O'Reilly Digital Media

After finally catching up on much needed sleep after ETech, I’ve got a few final observations to get out of my head:

• I’ve been to both P2P conferences and to both ETech conferences and this years ETech conference was the most action packed and intense conference I’ve ever attended. The mix of people at the conference was excellent — very few suits, yet tons of geeks from all backgrounds. Each year there is a group of younger, more hard-core geeks present at the conference. For the P2P conferences these geeks were the P2P stars like Brandon Wiley, Gene Khan, and Ian Clarke, and for the ETech conferences you had the wireless trouble makers Rob Flickenger, Schulyer Erle and all the hackers from freenetworks.org and nocat.net. I’m curious to see who the alpha geeks in the next few years will be.
• While Tim Appnel was fueled by adrenaline I was grateful that the coffee at the conference never stopped flowing. Without caffeine, I wouldn’t have survived 16 hours of non-stop geeking each day.
• The WiFi network and the density of laptops brought about new dynamics at the conference. People who needed to charge their laptops clustered around the power outlets like nomads clustering around a desert oasis. (Kudos to the O’Reilly conference team for providing more access to power this year!)
• Each of the sessions was largely silent — the speaker was the only person talking. The only other thing to be heard were people tapping on the keyboards of their laptops, blogging the sessions, or chatting with other attendees. For each session there were multiple layers of communication happening simultaneously: IRC, iChat and Hydra collaborative note taking. It can be hard work following one conversation, but when there are 4 or 5 conversations happening at the same time, its exhilaration and overload at the same time.

And then there were a couple of recurrent threads that many speakers touched upon:

• Incumbents vs innovators: DRM technology, the DMCA, the super/state DMCAs and patents present a growing threat to the innovators of high tech. The geeks must become more politically active in order to counter-act the evil technologies that are being pushed large media companies and the government.
• Frustation with the music industry: During Howard Rheingold’s keynote speech he expressed his frustration with the music industry, and the need for someone to figure out a system to reward the artists for their hard work. This sentiment was echoed in several other presentations and discussions at ETech. Unfortunately, no one has any good leads on how to accomplish this.

That wraps up ETech for me this year — it’s been a ton of fun. If you went to ETech this year, please take a moment to fill out the online evaluation forms.

If you made it to ETech, what did you think?

Related link: http://human-nature.com/group/chap3.html

As we’ve come to expect from our cult leader Clay Shirky, his talk “A group is its own worst enemy” was densely packed with valuable information for anyone wishing to design social software. Rather than going over the entire talk, I’ll focus on Clay’s conclusions. For more detailed notes on the entire talk, check out Cory’s notes.

Clay suggests that if you’re going to design social software, you should accept the following points:

• You cannot separate the social issues from the technical issues. They are too intertwined and it does not work to separate them; as an example read LambdaMOO Takes a New Direction.
• Software only determines what people will do — up to a point. Software cannnot influence/control all social aspects; groups have their own mentality that cannot and should not be boxed in by software. The group must have control over defining their own values.
• Members are different from users. Social software will have some people who care and contribute more than others and it’s important to recognize the valuable contributors. Members in good standing in the community will find others in the same community. The social software should give the members the ability to find and communicate with other members in good standing.
• The core group has rights that trump individuals in some situations. A good example is the Wikipedia group defending itself from malicious individuals who trash wiki pages. The group’s goal is to create a comprehensive encyclopedia wiki and when a few individuals work against that goal, their individual rights should get squashed preserve the rights (goals) of the group.

Furthermore, if you’re going to design social software, you should consider the following points:

• Groups need a social contract. Since software only determines what people do to a point, a social system needs to have a constitution in place that governs the social aspects of the group.
• Handles for the user that matter. Users need handles (user names) that matter to them, and there must be a penality for switching user names. A good example of this is the Kaycee Nicole Hoax.
• Members in good standing need to be recognized. Just like in open source software, members respond to being recognized for their good work. Social software needs to have method for quantifying and recognizing the work of its members.
• Some barriers to participation are needed. Some things in the system need to be hard to do. The core group members needs some way to differentiate and defend itself from the mass of users.
• You have to spare the group from scale. (For once) Metcalfe’s law is a drag — as social software systems get larger, supporting a meaningful conversation becomes harder. Some social software systems shut off access to new users as the system reaches its useful limits.

