Something called the Social Issues Research Centre says that the Internet is going to make us all ‘nicer’. Generation C - that’s C for content, connectivity, creativity, collaboration, communication and a few other Web 2.0 catchphrases originally coined by Steve Case of AOL - is going to do better at communicating and finding common ground with people who don’t agree with them. According to Dr Peter Marsh, growing up with open access and free exchange of information will make future generations more understanding.
Haven’t these people ever seen a flame war?
I’m a big fan of the inclusive Internet. It’s where I met my husband and many of my friends, and where I keep in touch with just about everyone who matters to me, for work or fun. It’s where I start a lot of my research, where I chat to my peers and where I see flaming rows day after day. Mark Anderson is one of the smartest futurists I know; he has a blog at http://www.tapsns.com/blog/ which mixes technology, science, economics and politics. The day he posted about Jimmy Carter’s book on the Middle East the comments flooded with vitriolic diatribes and denial of service attacks. I don’t know where to go online to see Jews and Palestinians discussing things calmly.
A blurring of real and virtual works with technology integrated into our lives, always on and taken for granted? You’ve got me. Like-minded people staying in touch in new ways? Check. People learning that other people who play X Box games but happen to live in another country are more like them than people who live round the corner and like croquet or QPR instead? Absolutely. Major societal change by 2020 because the Internet releases our inner communicator? What colour is the sky on your planet again?
-Mary

HP and Lite-On were planning a USB 2.0 external HD DVD drive - with the usual mix of pluses, minuses: HD DVD-ROM, DVD±R/±RW and ±R double-layer discs, as well as CD±R/±RW and CD-ROM . The PR company just told me the drive has been cancelled “due to there not being a demand for it”. At first I thought it might have been pricing, or the fact that it wasn’t an HD writer - if I want to watch a movie on my notebook PC I’m more likely to download it with Sky Anywhere than to drag an HD DVD disc around with me, impressive as the extras are (HD DVD is the only system that makes me even consider watching the commentaries).

And then I thought about whether I’d want a writer anyway. If I have a lot of files to transfer I use as site like www.yousendit.com or www.sendthisfile.com to bypass the laughably small inbox limits at most companies. We do backup with a combination of a 2TB NAS box from Buffalo and external 500GB drives from Seagate and Maxtor, with Carbonite or Mozy thrown in for the online aspect. If I want to give someone a file and they have to have it reduced to atoms, I’m as likely to recycle a 256MB flash drive from a press conference as I am to go to the hassle of digging out a blank and burning a CD or DVD. Bill Gates said that HD DVD and Blu-Ray would be the last format war and he’s right was far as buying or renting DVD movies is concerned. But what else are we going to bother with high capacity coasters for?

Two years ago a 50GB DVD would have been a nice idea. By the end of this year I expect to have 60GB in my phone. Not even Office 2007 and Vista is big enough to need more than a DVD. By being so greedy about IP that they forced two standards on the market the two HD camps lost those two years of sales, and the next two as the home viewer waits to see which standard wins; and it’s just possible they’ve killed the market completely.

Is there anything you really need an HD DVD for that’s not a movie?

-Mary

Last week saw hundreds of web developers fill a Kensington conference centre for the standing room only Future of Web Applications conference. The speakers came from the ranks of the Web 2.0 illuminati, and the topics covered everything from finding venture capital to building and managing communities. Microsoft and Adobe demonstrated their latest tools and platforms, and Fotango unveiled its Zimki hosted web application platform.

However, once you sat down and listened to the speakers, there was one theme that kept cropping up. It was there in Yahoo!’s tale of how they used Flickr as a glue to hold their new acquisitions together, and Kevin Rose’s description of how Digg detected attempts to game the site’s ratings scheme. The key was “attention data” - the ability to use site metrics to generate additional metadata about a piece of information: who’s looking at it, what have they looked at before, who’s linking to it, who’s blogging about it, who’s commenting on it. Site metrics are mashed up with user information to develop a picture of what the information is being used for, and how trustworthy the users that are working with it are.

You don’t need sophisticated machine learning or AI techniques - you just watch what people are doing with the information. There are things that people can do that computers can’t, like determine what a good picture is, or whether a blob of white in a satellite image is a yacht. Amazon uses this approach in its Mechanical Turk service, using computers to break down a task into work units, and then sharing them out among internet users.

