Image source: Talent imitates, genius steals

Faris at Talent imitates, genius steals wrote up a great post on the Fed Ex logo, which has been one of my all time favorites for years. I’m sure we’ll familiar with it, but if you have really looked at it, please read his post. You’ll never all at it the same way again.

I am loving the DVNO video from Justice, the French techno duo. Although the retro designs invoke my humorous Gen X sensibilities, what I really love is the look and feel. The color saturation of the logos against the black background hits a sweet spot that feel very fresh today. Even with the fairly high compression of flash video on youtube, DVNO is just beautiful to watch. Part of the reason of its success is that the technology behind the effects are invisible, the video is about the logos rather that digital visual effects (even if they are employed.) So much of digital imagery is still about showing off rendering capabilities. Although the cost of video is decreasing and becoming more democratic, you still can’t discount the power of good eye and the willingness to push back against the grain of the status quo.

Images source: Wired.com

I was sad to just find out that Gary Gygax, the creator of Dungeons & Dragons died on Tuesday.

I haven’t played D&D in about twenty years, and when I did I was never particularly very good at it. But it was 80s, and video games still had 8 bit graphics, and I was really into creating characters, lead figures, and dice with more than six sides. Eventually video games would get more advanced, and D&D seemed to be passed its peak. As his obit in the The Time Online noted, his influence can be seen in years to come. The early 3-D first-person shooter games that started appearing in the mid-90s, such as Doom (even if it was more sci-fi than fanasty, the player is still running around a subterranean maze of sorts), Myst, and World of Warcraft come to mind. Magic the Gathering seems to be an obvious extension of D&D as well, although not a video game.

I appreciate that fact that Gygax didn’t particularly like video games, and never designed one. As he was quoted in an interview in 2005, that Dungeons & Dragons “offers camaraderie, imagination, socialisation… Computer games can be so isolating. They’re not anything like sitting in a group and laughing, telling stories. You can’t share a bag of Cheetos online.” And even though I’m still not a huge gamer, there are still residues of my D&D days such as a love of graph paper and my DVD box-set of the Dungeon & Dragons animated series voiced by Willie Aames ( Tommy from “Eight is Enough” and Don Most (Ralph Malph from Happy Days.)

D&D seems to continually appear in random places over time. The last episode of Freaks and Geeks, Discos and Dragons, which is amazing and some of the best television ever produced. The opening lines to In the Garage by Weezer, “I’ve got a Dungeon Master’s guide, I’ve got a twelve-sided die,” is brilliant. However Gygax’s influence, as alluded to before, moves beyond that of kitschy, vaguely ironic pop culture references.

More recently, I went to a panel on gaming for the book, The Game Design Reader: A Rules of Play Anthology by Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman. One of the speakers included in the anthology was Gary Alan Fine, a sociologist, now at Northwestern. In the 80s, he did an great ethnographic study of role playing gamers, including ones who played Dungeons & Dragons, which he documented in his still in print book, Shared Fanasty. The book contains knowing insight into the players of these games and their social structures, during that period, and still has relevance today as new (or perhaps not so new) social structures and conventions are being created in today’s MMRPGs.

Players of D&D in the 70s and 80s went on to advance the world in computer science and gaming, which clearly influenced the development of these technologies and environments for better or worse. We are only recently moving beyond these motifs and initial sources of inspiration in our increasing digital and interactive world. However, it is still important to mark the influential role that Gary Gygax played in the development gaming and virtual worlds, even if he lived in relative obscurity to the world at large.

On February 10th, just a few blocks from my hotel, an arsonist burned Namdaemun or “South Gate,” in central Seoul. It was one of the oldest original structures dating back 600 years, and had survived the Korea War as well as the various occupations of foreign countries. The Cultural Heritage Administration is stated that it will spend over US$20 million to rebuild the gate over the next three years.

In Seoul, people don’t navigate via street addresses.  Instead, people use landmarks to describe locations. For example, people often give taxi directions in terms of going down a main road and turning at the movie theater.  Namdaemun, then, was an important fixture for more than historic reasons. It also held a function, being used to explain the location of surrounding destinations such as the street markets, malls and office buildings that surround it.

Central Seoul has many palaces, walls and gates which are have reconstructed over many years, and now Namdaemun will join them. The historic sites have been built and rebuilt. Just north of Namdaemun, is Gwanghwamun, another gate dating back to the same period. The structure had gone through several reconstructions. It is also currently being disassembled and moved 15 meters and also rotated to realign it with the Gyeongbok Palace, its original position.

