2006 Flashforward (February 27-March 2)
We are thrilled to announce new dates for the west coast edition of the 2006 Flashforward (February 27-March 2), and a new location. For the first time ever, Flashforward will be held in Seattle, Washington—home of the Space Needle, the Adobe Audio and Video product teams, Experience Music Project, Pike Place Market, Starbucks, Amazon.com and Pioneer Square. We're taking over the top floor of the Washington State Convention and Trade Center—Flashforward is growing, evolving, expanding!
site http://www.flashforwardconference.com/
blog http://blog.flashforwardconference.com/
call for entries New Forms Festival 2006
New Forms Festival 2006
Call for submissionsDeadline: 01/03/2006
Please read the attached document for the Call for Proposals: NFF 2006: Transformations. Below are the calls for the Conference, Exhibition, Low Art and Film sections of the festival.
All Proposals must accompany a submission form downloaded from www.newformsfestival.com .
call for entries 9th Annual Subtle Technologies Festival Toronto
CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS
Deadline: January 15th 2006
9th Annual Subtle Technologies Festival investigates Architecture and Responsiveness in 2006
June 1st - June 4th, 2006University of Toronto, Toronto Canada Recognized internationally as a forum that encourages new insights and collaborations, Subtle Technologies invites artists and scientists to contemplate how art and science can work together and reshape perspectives. The gathering will include four days of presentations including illustrated talks, gallery installations, workshops and discussions. Subtle Technologies events encourage active discussion and draws upon the wide-ranging perspectives of participants and audience members. The extraordinary interest of highly specialized topics and often-unexpected threads woven between presentations make the festival a unique experience. This year's theme for Subtle Technologies is Responsive Architecture. We are interested in investigating how environments and systems can interact and respond to their occupants. We hope for wide-ranging discussions and presentations that explore dynamic systems and environments at every scale, from molecules to continents. The conference will include a wide definition of architecture that encompasses buildings, mechanical and natural environments.Examples of possible topics include:
Interactive systems
Smart materials
Buildings that can move and transform
Adaptive environments
Hybrid ecologies
Complex systems analysis
Expanded perception Within this general theme, sound and acoustics will be a special focus. The 2006 festival is being held in partnership with SoundaXis, a Toronto-wide event inspired by the work of renowned architect-composer Iannis Xenakis.Specialized topics include:
Resonance
Spatial acoustics
Physics of sound
Psychoacoustics
Sound Installations We encourage demonstrations and can accommodate a wide variety of presentations. Technical support and honoraria for presenters is included. Summaries of past presentations are archived on our website. We encourage those interested in submitting a proposal to acquaint themselves with our history of programming. The festival is open to the public and presentations should be accessible to a non-specialized audience. Presentations typically last 40 minutes, followed by a ten minute question and answer period. Deadline for Proposals January 15, 2005. PDF version of Call for Submissions
Subtle_Tech_subs_2006.pdf
-->How to Apply Use our online submission form: http://www.subtletechnologies.com/submissions/submission_form.html If you have any questions feel free to contact us at programming@subtletechnologies.com
H2PTM'05 29/11/2005 - 01/12/2005 , Paris
- Create, Play, Exchange: network experiences
november 29th, 30th, december 1st 2005Universite Paris 8 - Paris, Francehttp://www.edsiic.org/h2ptm/en/This 8th edition of the H2PTM (hypermedias, hypertexts, products, tools, methods) conference series restates the now classic themes that initiated the first conference and since confirm its continuity. With attention to recent developments, however, it progressively expands the thematic area into several directions.Hypermedia tools are above anything else instruments of creation and it is hypermedia where the new products and works of the digital universe are created. The conference thus accords a large part to the problems of product development and artistic creation. It emphasizes - among other things - the question of the "digital author". The fast paced development of 3D, animation, and interaction technologies stirs at the same time an interest in video and computer games which will be part of H2PTM this year. The conference will also tackle the question of "sharing", which lies at the heart of network practices. Finally, it will closely examine the notion of the digital document from the point of view of its creation, transmission and conservation.Having arrived at a point of maturity, the conference seeks to establish a perspective on the evolution of its centers of interest and - after a lot of experimentation - to come back to the question of experience. This concept will therefore play the role of a red line: user experience, author experience, capitalized experience, lived experience, transmitted experience; this way, the anthropological dimension of hypermedia will be examined and underlined.