Yahoo! has used this approach to develop the “interestingness” ratings used on Flickr. A sometimes controversial way of indicating the best images on the site, the measure of interestingness is still a secret. However, Bradley Horowitz, VP of Yahoo!’s Advanced Development Division (or as he put it, the “ADD VP”), described it as a measure of the organic activity around an image, looking at comments, “favouriting”, whether it’s been blogged about, amongst other metrics. Instead of being limited to time-based exploration of the site, you can now jump to the “best” images instantly - and be sure that this isn’t a machine’s judgement of what makes a good photograph.

While Yahoo! introduced interestingness after it acquired Flickr, the organic nature of the data meant it could be applied retroactively - and could be kept updated dynamically. What was interesting today might not be interesting tomorrow. Geotagging adds a new layer to attention data, allowing Flickr to analyse crowd effects. A cluster of photos from a group of people in one place at one time, did something interesting happen? Two Yahoo! research projects use this information from Flickr, and map it on Yahoo! Maps, making it easier to see what’s attractive about a place.

Attention data is another element of what people have called the semantic web. However, instead of relying on complex, committee-led metadata definitions, it uses folksonomies, user metadata, and user activity. Yes, you may need to put some work into analysing log files and writing tracking code, but in the end you’ll have a site that’s not only responsive to your users’ needs, but also capable of building the type of community that stays around - long after the hype has gone.

Let’s hope it’s true of Web 2.0 as a whole.

–S

Last week saw hundreds of web developers fill a Kensington conference centre for the standing room only Future of Web Applications conference. The speakers came from the ranks of the Web 2.0 illuminati, and the topics covered everything from finding venture capital to building and managing communities. Microsoft and Adobe demonstrated their latest tools and platforms, and Fotango unveiled its Zimki hosted web application platform.

However, once you sat down and listened to the speakers, there was one theme that kept cropping up. It was there in Yahoo!’s tale of how they used Flickr as a glue to hold their new acquisitions together, and Kevin Rose’s description of how Digg detected attempts to game the site’s ratings scheme. The key was “attention data” - the ability to use site metrics to generate additional metadata about a piece of information: who’s looking at it, what have they looked at before, who’s linking to it, who’s blogging about it, who’s commenting on it. Site metrics are mashed up with user information to develop a picture of what the information is being used for, and how trustworthy the users that are working with it are.

You don’t need sophisticated machine learning or AI techniques - you just watch what people are doing with the information. There are things that people can do that computers can’t, like determine what a good picture is, or whether a blob of white in a satellite image is a yacht. Amazon uses this approach in its Mechanical Turk service, using computers to break down a task into work units, and then sharing them out among internet users.

Yahoo! has used this approach to develop the “interestingness” ratings used on Flickr. A sometimes controversial way of indicating the best images on the site, the measure of interestingness is still a secret. However, Bradley Horowitz, VP of Yahoo!’s Advanced Development Division (or as he put it, the “ADD VP”), described it as a measure of the organic activity around an image, looking at comments, “favouriting”, whether it’s been blogged about, amongst other metrics. Instead of being limited to time-based exploration of the site, you can now jump to the “best” images instantly - and be sure that this isn’t a machine’s judgement of what makes a good photograph.

While Yahoo! introduced interestingness after it acquired Flickr, the organic nature of the data meant it could be applied retroactively - and could be kept updated dynamically. What was interesting today might not be interesting tomorrow. Geotagging adds a new layer to attention data, allowing Flickr to analyse crowd effects. A cluster of photos from a group of people in one place at one time, did something interesting happen? Two Yahoo! research projects use this information from Flickr, and map it on Yahoo! Maps, making it easier to see what’s attractive about a place.

Attention data is another element of what people have called the semantic web. However, instead of relying on complex, committee-led metadata definitions, it uses folksonomies, user metadata, and user activity. Yes, you may need to put some work into analysing log files and writing tracking code, but in the end you’ll have a site that’s not only responsive to your users’ needs, but also capable of building the type of community that stays around - long after the hype has gone.

Let’s hope it’s true of Web 2.0 as a whole.

–S

There aren’t many announcements that have me hugging spokespeople, friendly as I am. But when David Quin of ALK showed me the new version of CoPilot and the Bluetooth GSM dongle that comes with it, I’ll admit I flung my arms around him.
 