These points seem to cover the most pertinent aspects of social systems — of course things are lots more complex than that. Clay refererred to
Group Relations, which covers Bion’s work and a book by Wilfred R. Bion.

What other social software points should be considered?

Related link: http://hydra.globalse.org/

ETech 2003 is the first conference I’ve attended where I finally joined the Mac crowd, proudly blogging from my new 12″ powerbook. The number of Mac laptops at the conference is stunning and encouraging. Between Linux and Mac OS X laptops, the windows laptops are starting to become less frequent — a refreshing change, IMHO.

Using Rendezvous and iChat to politely talk to other attendees during the conference enhances the experience and allows attendees to share insights gleaned from the presentations. Cool and simple, but very effective for enriching the conference.

But, that was nothing until Richard Soderberg bugged me to try out Hydra, the collaborative text editor. Hydra allows multiple people to edit a single text document at the same time. Using Rendezvous to discover fellow editors at the conference, a user can join others in editing a document. Hydra shows who is editing the document, how many changes they have made, and keeps all the changes from each of the contributors color coded to keep things attributed to their contributor.

For each conference session someone would start a Hydra document to keep notes during the session. Lots of people jumped in for each session to help out the editing. One or two people contributed most of the work in capturing the message of the session, and a number of others help out in digging up links, fixing typos and adding more details to the notes. The resultant document is vastly more comprehensive than the notes from any one person. Finally, an informal convention arose where each contributor added their email address to the end of the document so the original author can mail the finished document to all the participants.

Watching this process at first is outright amazing — it’s was more
fascinating than TV. I stared in amazment for the first few sessions, held back by the same hesitation that I felt when I first started using Wikis. Unlike a Wiki, the document you’re watching is literally alive in front of you.

However, this process also has some downsides. During Clay Shirky’s “A group is it’s own worst enemy” talk, there were too many cooks in the kitchen. Just as Clay was talking about how social groups can grow past their optimal size, some people started editing the same paragraph. The paragraph got totally munged because too many people were editing it at the same time. The Hydra crowd was its own worst enemy, ironically.

The collaborative note taking worked better in the smaller sessions and BOFs, where maybe 3-5 people were actively participating in the note taking. During the large keynote speeches the editing was more hectic and some portions of the document suffered from scalability issues. I think that either the Hydra editor or it’s users need to take the key points from Clay’s talk into account to ensure that the Hydra user can be managed without having too many editors spoil the document. (I’ll be posting the key points from Clay’s talk later on.)

I’ve really enjoyed being a Mac user at this conference. I finally understand what all the fanaticism is all about. :-)

What are your experiences with Hydra?

Related link: http://www.archive.org/bookmobile/

PRESS RELEASE

For Release: April 23, 2002
Contact: Richard Koman
415-561-6767
richard@archive.org

In San Francisco, India, and soon Egypt,
Internet Bookmobiles Take Books to the People

New nonprofit formed to facilitate bookmobiles around the world

Somewhere near Delhi, India, two vans are on the road, stopping at villages and providing local schoolchildren and teachers with books. But these are not traditional library bookmobiles carrying a limited selection of expensive commercially published books that must be returned in a few weeks. These “digital mobile libraries” have more than 10,000 books in languages from English to Telugu, all available via the Internet. Even valuable medical knowledge captured only on palm leaves is now being scanned and made available to the public domain. A laser printer, a desktop binding machine and a paper cutter are all that’s needed to turn those files into books. And those books don’t have to be returned; they’re not lent, they’re given. In addition, each mobile library has a scanner, so individuals can offer their personal documents and creations to the world.

These two mobile libraries are the beginnings of a fleet of 30 vehicles that the Indian government plans to send out across the vast country, one for each state. The Indian digital mobile library, a project of India’s Ministry of Communication and Information Technology, was directly inspired by work done by Brewster Kahle, digital librarian at the Internet Archive in San Francisco.