http://www.edsiic.org/h2ptm/en/
Urban Eyes 24/11/2005 , Rotterdam
Urban Eyes 24/11/2005 , Rotterdam
Award-winning cross-media project by Markus Kirsch and Jussi Ängeslevä Presentation of Urban EyesOn Thursday 24 November, Marcus Kirsch and Jussi Ängeslevä present their award winning cross-media project Urban Eyes at V2_. Urban Eyes wants to provide an alternative view on the city by using pigeons as the messengers of camera and other imagery overlooking the main streets and back alleys.Urban Eyes project presentationLocation: V2_, Eendrachtsstraat 10, Rotterdam (tram 4 or 5 / metroCalandlijn, Eendrachtsplein station)Date: Thursday 24 November 2005, 19:30 hrsEntrance: freeParticipators: Marcus Kirsch (UK) and Jussi Ängeslevä (D)Urban Eyes is made possible with support of: Datamars S.A., Sokymat,Motz-Computer, Arts Council England and V2_Lab.The urban rock dove (columba livia) is part of every cityscape. More hated than loved due to malnourishment based on fast food left-overs, the "flying rat" is very likely here to stay in our urban scenario. The urban pigeon population can be seen as an indicator of the city's atmosphere. Bottomline is, just as every other behaviour pattern and network in the city, we are connected to it as we share the same space.In a mixture of revived shamanism and panoptic view that might challenge the artificial network of CCTV cameras, the pigeon population's unpredictable movement patterns offer a set of eyes that could offer a unique view onto unknown places. Based on the Bavarian Pigeon Corps from 1903, where homing pigeons were equipped with tiny cameras to take aerial shots from behind enemy lines, Urban Eyes uses RFID and wireless technology to turn the once able urban pigeon into a chaotic agent and messenger of visual impressions from the road you never took.Perceived as a critical design concept and public art installation, Urban Eyes accesses the live network of pigeons to expand what you know about your own city and reclaim the exploring stage of citylife. In 2004 the project proposal of Urban Eyes won 3rd price at Fusedspace, an international competition for innovative applications for new technology in the public domain.On Thursday 24 November at V2_, media artists Marcus Kirsch and Jussi Ängeslevä will present Urban Eyes with an introduction to the project's origins and concept and the findings of Kirsch' research during his V2_ residency. The presentation includes an example run of the prototype built in and with the help of the V2_Lab over the last two months as well as perspectives on Urban Eyes' future.
You are welcome to join the presentation and discussion.V2_, Institute for the Unstable MediaEendrachtsstraat 10, 3012 XL Rotterdam, NLPO Box 19049, 3001 BA Rotterdam, NLTel + 31 10 206 72 72 Fax + 31 10 206 72 71E-mail info AT v2.nl URL http://www.v2.nl
http://www.v2.nl
Mediamatic Interactive Film Lab07/12/2005 - 11/12/2005 , Amsterdam
Mediamatic Interactive Film Lab @ Impakt & HKU
7 - 8 - 9 - 10 - 11 december
final presentation 11 december
Mediamatic with the Impakt festival and the Utrecht Academy of Arts organizes a workshop on online databased film. In this 5-day workshop you and 15 other film-, tv-, radio, new media makers from all over Europe use your own footage to make an online interactive film, and explore how to integrate the viewer's choices in a meaningful way. Thematically the participants are invited to explore their notion of local truth: market forces and and political processes can less and less escape their global grids, and media are becoming more and more personal and intimate. Can we only look for truth and authenticity locally? To make their interactive film, participants use the ever evolving Korsakow software.This workshop starts the 7th of December with speakers that present a selection of interesting interactive film projects. During the next four days you’ll work on your own project withpersonal technical and theoretical support from trainers and teachers. At the end of the workshop a selection of workshop projects will be presented to the audience. Visit the Mediamatic website (www.mediamatic.net) for more information and registration. You can also mail workshops@mediamatic.nl or call Mediamatic (+31)0206389901.This workshop is made possible with the support of the MEDIA PLUS PROGRAMME of the European Community.
