brinking

Power Laws and Blogs: An offshoot of Clay Shirky's now famous Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality. Kevin Mark's makes a bunch of new points, and I'm still digesting them. If you haven't yet read up on Power Laws, six degrees of separation and the rest, Clay Shirky's piece is a good starter before you read Kevin's follow-up.

Ambient Orb as build status indicator: Over at eBay, as well as another Fortune 500 tech company, they've adapted the Ambient Orb to be a public display of the health of their build status (basically how the programming team is doing at building their software). It's the digital version of the fund-raising thermometer. By creating better transparency to information that everyone has an interest in, you help socially motivate a behavior. Previously this information was buried in a database somewhere, but the Orb puts it in a semi-public arena where it can do some good.

"Since introducing the orb, people have been much better about not breaking the build, and faster in fixing it when it happens.

An unexpected bonus is that it gives managers and other occasional visitors an indication of what is going on, increasing their interest and involvement. "

John Steele Gordon says digital camera makers can learn from George Eastman (founder of Kodak).

Eastman had to convince the public that it could handle what had always been a very complicated technology. He turned the trick with what is universally regarded as one of the greatest slogans in advertising history: “You press the button, we do the rest.” The new Kodak was a sensation, and George Eastman became fabulously rich …
… Digital photography will never be as easy as Eastman made chemical photography, of course. There is too much you can do with it. But the first company writing software for digital cameras that takes to heart George Eastman’s most important idea for how to create a mass market—make the product easy to use—may find the world beating a path to its door.

The story of how Eastman brought dry-plate photography to the masses is a great read to boot. [thanks Signal vs Noise]

Google vs Amazon: Jon Udell makes a good point in discussing the new Amazon full test search of books. Perhaps it is as valuable as a new search tool to trump the index to your current books as it is a way to search for new ones.

Now Amazon lets you search the full text of its books. This is astounding, not only because of the further differences it highlights between Amazon and traditional bookstores, but because of the effort it must have taken to accomplish. The text seems to be from scans of pages, subjected to an OCR process. And not just the bulk of popular books, either. They've got all sorts of wild and wooly volumes available this way. I don't know how truly useful it will be, since full text searching can be extremely noisy, even before the OCR noise is factored in. [Ned Batchelder: October 2003]

I wondered about the OCR strategy too. In this day and age, surely any publisher could provide electronic copy to an indexer. But then I drilled down and discovered something quite remarkable. I own a copy of Tesla: Man Out of Time. The other day, I was mentioning to someone that, according to that book, some of Nikola Tesla's writings are still classified. This query finds the passage I was remembering. Awesome! Now the physical book I bought from Amazon is more valuable to me. Its printed index has been augmented by a vastly more capable online index. This extremely useful capability is, by the way, also available to owners of books in the Safari Books Online service, though it correlates results only to chapter and section, not to page. Little-known fact: you need not be a Safari subscriber to use Safari as an augmented index to books you own. ... [Jon's Radio] "

MIT decides to disband RFID research center: The Auto-ID Center, a not-for-profit group established by MIT to develop RFID standards is being dispanded. This is a great thing, and something I wish would happen more in academia. It signals to great things - a) that smart folks realized to be affective they needed to influence commercial markets directly - not simply squirrel away and write papers, and b) that it had largely succeeded in helping to actually influence the commercial market, but that that RFID was actually hitting the market their job was done. Good discipline, affecting real change, what's not to like.

The announcement doesn’t mean the effort is going to stop. According to Kevin Ashton, executive director and co-founder of the center, "the thing has gotten too big for the university to handle. We're not going away, but the transition to this new organization is recognition that the (RFID) system is going live."

And apparently our friend Simson Garfinkel is staying busy, he plans to hold a follow-on RFID Privacy Workshop on November 15th.

More on the end of Auto-ID at News.com.