The idea of building and rebuilding cultural historic monuments is fascinating. We think of these structures to be permanent, however like all architecture and cities, they get built, altered, torn down, and rebuilt.

Images source: Peer to Patent

A month ago, I heard Beth Novack from the New York Law School give a talk at the Symposium on Reputation Economies in Cyberspace. She is working on an interesting project called the Peer to Patent project, which is trying to incorporate peer review into the patent review process. She pointed to a (then) recent blog post by Adam Oram, on O’Reilly Radar:

“The idea of micro-elites actually came to me when looking at the Peer to Patent project. There are currently 1611 signed-up contributors searching for prior art on patent applications. But you don’t want 1611 people examining each patent. You want the 20 people who understand the subject deeply and intimately. A different 20 people on each patent adds up to 1611 (and hopefully the project will continue, and grow to a hundred or a thousands times that number).”

The concept of the micro-elite is interesting because it has characteristics of both a zero-sum and a non-zero-sum game. In that, anyone can in theory become a micro-elite, by picking a sub-genre (or perhaps sub-sub-genre) and broadening your knowledge base. Picking something obscure helps achieve micro-elite status. The problem appears if you want to become a micro-elite on a popular subject. Then, being one of the select few becomes more much difficult. Oram also mentions that this project also requires someone to have to go out and persuade the 20 experts to help out. However, what happens when you have too many equally skilled people who want to be involved? The term micro-elites by definition set a finite number of participants. The idea of crowd sourcing, if you will, the patent review process is a very interesting one. Peer to Patent is just starting out. I’ll be curious to see how it scales, how the collaborative efforts can grow, and if there is competition for participation in general or for specific cases occurs.

Aleks sent me this link to the game “Passages” a couple of weeks ago, which also got picked up on the blogosphere. It’s definitely worth spending ten minutes playing the game. I’ll try not to spoil it too much, but some may want to play it first and then read the post.

Passages is getting closer to what I would call interactive fiction. Although Passages is a game, it has a narrative associated with it. The game play leads the reader/player through the process discovery, and insights from the author. The success of the game hinges upon having a point of view, which most games as interactive fiction lack.

The main challenge of interactive fiction is related to the idea that author has a point of view, which she is trying to convey to the reader. This leads to tree and branch narratives, where the choices seem contrived or obvious in the attempts to lead the “reader” down a particular path. Interactive narratives are getting closer. They still offer incomplete experiences because the reader/player always tried to do something not built into the game engine, which breaks the illusion. Games like Bioshock are definitely moving towards more cinematic gaming experiences, which takes game art direction to new heights. However, improving interactive narratives is not solely based on more complex decision trees, artful imagery or polygon renderings.

Passages is very simple game, stripped down to 8 bit graphics. Its compelling narrative and commentary on life, relationships, and work life it above other works. It’s a simple reminder that games as the fiction of the future will still need to have a perspective and something compelling to say. Otherwise, it will be remain delegated to the realm of genre fiction.

Image source: flickr

David Weinberger gave a description of a link in a panel last year at the Hyperlinked Society Conference. A link is a conscious act of generosity. These acts is moral, and they form the architecture of the web. He goes on to explain that the syntax of a link (i.e. the href HTML tag) has no meaning within itself, it is merely an instruction which points to another location. The meaning of the link, which can be agreement or disagreement, is found in the text surrounding the link.

While these links have no meaning, they do have value, which is the reason by creating a link performing generosity. Google ranks pages by the number of links other sites point to a page. Appearing early in a search result clearly has value over a later listing. You can only have a reputation if other people can find you. A page and her owner’s reputation then relies on the generosity of others linking to her page. If an author disagrees with the contents of page and wishes to dispute it, linking to the page adds to its value and reputation. The author is then left to not link. However, this practice which the status quo forces people to use still leaves the reader at a disadvantage.

There have been suggestions to create a newer kind of syntax and link taxonomy which would add to the current binary options of link or no link. The simplest system would be to have three choices, positive link, negative link and no link. This system would actually be very easy to for users. All you need to do is add a tag to the link.

Flipping forward one year, I was struck when Jonathan Zittrain pointed out in his talk last Saturday, the use robot.txt files for telling search engines not to spider a file or directory started in the early age of the web as an adhoc measure by individual which became an internet standard. Today, it is much harder to get a standard adopted, but the story of robot.txt reminds us that it is possible to create grassroots change in internet standards. Endorsement links allude to aspects of the Semantic Web, but frankly, I’m not sure if it will every come. Contextual syntax might evolve over time with gradual implementations.

