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January 30, 2004

Tivo as digital hub?

Om Malik thinks Tivo's
purchase of a startup called Strangeberry signals its intention to
become a hub for digital home entertainment.  Makes sense. 
Strangeberry is apparently made up of ex-Sun people, and the idea of
universal zero-configuration networking was a big element of Sun
co-founder Bill Joy's Jini vision. 

Of course, all the major consumer PC vendors, most notably Gateway,
Sony, and HP, have similar dreams, as do Apple, Microsoft, and your
cable company.  This probably makes Tivo interesting acquisiton
bait.  But for whom?  Tivo is built on Linux, so it probably
isn't a fit for any of the Windows-centric companies.  Or for
Apple, which has its own Rendezvous networking technology.

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Posted by Kevin Werbach at 7:38 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

January 29, 2004

Guess Who's Coming to Supernova, Part I

One of the best things about doing a conference like Supernova is the
opportunity to assemble some of the most fascinating, insightful people
I know in one room. It makes me excited just to attend!

The speakers for this year's event are looking particularly good. He'll be there. And her. Oh, and his dad (aka this guy). And we're just getting started....
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Posted by Kevin Werbach at 10:07 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Dean doesn't get it

Here's how Howard Dean justified his
decision to replace campaign manager Joe Trippi with Washington insider
Roy Neel: "What we need is decision making that's centralized."

One would think that, after Dean's extraordinary rise from obscurity to
front-runner status on the back of a radically distributed, networked
movement, he would appreciate the value of decentralization.  If
Dean had tried to be John Kerry from the beginning, he'd be where
Dennis Kucinich is now, scraping at the verge of respectability. 

Clearly, something went wrong.  The wave of enthusiasm for Dean
didn't translate into the predicted primary victories.  Maybe his
campaign staff does need better organization and discipline.  Just
don't blame the failings on decentralization.  The gusher of
collective energy that attended all those Meetups and produced all
those blogs is real.  If there is any hope for the Democratic
party in 2004 and beyond, it will involve tapping the enthusiasm and
fund-raising might that Dean's virtual army demonstrated.  A
centralized, message-controlled, Beltway insider campaign won't do
it. 

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Posted by Kevin Werbach at 9:29 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

January 28, 2004

Hyper-connectivity

Today, the hyper-connected are still seen as weird and almost
childish.  Conferences still think their value depends on secrecy,
as though real-time communication to the outside world would sap their
essence.  Before long, though, newspaper articles will poke fun at the people whose only connectivity is their secretary back at the office.

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Posted by Kevin Werbach at 2:47 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Does the Net promote echo-chambers?

Steven Johnson questions the
conventional wisdom that the Net fragments us into like-minded
micro-communities.  (FYI, the seminal elaboration of this
viewpoint is Andrew Shapiro's The Control Revolution.) 

I generally agree with Johnson's view.  The Net gives us many
tools to filter information and to spend our time in closed
communities.  But at the same time, it exposes us to far more
diversity than any previous medium.  Those filters are never
perfect.  And there is a countervailing pressure toward
aggregation, which works against the fragmenting effects of
filters.  Google and Yahoo aren't echo chambers, because their
value comes from their breadth and scale. 

Furthermore, even when online communities and information sources are
narrowly tailored to a specific viewpoint, that doesn't mean the people
participating in them are hermetically walled off from one
another.  Communities overlap.  If I'm a dog owner, a
libertarian, and a fan of Sex and the City (for the record, I'm none of
the above), chances are the people and content I interact with will
differ from me along at least one of those dimensions.  Some
people may vote based on a single issue, but no one is ultimately
defined by a single interest.  The more specialized the commuity,
the more likely its members will differ on other matters. 
Spill-over is inevitable.

The final point is that the Net is still largely an open
platform.  There is always room for another community or
information source.  Traditional media has never been open in the
same way.  With consolidation and the rise of politically
polarized news, it is becoming even less so.  At a dinner the
other night, I talked with Mark Walsh, a former exec at VerticalNet and
AOL, and technology advisor to the Democratic Party.  He is
launching a liberal talk radio network called Progress Media in eight
cities in March.  Perhaps, on radio at least, there is still some
room to challenge the dominant opinion current.

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Posted by Kevin Werbach at 12:16 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

The kids are all right...

...Just a bit under the weather.

Our son got a bad cold last week and gave it to our daughter. 
Nothing more serious, according to the doctor.  Since Esther is
only one month old, though, anything is a cause for concern. 

So that's my current excuse for the lack of blogging lately. 
That, and something more positive -- working hard on the next Supernova, which will be June 24-25 in Santa Clara.  I'm already getting excited, and we're five months away! 