Last fall, Kahle created the Archive’s Internet Bookmobile, a used minivan equipped with a Motosat satellite Internet connection, several laptop computers, an HP color laser printer, Fastback desktop binding system, and a manual paper cutter. Using public domain works freely available on the Internet, Kahle was able to produce perfect-bound paperback books for a cost of about $1 a book. The total cost of the vehicle was less than $15,000. On a cross-country tour of the U.S., the Internet Bookmobile stopped at schools and libraries giving away copies of “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” and “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.” The Internet Bookmobile continues to make books at events around the San Francisco Bay Area.

The original idea was to show the value of the public domain — in a word, free books. But the Indian initiative is showing that it’s an idea with the potential to attack problems of illiteracy and lack of education in one of the world’s most populous and impoverished nations.

The Library of Alexandria in Egypt — which hosts a complete copy of the Internet Archive’s collections — has also agreed to deploy its own Internet bookmobile later this year. “Countries like India and Egypt are realizing that by using the Internet and scanning their own books they can use this technology to put books in kids’ hands incredibly cheaply,” Kahle said.

To help move forward the movement to deploy Internet bookmobiles, the Internet Archive today announced the creation of a new nonprofit organization, Anywhere Books. The mission of Anywhere Books is to facilitate the deployment of Internet Bookmobile technology around the U.S. and the world, through financing systems, collective fundraising and equipment purchasing, consulting and support.

“The technology demonstrated by the Internet Bookmobile can have a substantial impact on illiteracy, education and poverty,” said Brad deGraf, director of the new organization. “We see this as a way to help span the Digital Divide. Even in communities well beyond the ‘last mile’ of the Internet, bookmobiles can deliver books. In addition, these units can serve as scanning stations to make new material from a variety of cultures and languages available over the Internet.” Anywhere Books is actively seeking funding from individuals, foundations and the international development community.

Anywhere Books is organized as a project of the Rudolf Steiner Foundation. The Internet Archive is a 501(c)(3) corporation based in San Francisco. For more information on Anywhere Books, the Internet Bookmobile, and the Internet Archive, visit http://www.archive.org/bookmobile

If you have international connections interested in bookmobiles, drop me a line: richard@archive.org

Related link: http://www.boycott-riaa.com/article/6540

This article on Boycott-RIAA.org is a proposal for a P2P net that 100% consists of creative commons-licensed materials. A good idea! The problem being that just like Napster couldn’t get music label content off, how are you going to stop people from putting the latest Madonna tracks on it?

The obvious problem being that just like Napster couldn’t get music label content off, how are you going to stop people from putting the latest Madonna tracks on it? But if it’s all CC content then it should be simple for the machine to check for the existence of a cc license. But do we have the technology to put cc licenses in audio files? Or should the system consist of placeholder html files that contain the cc license and a link to the content? Perhaps Adam can answer these questions fairly easily.

In any case, I agree in principle with the idea that there should be a thing that consists of OUR content and OUR technology. As the author points out, the P2P era revealed the possibility of artists and listeners finding each other directly.

The question with Napster, as Cory pointed out when I interviewed him recently, Napster was only really good to find stuff you already knew existed. A cc-p2p would be exclusively about finding stuff you don’t know exists. So it’s not clear that p2p would be better than a cc yahoo, or some centralized effort to let people browse what content exists.

As far as the payment model goes, you still don’t get paid for putting your stuff online. But why should artists be different from writers and bloggers and visual artists and programmers? The only people who get paid for putting stuff online are people working with established sites who have an advertising-based revenue stream based on audience size, which is based on compelling content. So there can be advertising-based music sites. There’s no need to replicate the old model here.

In any case, a start of something is available at the Archive/ETree page of free concert recordings. They’re up to 200 artists. See: http://www.archive.org/audio/etree.php

Anyone want to take this on? Can CC people answer some of these questions?

Cory Doctorow said: “57 million Napster users built the largest online library ever assembled using a bottom up fashion. The US constitution is used to build libraries, but copyright law is being used to burn down libraries.” The goverment, influenced by large media companies, is changing the fundamental concepts of how information is made available to the public. The basic concepts written into the constitution by the founders are being changed by incumbent media companies. Cory skillfully puts this fundamental change into perspective by contrasting it to book burning, and even worse, library burning. Burning a books is commonly accepted to be a bad idea. Burning libraries is collosally stupid.