http://www.mediamatic.net
workshops@mediamatic.nl
Globalizing Protest Oliver Ressler Milano
Globalizing Protest
23/11/2005 - 23/01/2006 , Milan
An exhibition by Oliver Ressler curated by Marco Scotini
Galleria Artra, Via Settala, 6, 20124 Milan, Italy, Tel/Fax: +39 02 29402478
Opening: November 23, 2005 at 18,30
November 23, 2005 - 23 January 23, 2006
Tuesday to Saturday 15,30-19,30
"Globalizing Protest", the exhibition due to open on Wednesday, 23rd November at the Galleria Artra in Milan, marks the first personal show in Italy by the Viennese artist Oliver Ressler (born in 1970). Ressler's new project has been specifically designed for the Milan space and brings together his different conceptual and visual artistic strategies.Ressler is one of the new generation of artists operating in the "grey area" that exists between art and politics who develop projects on a variety of social themes using different media. But what particularly distinguishes Ressler's work compared to others and has led to his international renown is the role of policy activist he assumes through his documentary and social inquiries, through the production of slogans and publicizing campaigns that serve many and various types of political agitation and social conflict, and finally through conferences, publications, counter-information campaigns and exhibitions that gather together the results of his investigations.In this respect, one of the fundamental aspects of Oliver Ressler's work is his collaboration with political activists, anti-racist groups, immigrant organizations, student groups and so forth. Two examples of the complex nature of Ressler's work are projects such as "European Corrections Corporation" on the privatization of prisons, created with Martin Krenn as a container installation in the centres of Graz, Linz and Munich, and the current project "Boom!" with David Thorne, dealing with the contradictions inherent in global capitalism.Already renowned for his participation in shows such as "Making Things Public" at the ZKM in Karlsruhe, "The Interventionists" at the MASSMOCA (Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art), and "Attack!" at Vienna's Kunsthalle, Ressler has been working since 2003 on one of his most important projects: "Alternative Economics, Alternative Societies", an itinerant and ongoing show presented so far in eighteen different exhibition spaces, from Madrid's Centro Cultural Conde Duque to the Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center in Istanbul. The scope of the work is to present a variety of alternative ways of thinking, from Zapatist self-government to Ralf Burnicki's ?Anarchist Consensual Democracy'.The "Globalizing Protest" exhibition at the Artra Gallery focuses on different strategies and ideas that point the way towards a less hierarchical, self-determining society - one that can definitely not be a capitalist society. The term 'globalizing' also refers to the different sources for the exhibition material. Two photographic works deal with the Geneva G8 summit in 2003 and the Edinburgh G8 in 2005. TheGenoa G8 is the subject of the video "Disobbedienti" (2002), filmed in Italy with Dario Azzellini, while other works have been conceived for no-global demonstrations of various kinds.Videos, photographs, photographic and text montages and banners are just some of the material that will be on show in Milan. At times they assume the character of an appeal, of counter-propaganda, accusation, testimony and critical reflection. One example is the photomontage "Politics Thwarting the Logic of Rule", referring to Rancière's book "La Mèsentente" (The Disagreement), which shows a perfectly mirrored, superimposed image of demonstrators and a line-up of police.Information:
http://www.ressler.at/
COMUNICATO STAMPA
Con la mostra Globalizing Protest si inaugura mercoledì 23 novembrepresso la Galleria Artra di Milano la prima esposizione personale inItalia dell’artista viennese Oliver Ressler (classe 1970).Nell’occasione sarà presentato un nuovo progetto, realizzatoappositamente per lo spazio milanese, che riunisce le differentistrategie concettuali e visive della pratica artistica di Ressler.Oliver Ressler fa parte di quella nuova generazione di artisti cheopera all’interno di quella zona grigia tra arte e politica,sviluppando progetti su vari temi sociali attraverso l’uso didifferenti media. Ma ciò che più di altri contraddistingue il suolavoro e lo pone ad un livello di notorietà internazionale è il ruolodi policy activist che attraverso la sua ricerca Ressler intenderivestire mediante inchieste sociali e documentari, mediante laproduzione di slogan e campagne di comunicazione messe al serviziodelle molteplici esperienze di agitazione politica e di conflittualitàsociale, mediante infine conferenze, pubblicazioni, campagne dicontro-informazione ed esposizioni che raccolgono i risultati delle sueindagini.In questo senso uno dei momenti fondamentali della pratica artistica diOliver Ressler è la collaborazione temporanea con attivisti politici,con gruppi anti-razzisti, con organizzazioni di migranti, gruppi distudenti, etc. Progetti come “European Corrections Corporation” sullaprivatizzazione delle carceri realizzato con Martin Krenn all’internodi un container posto nel centro di Graz, oppure il progetto ancora incorso “Boom!”realizzato con David Thorne, e apparso su differentidisplay in molti luoghi, sulle contraddizioni del capitalismoglobalizzato sono alcuni esempi dell’attività di Ressler.Giunto a notorietà per aver partecipato a mostre come “Making ThingsPublic” allo ZKM di Karlsruhe, “The Interventionists” al MASSMoCA,Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, “Attack!” alla Kunsthalle diVienna, uno dei progetti più importanti che Ressler sta portando avantidal 2003 è “Alternative Economics, Alternative Societies”. Si tratta diuna mostra itinerante e “in progress” presentata finora in diciottospazi espositivi, dal Centro Cultural Conde Duque di Madrid al PlatformGaranti Contemorary Art Center di instambul, che vuole essere unaraccolta di modi per pensare l’alternativa: dall’autogoverno zapatistaalla “democrazia consensuale anarchista di Ralf Burnicki.La mostra Globalizing Protest per la Galleria Artra si concentra sudifferenti strategie ed idee che mirano ad una società meno gerarchicaed autodeterminata, che può definitivamente non essere una societàcapitalistica. Lo stesso termine “globalizing” fa riferimento aidifferenti luoghi da cui sono tratti i materiali in esposizione. Duelavori fotografici fanno riferimento al G8 di Ginevra del 2003 e al G8di Edimburgo del 2005. il video “Disobbedienti” (2002) è girato conDario Azzellini in Italia e si riferisce al G8 genovese, mentre altrilavori sono stati concepiti per altre circostanze di manifestazioniantiglobal.Video, fotografie, montaggi fotografci e di testi, banners con testisono alcuni dei materiali che assumono il carattere di appello,contro-propaganda, di denuncia, di testimonianza o di riflessionecritica come nel fotomontaggio “Politics Thwarting the logic of rule”che fa riferimento al libro di Rancière “La Mésentente” e mostrasovrapposte e perfettamente speculari una immagine di manifestanti euna delle forze dell’ordine.
Does "Web 2.0" mean anything? Paul Graham
November 2005 Paul Graham
Does "Web 2.0" mean anything?
