The fine folks at Urban Omnibus and WNYC are hosting a meet up at Bryant Park this Saturday to explore New York’s unbuilt future from the past with the project I worked on: Museum of the Phantom City.
Details below…
Urban Omnibus and WNYC Meet-up
Museum of the Phantom City
Saturday, October 31
2:00-4:00 p.m.
Meet at the Bryant Park Fountain (6th Avenue side)
Drinks and conversation to follow
RSVP to culture@wnyc.org
Shot from the top floor of 14 Wall St. J P Morgan (the person, not the bank) used the entire floor as a piet de terre.
Wonderfully surprised by the renovation of Alice Tully by Diller Scofdio + Renfro and FXFowle. Is it a shark or a ocean liner? Interiors and sound quality were great too. I heard Alarm Will Sound, Bang on a Can All-Stars, and Steve Reich & Musicians.
This sign was found in the bathroom of the 31st floor of One Chase Manhattan Plaza. The typography is mesmerizing.
We’re in the final stretch of a long presidential campaign, which is a watershed election for many reasons. The more obvious having to do with the race and gender of the candidates. However, there are lesser ones which are important as well. One aspect that people tend not to think as deeply about is the fact that we are increasing getting the most insightful political commentary from comedians like John Stewart of the Daily Show, David Letterman, and Tina Fey and the other cast members of Saturday Night Live. This observation is not my own, Charles Kaiser of Full Court Press, among others, have long championed Stewart and his staff writers for their dead-on political analysis.
With the country spending $10 billion a month on the war in Iraq, US banks struggling to survive and the world slipping in global recession, the increasingly ugly political presidential race blares onwards towards November 4th. This moment should be the time for journalists to step up and make sense of the world. And yet they seem two steps behind the joke makers. As long running dailies are turning weekly, traditional news outlets such as print newspapers, need to be making themselves more relevant, not less.
John Stewart’s interview with Peggy Noonan a few weeks ago was telling. In the interview, Stewart at one point, gives an impassioned plea to his guest on how the politicians can get away with rhetoric which treats the public like children. The reason of course is that the people as well as journalists allow it to happen. (It’s the same reason for why the debate have been reduced to 90 second sound bite speaks which are so tightly controlled, that nothing meaningful is said.) It was so rare to as any journalist or tv personality show that he really cares about the country’s well being, rather an partisanship or sidestepping responsibility in the name of staying objective.
Similarly, the McCain / Letterman bro-mance turning sour was amusing to watch from start to conclusion. What does Letterman have to lose by a continuing barrage of criticism after being personally lied to by McCain on a phone call saying that he has to go to Washington to deal with the financial meltdown. Letterman’s cut to McCain getting make up with Katie Couric, during the taping of Letterman’s show he skipped was priceless. Further, in McCain’s kiss and make up appearance (which reeked of PR control,) Letterman pursued him on the qualifications of Palin and if he really thought Obama was a terrorist, in a way that journalist rarely dare to attempt. McCain tried to side stepped the questions, with rhetoric of “many words are said in politics.”
I can’t help but wonder if one of the main problems is that the journalists fear criticizing and questioning politicians, will result in losing access to their sources. Just like fashion writers who shred shows and don’t get invited the next season. This fear may make short term sense, but journalists will lose out in the long term. Stewart, often uses his television home of Comedy Central, the airer of South Park, as cover for expressing honest political views. “I can say whatever I want, because I follow potty mouthed cartoon boys!” Actually he can say what he wants because he gets a lot of viewers online and offline, people blog about his segments, and lots of people of all ages do consider the Daily Show as an important source of political analysis. For this reason, he knows he can dig and deconstruction of McCain, as well as, Obama, because he knows that politicians realize his influence. Especially because the Daily Show will go on with or without them. The show doesn’t need direct access, so they don’t worry about being blacklisted.
Traditional journalism, especially newspapers and magazines are in trouble, and I’m really surprised by the response when there is so much to talk about. I usually don’t rant like this here, so in my follow up post, I’ll offer an alternative path on how journalism can regain it’s relevance.
Links to blogs with smart things to say about journalism:
Image source: EW.com
I’m in San Francisco, for short project, this week. On some downtime, I told Florian that in my next place I live, I want to get a landline, a real copper wire one, not VOIP. He turned and said he completely agreed.