The incumbent media companies are committing a crime against society — tearing down an ad-hoc digital library built literally overnight that should be celebrated as great feat of technology. We should learn the lessons from this bottom up shared library to create similar projects, but instead the trend with DRM (Digital Restriction Management) is to do everything possible to prevent this from happening again.

From the days of the piano roll the media companies have been trying to squash technology — it happened with radio, it happened with the VCR and now its happening with DRM. Unlike the previous attempts to squash technology, the media companies are looking for unprecedented powers to control not only what users are doing, but also in how new computer systems are designed. Integrating DRM into hard drives, motherboards and even embedding watermarks into digital to analog converters to close the analog hole is completely ludicrous.

Andrew “bunnie” Huang, of Xbox hacking fame, pointed out that future chips with DRM support are likey to be subsidized by the companies who support the DRM technologies. If this actually works, it will make chips without DRM support more expensive since they are not subsidized by the DRM pushers. We can only hope that this math won’t work out in the end — if it does we’re in serious trouble.

Furthermore, as Cory points out, the blame does not solely lie with the incumbent media companies. It’s up to the users/creators of this library to “Stop scattering like roaches when the lights come on.” The people who create this library need to become active in letting their congresscritters know how they feel. More political action is needed in order change the balance of copyrights back to something that resembles normal.

The last thought that Cory threw out was this:

“Is DRM the answer to a question we’re not asking?”

“How do we burn this library down for good?”

DRM — what are your thoughts on avoiding this nightmare?

The Emerging Tech conference 2003 was kicked off by a day of tutorials which introduce the key concepts covered in the conference. I picked the Laws and Emerging Technology Tutorialpresented by my personal hero Fred von Lohmann and by Rajiv Patel.

Jamming P2P Networks

The first quarter of the tutorial covered the basic copyright issues that Fred had covered in previous conferences. Most of the material covered can be read in Fred’s copyright white paper.

To underscore his examples of copyright infringement he outlined a lawsuit that is about to be announced: Hummer Winblad and former Napster CEO Hank Barry are being sued for secondary copyright infringement for investing into Napster.

At first glance this lawsuit looks ludicrous, but Fred outlined on what basis H&W and Hank Barry can be sued as vicarious infringers:

• There was direct infringement (of course)
• They had control over their users (Napster kicked people who violates the user agreement off the network)
• They had financial benefit, since they were shareholders in the company. (financial benefit includes tons of visitors coming a traffic site that contains a paid banner ad, as the Napster site did).

Given the outline of the law for vicarious infringers, this lawsuit is not as silly as it first seems.

Jamming web services

Fred outlined the common law concept of Trespass to Chattels which is now being used by companies to protect themselves from aggressive screen scrapers and users who use web services not in accordance with use policies. The legal concept of trespass to Chattles is the idea that one company can stop another company from meddling with their stuff, if they can show that some damage was caused. Putting this into everyday terms, Fred says: “Petting your neighbor’s dog is not tresspass to Chattel, kicking the dog is tresspass to Chattel.”

BiddersEdge was the prime example here — BiddersEdge screen scaped the EBay website for pertinent auction information that they aggregated on their own site. EBay told them to stop and even blocked the BiddersEdge IP address, but BiddersEdge persisted. Finally EBay sued BiddersEdge on tresspass to chattel, citing EBays’ degraded site performance due to BiddersEdge spidering, and the work that was required to block BiddersEdge. And EBay won an injunction against BiddersEdge.

The important note here is that at least $5000 of damage needs to be caused before someone can be sued under the trespass to Chattel law.

Jamming anything with a handshake

The Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) basically states two things:

• It is illegal for a person/campany to cirmcumvent technical protection measures, and
• It is illegal to traffic in devices/tools that circumvent protection measures

The best example for how the DMCA affected strange and bizzare areas of technology, Fred outlined the Lexmark v. DCC case, where Lexmark sued DCC for copyright infringement. Apparently Lexmark embedds a depleted flag into each printer cartridge, and when the printer cartridge runs low on ink, the depleted flag in the cartridge gets set. If the user has a depleted cartridge refilled and reinserted into the printer, the printer will refuse to print since the cartridge is marked as depleted.