You Can Hear Verizon Now - But can you hear it later? (Slate): If Slate has gotten around to writing about it, chances are you've probably heard of Skype by now. During a dinner at Poptech 2003 last weekend I was speaking with Frode Eilertsen at Flagship and he mentioned Skype in passing. Since we rambling about the wireless industry I let it fly, but circled back around and clearly realized I was behind the leading edge on this one. Slightly embarrassed to be slow on the uptake, I can safely say I've now sufficiently overresearched it to compensate.

If you don't know, the basic deal is that Skype is a p2p phone system. On a normal cable or DSL modem, with free software, you can call anyone else in the world who also has Skype. Wonderfully clear, stereo calls as long as you want, no charge. The buzz is that this is going to do for Verizon and the phone industry what Kazaa/Napster is doing to the music industry - namely destroy it. But I don't buy it. Not that Skype won't be huge, but there are two factors that don't translate from the Napster phenomenon.

1) The first is fairly obvious - Verizon provides the DSL that many use to make these phone calls, so it doesn't exactly destroy their livelihood. It's true that they will have to compete with Cable for that customer, but that is what they are going to have to do regardless of Skype.

In fact, an argument could be made that people who feel free to call more on the net might actually be even more inclined to use the telephone.

A good example of this was in the UK, when BT decided to test giving telephone calls away for free on Sunday's. Since Sunday was the slowest day, it was the least risky, and they hoped it would spurn increased call volume the rest of the week. They were right. People felt free to call lots of their friends and family on Sunday, which kept them better in touch, which actually led to increased call volumes the rest of the week.

And of course you won't be able to call everyone with Skype, since many don't have Internet access, even less have broadband, and even less have Skype. Which gets me to my second point.

1) Napster worked because music is a broadcast medium. There are a limited number of commodities that are being distributed out over the internet. Although I have not yet seen studies, I imagine that p2p music sharing is a power law distribution (see Clay Shirky's excellent article on Power Laws in Weblogs for a primer).

That is, there are a small amount of people at the top of the A-list that hold massive music collections and serve as super-hubs to the most of the rest of the users. This means that you need only a small number of people at the top of the involvement curve to feed the rest of the model. With all the talk about p2p, in large part it is still a broadcast medium - just a more distributed one.

However, by the very nature of one-to-one phone calls, Skype can not take advantage of that.

In other words, millions of people want Radiohead's music, or to read Kevin Sites' blog. But unless Britney Spears shows up on Skype ready to chat with millions, there is a one-to-one relationship between a handful of people you know and a handful of people you want to talk to.

Skype will be a powerful new tool that could augment the way many people use the Internet. It is certainly a wonderfully designed tool, even alone the ability to have presence information on the person before you call them is incredibly valuable. But to those who would start shorting Verizon stock, I'd step back and take a look at the difference between a broadcast and fundamentally peer-to-peer medium.

Asymmetrical Information: I usually keep politics out of this blog becuase, well, if I started posting about politics that will likely be all I posted about. But Jane's law I think has broader applications, so here it is -- "The devotees of the party in power are smug and arrogant. The devotees of the party out of power are insane."

First, it's a great way to look at Clinton/Gingrich for perspective and see that when the Republicans were at their most hateful, it ultimately did not unseat the President and instead made them lose much of their leadership. Newt left and they lost re-election. Only when they turned positive and centrist did they win. The fundamental message of the Bush campaign was compassionate conservatism after all, even if some argue that wasn't what the administration has been about in practice. There are powerful correlaries for the Bush/Dems right now.

Secondly, there is likely an overall lesson that applies whenever we are attempting to get an idea adopted, whether it be a leader or a technology. A boxer who has fallen behind better not lose his head in the ring.

Oh, and lastly this happens to be an incredible example of how user feedback is such a valuable part of the blogging culture. Be sure to read some of the comments of others content as good as or better than the original column.

Sony Develops Low Power Tuner to Receive Digital Terrestrial Broadcasts in Mobile Devices: Still trying to figure out the implications of this press release as it is pretty vague. But the new module is expected to be used to receive digital terrestrial broadcasting and digital terrestrial radio broadcasting signals in mobile phones, personal digital assistants and other mobile devices.