Reasons Unbeknownst

There’s a saying about startups. That you have to work 12 hour days. Well it’s all a lie. It’s more like 14 hour days. I’m really, really in the zone right now though. My brain’s hanging in there but my eyes are nearing their limit. Visine is keeping me in the hunt.

I’m presenting the site to a bunch of investors on Monday. I’m going to stand up in front of a executives and talk for 20 minutes. Normally I’d don’t like talking in public but I can ramble on about journalism and technology for hours at a stretch.

Artist is working on a logo for tomorrow. Looking for security holes. Fixing bugs.

Right now HoundWire.com is password protected but if you’re interested just leave me a message at
kirk@YOURPANTSabinventio.com Just be sure to remove YOURPANTS first (that’s a creepy anti spam technique FYI).

Looks like I might have a patent app in the works for an advertising idea I had this afternoon. Some lawyers are looking into it.

New RadioHead album is definitely worth the price, whatever it is. Also listening to M.I.A. Imagine Bjork in a jungle hunting Gwen Stefani down with an AK-47 and you’ll get the gist of it.

I can say, without hesitation, that I’ve learned more in the last few months than during any other point in my life.

Here’s some marketing stuff I’m working on for HoundWire.

We aim to provide a replacement for the newspaper and an outlet for all local writers and journalists. Owning a printing press shouldn’t be a requirement for communicating with other citizens. The front page of any given community consists of news voted on by the users. You can also vote on comments so if someone is consistently insightful it will be apparent.

Finally, a brilliant quote from Tim O’Reilly

” Alas, I find the Web 3.0 arguments as clear evidence that the proponents don’t understand Web 2.0 at all. Web 2.0 is not about front end technologies. It’s precisely about back-end, and it’s about meaning and intelligence in the back end.

Click the photo for credits.

I’ve been writing about personal servers for a while and it seems they’re starting to gain traction. From Hack Attack:

However, if you’re not comfortable keeping all of your bookmarks on someone else’s server, or you just prefer to roll your own solutions so that you have total control over what happens with your data, this tutorial is for you. So while you definitely don’t need to do this by any means, if any of the preceding reasoning appeals to you, forge ahead!

These personal servers are still in their infancy because users of this system have to know what FTP and Dynamic DNS are and few phones have GPS support. I wonder if it would make more sense to put the server on a mobile device to be carried around to cut out latency if it’s the most often used device and bookmarks are kept on the server. Did some research on the new Nokia N95 today. I was wondering if it’s possible to write apps that take advantage of its GPS capabilities and found this review.

“The GPS functionality is the major addition to the N95 and marks a step forward for convergence. The onboard software is the key to this. The new Maps application allows you to browse around maps (which are downloaded onto your device over the air) in 2D or 3D and do route planning. The map coverage varies by country, but many places are covered down to street level. The software includes the ability to find addresses and location by street name, location and postcode. The onboard GPS allows you to jump to your current location and track yourself as you go. Automatic turn by turn voice instructions are a premium service that can be upgraded to from the handset (other premium services include city guides), but basic route planning and tracking (i.e. manually stepping through the route) are free.”

Battling my first cold since I had my tonsils removed early last year, this is much more pleasant with mere swollen-nubs getting in the way.

It pains me to watch Larry Kudlow talk about the mortgage market. The fundamental point everybody on CNBC seems to miss is that we’re not witnessing a sub-prime problem. Even people with good credit had to resort to negative amortization, zero down, no documentation loans to buy houses at these prices. At least one guest on his show mentioned the fact that people in modest homes who move up have been selling their houses to sub-prime buyers. There is no more sub-prime market. In fact everybody who could sign their name probably already bought a house. I was talking with some hotshot finance guy from NY about the problems with CNBC programming and he said everybody there watches Bloomberg. Asian stock market is bouncing, hopefully not the dead cat variety. I really, really hope my inner bear gets to hibernate again.

I was inspired by Barry Ritholtz’s forays into music reviews so I dug this up on YouTube. The Silversun Pickups are an interesting mix of elephant, rhino, Smashing Pumpkins, Butthole Surfers, and Chuck Manson.

That photo is from the Best of Flickr. You can read more about it here.