To get around this, DCC started replacing the chips with fresh new chips that didn’t have their depleted flag set. And by doing this they committed a copyright violation. Huh? Copyright violation? It turns out that the Lexmark folks had the lawyers involved from day one and they in turn got the engineers to design the print heads so that the print head would actually download required firmware in order to start printing. By inserting a DCC cartridge, proprietary code from the printer was copied onto a non-Lexmark component, thus creating a copyright violation. Lexmark was granted an injunction against DCC creating printer cartridges for Lexmark printers.

Whacky, but true.

For lots more info on the DMCA and all the crap that it has spawned, check out the EFF’s DMCA and its unintended consequences.

This covers Fred’s portion of the talk — I’ll try and blog about Rajiv’s patent portion later…

Reminder: If you’re at the Emerging Tech conference this week, please take a moment to fill out the groovy new online evaluation forms, to help O’Reilly make the conference even better. If that is possible. :-)

How much do you hate the DMCA??

This is not a political rant. It is an observation about warfare’s current state, regardless of whether you are in favor of, or opposed to, the current war in Iraq.

The term “disruptive technology” is often applied to something that changes the terms on which a battle over a marketplace is fought. For example, O’Reilly published a book called “Peer-To-Peer: Harnessing the Power of Disruptive Technologies” that discussed how P2P systems are implemented to, say, ensure anonymity or availability of censored material. Napster was disruptive because it lowered barriers to entry into the music distribution business. You didn’t need the rights to the music or a big server to distribute the music. More importantly, Napster changed the distribution process and the decision-making process. Bands could publish their music instantly without a record contract, and users could obtain music even if it wasn’t available directly from the rights-holders. The speed and ease of Napster’s distribution model changed the rules of the game for participants, even the unwilling ones (i.e., the music companies).

So how has the speed with which warfare is conducted changed the rules of geopolitics, domestic politics, and society? The effect on the battlefield is obvious. A favorite phrase of war pundits and planners is, “The U.S. was able to get inside the opposition’s decision cycle.” This means that the U.S. was able to deploy troops and direct attacks before an effective response could be formulated much less implemented. Most U.S. citizens consider this a good thing even if they are opposed to the war. Even those opposed to the war generally say, “I hope it is over quickly,” not, “I hope it drags on forever just to make Bush look bad.” Likewise, although there are raging debates about exactly what is happening on the ground in Iraq, clearly, wars are being fought differently today by the U.S. military than by any other fighting force in the history of the world.

Clearly, the U.S. has superior technology, whether in terms of surveillance, communications, or firepower. But battlefield superiority is not in and of itself disruptive. For example, when the U.S. was the only country in the world with an atomic bomb (circa 1945) there were still checks on the President’s use of the bomb. As history proved, it was relatively easy for other countries to develop or obtain their own atomic bombs. Furthermore, the atomic bomb is considered so horrific and serious as to preclude its use on a casual basis. Even George W. Bush wouldn’t drop a nuclear bomb without consulting Congress. There are no such hesitations when using J-DAMs and similar “convential” weaponry. A disruptive technology, however, not only plays the game better than its predescessors, it changes the rules of the game entirely.

So what rules of the game have changed? For one thing, the U.S. military is not only “inside the decision cycle of the opposition” they are inside the decision cycle of the legislators and citizens of their own country. If a war can be initiated and nearly concluded in three weeks, debate becomes largely moot. I believe the U.S. President has to consult with Congress within 30 or 60 days of a troop deployment. Within 30 days, President Bush is already calling aircraft carriers back from the Persian Gulf to their home ports. The U.S. Congress, therefore, has been reduced to spectators despite the fact that the U.S. Constitution gives them sole power to declare war.