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Posted by Kevin Werbach at 11:25 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

January 22, 2004

Telecom wags the Internet dog

There is an important New York Times article
today about the battle between law enforcement agencies and the FCC
over Internet policy.  The Justice Department wants broadband and
voice-over-IP applications classified as legacy "telecommunications
services," so that it has an easier time gaining access for
wiretaps.  The problem is that classification brings with it a
whole set of baggage.  At worst, law enforcement's approach would
force the Internet into the centralized, monopolized, regulated model
of the old telephone network. 

Law enforcement officials should certainly have the tools they need to
do their jobs.  But in this case, they seem to believe that
nothing else matters.  We would have better security by requiring
all telephone calls to be tapped and all airline passengers to be
chained to their seats.  We don't do those things because the
negative consequences far outweigh the security benefits.  The
same test should apply here.

Congress passed the Communications Assistance to Law Enforcement Act
(CALEA) in 1996 to address law enforcement concerns about wiretapping
data networks.  Law enforcement received further authority in 2001
under the PATRIOT Act.  If voice over IP creates unanticipated new
problems for law enforcement, Congress should consider new
legislation.  Re-architecting the  Net isn't the way to get
there.

Now, this doesn't mean all aspects of legacy telecom regulation are
bad.  The idea that monopoly transport networks should be open
platforms is entirely consistent with the basic architecture of the
Net.  And it doesn't mean law enforcement should have no way to
gain legal access to VOIP conversations.  The point is that we
should examine the costs and benefits of every policy decision and use
the most precise tools available.  Just as a blanket rule labeling
everything involving packet data as unregulated would go too far, so
would a blanket rule that all packet data be regulated to satisfy law
enforcement. 

This issue is important because it points out how central the seemingly
arcane debates at the FCC are to the future of the Internet and
communications.  this is where the rubber is meeting the
pavement.  We'll all be living with today's decisions for years to
come.

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Posted by Kevin Werbach at 9:37 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

January 15, 2004

Still here

Sorry, light blogging period.  In addition to baby-related
activities, I had a serious computer crash earlier this week.  I
had to reformat my hard drive and recover from backups. Thankfully, all
my data is fine, but the process took the better part of two
days. 

Now I'm sitting at Philadelphia airport getting ready to fly to LA for
a friend's wedding.  AT&T Wireless now provides public WiFi
access here, but they want $9.99 for a one-day connection.  So I'm
using my Treo to connect.  CNet's bandwidth meter claims the
connection speed is 329 kbps, which can't be right.  Regardless,
it's nice to have an alternative to price gouging of a captive audience.

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Posted by Kevin Werbach at 11:18 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

January 12, 2004

The joy of parenthood, v. 2.0

Ahh yes, now I remember what sleep deprivation is like!

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Posted by Kevin Werbach at 3:47 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

January 6, 2004

Esther's photo album #2 [1]...

Esther's photo album #2 is online, with shots from Esther at home.

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Posted by Kevin Werbach at 11:27 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

The fabric of the blogosphere

Reading Brian Greene's New York Times op-ed
on the inherent subjectivity of time in a quantum, relativistic
universe, I couldn't help be struck by two thoughts. First,
Greene fails to mention Peter Galison's excellent recent book on the very same subject of time simultaneity.

Second, and more important, Greene's vision of "kaleidoscopic" time perfectly describes the
messy, intersubjective, constantly changing yet enduring nature of
information in the emerging blogosphere:

As David Weinberger taught us in Small Pieces Loosely Joined, the Net has deep metaphysical implications for our conception of the world. We're all used to thinking of the Web as the revolutionary development, and it certainly was. But while the Web dramatically lowered the cost of publishing and accessing information, it kept the static and impersonal page metaphor of older media. Weblogs, aided by syndication mechanisms, remove that crutch.

Some day we may look back and identify the rise of blogs, not the Web,
as the decisive development that changed our relationship to
information... and to each other.

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Posted by Kevin Werbach at 9:06 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Reading the FCC Tea Leaves on VOIP

In trying to interpret the public statements of policy-makers, sometimes what's most important is what isn't said. FCC Commissioner Kevin Martin, interviewed in BusinessWeek, hints at the Commission's road map for voice over IP:

The tip-off is his separation of the Pulver petition from the other
two.  The FCC has been indicating for some time that it plans to
open a general proceeding on VOIP, which will seek comment but not yet
adopt any binding rules.  Last month, though, Chairman Powell's
legal advisor told reporters that the FCC was thinking about ruling
early on the AT&T and Pulver petitions. 

Why is this important?  If the FCC takes any action on the Pulver
petition, it will be to grant it.  Otherwise, it would just roll
it into the larger proceeding.  Similarly, the only reason to act
separately on the AT&T petition is to deny it, and subject VOIP
backbone traffic to inflated access charges.  Local phone
companies have been pushing the FCC to do just that. 

If in fact the FCC has decided to lump the AT&T petition into the
general rulemaking proceeding, it's good news for VOIP. 

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Technology, policy, and social norms

Joi Ito: "New technologies disrupt our habits and our norms and what we feel comfortable with."
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