Every so often, I think about the days when I enjoyed talking on the phone. When I lived in Seattle in the 90s after college, I would call people in New York or where ever the landed. There were several people I would call a couple of times a month, for conversations over half an hour on a crystal clear and reliable landline connection. These calls were a rich and valued experience. These days, mobile phones and VOIP are a constant battle. Having a telephone call where both sides are clear and audible seem like a victory instead of the standard.
Rates on mobiles are cheaper, but I wonder if there will be a return back to landlines for their reliable service and clear conntections.
Is part of the reason I SMS more now because talking on the mobile phones is often a futile exercise of shouting, deciphering lost syllables, and walking around looking for the best signal?
I was walking in Chelsea last Sunday, and approached one of Verizon’s buildings. I wondered if there where any remnants of Saul Bass‘ classic Ma Bell logo. His design was the last in the evolution of the Bell System’s logo, before the 1984 break up of the company. I was surprised, if not pleased, to see that there was, clinging to the side of the brick, leaving a fading trace of the past. I was not exactly pleased, because the logo’s successor fails to reach the original’s greatness.
The Ma Bell logo was strong, clear, and confident. (Look at the red check of the other logo, off balance, ready to tip over.) Bass designed a bell, for a company named after Alexander Graham Bell. He is credited for inventing the telephone, which rang. The logo was created back into the days of monopolies over start-ups, land lines over wireless, circuits over IP, a few indestructible phones styles over a multiple of unusable bricks, expensive long distance over universal access, clear voices over shouting through static on sidewalks, and 99.99% reliability over dropped signals. What governs the features we value, which are often mutually exclusive, in the evolution of something so pervasive as the phone?
I did a quick search for a little more history on the logo. Michael Bierut over at Design Observer, wrote a nice piece in 2005 about AT&T redesigning its logo, which they still use today. He gives the story behind Bass’ original design and his globe inspired logo for AT&T, after the 1984 break of the Bell System. By coincidence, he ended of the piece to commemorate the destruction of Pennsylvania Station forty-five years ago whose anniversary coincided with his Bass-AT&T posting. He said “graphic design, unlike architecture, leaves no footprint.” Perhaps he was wrong.
The shifts of the city, both graphic and architectural are natural. The images on a building’s facade are not quite removed as a snake’s shedding its skin, but decay and erode. An evaporating logo has a half-life, akin to a sweaty glass’ ring left on a coffee table, waited to the properly cleaned or covered with a stack of magazines.
I have IM accounts on AIM, iChat, Yahoo, MSN, Gmail and Skype. (Years ago, I once used ICQ and IRC.) I always find it interesting, how certain services are popular in specific countries. AIM is most popular in the US, where as, MSN more widely used in Asia, South American, Canada. IM, like all networks, benefit from network effects. If a service gains traction early in a country, when it can maintain growth, even if it is surpassed by other services who may be globally larger.
The shrunken image above from Valleywag shows which social networks are most dominant by market share, which was tipped off to me by hellowojo. The color coding is a bit confusing, because they decided to make match the countries by the color of the social network’s logo. Because most of social networks logos are blue, a network’s reach is difficult to differentiate. Fortunately, Valleywag also includes another graphic with a list of all the countries by social network.
Going forward these data will change. I wonder if there will be a consolidation of these networks, start into interconnect, or with they stay fractured, in the same way that email addresses were once closed. Here are a couple of possible of future scenarios.
Just as standards for email have been created, Open Social or some other social networking set of standards can allow for competing sites to share information with each other. Wordpress or Moveable Type could become the open platform, where people host their own blog which would act like their profile, or use a service provider to maintain their profile/blog. Gigaom has postulated Wordpress’ move into social networking. Third party widgets could be created to offer function, such as status updates, photo albums, walls, and gifting applications to mimic many of the features of Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace and others SNS. This sounds like a lot more work for the end user, which would be fine for the people who want to have control and heavy lifting which that entails. For the Blogger and LiveJournals users of the world, adoption is only going to take place if setup is as easy as creating a Blogspot or Facebook account.