Likewise, what is seen as largely a very messy, dirty war in the rest of the world hasn’t had many consequences for the US populace. Charles Rangel, a Congressman from New York State pointed out that very few members of Congress have children serving in the all-volunteer U.S. military. Furthermore, although many Americans have familily members and neighbors serving, few of us know service men and women who have died in a U.S. war in the last decade. The 1992 Gulf War (Desert Storm), Bosnia, and Kosovo saw historically low military deaths for U.S. troops. Perhaps opposition forces realize that even small numbers of casualties, as in Somalia, can send the U.S. packing. But the message sent by the latest war in Iraq is, “American troops will take so few casualties that the American public’s resistance to the war will be minimal. So don’t mess with Texas.”

So another important check on U.S. military power and intervention, the U.S. public, is largely neutralized. Even if there were massive American casualties, a short war precludes much organized opposition (or time for dissent to foment). Short-term propaganda is sufficient to hide the messay details from the public until it too becomes moot. And if there were massive casualties from, say, chemical or biological weapons, the U.S. public would have even more confidence that their cause was just.

I started this blog saying that it is not a political rant, and I maintain that still. I’m not saying whether the changes are good or bad for Americans and for the world. That is for others to decide. But I am here to remind everyone of the real changes that have taken place in the implications and conduct of warfare outside the battlefield because of the changes in the conduct of warfare on the battlefield.

What have you got to say about it?

So what did you miss at FlashForward SF 2003 on Day 3?

I skipped Thursday night’s party at the end of Day 2, sponsored by Media Temple, but anybody sponsoring an open bar deserves a plug in my book. Having caught up on sleep and not being hung over, Day 3 was a workhorse day for me. I attended several informative sessions, including Mike Chambers talking about Flash Remoting, Thomas Wagner covering Flash game development, and Brian Ghidinelli addressing Rich Internet Application development processes. Other popular sessions included Phillip Torrone discussing content creation for mobile device, Robert Penner teaching Scripted Animation techniques, and Dave Yang covering OOP techniques in ActionScript.

The highlight for me, however, was Erik Natzke’s closing session entitled “Interaction Less Ordinary.” Erik showed some breathtaking animation sequences, most notably a hyper-realistic page-turning animation that was so perfect in its elegance and natural in appearance that it would be easy to overlook if encountered on a web site. Erik does some amazing stuff in Flash without it appearing too Flashy. Moreover, he creates some very useful interfaces, such as the one that distributes images in a circle, making it much easier to shuffle through them.

The conference closed with an unparalleled swag distribution hour. Nearly half the people in the audience walked away with door prizes ranging from $50 to $10,000, including free Flash Comm Server hosting, free conference passes, a DevNet subscription, a Pocket PC, and, of course, several stacks of free O’Reilly books.

A rockin’ party at Method (on 5th and Mission) closed out the week with appropriate libation and conversation. I look forward to seeing everyone July 9-11 for FlashForward 2003 in New York.

See Day 1 and Day 2 commentary, as well.

What is the best conference swag you ever got?

So what did you miss at FlashForward SF 2003 on Day 2?

The keynore featured Macromedia’s Kevin Lynch discussing their vision for the Flash platform. Kevin and cohorts highlighted important touchpoints in Macromedia’s strategy, including Macromedia Central, a dashboard-like interface to Flash content and other utilities. It featured offline content for those with intermittent connectivity, plus e-commerce to help stimulate an active developer community. Kevin also announced Flash Communication Server 1.5, featuring secure connectivity and RedHat Linux support. Tony Lopez of Macromedia discussed their web site’s redesign and the lessons learned. Joe Tan of Vividence demonstrated the ability to track user interactivity across a Flash-enabled application or site to improve usability. Paul Gubbay of CyberSage described his company’s RAD environment for Flash developers. Mike Chambers of Macromedia introduced DevNet Pro, a new subscription service that allows Macromedia developers to track their licenses, receive the latest upgrades, and obtain enhanced support. And Chris Thomas of Intel described the chip manufacturer’s commitment to mobile computing and the new Centrino chip. Kevin concluded with a demonstration of Flash Player 6 for the Windows-based Pocket PC.

