I just ran across this, mostly because it shows why it's important when we think of the 'Mobile Web' to not consider a mobile phone as a small pc you operate with your thumb. In this case, pointing out how social networking on mobiles has a different intent than more traditional 'browser-based' social networks.
When we think about mobile services on campus, perhaps we should start identifying these niches in the college experience.
Friday, February 9, 2007
RENCI Lecture Series Yesterday
I took a trip out to the Friday Center to hear Dr. Irving Wladawsky-Berger, who is IBM's VP for Technical Strategy and Innovation. This was part of RENCI's Distinguished Lecture Series. The program was about the coming '3D Internet'.
Dr. Wladowsky-Berger took a different tack from the typical future internet fodder, such as I peddle on this blog, and getting a fresh perspective from a different angle definitely made the trip worthwhile. The whole thing was about the emerging use of virtual environments as a way to interact with the web, implying a progression from the original 'text-and-flaming-gif', through the now mainstream mp3 and YouTube era, to an era of virtual reality and presence through an avatar as illustrated by Second Life. Examples ran from the obvious (for virtual meetings/lectures) through some interesting ideas about changing the online shopping model from catalog -> web to physical store -> virtual store. In the presentation, the idea was to model a real store, complete with sample merchandise and salespeople, in a virtual world. One could shop with their friends, interact with subject matter experts, etc. It's easy to get a picture of that in your mind.
Upon seeing the screen shots of this store model, it struck me that one should not think about directly modeling reality in such a 3D web. It's not about making the 3D web model a store, it's about creating a new store, where, for example, your identity, reputation, and social networks, all come into play. The example was given in the talk of a jazz section in a virtual record store, where you could talk to an avatar of a salesperson about the best (I think it's 'Kind of Blue', but I'm an old-school throwback) Miles album. Why not have the store note the 'section' you are in, and match the interests and reputation of the sales people to the interests of the person visiting the store? Why not make a connection between all of the avatars looking at trip-hop, and let them meet and share? Why not link people in real stores with people in virtual stores? That last idea is one I'm playing with.
The question that did come up at the talk was 'what about mobile web'? And this plays into some things I had been yapping about. How would the mobile web interact with the 3D web conception? Here's one idea...
ITS is looking at Second Life as an educational tool. At the same time, we've been looking at location aware services, GIS, GPS, and the like. Since UNC is building a virtual campus, could we map part of the virtual campus to an actual, physical campus location? Given that, we've got mobile devices with GPS capability, and a heads-up display. Could you integrate the virtual and the physical by navigating around the pit, for example, wearing a HUD, and visualizing the virtual people in the same location? I think this would be a cool demonstration, and given a 10 second look at some of the Second Life docs, it does not seem impossible...
The question becomes 'what could you do with that'? And I think there are a million cool things you could try...
Dr. Wladowsky-Berger took a different tack from the typical future internet fodder, such as I peddle on this blog, and getting a fresh perspective from a different angle definitely made the trip worthwhile. The whole thing was about the emerging use of virtual environments as a way to interact with the web, implying a progression from the original 'text-and-flaming-gif', through the now mainstream mp3 and YouTube era, to an era of virtual reality and presence through an avatar as illustrated by Second Life. Examples ran from the obvious (for virtual meetings/lectures) through some interesting ideas about changing the online shopping model from catalog -> web to physical store -> virtual store. In the presentation, the idea was to model a real store, complete with sample merchandise and salespeople, in a virtual world. One could shop with their friends, interact with subject matter experts, etc. It's easy to get a picture of that in your mind.
Upon seeing the screen shots of this store model, it struck me that one should not think about directly modeling reality in such a 3D web. It's not about making the 3D web model a store, it's about creating a new store, where, for example, your identity, reputation, and social networks, all come into play. The example was given in the talk of a jazz section in a virtual record store, where you could talk to an avatar of a salesperson about the best (I think it's 'Kind of Blue', but I'm an old-school throwback) Miles album. Why not have the store note the 'section' you are in, and match the interests and reputation of the sales people to the interests of the person visiting the store? Why not make a connection between all of the avatars looking at trip-hop, and let them meet and share? Why not link people in real stores with people in virtual stores? That last idea is one I'm playing with.
The question that did come up at the talk was 'what about mobile web'? And this plays into some things I had been yapping about. How would the mobile web interact with the 3D web conception? Here's one idea...