Till recently I thought it didn't, but the truth turns out to be more complicated. Originally, yes, it was meaningless. Now it seems to have acquired a meaning. And yet those who dislike the term are probably right, because if it means what I think it does, we don't need it.I first heard the phrase "Web 2.0" in the name of the Web 2.0 conference in 2004. At the time it was supposed to mean using "the web as a platform," which I took to refer to web-based applications. [1]So I was surprised at a conference this summer when Tim O'Reilly led a session intended to figure out a definition of "Web 2.0." Didn't it already mean using the web as a platform? And if it didn't already mean something, why did we need the phrase at all?OriginsTim says the phrase "Web 2.0" first arose in "a brainstorming session between O'Reilly and Medialive International." What is Medialive International? "Producers of technology tradeshows and conferences," according to their site. So presumably that's what this brainstorming session was about. O'Reilly wanted to organize a conference about the web, and they were wondering what to call it.I don't think there was any deliberate plan to suggest there was a new version of the web. They just wanted to make the point that the web mattered again. It was a kind of semantic deficit spending: they knew new things were coming, and the "2.0" referred to whatever those might turn out to be.And they were right. New things were coming. But the new version number led to some awkwardness in the short term. In the process of developing the pitch for the first conference, someone must have decided they'd better take a stab at explaining what that "2.0" referred to. Whatever it meant, "the web as a platform" was at least not too constricting.The story about "Web 2.0" meaning the web as a platform didn't live much past the first conference. By the second conference, what "Web 2.0" seemed to mean was something about democracy. At least, it did when people wrote about it online. The conference itself didn't seem very grassroots. It cost $2800, so the only people who could afford to go were VCs and people from big companies.And yet, oddly enough, Ryan Singel's article about the conference in Wired News spoke of "throngs of geeks." When a friend of mine asked Ryan about this, it was news to him. He said he'd originally written something like "throngs of VCs and biz dev guys" but had later shortened it just to "throngs," and that this must have in turn been expanded by the editors into "throngs of geeks." After all, a Web 2.0 conference would presumably be full of geeks, right?Well, no. There were about 7. Even Tim O'Reilly was wearing a suit, a sight so alien I couldn't even parse it at first. I saw him walk by and said to one of the O'Reilly people "that guy looks just like Tim.""Oh, that's Tim. He bought a suit."I ran after him, and sure enough, it was. He explained that he'd just bought it in Thailand.The 2005 Web 2.0 conference reminded me of Internet trade shows during the Bubble, full of prowling VCs looking for the next hot startup. There was that same odd atmosphere created by a large number of people determined not to miss out. Miss out on what? They didn't know. Whatever was going to happen-- whatever Web 2.0 turned out to be.I wouldn't quite call it "Bubble 2.0" just because VCs are eager to invest again. The Internet is a genuinely big deal. The bust was as much an overreaction as the boom. It's to be expected that once we started to pull out of the bust, there would be a lot of growth in this area, just as there was in the industries that spiked the sharpest before the Depression.The reason this won't turn into a second Bubble is that the IPO market is gone. Venture investors are driven by exit strategies. The reason they were funding all those laughable startups during the late 90s was that they hoped to sell them to gullible retail investors; they hoped to be laughing all the way to the bank. Now that route is closed. Now the default exit strategy is to get bought, and acquirers are less prone to irrational exuberance than IPO investors. The closest you'll get to Bubble valuations is Rupert Murdoch paying $580 million for Myspace. That's only off by a factor of 10 or so.1. AjaxDoes "Web 2.0" mean anything more than the name of a conference yet? I don't like to admit it, but it's starting to. When people say "Web 2.0" now, I have some idea what they mean. And the fact that I both despise the phrase and understand it is the surest proof that it has started to mean something.One ingredient of its meaning is certainly Ajax, which I can still only just bear to use without scare quotes. Basically, what "Ajax" means is "Javascript now works." And that in turn means that web-based applications can now be made to work much more like desktop ones.As you read this, a whole new generation of software is being written to take advantage of Ajax. There hasn't been such a wave of new applications since microcomputers first appeared. Even Microsoft sees it, but it's too late for them to do anything more than leak "internal" documents designed to give the impression they're on top of this new trend.In fact the new generation of software is being written way too fast for Microsoft even to channel it, let alone write their own in house. Their only hope now is to buy all the best Ajax startups before Google does. And even that's going to be hard, because Google has as big a head start in buying microstartups as it did in search a few years ago. After all, Google Maps, the canonical Ajax application, was the result of a startup they bought.So ironically the original description of the Web 2.0 conference turned out to be partially right: web-based applications are a big component of