallels between Internet users and the Levelers, a 17th Century pseudo-political group, who had an agreement to support freedom of the people.  I think those early Internet pioneers, the ones who sweated over the fuzzball routers and the ones who ran the BBSs were levelers at heart – creating something much bigger than themselves. Working with high ideals, connecting people in an attempt to build knowledge. It didn’t always go according to those ideals, and some things failed. Charlie said levelers failure was caused by the lack of an economic model. Well, the Internet has an economic model, all be it a very complex one. However, whatever it becomes, it is all about the people.

To be continued…

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]]> http://redcatco.com/blog/technology/future-of-the-web-part-i/feed/ 5 Communicating Feelings on the Future of the Web http://redcatco.com/blog/productivity/communicating-feelings-on-the-future-of-the-web/ http://redcatco.com/blog/productivity/communicating-feelings-on-the-future-of-the-web/#comments Mon, 07 Jul 2008 16:03:56 +0000 Benjamin http://redcatco.com/blog/?p=519

Two things in one here: A heads up on an event tomorrow (don’t worry, you can still catch it), and an interesting way to look at things.

Tomorrow sees a talk from Sir Tim Berners-Lee (recently voted the most important technology innovator of the last century), focussing in on web science. It is an area I am fascinated by, so I’m chuffed to be going along. Web science looks at the impact of the web on our society and economy and combines a number of disciplines dear to my heart.

He will be joined by Andy Duncan (Chief Executive of Channel 4) and Charlie Leadbeater (author of “We-think“: The Power of Mass Creativity’) for discussion on the role of governments, business and academia in safeguarding the future of the web as an open platform. The session is fully booked, but panic not, there will be a live webcast, tomorrow from around 4pm GMT (or a bit earlier to be sure!). Here is the URL:

http://www.nesta.org.uk/the-future-of-the-web-with-sir-tim-berners-lee-8-july

The NESTA Innovation Edge team polled a number of people about their hopes and fears for the future of the web, and used these to produce a Wordle cloud. I’ve seen a few Wordle clouds recently, and they can be quite thought provoking. It is essentially a word cloud (just like a tag cloud, if you are familiar with those), but more graphically rich.

Take a look and you’ll get the idea. Here are people’s hopes for the future of the web:

And here are people’s fears about the future of the web:

 

Word clouds are a useful stimulus for conversations. The words, freed from their semantic context, stimulate all sorts of thinking. How about building your own word clouds about your hopes and fears and then see what they tell you? Just go to Wordle – Create and paste in your text.

Here’s the wordle for this blog:

 

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]]> http://redcatco.com/blog/productivity/communicating-feelings-on-the-future-of-the-web/feed/ 1 Tim Berners-Lee @ The Innovation Edge http://redcatco.com/blog/technology/tim-berners-lee-the-innovation-edge/ http://redcatco.com/blog/technology/tim-berners-lee-the-innovation-edge/#comments Thu, 22 May 2008 22:10:09 +0000 Benjamin http://redcatco.com/blog/?p=479

This is the second in a short series of posts, as I digest the talks from The Innovation Edge 08. Yesterday covered Gordon Brown (I’m enjoying the comments). Today is focused on Jonathan Freedland’s interview with Sir Tim Berners-Lee. For those that may have temporarily forgotten, Sir Tim is broadly viewed as the inventor of the World Wide Web. There was a minor distraction as Tim’s earpiece insisted on stealing the show by constantly falling out, and there is a little earth-loop hum in the audio, but the content is gripping, you can watch the talk for yourself. (and this is the write up on the NESTA blog)

My first encounter with Sir Tim’s work was back in 1990. I was at Kent University at the time, and got involved in the trial of something called “Hypertext”. Quite frankly, I didn’t get it. A page of text where you could click on a word and another page of text would come up. What was anyone going to do with something like that? I took the pay and went back to circuit boards and DJing at the college radio station. Two years later I was back working on Internet technologies. The experience has made me much more thoughtful when I encounter new technologies!

As Sir Tim recounted the foundations of the web, it was curious how accidental and casual the whole thing sounded. The project was a ‘back-room’ effort, carried out during a lull in the work on the Cern accelerator. As Tim put it, giving staff a long leash, giving them space, is where innovation comes from. It brought to mind Google’s 20% time. You could hear the pens of the managing directors in the audience scribbling furiously.

The point of innovation is that you don’t know the end product before you start, sometimes you don’t even know the problem. It is a big risk, and that makes it tricky for a traditional management mindset. The web (or rather hypertext) was driven by the challenge of dealing with lots of documents and having to get others up to speed on them quickly. Necessity is the mother of Invention, which is a theme that came back later during the conference.

He described blogs as a social machine, which is an interesting metaphor – I guess we are still cogs in a machine, even in the world of social media. I have seen what this social machine can create form the huge diversity that it brings together. For me, two stand out quotes from the talk:

“The people doing the really interesting things tended to fall between two stools”

“The web really has to be thought of not as a system of connections between computers, or even as links between web pages, but really as humanity connected.”

The first made me think of the Medici effect, and is the reason for The Web Science Initiative, which sounds very interesting. The second was the final take away for me: The future of the web, and of innovation, is in individuals working in collaboration. There again, that is how all the greatest achievements have come about.

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]]> http://redcatco.com/blog/technology/tim-berners-lee-the-innovation-edge/feed/ 4 Gordon Brown at NESTA – The Innovation Edge http://redcatco.com/blog/leadership/gordon-brown-at-nesta-the-innovation-edge/ http://redcatco.com/blog/leadership/gordon-brown-at-nesta-the-innovation-edge/#comments Tue, 20 May 2008 16:15:32 +0000 Benjamin http://redcatco.com/blog/?p=477

I’m typing from The NESTA Innovation Edge event today. Innovation has been, unsurprisingly, the key theme. I’ll post more on my notes from the sessions over the next few days – Tim Berners-Lee spoke, and as a surprise (for me at least), Gordon Brown also spoke briefly at the event. He said he was sending a message (and he was by speaking at the event) about how key innovation is to Britain – the ability to innovate and invent, based on the creative talents of our people, is key to the continued growth of the country…

“The most important thing you have is you – your creative talents and ability to lead for the future”

“We are in a global economy where the country that drives innovation will win”

Countries will succeed because they have the creative ideas, not just the capital or resources. Gordon said that he wants to break down every barrier in front of people with creative ideas and innovative businesses. In my view that is going to mean some big changes in regulation and tax, and he did mention those. There are many barriers to setting up a business.

Innovation is very much on the popular agenda these days. A shift to a knowledge economy places an increased emphasis on thinking things (innovating), rather than just making things. The big challenge is that no-one really seems sure what innovation actual is.

What does innovation mean to you?

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