ITS is looking at Second Life as an educational tool. At the same time, we've been looking at location aware services, GIS, GPS, and the like. Since UNC is building a virtual campus, could we map part of the virtual campus to an actual, physical campus location? Given that, we've got mobile devices with GPS capability, and a heads-up display. Could you integrate the virtual and the physical by navigating around the pit, for example, wearing a HUD, and visualizing the virtual people in the same location? I think this would be a cool demonstration, and given a 10 second look at some of the Second Life docs, it does not seem impossible...
The question becomes 'what could you do with that'? And I think there are a million cool things you could try...
Wednesday, February 7, 2007
Why I have not been blogging...
Big presentation for a Sun conference, it's been crunch-time. I hope to recap some things this week. Willi hinted about some things in his new blog, in the meantime. I had to laugh, because the pic makes it look like we were video conferencing with Barbara Boxer, when actually we were looking at the Carolina game when we had a spare moment (this was on a Saturday, hence the pizza too). Working on weekends has some perks.
Tuesday, January 23, 2007
DARPA PAL, Clippy, armed to the teeth
So there's all this talk about Web3.0 now, as I described in a previous blog entry. In poking around DARPA, I ran across their PAL project. The vision of PAL is:
DARPA intends to make major and long-term contributions to the field of cognitive systems, by:
DARPA intends to make major and long-term contributions to the field of cognitive systems, by:
- producing long-term scientific and technical innovations in the areas of machine learning, reasoning, perception, and multi-modal interaction;
- developing prototype PAL systems that bring together the best individual technologies to create integrated cognitive assistants;
- conducting a progression of increasingly more capable and robust prototypes to be tested and used in real world situations.
Friday, January 5, 2007
Enrique Ortiz on the Future Web
I ran across this blog post from C. Enrique Ortiz on the future of the web, and I thought it was spot-on. His post fits very well with the themes of may last few posts. Ortiz points to the importance of search, and find-ability, when he says:
O'Reilly skipped a whole revolution - the web (indexing and) search revolution. This is an "information accessibility" revolution. This search revolution and tipping point is the true Web 2.0.
Ortiz goes on to amplify his conception of search as a richer built-in intelligence:
Natural and Intelligent Web, where we will be able to use natural expression/language, and where based on our context and semantics, the web tools are able to suggest or find related information, where all your related information is intelligently connected allowing for smart ways to find, consume and share information and goods;
I agree with this, but I sense a tendency in Web2.0 writing to rely to much on a Web1.0 point of reference. Are we doing the same, relying on Web2.0 to describe Web3.0, or is Web3.0 going to be so different that these sorts of comparisons become unhelpful? What I'm getting at is this idea that Web3.0 is about better, smarter delivery of content through better interfaces, and smarter web sites that can also display on mobile. Maybe Web3.0 is where the whole browser model finally falls away? I say that more to get out my own mental rut, I'm quite sure we'll still be browsing happily on Web3.0, but 'What if?' questions can be a good springboard.
Nova Spivack described Web3.0 in his article on KurzweilAI.net as a broader collection of technologies, which I will summarize as:
Good stuff from two good writers!
O'Reilly skipped a whole revolution - the web (indexing and) search revolution. This is an "information accessibility" revolution. This search revolution and tipping point is the true Web 2.0.
Ortiz goes on to amplify his conception of search as a richer built-in intelligence:
Natural and Intelligent Web, where we will be able to use natural expression/language, and where based on our context and semantics, the web tools are able to suggest or find related information, where all your related information is intelligently connected allowing for smart ways to find, consume and share information and goods;
I agree with this, but I sense a tendency in Web2.0 writing to rely to much on a Web1.0 point of reference. Are we doing the same, relying on Web2.0 to describe Web3.0, or is Web3.0 going to be so different that these sorts of comparisons become unhelpful? What I'm getting at is this idea that Web3.0 is about better, smarter delivery of content through better interfaces, and smarter web sites that can also display on mobile. Maybe Web3.0 is where the whole browser model finally falls away? I say that more to get out my own mental rut, I'm quite sure we'll still be browsing happily on Web3.0, but 'What if?' questions can be a good springboard.