Web 2.0. But I'm convinced they got this right by accident. The Ajax boom didn't start till early 2005, when Google Maps appeared and the term "Ajax" was coined.2. DemocracyThe second big element of Web 2.0 is democracy. We now have several examples to prove that amateurs can surpass professionals, when they have the right kind of system to channel their efforts. Wikipedia may be the most famous. Experts have given Wikipedia middling reviews, but they miss the critical point: it's good enough. And it's free, which means people actually read it. On the web, articles you have to pay for might as well not exist. Even if you were willing to pay to read them yourself, you can't link to them. They're not part of the conversation.Another place democracy seems to win is in deciding what counts as news. I never look at any news site now except Reddit. [2] I know if something major happens, or someone writes a particularly interesting article, it will show up there. Why bother checking the front page of any specific paper or magazine? Reddit's like an RSS feed for the whole web, with a filter for quality. Similar sites include Digg, a technology news site that's rapidly approaching Slashdot in popularity, and del.icio.us, the collaborative bookmarking network that set off the "tagging" movement. And whereas Wikipedia's main appeal is that it's good enough and free, these sites suggest that voters do a significantly better job than human editors.The most dramatic example of Web 2.0 democracy is not in the selection of ideas, but their production. I've noticed for a while that the stuff I read on individual people's sites is as good as or better than the stuff I read in newspapers and magazines. And now I have independent evidence: the top links on Reddit are generally links to individual people's sites rather than to magazine articles or news stories.My experience of writing for magazines suggests an explanation. Editors. They control the topics you can write about, and they can generally rewrite whatever you produce. The result is to damp extremes. Editing yields 95th percentile writing-- 95% of articles are improved by it, but 5% are dragged down. 5% of the time you get "throngs of geeks."On the web, people can publish whatever they want. Nearly all of it falls short of the editor-damped writing in print publications. But the pool of writers is very, very large. If it's large enough, the lack of damping means the best writing online should surpass the best in print. [3] And now that the web has evolved mechanisms for selecting good stuff, the web wins net. Selection beats damping, for the same reason market economies beat centrally planned ones.Even the startups are different this time around. They are to the startups of the Bubble what bloggers are to the print media. During the Bubble, a startup meant a company headed by an MBA that was blowing through several million dollars of VC money to "get big fast" in the most literal sense. Now it means a smaller, younger, more technical group that just decided to make something great. They'll decide later if they want to raise VC-scale funding, and if they take it, they'll take it on their terms.3. Don't Maltreat UsersI think everyone would agree that democracy and Ajax are elements of "Web 2.0." I also see a third: not to maltreat users. During the Bubble a lot of popular sites were quite high-handed with users. And not just in obvious ways, like making them register, or subjecting them to annoying ads. The very design of the average site in the late 90s was an abuse. Many of the most popular sites were loaded with obtrusive branding that made them slow to load and sent the user the message: this is our site, not yours. (There's a physical analog in the Intel and Microsoft stickers that come on some laptops.)I think the root of the problem was that sites felt they were giving something away for free, and till recently a company giving anything away for free could be pretty high-handed about it. Sometimes it reached the point of economic sadism: site owners assumed that the more pain they caused the user, the more benefit it must be to them. The most dramatic remnant of this model may be at salon.com, where you can read the beginning of a story, but to get the rest you have sit through a movie.At Y Combinator we advise all the startups we fund never to lord it over users. Never make users register, unless you need to in order to store something for them. If you do make users register, never make them wait for a confirmation link in an email; in fact, don't even ask for their email address unless you need it for some reason. Don't ask them any unnecessary questions. Never send them email unless they explicitly ask for it. Never frame pages you link to, or open them in new windows. If you have a free version and a pay version, don't make the free version too restricted. And if you find yourself asking "should we allow users to do x?" just answer "yes" whenever you're unsure. Err on the side of generosity.In How to Start a Startup I advised startups never to let anyone fly under them, meaning never to let any other company offer a cheaper, easier solution. Another way to fly low is to give users more power. Let users do what they want. If you don't and a competitor does, you're in trouble.iTunes is Web 2.0ish in this sense. Finally you can buy individual songs instead of having to buy whole albums. The recording industry hated the idea and resisted it as long as possible. But it was obvious what users wanted, so Apple flew under the labels. [4] Though really it might be better to describe iTunes as Web 1.5. Web 2.0 applied to music would probably mean individual bands giving away DRMless songs for free.The ultimate way to be nice to users