Not many economists can tell you what Moore’s Law is or what it could mean for the economy but I think the brains at the Fed probably know exactly what the following report from the Cato Institute implies:

“Machines complement human labor when they become more
productive at the jobs they perform, but machines also substitute for human labor by taking over human jobs. At first, expensive hardware and software does only the few jobs where computers have the strongest advantage over humans. Eventually, computers do most jobs. At first, complementary effects dominate, and human wages rise with computer productivity. But eventually substitution can dominate, making wages fall as fast as computer prices now do. An intelligence population explosion makes per-intelligence consumption fall this fast, while economic growth rates rise by an order of magnitude or more. These results are
robust to automating incrementally, and to distinguishing hardware, software, and human capital from other forms of capital.”

So my thinking goes like this:

• Our economic system is built on inflation
• Technology is advancing exponentially
• Technology causes deflation (higher productivity)
• The Fed is fighting deflation by increasing the money supply at the same rate technology is advancing
• Inflation causes a misallocation of resources
• Misallocation of resources is growing which results in asset bubbles
• Inflation is a lot worse than it appears because it’s hidden by techno-deflation
• Inflation can exist without prices rising much if the money supply is increasing
• Misallocation of resources is a function of increases in the money supply, not increases in prices
• CPI is fairly meaningless
• If the Austrian School is right then this credit bubble is going to end painfully

The next two thoughts will probably end up as their own posts but for now have a gander.

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Here’s an interesting article on the language processing features of KDE 4. If you’re not sure what KDE is think of it as the eventual replacement for your Windows desktop.

KDE 4′s Sonnet will turbocharge language processing
There is a good chance that in 10 years Linux will replace Windows as the de-facto-standard desktop operating system. There’s also a good chance that KDE will become the most popular window manager for Linux. Some cell phones are already running versions of linux so the following excerpt from the above article could affect a lot of people some day.

With the Sonnet library for KDE 4, developer Jacob Rideout hopes to reinvigorate the field of desktop linguistics by adding automatic language detection and other innovative features. Sonnet is to be for KDE 4 what KSpell 2 is for the current version of the K Desktop Environment, providing spellchecking facilities to applications as diverse as the Konqueror Web browser, Kopete instant messenger, and KWord office software. Unlike KSpell, however, it will also provide grammar checking, multilingual tools, and perhaps even translation, dictionary, and thesaurus functionality across all of KDE.

And if you thought Apple’s OSX was the zenith of desktop computing I’d recommend watching the following video. I demoed Beryl at work for some interns and they were stupefied, and probably a little more interested in computers.

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Open Source as distributed intelligence contradicts the view that centralization is only possible with a few smart people in office. So when applied to government is centralization just the means to an end that we’ve gotten so used to that it became the end?

Interesting quote:
“Sometimes it is said that man cannot be trusted with the government of himself. Can he, then be trusted with the government of others? Or have we found angels in the form of kings to govern him? Let history answer this question.”
Thomas Jefferson

I think my next post will be on the last idea.

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Idea as a read my laptop in my backyard. It’d be nice if someone invented a firefox plugin that would read highlight text with a right click. It’d need a playback speed adjustment tool and export to mp3 option. Then I could hilight an interesting story and dump it on an MP3 player and go for a jog. Or just sit here with headphones on.

I have a lot of reading to do, most of the ideas I’ve had over the last few days have already been discussed or invented. Del.irio.us is an open source version of Del.icio.us for instance. Which means a lot of my questions have already been answered which leads comment about a lot of reading. There are so many smart people thinking about this that it’s going to be hard to keep up with the progress but it’s so damn interesting.

Open Source del.icio.us discussion http://www.redmonk.com/sogrady/archives/000574.html

Google search objectivity – Jeff Jarvis on Flickr Interestingness

Cameras connected to a mobile broadband network that automatically upload images to either Flickr or a personal server without user intervention.

If people no longer need Google to do a search, how do businesses advertise? Embed it in content. Podcasts on wine could contain ads about wine, etc.

A search engine that’s distributed and built into web browsers. The following goes into the decentralized part.

http://security.riit.tsinghua.edu.cn/share/coopeer.pdf

“Insertion of personalized factor for searching results by routing in self-organized user community. These advantages are only possible in P2P network where the information and cost is shared among all the members.”

http://security.riit.tsinghua.edu.cn/share/coopeer.pdf

“Insertion of personalized factor for searching results by routing in self-organized user community. These advantages are only possible in P2P network where the information and cost is shared among all the members.”

Anger at an open source “clone” of del.icio.us is hypocritical if you also believe that business process patents are wrong. That said, if a clone isn’t addressing the right problem then it’s bound to fail, even if it is open source. The problem I forsee with Del.icio.us is currently afflicting Flickr. They’re your photos so why is Flickr getting rich off of them? What if everybody suddenly created a robots.txt file that prevented Google from indexing their servers? Their search system would break down in a matter of weeks. If an open source search engine was created and Google began to look more like Microsoft to the anti-corporate geek masses, a Google boycott could become trendy. Businesses would continue to allow Google crawling because they want to drive traffic but bloggers are starting to get more traffic from Del.icio.us anyway. What if Moore’s law is outpacing content growth?