Nova Spivack described Web3.0 in his article on KurzweilAI.net as a broader collection of technologies, which I will summarize as:
- Ubiquitous Connectivity - pervasive, always-on wireless networks
- Network Computing - software as a service, grid, distributed computing, and utility computing
- Open Technologies - open data, formats, and API
- Open Identity - portable identity and reputation across networks, and across platforms, api, and services.
- Intelligent Web - semantic web technology, intelligent agents
Good stuff from two good writers!
Thursday, January 4, 2007
Mash-able Campus
So Web2.0 and Mobile2.0 together are a big swath of services and technology to consider. Really, these memes represent philosophy more than specific implementation details. In a previous post, I took a stab at some of the implications of these new ideas for college campuses.
One idea I'd like to throw out is the 'Mash-able Campus'. There is always an undercurrent in IT shops to create centralized content, but a college campus is different from an accounting firm. (That's not to say that mash-ups don't apply to more traditional enterprises, such as eBay). College life is a mix of academic, enterprise, social, creative, and political/activist interests. In many ways, IT on a college campus is a potential Web2.0/Mobile2.0 microcosm, where you can visit and experience all the ways that technology is changing and evolving. I don't think there's a better place to be for the geek-at-heart. So let's turn the traditional idea of centralized content on its head, and see what shakes out. How about adding parts of the campus experience as content and services that live within other applications on Web2.0? What would that look like? Are there any good examples already out there?
I'm interested, in the technology and information sources used by students in their day to day life. There are obvious answers, such as Facebook and MySpace, but what's beyond these social applications, and what will be possible in the future? Web2.0 would tell us that there won't be a central point for accessing everything, so perhaps the real strategy is to create services on campus that can be mixed in with the growing 'programmable web'?
Another question I have is around identity. How will Identity2.0, and the potential overlap between identity within the enterprise, and identity in the Web2.0 cloud play out? Dion Hinchcliffe gave a good summary of that issue:
This world of fragmented logins also has a lot of implications for the growing remix world of Web 2.0 mashups. These sites use remote Web services that require logins to access a user’s information on the remote Web site. The power and utility of these mashups are limited where there is no safe way to pass identity along to these others sites without providing a long list of user IDs and passwords.
I'm interested in things like OpenID, and how they work. A 'mash-able campus' would certainly need to participate in any evolving standards for Web2.0 identity.
One idea I'd like to throw out is the 'Mash-able Campus'. There is always an undercurrent in IT shops to create centralized content, but a college campus is different from an accounting firm. (That's not to say that mash-ups don't apply to more traditional enterprises, such as eBay). College life is a mix of academic, enterprise, social, creative, and political/activist interests. In many ways, IT on a college campus is a potential Web2.0/Mobile2.0 microcosm, where you can visit and experience all the ways that technology is changing and evolving. I don't think there's a better place to be for the geek-at-heart. So let's turn the traditional idea of centralized content on its head, and see what shakes out. How about adding parts of the campus experience as content and services that live within other applications on Web2.0? What would that look like? Are there any good examples already out there?
I'm interested, in the technology and information sources used by students in their day to day life. There are obvious answers, such as Facebook and MySpace, but what's beyond these social applications, and what will be possible in the future? Web2.0 would tell us that there won't be a central point for accessing everything, so perhaps the real strategy is to create services on campus that can be mixed in with the growing 'programmable web'?
Another question I have is around identity. How will Identity2.0, and the potential overlap between identity within the enterprise, and identity in the Web2.0 cloud play out? Dion Hinchcliffe gave a good summary of that issue:
This world of fragmented logins also has a lot of implications for the growing remix world of Web 2.0 mashups. These sites use remote Web services that require logins to access a user’s information on the remote Web site. The power and utility of these mashups are limited where there is no safe way to pass identity along to these others sites without providing a long list of user IDs and passwords.
I'm interested in things like OpenID, and how they work. A 'mash-able campus' would certainly need to participate in any evolving standards for Web2.0 identity.
Monday, January 1, 2007
iFind from MIT
iFind is an interesting project from MIT that mixes location awareness with social awareness. I found out about it from some folks at Telecommunications at ITS. It looks very similar to some of our 'Context Browser' ideas within TAP. Within our own group, there's a lot of concern about establishing baseline services, such as reliable location determination, reliable connectivity, and secure privacy. These are difficult to achieve! It's interesting to see iFind mixing GPS with the services within PlaceLab. This is something that our group is also leveraging. Specifially, Willi Schulz has been integrating PlaceLab with other methods of reporting location.