is to give them something for free that competitors charge for. During the 90s a lot of people probably thought we'd have some working system for micropayments by now. In fact things have gone in other direction. The most successful sites are the ones that figure out new ways to give stuff away for free. Craigslist has largely destroyed the classified ad sites of the 90s, and OkCupid looks likely to do the same to the previous generation of dating sites.Serving web pages is very, very cheap. If you can make even a fraction of a cent per page view, you can make a profit. And technology for targeting ads continues to improve. I wouldn't be surprised if ten years from now eBay had been supplanted by an ad-supported freeBay (or, more likely, gBay).Odd as it might sound, we tell startups that they should try to make as little money as possible. If you can figure out a way to turn a billion dollar industry into a fifty million dollar industry, so much the better, if all fifty million go to you. Though indeed, making things cheaper often turns out to generate more money in the end, just as automating things often turns out to generate more jobs.The ultimate target is Microsoft. What a bang that balloon is going to make when someone pops it by offering a free web-based alternative to MS Office. [5] Who will? Google? They seem to be taking their time. I suspect the pin will be wielded by a couple of 20 year old hackers who are too naive to be intimidated by the idea. (How hard can it be?)The Common ThreadAjax, democracy, and not dissing users. What do they all have in common? I didn't realize they had anything in common till recently, which is one of the reasons I disliked the term "Web 2.0" so much. It seemed that it was being used as a label for whatever happened to be new-- that it didn't predict anything.But there is a common thread. Web 2.0 means using the web the way it's meant to be used. The "trends" we're seeing now are simply the inherent nature of the web emerging from under the broken models that got imposed on it during the Bubble.I realized this when I read an as-yet unpublished interview with Joe Kraus, the co-founder of Excite. [6]
Excite really never got the business model right at all. We fell into the classic problem of how when a new medium comes out it adopts the practices, the content, the business models of the old medium-- which fails, and then the more appropriate models get figured out. It may have seemed as if not much was happening during the years after the Bubble burst. But in retrospect, something was happening: the web was finding its natural angle of repose. The democracy component, for example-- that's not an innovation, in the sense of something someone made happen. That's what the web naturally tends to produce.Ditto for the idea of delivering desktop-like applications over the web. That idea is almost as old as the web. But the first time around it was co-opted by Sun, and we got Java applets. Java has since been remade into a generic replacement for C++, but in 1996 the story about Java was that it represented a new model of software. Instead of desktop applications, you'd run Java "applets" delivered from a server.This plan collapsed under its own weight. Microsoft helped kill it, but it would have died anyway. There was no uptake among hackers. When you find PR firms promoting something as the next development platform, you can be sure it's not. If it were, you wouldn't need PR firms to tell you, because hackers would already be writing stuff on top of it, the way sites like Busmonster used Google Maps as a platform before Google even meant it to be one.The proof that Ajax is the next hot platform is that thousands of hackers have spontaneously started building things on top of it. Mikey likes it.There's another thing all three components of Web 2.0 have in common. Here's a clue. Suppose you approached investors with the following idea for a Web 2.0 startup:
Sites like del.icio.us and flickr allow users to "tag" content with descriptive tokens. But there is also huge source of implicit tags that they ignore: the text within web links. Moreover, these links represent a social network connecting the individuals and organizations who created the pages, and by using graph theory we can compute from this network an estimate of the reputation of each member. We plan to mine the web for these implicit tags, and use them together with the reputation hierarchy they embody to enhance web searches. How long do you think it would take them on average to realize that it was a description of Google?Google was a pioneer in all three components of Web 2.0: their core business sounds crushingly hip when described in Web 2.0 terms, "Don't maltreat users" is a subset of "Don't be evil," and of course Google set off the whole Ajax boom with Google Maps.Web 2.0 means using the web as it was meant to be used, and Google does. That's their secret. The web naturally has a certain grain, and Google is aligned with it. That's why their success seems so effortless. They're sailing with the wind, instead of sitting becalmed praying for a business model, like the print media, or trying to tack upwind by suing their customers, like Microsoft and the record labels. [7]Google doesn't try to force things to happen their way. They try to figure out what's going to happen, and arrange to be standing there when it does. That's the way to approach technology-- and as business includes an ever larger technological component, the right way to do business.The fact that Google is a "Web 2.0" company shows that, while meaningful, the term is also rather bogus. It's like the word "allopathic." It just means doing things right, and it's a bad sign when you have a special word for that.
