The author of the book is Arthur Benjamin.  He gave a demonstration of his mad skillz at TED a while back, which I’m embedding here because it’s awesome.

Migrating this blog has been fun because it’s forced me to look over a lot of the old content I’ve written.  A couple years ago I found Benjamin’s Ted talk, which has inspired all this craziness.  I think it’s good to keep the brain fresh by taxing skills that one might not have used in a while.

iSlate is rumored to have a bunch of new content associated with it.  Particularly print content.  Print publishers will probably want consumers to sign up for subscriptions.  So Apple’s probably going to be introducing people to the concept of content subscriptions on their portable devices, likely with iPhone OS 4.0 which probably will run the iSlate and old iPhones and iPod touches too.  So I wouldn’t be surprised if you can get an all-you-can-eat music subscription service available too.  We’ll see.  It’s pure speculation, but it would make sense.  I’d be particularly tickled if my off-the-cuff prediction of dates from 2007 turned out to be right.

Unless Apple has come up with a better way to do soft keyboards, that is.  When I say “soft keyboard” I mean the kind of keyboard that appears on a touch screen and has no physical keys.  I’ve complained about the iPhone’s keyboard for a while.  While it’s true that people do get better at using these, I still don’t think I’ll ever be nearly as fast or accurate (even with smart correction) with a soft keyboard as I was with my blackberry.  I think that’s probably true on average for most people.  The basic reason is the lack of tactile feedback.  With a physical keyboard, if my fingers are slightly off target, they are guided to the right place by feel.

I’ve argued for some time now that the way to solve this is by figuring out how to make a touch-screen display with tactile feedback.  How would such a device work?  Physically I couldn’t tell you.  But what we’d need would be a way to electronically manipulate texture in a clear material.  A plastic with a matrix of cells that could expand or contract under electronic control.  So the software could create bumps where each of the keys are.  This would allow a software-reconfigurable gadget that could be almost as usable as a dedicated-purpose device.

This is very different from what is commonly referred to as “haptic feedback” on some of today’s gadgets like the Nexus One.  Here, the phone’s vibrator pulses a bit when you press a soft key.  This is a kind of feedback which is tactile in that you feel it, and it gives you information about your interaction with the device without having to look at the screen.  It certainly helps.  But it is not going to improve basic typing for a critical reason — it can’t help guide fingers to the right place.  The basic act of positioning fingers on controls is still basically open loop, feed forward, without guidance.  What I’m referring to as tactile feedback helps the fingers find the right spots to press without looking.  Today’s haptic feedback can’t do that.

To be clear, true tactile feedback like this almost certainly doesn’t exist yet.  This kind of pure technological innovation basically always starts in universities or government run labs.  The ROI on pure research into unproven technology is so low that it doesn’t make sense for companies to invest there.  Even if a company proved this was possible (which AFAIK hasn’t been done yet) they’d need to figure out how to manufacture it at scale before they could sell a device with it.  Last time I predicted it would be about 2012 before we saw these.  Even though Jobs almost certainly foresees the value of such a system, Apple’s expertise is not in material science.  Wired speculated about such a keyboard based on Apple’s patent filings, but what they describe seems a bit too sci-fi for me to believe.

If they have come up with something new and cool, it’s going to be a smarter way to use basically existing hardware.  I’m gonna guess it’s probably something like a touch screen which is pressure sensitive, so you can rest your fingers on it without indicating a “button press”, making typing more natural.  You could combine this with fixed, transparent dimples on the screen under the positions where the keys are, and you’d do pretty well.  Restrict the keyboard to only work in landscape mode and you only need one set of dimples.  This would be a huge improvement in usability and the biggest technological breakthrough would be the ability to distinguish a soft push from a hard push on a capacitive touch-screen.  Like by how much surface of your finger is on it.

Regardless of what Apple’s actually managed to achieve, I wish them the best.  They’re really pushing the envelope on human-computer interactions.  If they’ve done anything significant to improve soft keyboards, they will have once again done something that the entire rest of the industry will want to emulate, and I’ll tip my hat to them.