Taggle… http://www.brianstorms.com/mt/mt-comments.cgi?entry_id=503
From a Google search:
Results 1 – 10 of about 1,490 for snuffalufagus. (0.25 seconds)
They emphasize the quarter second because they know it may be the only way to differentiate between the results of a distributed search engine

The community is rallying behind the person (joshua) and the brand not the idea. Instead of Venture Capital, Joshua could have made the code open source and requested hosting from the Wikimedia foundation. That would have addressed some trust issues surrounding profit and community software.

So my proposal is that a group of leaders in the field fork del.iRio.us and take it to Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia fame. Instant trust, instant publicity, instant servers. A big problem I’ve noticed with these tagging tools is that they’re quickly killed by overuse. It’s expensive to handle that much traffic even with a few thousand users. Now imagine Internet Explorer 7 comes out and it stores all of your bookmarks in Del.icio.us. Del.icio.us would instantly collapse. That problem is solvable.

If the network is the computer and the people are the network then

If Microsoft or even Google cloned wikipedia nobody would use it because of the ads required to make it profitable and they wouldn’t trust the entries on Google or Microsoft.

How Google can make money online without a search engine? Turn into a marketing company.

Export tag data from Del.icio.us to a file so it could be migrated to a new open tagging system.

Irony – I just used my DVR to rewind and re-watch a funny ad.

Job of the future:
Search algorithm designer
“I?m not sure Google can maintain its algorithmic secrecy indefinitely without consequence. I?m in favor of more transparent, user-configurable algorithms.”

I’m working on a big idea that’s been simmering in my brain. Notes below, I’ll clean this up in a few days when I find some thick coffee. What follows is just stream of thought stuff that I’m trying to fashion into something coherent.

Stuff to read first…
Benkler
Hobbes – Leviathan
Full Transcript of USVdiscussion

OUTLINE

1> The future – Personal servers vs. Flickr – Del.icio.us – Gmail
a> Centralization (flickr,gmail.com) is only necessary because we don’t have our own servers yet. Yet.
b> IP or domain name as unique ID key – social security #
c> Some issues like popularity can be solved from distributed data – see pagerank – apply pagerank to a p2p network of content to replicate popular posts data. P2p Crawler. Trust is the issue.
d> Problems that need solving

2> Ranking Systems
a> Open data architecture(New) vs. Open Network Architecture(Old)
b> Recommendations, Popularity, Input(voting – Digg, Reddit) , Reputation
c> Aggregation – user submitted and voted vs. crawled.
d> Harnessing the wisdom of the crowd == Aggregation?

3> Solutions to the problem
a> Distributed P2P data storage
b> Current thinking assumes solutions are engineering problems instead of considering emergence as a problem solvers. Just decrease the friction and let nature take its course and don’t pollute the discussion with bad ideas drawn from political affiliations/bias.

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So we have a rusty machine, friction is rampant. My goal with this post is to throw a handful of hypothetical grease at the leviathan and try to figure out what it’ll look like in a few years. That might make it easier to figure out the steps necessary to reach that goal

To read
Benkler Coase’s Penguin – Similar to the Lessig arguments about restrictions/copyright, etc.

Pincus – Portable reputation, how would this look on a server? XML Friends Network, credit score. Open source banking!!!Plane Black market. Different types of reputation. Say Financial (credit). Privacy – get email – bob jones is requesting your financial reputation score, click here to approve request…

Centralization is misleading. Ebay reputations are only centralized in the sense that they’re contained on one server. The IP address could replace the user name whith regard to the reputation system. Distributed P2P database to contain transaction registry data. The non-relevant transaction details stripped from the data before upload. None of this would work without some sort of transaction standards system. Think Craigslist customization for car sales. There is no “miles” option for roommates. So if you miss a car payment it shows up in the p2p data and the next time you borrow money from the p2p bank your interest rate goes up, based on the decentralized wisdom of the crowd.

You could build a bot with its own bank account, this would be the ultimate Turing test.

Email hosting. Antivirus

The big difference between this type of non-profit peer production and socialism is that it’s not government directed, it’s emergent, which is compatible with free market proponents’ arguments for limited government.