Where the first example envisions some combination of blogs and SNS, another example is email fully integrating with social networking profiles. Google has been able to effectively enter the IM space by introducing a closely integrated chat client into its Gmail service. By sidestep the application download step, millions of their email users instantly became IM users. Similarly, the Xobni Insight plugin for Outlook, connects information profiles on email contacts, giving Outlook an SNS feel. I haven’t used Outlook in a couple of years, but if I did, I would certainly be trying to get a copy of Insight, which is still in an invite-only beta.
The final possibility to consider is the consolidation of social networking sites into one main site, which may have an open API like Facebook, but is also closed and propritary in the sense that people cannot easily export their profile data out of Facebook, MySpace, or Orkut. While people can leave at any time, if all your friends and contacts use a network then there is incentive to stay in that network. In this way, a company like Google, Yahoo, and MSN could use its adjacent email or blogging services to leverage its entrance into social networking and possible become the de facto platform. Although, as of yet, none of these sites have been about to make a major impact across continents.
So, I guess we’ll just wait and see what happens.
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, FastTCPTM, 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 FastTCPTM. 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 FastTCPTM 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.”
Image source: IEEE
Noah Brier posted an interesting link recently to an article claiming that Metcalfe’s Law, which famously has been paraphrased to be the value of a network exponentially quadratically grows with each additional node, is wrong. This is a provocative thesis because the law is widely trumpeted in all that is good about the Internet.
In the theoretical long term view, networks with more nodes will encourage late adopters to join (and pay.) People often cite the instance of email, the rates of people setting up (and paying for) email accounts in the 1990s rose much faster after it was possible to communication with people outside a user’s ISP, being AOL, Compuserve, Prodigy, or an academic institution. However, network adoptions plays out differently in other cases.
The disconnect here may be that in the definition of value, more specifically value by whom. In the valuation of a network, the network of 100 is worth more than a network of 10. According to Metcalfe, it’s worth 100 times (10^2) the smaller network. For the consumer, it is clear that the value of the telecommunications network grows with each new person, especially if the costs for the user doesn’t increase. However, consider combining access of two competing networks from the perspective of the network operators. From this angle, the smaller network will clearly see more benefit than that larger network, as the article suggests. Further, both operators will see an increase in the costs associated with network traffic (from hardware to customer service,) with no new paying customers. If the operators are charging an unlimited usage prices, there is little upside to combining networks, which shows why network operators tend to resist interoperability. Why would a market leading operator take on additional cost with increased revenue and help a smaller competitor?
Coming back to the definition of value, the value of the network actually doesn’t change if the willing to pay (i.e. the ability to extract fees) from the customers of the network. I’m still trying to grapple with the difference between the value of the network from the customer versus the operator. That is, the problem is that as although the value of a larger network may grow, there willingness to pay by the customer does not. In fact, it may even shrink, which was noted in a MobileCampNYC talk by some smart folks at Air Arts last Saturday. Consumers have been conditioned to expect prices to fall, especially in the area of telecommunication services, even as nodes (and the value of the network) increases. Is the reason that customers don’t want to pay for that additional nodes because the new nodes are less valuable to the customer as the article suggests? Is it a matter of marketing conditioning from other services industries associated with the properties of the economics of scale that prices for services should go down over time?
Although the article was published last year, the valuations for networks will only receive more scrutiny after Facebook’s USD$15 billion valuation, which is about 25 times what News Corp paid for MySpace, which has more than double the users than Facebook. Expect more discussion to follow.
Image source: usgs.gov
My last post to flowtv.org described the work by Kevin Werbach, a legal professor at the UPenn’s Wharton School of Business. I first heard about him at this year’s Telecommunications Policy Research Conference. He is looking at how the different forces pull the Internet together as well as pushes them apart. I wrote about how it got me thinking about how the Internet is fractal, and how important is it to have models like Werbach’s to help explain it.
At first, because the Internet works so well as a decentralized network, Werbach’s suggestion of the idea of a fragmented network comprised of archipelagos and walled gardens seems unlikely and unwanted. However, Techcrunch is reporting that in China, attempt to access Google and Yahoo are getting redirected to the homegrown (and approved) Baidu. A chance of this kind of fragmentation is quite real, which could also mean that the ICANN testing of non-Roman language domain names might be too little, too late.
Ray Cha works in New York and lives in Brooklyn.
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