• Keep all blog posts and comments
• Keep all posts at their original URLs
• Maintain all category pages at the same URLs

The first one’s easy.  Google released some migration tools which cover that quite well.  But, at least when importing from typepad / movable type, they don’t preserve permalink URL’s.  So anybody who followed a linked to a specific page on my site would get a 404 page.  Weak.

I spent a lot of time on this.  Basic problem is that Typepad doesn’t include URL information in their export file format. It would be very easy for them to do this, but then why would they want to make it easy for you to leave?  Actually the answer there is easy.  Because by trying to lock in users, they create angry vocal opponents of their service.  I’m not angry, but I would advise against anybody considering Typepad as a blog host, specifically because of their tendency to lock people in.

<rant> Don’t keep my data hostage.  It’s my content.  I created it.  You’re just delivering it.  Do not try to lock me into using you as a service provider.  You might get some more money out of me, but every dollar I give you after I want to leave will contribute to my dis-liking you.  As the internet matures and consumers become more sophisticated and better able to share their experiences with each other, they will increasingly choose the service providers who are open.  (Echoing Jonathan Rosenberg’s recent diatribe on openness.)  I really appreciate Google’s commitment to Data Liberation.  My current provider, Dreamhost, also does a splendid job of giving me control over my data.</rant>

It turns out that getting a full-fidelity export out of typepad is possible with some work.  I followed these instructions from FolioVision which provides a custom export template that does include URL’s.  If your blog has more than 100 posts, then you need to change the first line to

<MTEntries lastn="100">

<MTEntries lastn="100" offset="100">

<MTEntries lastn="100" offset="200">

etc. and merge all these files together into one big export file that has URL’s.  Then I tried to get blogger to honor the import file with permalinks but I couldn’t.  I do believe blogger is capable of doing this, but what ultimately turned me away from it was that it doesn’t seem to offer any way to honor links like www.embracingchaos.com/humor for category listings.  Which I like and get a lot of visitors on.  So I went with wordpress.

FolioVision helpfully posted a custom wordpress import plugin to match their typepad output template, which makes it all go.  Once that’s done, you have to move all the attachments hosted at typepad, and then there’s a bunch of wordpress configuration, and moving your analytics and favicons and finally switching DNS.

So here we are.  Please tell me if you notice anything amiss with the new site.

Broadly, the concept of information democracy is that an increasingly large number of people are able to influence how information is aggregated.  Wikipedia is a clear and simple example of allowing anybody to contribute to what used to be authored by a select few — “The Encyclopedia.”  Google’s Pagerank algorithm democratized web search.  Today’s most successful software is democratizing the feature set by allowing users to vote on how they want to use it.  The general principal is that large numbers of individuals can together make better decisions than any small group.  Applying this principal to culture, we can predict that a cultural democracy will produce “better culture” than what was available before.

Information technology makes it cheaper and easier to both create and to distribute culture.  With the right software, any laptop today has all the power of a professional music or video studio.  Sure the quality won’t be as good without professional inputs (microphones, cameras, etc) but the cheap stuff is good enough for a lot of things.  Obviously the internet makes distribution of this content trivially easy, which is disrupting traditional media businesses.  Easy creation and distribution of cultural content is an important part of creating a cultural democracy, but it is not the critical enabling step.

The key to democratizing culture is in the editorial process.  If everybody is contributing cultural content that is easily distributed, but there’s still a small group deciding which pieces everybody watches, we’re still in a cultural dictatorship.  Enabling the mass public to “vote” on content is the democratizing step.  That enables the collective intelligence of all media consumers to help choose what should become part of mass culture.  So instead of some programming executive trying to guess what will be popular, the question almost becomes moot — whatever is popular becomes popular culture.  Actually making this work is not at all straightforward.  I’ll save a full description of the necessary ingredients for another post, but we can look at a couple examples.