The current thinking seems to be in black and white “It turns out that we voluntarily do thing we don?t get paid for, even for strangers. Sometimes we even do good anonymously. Now go figure. What a way to screw up the economists? models.”

http://blog.tomevslin.com/2005/10/good_news_peopl.html

Jeff Jarvis has a great, TomPaine-like post on the control of ownership. It’s really about personal freedom. Freedom to decide whether or not to restrict or profit from our own creations.

IMage – emergence

I like that he’s digging deeper into this issue b

Corporations represent the regulation here not government. But the argument for smaller corporate involvement in our personal data is identical to the argument for smaller governmnet involvement in our personal lives. It’s liberty.

Panoramic Abilities

Two issues here:
Search
– Forum search tools

Aggregators
– Flickr, Delicious

Kazza – Search result latency vs.

But the first thing that P to P networks are is social provisioning of a distributed data storage and retrieval system.

Google always emphasizes their speed, why unless they’re worried that their lead in accuracy is short lived?

Pure Popularity
Categorized popularity

Recommendations – Netflix

Bundled services – cable – phone – etc.

Mix between Open Directory Project and google results

Semantic Web?

Wife Verbs/Nouns

Timeframe – Podcasting

Sessions1 thoughts from the transcript

O’Reilly –
Greed vs. Good naturedness in peer production – what about those who are paid to write open source software either through IBM, Redhat or from donations. Politics are interfering with the argument at this point. Bias, left instead of right in this case. They’re talking really big picture issues, big enough that political belief has an effect on the ability to come to sound conclusions.

“There are a lot of very interesting things happening in the market.” Emphasis on market

Link to Benkler

http://crackhouse.blogspot.com/2004/07/theres-something-humorously.html

So what will the personal server of the future look like? Well for starters I’ll have a web interface so Webmin comes to mind.

Webmin

Why do we want to figure this out? So we can start working on the software and hasten the arrival. Talk about the problem of amateur control.

Motivation – cash – respect – good will is only important

http://www.opensourcexperts.com/bountylist.html

SEMMELACK
Apple – Ipod, closed system that dominates’s the world. OPEN SOURCE DRM as a solution!

Next Topic – Open Data Architectures

Flickr vs Gimages order by interesting!!! That’s what the google toolbar does, finds popularity and feeds the data back to the search engine algorithm.

Proxy server / cache as well for personal server

Obsessions with the top down design. The only thing that needs design are things that decrease what “Bla” calls friction. Those things are open standards and open source standards. Not open source for open source’s sake but if there’s going to be trust the code has to be out there. Think the overturning of speeding tickets based on radar gun source code transparency.

DNS Metadata as a model – take the median

Standards will kill the need for centralization assuming the network is good enough.

The supernode has privleges?

Not just businesses but intellectuals are threatened by this decentralization. What about the ginormous fee to attend the conference.

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Post #1 is about USV Sessions #1

PAREKH:

And one of the things that I’m trying to figure out in a lot of these examples is
which of the systems that have lower friction points. Like Del.icio.us, where you would
assume that a lot more people, because it’s easier to put tags in, are participating and
contributing to the system as opposed to just taking things out, and one of the things we
need to be mindful about in all the peer to peer conversation is how do you make these
systems more efficient? How do you get more people to participate, whether it’s trust
factors, shyness factors, learning the tools. Whatever the element is of that system.

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A test case…

You know, you could take, say Ares Galaxy, an open source p2p app and modify it to have a Flickr like user interface appearance, add metadata to the image file format and have a free, open source alternative to Flickr. It might have a catchy name like OINk for Open Image NetworK. It could be the second sourceforge project I start that I don?t have enough time to devote to :) Maybe I?ll make time.

…. Just solved a technical problem. If OINk was running on the same server as apache(your blog) and you mapped yourblog.com/images/ to the OINk down/upload directory then you could kill two birds with one stone. OINk could have a web interface so you wouldn’t need to host the server on your desktop computer, solving the portability issues Jeff was talking about earlier.

Maybe Google thinks this is all possible and knows that truly open APIs and web services are going to use more bandwith than even video which would explain why they bought all of that dark fiber. If the economists are right (there should have been a few at the USV Conference IMO) and human wants are unlimited then we’ll continue to find ways to use bandwidth even after the big web companies we now see as eternal fixtures are gone and we’re all hosting our own email, images, podcasts, video, etc. on our own servers shared over next generation P2P networks. Looks like we’re about to find the limits of emergent order. A potential libertarian utopia? Would it freak people out if no reassuring figurehead was in power?