Greasy Leviathan
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?