Notes[1] From the conference site, June 2004: "While the first wave of the Web was closely tied to the browser, the second wave extends applications across the web and enables a new generation of services and business opportunities." To the extent this means anything, it seems to be about web-based applications.[2] Disclosure: Reddit was funded by Y Combinator. But although I started using it out of loyalty to the home team, I've become a genuine addict. While we're at it, I'm also an investor in !MSFT, having sold all my shares earlier this year.[3] I'm not against editing. I spend more time editing than writing, and I have a group of picky friends who proofread almost everything I write. What I dislike is editing done after the fact by someone else.[4] Obvious is an understatement. Users had been climbing in through the window for years before Apple finally moved the door.[5] Hint: the way to create a web-based alternative to Office may not be to write every component yourself, but to establish a protocol for web-based apps to share a virtual home directory spread across multiple servers. Or it may be to write it all yourself.[6] The interview is from Jessica Livingston's Founders at Work, to be published by O'Reilly in 2006.[7] Microsoft didn't sue their customers directly, but they seem to have done all they could to help SCO sue them.Thanks to Trevor Blackwell, Sarah Harlin, Jessica Livingston, Peter Norvig, Aaron Swartz, and Jeff Weiner for reading drafts of this, and to the guys at O'Reilly and Adaptive Path for answering my questions.
source http://www.paulgraham.com/web20.html
Guide to Digital History Published by CHNM Staff Members
Guide to Digital History Published by CHNM Staff Members
The University of Pennsylvannia Press has just published Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web by Daniel J. Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig. Cohen is Director of Research Projects at the Center for History and New Media (CHNM) and Rosenzweig is Director and founder of CHNM. The book can be purchased online from Amazon but is also available for free on the CHNM website.
The book provides a plainspoken and thorough introduction to the web for historians—teachers and students, archivists and museum curators, professors as well as amateur enthusiasts—who wish to produce online historical work, or to build upon and improve the projects they have already started in this important new medium. It begins with an overview of the different genres of history websites, surveying a range of digital history work that has been created since the beginning of the web. The book then takes the reader step-by-step through planning a project, understanding the technologies involved and how to choose the appropriate ones, designing a site that is both easy-to-use and scholarly, digitizing materials in a way that makes them web-friendly while preserving their historical integrity, and how to reach and respond to an intended audience effectively. It also explores the repercussions of copyright law and fair use for scholars in a digital age, and examines more cutting-edge web techniques involving interactivity, such as sites that use the medium to solicit and collect historical artifacts. Finally, the book provides basic guidance on insuring that the digital history the reader creates will not disappear in a few years.
The book grows out of the work of the ECHO project, which has been generously supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
Ten Wikipedia Hacks
When something's working, you stick with it. My series of social media hacks (RSS, Technorati, blogging) has been such a hit, I am going to keep it going! So, with that in mind, here are 10 hacks that will help you get more out of your favorite reference site and mine - Wikipedia!
http://www.micropersuasion.com/2005/11/ten_wikipedia_h.html
Greatest Internet Moments
Greatest Internet Moments
Here they are: the 100 Greatest Internet Moments. They're displayed in no particular order (they appear in different positions every time you visit the page), and some of them are only known to the geekiest geeks. But it's still good stuff.
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