Category: Book Related

A Morning With Danny Hillis

Have had a very productive couple of days recently on the book, talking at length with various folks who in one way or another have very unique views on the search world. Before I get to Tim Koogle, who I spoke to this morning, or Shana Fisher and Geoff Yang…

hillisHave had a very productive couple of days recently on the book, talking at length with various folks who in one way or another have very unique views on the search world. Before I get to Tim Koogle, who I spoke to this morning, or Shana Fisher and Geoff Yang (yesterday afternoon), I wanted to talk about my visit with Danny Hillis.

On Tuesday I flew down to LA to visit with Danny, who founded Thinking Machines. After that he became an imagineer at Disney for five or so years (“The best ‘real job’ you can have,” he quipped). Danny has a million great ideas and is something of a polymath. He recently founded Applied Minds as a way to put that skill to work (he partnered with Bran Ferren, himself a scary smart polymath).

Danny has a lot of things to say about search, it’s an area he finds rich in implications, in particular as it relates to some of the long-term projects he’s involved in, such as the Clock of the Long Now. We spent some time riffing on the future of search, and its current limitations, but … I get ahead of myself. What I really thought was incredible was the playground Danny and Bran have created for themselves at Applied Minds.

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Think Back to 1998…

Remember that period of time in the history of search? As I review my notes from talking to folks like Monier, Gross, Cutting, and others, I'm reminded of just how terrible search was back then. Spam – mostly porn – was rampant, and search was pretty much ignored in favor…

Remember that period of time in the history of search? As I review my notes from talking to folks like Monier, Gross, Cutting, and others, I’m reminded of just how terrible search was back then. Spam – mostly porn – was rampant, and search was pretty much ignored in favor of stickiness. Search was considered “good enough” – and of course it was not. That opened the door to innovation – Google and Overture launched in 1998. So here’s my lazyweb request for the day: any readers have great stories of search engine spam, or frustrations with corporate bosses missing the boat over search in the late 90s?

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Terms of Service and the Clickstream: A Survey

As I muddle my way through yet another iteration of my outline, and think about the issues raised in my recent ephemeral/eternal post, it seems apparent to me that as a culture we are nowhere near consensus on what rights, if any, a person has with regard to the data…

TOSAs I muddle my way through yet another iteration of my outline, and think about the issues raised in my recent ephemeral/eternal post, it seems apparent to me that as a culture we are nowhere near consensus on what rights, if any, a person has with regard to the data we create and/or provide to third party applications like A9, Gmail, Plaxo, and the like. Clearly we are touchy about all of this, as the reaction to Gmail proves. In the process of my research, I started reading the terms of service and privacy policies for various services, and found them inconsistent, often vague, and in general difficult to understand.

Now, I know there is a vocal contingent of folks who believe that we should simply assume we have no privacy online, and assume the quid pro quo for any service that we use is loss of control over the metadata/personal information we create along the way. I certainly understand this line of thinking, but…it strikes me as a cop out. In the end, I’d warrant that business models are going to evolve to the point where services will spring up that offers consumers access to their own clickstreams in new and powerful ways, and I’m going to predict that we will want that access as a right. I’d prefer we not have early lockdown on this issue, if we can at all avoid it.

The nice thing about doing a book is that people help you. I have had and continue to have help from a lot of smart folks, and one of them is Abigail Phillips, a lawyer who has worked with the CDT and the Berkman Center. Abigail is helping me pull together a little research project that will compare the policies of several well known platform players as they relate to what I’m calling “clickstream/stored information” – the data exhaust we all create when we interact with web-based services.

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Aristotle and the Knowledge Web

John Brockman republishes a four-year old essay from Danny Hillis positing "Aristotle," a tutor program built around a "knowledge web" (not unlike the semantic web, but more specialized) which might revolutionize how we learn. Many luminaries weigh in on the concept. Not light reading, but interesting, and very search-driven. Neal…

hillisJohn Brockman republishes a four-year old essay from Danny Hillis positing “Aristotle,” a tutor program built around a “knowledge web” (not unlike the semantic web, but more specialized) which might revolutionize how we learn. Many luminaries weigh in on the concept. Not light reading, but interesting, and very search-driven. Neal Stephenson fans will hear an echo of “The Primer” from The Diamond Age.

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From the Ephemeral to the Eternal

(Part 1 of …?) This is an idea I'm starting to rough out. As I said earlier, I will be testing your patience over the coming weeks as I do this more frequently. These essays are not intended to be the “book,” but rather sketches that lead to the…

OlduvaiFoot
(Part 1 of …?)
This is an idea I’m starting to rough out. As I said earlier, I will be testing your patience over the coming weeks as I do this more frequently. These essays are not intended to be the “book,” but rather sketches that lead to the book. (Lord knows, I can’t assume a general readership will be nearly as forgiving as you hardy souls have proven to be.)

I’m interested in what I’ll call the shift from the ephemeral to the eternal. Gmail is a good example of this, as are Plaxo, social networks, and most ecommerce sites that keep profiles of our browsing and buying habits. And search – in particular, the approach to search that A9 has taken – is perhaps the most interesting and difficult to classify expression of the trend.

In the past few years, a good portion of our digitally mediated behavior – be it in email, search, or the relationships we have with others – has become eternal – in other words, recorded and preserved by one entity or another, usually commercial in nature. And as this information has become eternal, we, as creators of that information, have lost a large degree of control over how that information is used and in what context. In fact, in many cases we have lost ownership of the information altogether – arguably before we even knew it existed in the first place. Whether this matters at all is worth debate – after all, how could we lose that which we never had? It’s not my goal to write a privacy screed here, nor take “evil corporations” to task. But it seems to me the issues raised by the ownership of our collective data exhaust are certainly worth raising and discussing, with a particular eye toward the Law of Unintended Consequences, if nothing else.