Not just because it was my last meeting at the end of 3GSM. Not so much because CoPilot Live 7 looks good – though it does. New customisable map styles, and an improved interface. Not because it will run on my trusty Palm 705v – although I’m delighted about that. But because I spotted the power connector on the little gizmo; micro USB. And that means one less charger to lug around when we travel. Especially as the power charger we have for the Bluetooth GPS we use with the current version of CoPilot only plugs into the cigarette lighter socket in the car. This is fine and dandy if you’re navigating while you drive, but not so much use if you’re setting off for a day walking around San Francisco. And absolutely no use at all if the rental car you get has no power to the lighter socket.
 
The connector on the previous generation of Bluetooth GPS receivers was nearly always the same, and it was an early attempt at being compatible because it used the same connector as the iPAQ. When iPAQs were the device everyone used you could expect to have one adapter in the car and another at your desk. These days if you walk into Frys or Dixons (depending which side of the pond you’re on) and ask for an iPAQ charger you get a puzzled look and ‘did you mean iPod?’.
 
In the beginning iPods had a standard charger: FireWire. Obscure trivia; there are two versions of the FireWire connector, one with the pins for power and one without because Sony wanted a version that let you plug a hard drive into a camcorder without draining the camcorder battery (either that, or Sony just hates accepting standards designed by anyone else – you decide). The dock connector on the current generation of iPods does give more control to accessories that get line out sound or display information on the iPod screen – and no other gadgets picked up FireWire as the charging port.
 
But USB is almost ubiquitous enough that I curse when I see a device that doesn’t use it for charging (say, my Palm 750v). RIM got the idea years ago, as did HTC – who have managed to put extra control options into a standard USB connection but still make it charge with a standard cable. Seagate are using USB as the PC and power connection for the new Bluetooth DAVE drive (which we’ll see first from the Business division at Orange adding 60GB of storage to your mobile phone). Rob Pait from Seagate got a hug for that news too.
 
So I say it’s time for the other hardware manufacturers to get their acts in gear and switch to USB for power now. You’ll gain the gratitude of vast numbers of travellers. And you might get a hug too.
 
-Mary

I like QWERTY. I learned to thumb type on a Psion Series 3 and I can type almost as fast on a BlackBerry as I can on a notebook. The hunt and peck of predictive typing - BlackBerry SureType or standard T9 or worst of all the strange Motorola version - gums up my thoughts in the mechanics of the letters I’m hunting and pecking for.

I also like being able to start typing a name on my phone and have the phone number get dialled for me, which is why until Windows Mobile 6 comes along and puts predictive dialling on both versions I have two choices: a Windows Mobile 5 smartphone with a QWERTY keyboard like the T-Mobile Dash or the Samsung BlackJack, or the Palm 750v I’ve stuck with for nearly a year even though the keyboard isn’t a patch on a BlackBerry because it combines predictive dialling with the extra power of a Pocket PC phone. The BlackBerry has better mail search too, but without putting in a BES server I don’t get over the air sync of contacts and calendar, so even if I didn’t mind having to open the address book every time I wouldn’t have the numbers I want to call.

But the next version of T9 - on show at 3GSM and in phones by the end of this year - makes a third option that extends to more than just Windows Mobile.

XT9, as it’s known, is better at actually producing the words you were trying to type; it takes common spelling mistakes into account in the list of alternatives you get and it learns not just from the messages you write but from the emails, texts and IMs you receive on your phone. So when a colleague suggests meeting at Potemkin for dinner it won’t take you an hour to reply ‘Potemkin at 9′. The most often and more recently you’ve used a word, the higher up the list it comes. And XT9 works on QWERTY phones and touchscreens with handwriting recognition too.

Plus it’s not just words you’re typing. Power up your phone, type in ‘clock’ and you’ll get a list of options that includes the app that changes the time. The list includes bookmarks and contacts, all together or separated into categories. It’s almost exactly the same effect as typing into the Start menu in Vista to search for file, applications, documents and everything else.

Tegic calls this ‘T9 the discovery tool’ which sounds like a bad RPG, but as I hardly ever meet anyone who knows everything their phone can do it isn’t a bad tag line. As with Vista it ceases to be a matter of knowing how to do things and becomes about what you want to do. A predictive interface that makes everything easier to do.

-Mary

The end of January set the scene for a year in which new processor technologies from both the main hardware vendors look set to battle for the server crown. Intel’s new Penryn processors move it onto new 45nm processes, while AMD’s Barcelona offers single die quad core as a drop in replacement for many existing servers.