The idea of rated links get even more interesting when you consider how search engines might use links that interpret reputation and authority. Of course, gaming the system would occur, but that happens now and should not deter the implementation of a link taxonomy. It might also encourage search engines to become open to annotating listings, as Frank Pasquale has suggested. Generally, search results are given by relevance or time of creation. New categories could be ranked in terms by agreement, disagreement or even controversy. The end result would be better ways for author to link, for readers to under the context of the link, and for searcher to usage links in the aggregate.

After many years, I finally made it to a dorkbot meeting, a tech meetup before there were meetups. One of the three presenters was Ted Johnson, a great tech guy and overall hacker. He showed a handful of projects, but my favorite is his Instant Digital Camera. Hacking together a Gameboy camera, screen and calculator printer, he captures digital images (which was pretty decent resolution) and translates it into analogue numeric printing, which is reminiscent of ASCII art.

The best thing about this project is how Johnson takes printing back in the opposite direction. The abstract rendering of forms by smudged numbers is a reminder how digital color printing’s “perfection” can look really soulless at times. At work, I always prfer the old HP black and white laser printer over the color printer. The HP produces crisp black type, which you can physically feel to the touch. The color pages come out slick and shiny, as if they were still on a screen.

However, I’m skeptical of this nostalgia. Growing up in the transition from print to digital text, my infatuation with the physicality of text may merely be a reflection of age. The physicality of printed text gives the illusion of permanence that digital text lacks. This psychological relationship we have towards that illusion is powerful, which is reflected in the tendency to downgrade online academic journals and ebook over their print countrparts. As the march toward digital text continues for reasons of both efficiency and sustainability, the question remains on what we will lose in the process.

Things just got really interesting in the mobile / wireless world. Verizon announced that they will over two categories of service by the end of 2008. One will continue to be its bundled handset service, and the other will be open to any device. This change brings Verizon Wireless in-line with the open networks that are available in Europe and Asia. The move will force T-Mobile, Sprint, and AT&T to consider offering similar services. (T-Mobile is already experimenting with allows users to make WiFi calls.) This announcement also may affect the upcoming 700MHz spectrum auction, as the FCC did not require open networks. I’m hoping that it will spur more innovation in the mobile space. Changes could happen quickly, we’ll have to wait and find out. I’m trying to stay optimistic.

Update: Techcrunch and GigaOM weigh in on the issue. A lot can happen in a year, and GigaOM is correct to be skeptical.

Images source: Wikimedia Commons, Matt Brim

The October issue of Discovery magazine has an article that piqued my interest, entitled, “This Man Wants to Control the Internet. And you should let him.” The man is Caltech professor, John Doyle, an expert in control theory. His field models dynamic physical systems, which includes things from a mechanical heart to space flight. The key idea is achieving a desired or steady state for one of these systems by taking current information about its state, and “feedback” that information to the system to make adjustments. These feedback system are mathematically modeled. When the system is non-linear and dynamic, for instance a airplane flying through wind currents, the mathematics required become quite sophisticated.

Doyle and his collaborator and fellow CalTech professor, Steven Low, have developed an improved protocol over TCP (or Transmission Control Protocol.) TCP describes how packets of data should be delivered and received over the Internet. FTP, email and WWW applications all rely on TCP. Using control theory, their protocol, FastTCP^TM, clocks the time a data packet takes to get to a final destination and make adjustments to optimize its stream of packets. Standard TCP does not take this extra information into account, and relies mostly on a strategy of monitoring lost packets. That is, packets that don’t make it to the finally destination. In the 2006 Supercomputing Network Bandwidth Challenge, they won it with a maximum throughput of 17 gigabits (a full-length movie) per second.

Improvements to the Standard TCP will be important in the coming years, as multimedia services (such as movies on demand) will increase the demand of the current network. Already, VOIP services do not use TCP, because packets sent using TCP cannot be received and sequenced fast enough for real time applications like phone calls.

Doyle and Low, along with Cheng Jin formed the startup, FastSoft, to sell products based on FastTCP^TM. However, they have trademarked their name and have submitted patents their technology. This is an important departure from the origins of the Internet, as no one owns that Standard TCP. Having to license or buy FastTCP^TM from FastSoft has implications to the future of the Internet, which could lead to its fragmentation.