The iFind service is focused on the sharing of location with peers, and on the ability to instantly communicate and 'microcoordinate', planning meet-me locations on a campus map. I'm interested in finding out how much such a service would be used in a campus setting? Beyond the typical social networks, how could professional, or research interests be used to form 'groups'?
With so much concentration right now on social computing, and on location aware computing, it's no suprise that they are being combined. I tend to frame applications like this as being examples of context aware computing. I'm using a pretty liberal definition of context awareness, namely applications that understand the who, what, when, where, and why of a situation, and deliver the right services at the right time based on that knowledge. iFind is concentrating on the who and the where, but I'll throw out two ideas I'm working on as 'logical extensions'. First is the 'when' component, which at its simplest could be a basic awareness of schedule. There's some work going on within our group to mash up Google calendar, our own campus calendar service, and FaceBook events. If there was a central calendar for an individual or space on campus that looked at all of these potential elements, how could that be leveraged. One simple idea...if an individual had an agent that was location and schedule aware, it could look at events going on on campus, compare them to an individuals interests, social network, or other factors, and also look at that person's schedule for available time. Let's say a presentation was happening that fit a person's interest, and they had a few hours on campus free...why not add notification? That's just one idea I'm playing with.
Another idea, that fits into my previous post on Mobile2.0, is the realization that spaces are getting smarter. As applications become location aware, it follows that those applications can use search and discovery to find services in a particular location. What if you needed to find a color printer, or a soda machine that wasn't out of root beer?
There's also this idea of using your feet to browse the 'web'. What if locations were associated with links, or if scripts were available that associated with a certain place. When you go to a bus stop, you browse the bus schedule. When you walk in the library, a script checks for any books you've reserved, or for any fines you should pay (that could be annoying). In this sense, the web really does merge with the physical world.
Just a few rambling ideas. iFind is a reminder of how the world is changing, and what campuses might need to consider for the future. Happy New Year.
By the way, if you haven't dug Magic Sam...you gotta see this! Truly one of the greatest 'unkown' blues guys ever. It's a crying shame he passed so young.
The iFind service is focused on the sharing of location with peers, and on the ability to instantly communicate and 'microcoordinate', planning meet-me locations on a campus map. I'm interested in finding out how much such a service would be used in a campus setting? Beyond the typical social networks, how could professional, or research interests be used to form 'groups'?
With so much concentration right now on social computing, and on location aware computing, it's no suprise that they are being combined. I tend to frame applications like this as being examples of context aware computing. I'm using a pretty liberal definition of context awareness, namely applications that understand the who, what, when, where, and why of a situation, and deliver the right services at the right time based on that knowledge. iFind is concentrating on the who and the where, but I'll throw out two ideas I'm working on as 'logical extensions'. First is the 'when' component, which at its simplest could be a basic awareness of schedule. There's some work going on within our group to mash up Google calendar, our own campus calendar service, and FaceBook events. If there was a central calendar for an individual or space on campus that looked at all of these potential elements, how could that be leveraged. One simple idea...if an individual had an agent that was location and schedule aware, it could look at events going on on campus, compare them to an individuals interests, social network, or other factors, and also look at that person's schedule for available time. Let's say a presentation was happening that fit a person's interest, and they had a few hours on campus free...why not add notification? That's just one idea I'm playing with.
Another idea, that fits into my previous post on Mobile2.0, is the realization that spaces are getting smarter. As applications become location aware, it follows that those applications can use search and discovery to find services in a particular location. What if you needed to find a color printer, or a soda machine that wasn't out of root beer?
There's also this idea of using your feet to browse the 'web'. What if locations were associated with links, or if scripts were available that associated with a certain place. When you go to a bus stop, you browse the bus schedule. When you walk in the library, a script checks for any books you've reserved, or for any fines you should pay (that could be annoying). In this sense, the web really does merge with the physical world.
Just a few rambling ideas. iFind is a reminder of how the world is changing, and what campuses might need to consider for the future. Happy New Year.
By the way, if you haven't dug Magic Sam...you gotta see this! Truly one of the greatest 'unkown' blues guys ever. It's a crying shame he passed so young.
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