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“SuperGoogle”

The ideas herein complement some of those which I'm pondering in my "From the Ephemeral to the Eternal" riff, which I might post here soon, if I can stop getting distracted by reading stuff like this. The whole privacy debate is a miasma, and I'm struggling with having something new…

The ideas herein complement some of those which I’m pondering in my “From the Ephemeral to the Eternal” riff, which I might post here soon, if I can stop getting distracted by reading stuff like this. The whole privacy debate is a miasma, and I’m struggling with having something new to say without having to go back and spend 5000 words on history and context. On that note, there’s this new book in the mix to boot.

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Privacy, Gmail, and Unintended Consequences

The email below comes to me via Dave Farber's IP list. I quote it in full with permission of the author, I think the story he tells is quite interesting as it relates to our communications and intentions moving from the ephemeral to the eternal (the title of a chapter…

The email below comes to me via Dave Farber’s IP list. I quote it in full with permission of the author, I think the story he tells is quite interesting as it relates to our communications and intentions moving from the ephemeral to the eternal (the title of a chapter in my book). This email was written by JA Terranson, who is on Dave’s IP list, in response to this article by Declan McCullagh on issues of privacy and GMail.

Subject: Opposing view of Gmail issues (Cypherpunk tie in)

Good Afternoon Declan,

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Microsoft: Built From Scratch, The Interface Migrates to the Web

Three things struck me as I reflect back on my trip to Microsoft Tuesday. One, it's not wise to dismiss the company as being "at the first grade level" or "behind" the rest of the pack. Second, the fact that Microsoft came late to the search game just might be…

msft_118x35Three things struck me as I reflect back on my trip to Microsoft Tuesday. One, it’s not wise to dismiss the company as being “at the first grade level” or “behind” the rest of the pack. Second, the fact that Microsoft came late to the search game just might be an advantage. And third, I need to get some face time with the Windows team, because I went into the day wondering if MSN isn’t becoming MSFT’s future interface/platform play, with Windows relegated to a supporting role (as DOS was to Windows) and, well, nothing I heard convinced me otherwise. And that certainly can’t be right. Or can it?

cole-1I met first with David Cole, who runs MSN and has a long history at the company, in particular with Windows and web technology. Much of what we discussed I need to save for my column, but suffice to say we covered a broad range of topics, including Longhorn integration (yes, MSN and search are being built with an eye toward that eventuality), the Web OS meme (while not dismissive of the idea, Cole thought it was just one of many approaches to solving computing and information service problems), and of course, competition with Google and the rest of the field. Cole began by outlining how MSN has shifted to its current strategy, based on building scaled software services that break into two major buckets: communications services (MSN Messenger, Hotmail, etc) and information services (search, content, etc.). Yusuf Mehdi, who I met with next, runs information services, and we had a pretty detailed chat about the present and future of search. That conversation was for the book alone, due to timing issues. I can report, however, that Yusuf was pretty charged up about what they are building.

So why did I leave thinking that MSFT’s late start in search could be an advantage? Well, think about it. The company has massive resources, and the folks in charge are pretty smart. So they get to tackle the search problem with no legacy issues and no presumptions with regard to approach. There are any number of hurdles in search – starting with how to scale your infrastructure and moving into how to integrate results with personalized data – and many of these might best be tackled by starting fresh. Plus, on the talent side, MSFT is really the only viable player that can offer engineers unlimited resources and the chance to start from scratch. I know, the Valley mill says MSFT is having a hell of a time hiring, but when I asked that question up in Redmond, I got quite the opposite answer.

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Taking the Day Off, Headed to MSFT

Going to MSFT today (well, early on the 20th) to meet with David Cole, who runs .net and MSN, and Yusuf Mehdi, who runs search and most of MSN for David. Should be darn interesting. Scoble, you around? If so, email me jbat at batellemedia.com. Anyone care to suggest questions…

Going to MSFT today (well, early on the 20th) to meet with David Cole, who runs .net and MSN, and Yusuf Mehdi, who runs search and most of MSN for David. Should be darn interesting. Scoble, you around? If so, email me jbat at batellemedia.com.

Anyone care to suggest questions for these two gentlemen? Post away on comments or email me….thanks!

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Grokking Furl: Storage, Search, and the PersonalWeb

Today I finally got to talk with Mike Giles, the fellow behind Furl. He's based near Amherst, Mass, but used to work out in California, most recently at Vitria, a businessprocessenterpriseapplicationsoftware (ie, BigBoringButImportant) company. He started there when it had 20 employees, rode it out as it went to 1200…

furlToday I finally got to talk with Mike Giles, the fellow behind Furl. He’s based near Amherst, Mass, but used to work out in California, most recently at Vitria, a businessprocessenterpriseapplicationsoftware (ie, BigBoringButImportant) company. He started there when it had 20 employees, rode it out as it went to 1200 and went public, then bailed (it’s now at about 300 or so). Before Vitria he founded a startup, then, closed it. In other words, he’s one of us – he’s been through the roller coaster, and he’s wiser for it.

Something tells me he’s pretty happy in his current gig. He’s the only full time employee, but works with a small cadre of contractors and friends. He’s got between 5-10K users since announcing the beta in January.

Mike started Furl about a year ago to solve a problem he – and a lot of us – had with bookmarks. Namely, bookmarking is a lame, half-assed, unsearchable, flat, linkrotten approach to recalling that which you’ve seen and care to recall on the web. Now, a lot of folks have made stabs at solving this particular problem, but Mike’s got a lot of very cool features built into his beta, and more on the way.

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