While Penryn is only just starting to sample, and is unlikely to ship until the later half of the year (though there are rumours of earlier ship dates), Intel’s Clovertown quad core processors are already shipping. AMD is hoping to leapfrog Clovertown’s performance with its new Opterons, and expects Barcelona to offer 40% better performance than the equivalent Clovertown. With Intel having stolen back the performance crown with its Core 2 architecture, AMD needs to offer big performance gains to win back flagship customers like Sun.

The power/heat envelope for next generation hardware remains critically important for managing existing infrastructure. Adding extra heat to an existing rack of blades can quickly reduce life – and overload existing cooling systems. Machine rooms and data centres have been designed for specific heat profiles, so keeping changes to a minimum will make it easier for IT departments to justify processor and server upgrades.

Barcelona promises to keep to the same heat profile of the current generation of dual core Opterons. As AMD has designed its quad core chips to fit in its existing sockets, recent motherboards should be able to be upgraded with a simple BIOS update. That’s a big advantage for any data centre that’s invested in Opteron servers, with the prospect of nearly doubling their available processing power with minimal changes. Of course this will depend on vendors providing the BIOS updates – or offering swap out services for blades and servers. Modular hardware from companies like HP will reduce risk, and make upgrades easier to handle.

Things look even better for anyone running a virtual infrastructure, as both Intel and AMD have new instruction sets that improve memory management for virtual machines (and per socket licensing from most virtualisation vendors means you’re also getting twice as much performance for your money). Both AMB and Intel are some way from offering virtualised I/O, but the new memory handling tools will make it easier for VMs to share physical memory – speeding up operations and reducing risk.

You’ll probably need to run a virtual infrastructure to get the most out of quad core with existing software. A four way quad core system will mean 16 available processors – and while operating system schedulers will be able to handle the available processing power, very little software is capable of operating at that level of parallelisation. IBM has been looking at the problem, and believes that the only solution is a complete rethinking of the way we develop software.

Certainly we need to think a lot more about how we handle concurrency and threads in our applications. New compilers are needed (and both Intel and IBM are working on these, alone and with partners), with tools for automatically detecting parellelisation, and optimising code appropriately. There’s also scope for a new generation of virtual machines, which could use the just-in-time compilation techniques used by both Java and .NET to manage threads across multiple cores.

Ultimately, of course, we’ll need to change the way we program. New visual languages (like Yahoo!’s Pipes) could help here, but we’ll need to start by training developers to work with threads…

Quad core is here, and will be running on 4-way SMP boxes very soon. That’s a lot of bang for the buck - so will you be able to take advantage of the spoils of the quad core wars?

–S

I’m not Nokia’s biggest fan. A Finnish journalist once asked me why on earth I thought Nokia was arrogant and got to sit through the full half hour of me explaining. And at that time I hadn’t even heard about the phone that was supposedly delayed for six months while Nokia and a mobile network argued about whose logo would be bigger… So when we saw the announcement that Nokia was doing a free mapping and GPS service, I agreed with Simon’s first comment, that Nokia had just Steved another partner (to Steve a partner; to encourage them to develop an accessory, application or other add-on to your product and then to bring out your own equivalent once the partner has established the market for you; for example Konfabulator, Watson). But then I looked at the optional pay-for upgrades and decided that actually Nokia has been very smart, very Web 2.0 and has changed not only the entire mobile mapping and navigation market but its own position.

Nokia isn’t just a handset manufacturer who sells more phones in a quarter than Apple has sold iPods (ever). Now Nokia is also a software and service company, butting right up against Google, Yahoo and Microsoft in one of the big moneymakers of the next decade. And delivering one in the eye to mapping software companies like CoPilot and TomTom and Navicore (although with error messages like ‘please drive closer to a road on the map’, I think Navicore has it coming).

From this saturday www.smart2go.com will give you free maps for 150 countries and free satellite navigation for 30. It doesn’t only work on Nokia or Symbian handsets - there’s a Windows Mobile version. Like Google Maps or Windows Live Search it offers maps from Navteq (so they’re good quality), but unlike the mobile services once you’ve downloaded the maps once you don’t have to keep downloading them - and you can get a big map on your PC and transfer it to your mobile. Like Microsoft’s Pocket Streets (Windows Mobile only, of course), you get free maps and points of interest (nearest petrol station please); but if you have a phone with GPS - or more likely a Bluetooth GPS - you get navigation as well as maps, which Pocket Streets doesn’t do.

The Web 2.0 bit is that companies can put their logos on the map, so McDonalds can clutter up the virtual high street too. I know Web 2.0 is supposed to be about social networking and community but it’s really about metadata and integrated advertising.