Last month, at team from Indiana Univeristy, the Technische Universitaet Dresden, Rochester Institute of Technology, Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center won the 2007 challenge. They achieved a peak transfer rate of 18.21 Gigabits/second and a sustained transfer rate of 16.2 Gigabits/second. It is not clear to me what kind of IP, the team from IU has on their technology. However, the received funding from the NSF, which may mean place of some or all of their research into the public domain.

Demands for bandwidth are only increasing. A complete overhaul of TCP is years ago, and involves incremental change, because the network at stake (that is, the Internet) is so important, which Doyle explain the Discover article. How we meet those demands is already controversial.

Susan Crawford notes that Comcast is already traffic shaping bits, by flagging packets by people using BitTorrent. (She also has a nice description of TCP in this post.) Meeting this growing need, the network can improve performance in various ways including: upgrading the infrastructure, such as laying fiber optic cable; improving data compression algorithms, and improving the protocols that control data traffic. In all these areas, the ownership and regulations of these technologies have huge implications on accessibility and adoption of the Internet. Although the Discover article’s title “this man wants to control the Internet” is a play on Doyle’s field of study, it raises an important point. Having public and private protocols may not only make parts of the inaccessible to each other, but further increase bandwidth as another form of economic inequality.

I’ve been slowing making my way through a very good book “Innovation and Incentives,” by Suzanne Scotchmer from UC Berkeley. I’ll close with a quote from her chapter on “Networks and Network Effects”:

“The protocols of the Internet and worldwide web were developed at public expense and put into the public domain. Given what turned out to be at stake, that is probably one of the most fortunate accidents in industrial history.”

The Apple developer’s kit for the iPhone and the Google phone is getting a lot discussion in the press. They are just two examples of that “innovation” has been getting attention recently. Despite all the discussion on innovation, I don’t feel like there is a standard language or measure to accurately describe what’s going on. Here are some graphs that I’ve been carrying around in my head, which are trying to categorize innovation or at least start to recognize patterns. As a proxy for innovation, I’m using hacks, which I defined broadly, as modifications to a product or system or service, for some unintended use, application, or outcome by the original source. The relationship between hacking and innovation probably deserves its own post, which I’ll try to get to soon.

In the graph, the y axis is roughly the number or frequency of hacks, which doesn’t have a scale, because it’s based on theoretical model. The x axis is time and show how the number of hack change over time. The graph isn’t always upward because hacks can become obsolete or blocked.

Graph 1 Creative Destruction: Schumpeter‘s ideas on creative destruction talks about how a disruptive technology or change affects the rate of hacks and innovation can be caused by events. An obvious example is Facebook’s decision to allow third part developers to create applications for its site. Overall, this situation doesn’t depend on moving from a open to a closed system. Sometimes a technical innovation that allows for innovation. For instance, movable type and wordpress blogging software made the web much more hackable by removing the need to know much about html and ftp to start a blog.

Graph 2 Eventual Obsolescence shows how a product or service, which is very hackable, can become less so over time. Many factors can be the cause of this change. Sometimes it is a matter of the product becoming more sophisticated, which makes modification harder for the amateur hacker. For instance, a Ford LTD station wagon from the 1980s was much easier to hack than a 2008 BMW 5-Series 535XI Wagon, which uses more synthetic materials and is loaded with electronics. In this case, automakers didn’t make create more sophisticated specifically to stop hacking. Open system become closed intentionally, as seen in the telephone system which was originally much easier to hack than it is today.

Graph 3 Build-A-Better-Mousetrap is the typical game that closed manufactures or service providers play with hackers. This is often the case for apps to break DRM or download songs off an iPod, where each software upgrade plugs up the hole, or in some cases turn your iPhone into a brick. People are trying to innovation, but their progress faces impediments. This start and stopping isn’t always a bad thing. Spam, besides masking originating email addresses, is essentially a hack of text (and interesting notion within itself,) where malicious email is created by altering text in order to fool spam filters into thinking its contain is legitimate.

Graph 4 Network Effects is a model of an open platform, such as Facebook, after they released their developer’s kits. The idea than an open platform will create value by increasing the users options, which will lead to more users. More users, in turn, will encourage more innovation, or so the ideal case goes. Nokia has an developer’s kit and Apple intends to do the same for phone. However, this example isn’t necessary an ideal as well. Too many apps creates too many choices, which can confuse and ultimately drive away users.

Identifying these patterns and clusters are only the first step. The steps will probably involve identifying outcomes and finally measures (even qualitative ones) to describe what happened. So, there is a lot to do, but this is a start.