Following the keynote, our own Tim O’Reilly gave an important talk on “Watching the Alpha Geeks.” Tim outlined the history and progression of technological cycles as follows:

1. Hackers create homebrewed solutions to interesting and challenging problems.

2. Entrepreneurs make things easier for ordinary users.

3. A few dominant players attempt to raise barriers to entry in order to monopolize the market.

More importantly, Tim outlined the conditions under which certain initiatives succeed or fail. For example, mp3.com preceded Napster, but it failed because it offered a centralized solution (”We have all the songs”) to a problem better addressed by decentralization (it doesn’t matter where the song is stored, so long as someone can find it by searching the network of peers). Furthermore, a platform strategy, like Microsoft Windows, will always beat an application strategy, like Netscape Navigator (I happen to disagree with Tim here. Netscape had a platform strategy in which Navigator was the platform to which plugins could be written. It failed because of Microsoft’s anti-competitive tactics and a loss of vision to carry the strategy through.)

So how do you predict the future and avoid the mistakes of the past? Well, first, you watch the Alpha Geeks, of course. Although the desktop paradigm still dominates business thought, hackers already know that the shift from a server-centric to network-centric world is well underway. The web browser is not the end of the revolution. The future is in microcontent browsers like Sherlock, Watson, and Macromedia Central, devoid of intrusive chrome, accessing cooperating Web Services and web-facing databases. Web services like those offered by Amazon and Google are the software components of the future.

How can Macromedia and Flash developers avoid being relegated to a side canyon of history? How can they compete with Microsoft, even as the .NET initiative pauses if not stumbles? Macromedia has to continue to promote the platform against which others will develop. They must maintain and extend their lead in Rich Internet Application (RIA) development. The community can help by creating a critical mass of open source components. (Here, Tim encouraged the attendees to share their code more openly, not realizing that although Macromedia develops proprietary software, many developers freely share source code. Furthermore, Macromedia has opened the SWF format to public scrutiny, going to great lengths to promote it as a community standard and not just the de facto standard.)

Tim closed by admonishing participants to promote and adhere to open standards (citing Apache’s success in being strict in what you transmit and liberal in what you accept as a key to long-term success). He also encouraged Macromedia to make it easier to imitate another developer’s work by adding a “View Source” feature to Flash (common in HTML browsers). He says that Open Source is not about a software license, it is about lowering the barriers to entry and innovation in order to repel monopolists that would otherwise raise barriers and stifle innovation. In summary, Tim said:

1. Play well with others - build in interoperability.

2. Think “platform” not “application” - build in extensibility.

3. Think “network”, think “open” - “value will be created in sofware above the level of a single device.”

Following Tim’s talk and numerous other excellent sessions, the day closed with a rollicking Flash Film Festival, featuring rubber arrow trophies and short acceptance speeches.

See Day 1 and Day 3 commentary, as well.

What are the Alpha Geeks telling us today?

Why do you care about FlashForward SF 2003 if it ended almost a week ago? Simple, the New York version is coming in July to a Big Apple near you, and is sure to serve up more excellent content and personal networking opportunities for Flash developers and wanna-bes.

So now that I’m caught up on sleep and Alka-Seltzered my hangover, let’s recap what you missed:

Day 1 featured four 3-hour sessions (two in the a.m. and two more in the p.m.) plus a separate Ask The Experts track featuring 1-hour sessions. As usual Lynda Weinman, who seems to get younger and hipper with each passing conference, opened the festivities. Lynda and UDA, who co-produce FlashForward, wisely offered Flash Video, Flash MX Fundamentals, ActionScript, and Creating Rich Media in the four main workshops. I sat in on the Flash Video session featuring Mike Davidson and Danny Mavromatis of ESPN.com, whose site gets over 1 billion (with a “b”) hits a month. Not content to be Macromedia mouthpieces, they discussed the real-world alternatives and trade-offs with different video technologies. They also mentioned that historical statistics enable them to predict Flash penetration rates (summary, the latest Flash Player is available on over 80% of client machines within about 15 months of release).

The afternoon was highlighted by a networking cocktail hour and author book signing, featuring O’Reilly author Colin Moock and our own Tim O’Reilly. The crowd was friendly and informed, and it was a great opportunity to connect with existing friends or make more business and personal contacts. See Day 2 and Day 3 commentary, as well.

What was your favorite or least favorite thing about FlashForward?