And the reason Nokia’s sat nav partners aren’t muttering and complaining is that you can upgrade to get turn by turn voice navigation. And you can buy it for a week - while you’re on holiday and need help on unfamiliar roads - or up to three years. I’ve lambasted Nokia roundly in the past for making users pay for its sat nav software every six months but depending on the price these limited licences shouldn’t be too bad. You can always stick with the free version.

Of course smart2go could still turn out to be hard2use but if it’s anywhere near as good as Live Search, Nokia has put itself on the map.

I’ve been using the new Office for months now, through betas and technical refreshes and release candidates and I’m a fan. Word makes almost everything I do easier, Excel makes tables and filters easier, Outlook’s To-Do Bar is the way I organise everything now. OneNote is almost the perfect app for taking notes and recording meetings (almost). Check out the OneNote blogs at http://blogs.msdn.com/olya_veselova/ and http://blogs.msdn.com/descapa/ for some tips even I didn’t know.
I’d say there are only a few things wrong with 2007 Office. One of them is the price for the full-featured versions; there are a lot of features so you can’t say it’s not good value, and many prices are the same as the current versions, but compared to the basic but free OpenOffice.org it looks very expensive.
The rest, for me, is niggles. Little rough edges I’d like filed smooth. Good things I want to be better. 
From 2003 to 2006 I hassled everyone I met, from Jeff Raikes down, to improve timezones in Outlook. I believe my file at Microsoft has the label ‘warning: contains timezones’ on it. (I like the new option to set the timezone for both the start and end of a meeting, not least because it’s exactly what I asked for). Here’s what I’ll be nagging the Office team to fix next time around. Got anything I should add to the list?
I’d complain about the still not improved options to file messages in Outlook but the $19 SpeedFiler from Claritude (www.claritude.com) fixes this just fine; it works without problems in Outlook 2007 although it would be nice to have an update so it doesn’t try to turn off editing in Word since that’s now the only option (and I like having the live spell check in my emails BTW).
- When you create a new contact - or open one from email, Linked In or Plaxo - and it’s the same as an existing contact, Outlook now shows you how it can merge the two, so you don’t have to find and open the old one by hand to check if there’s anything you need to transfer across. But I’d like this to be interactive; if the new contact adds a fourth email address Outlook chooses one of the existing three email addresses to delete to make room - let me choose that instead.
- The location field in an event. I can’t drag into it the way I can drag into the subject. And the dropdown of recent locations - why is this so short and why doesn’t it offer to autocomplete from the list as I type?
- How about a clipboard for Excel that finally works like any other application so that I can copy something and paste it AND have it stay on the clipboard?
- OneNote spell checking. Text handling in OneNote isn’t good enough; double-clicking only selects one word whereas in other apps I can drag to select the next work too. Plus I want to right-click on a spelling mistake and choose what I want it autocorrected to the way I can in Word, not have to go into a dialog box and type in both error and correction. And a Change All button in the interactive spell check is not a small thing to be missing. OneNote is where I’m always in a hurry and I want all the help I can get typing things in more accurately.
- Let me customise the Word floatie, the mini-bar or whatever inoffensive thing we’ve ended up calling the bar of common tools that appears as a hint and solidifies when you click on it; it’s the perfect place to have the commands I want and I want numbered bullets way more than I want the Format Painter. Either let me pick and choose what goes on or give me two extra slots for buttons on the end for my own picks. I asked about this last March when we got beta 2 and the Office team said they were considering it for a future version but didn’t expect to get it done for the initial release.
So, what are you complaining about?

Jim Gray, one of the men behind modern database design, is missing. You can help find him.

On Sunday, January 28th, 2007, Jim Gray, a renowned computer scientist was reported missing at sea. As of Thursday, Feb. 1st, the US Coast Guard has called off the search, having found no trace of the boat or any of its emergency equipment.
Follow the story here.
Through the generous efforts of his friends, family, various communities and agencies, detailed NASA aircraft imagery has been made available for his last known whereabouts.

An Amazon Mechanical Turk has been set up to help analyse this imagery. Just spend half an hour or so on the task - marking imagery for further analysis. It could help at least understand what has happened to Jim.
I’ve met Jim a couple of times. He’s a fascinating speaker and entertaining conversationalist, with much still to give the world - especially in his current area of research, tools to help manage large-scale distributed scientific computing projects.
It’s somewhat fitting that we can use the fruits of his research to help his family…