Youtube does this quite well.  It blurs the line between sharing a video clip with your friends and publishing it as a piece of mass culture.  Any video that isn’t marked private is submitted into a kind of massive popularity contest.  Videos that get millions of views are undeniably bits of popular culture.  For music, last.fm does a good job of being inclusive, but hasn’t quite taken off.  When I started building social features into Rhapsody I hoped they could democratize the music editorial process but that hasn’t happened yet.  Like many things in social media there’s a chicken and egg problem with scale which Youtube has clearly gotten past, but music is still struggling with.

Cultural Democracy is “retro”?!

This post is inspired by a recent story by Heather Chaplin that NPR aired describing participatory culture in video games.  The surprising part of the story for me was the assertion that this trend is not modern but in fact “retro.”  The story points out that before analog broadcast media, most culture was participatory — singing, dancing, crafts, etc.  Analog technology created the possibility of cultural hegemonies, and digital technology is breaking them down. A fine point, implying that the 20th century will likely be unique as the only period in human history when popular culture was dictated by an elite group of editors.  Thanks for the interesting tidbit.

]]> http://www.embracingchaos.com/2009/12/participatory-culture-and-the-democratization-of-information.html/feed 1 http://www.embracingchaos.com/2009/12/2009-a-year-of-commitments.html http://www.embracingchaos.com/2009/12/2009-a-year-of-commitments.html#comments Thu, 17 Dec 2009 21:44:49 +0000 leodirac http://wp.embracingchaos.com/2009/12/2009-a-year-of-commitments.html As the year wraps up, I'd like to share some of the major events that have happened in my life recently.  Many of my readers will be well aware of these events, but I recognize that personal news travels through a variety of channels, and all of those channels are unreliable.  (I'll save the diatribe on why Facebook is a horrible way to keep up with friends for another day.)  For readers who are looking for insightful analysis of technology, my apologies.  Note the "ego" tag.  This is a personal update but does contain a little insight into real-estate finance.

December is often a time of reflection, with good reason.  It's a natural opportunity to consider how things are progressing on a longer time-scale than we often do.  For me, 2009 was a year of making long-term commitments.  I made two huge ones, and I'm extremely happy with both of them.  The process of making these commitments kept me quite busy for almost the entire year.

Most significantly, I married the most amazing woman I know.  Maegan Ashworth and I permanently committed ourselves to each other on September 19th.  Our promises to each other were conversational, humorous, long-winded, personal and deadly serious.  We made them in the most public way we could manage, and were still sad to miss the company of many important people in our lives.  I could fill a book with everything I love about Maegan, but that's even more self-indulgent than I'm willing to be right now.  Suffice to say I am confident this will turn out to be one of the most important positive changes in my life ever.

The real planning for our wedding was compressed into just a couple months because it was difficult to focus on the ceremony while the other major event of the year was uncertain.  But in July we moved into a new house, ending 8 months of ambiguity about where we'd call home.  The process started in November 2008 when we first became interested in the house.  (Just before Maegan and I left for our bicycle tour across Vietnam, where we got engaged.)  It took months to reach agreement with the sellers and then months more to finish the process.  

I went in with a group of friends to buy the house together.  For years we had dreamed of living together in something like an "urban kibbutz".  I've liked that phrase ever since I read it applied to Barack & Michelle's early domestic life.  But for a more complete description of our situation, see our co-habitation blog.  (currently unpublished.  sorry.)

Getting a mortgage was particularly complicated.  The global financial crisis obviously did not help, but our situation was especially difficult.  Living comfortably with lots of good friends requires a big house, which means an expensive house.  In real-estate, expensive is also referred to as "jumbo" meaning that it's too much for any kind of government guarantee.  So banks would either need to make a long-term commitment to us themselves (a so-called "portfolio loan") or re-sell the mortgage to another bank on the secondary market.  We learned that the secondary market was "frozen" to use the popular vernacular, probably at about the same time as one particular bank which had all but committed to giving us a loan.  Another complication was that we needed 3 unrelated applicants to demonstrate our collective ability to pay back the debt, which was unusual enough to make many mid-crisis banks feel extra skittish.  I spent a large part of 2009 working on different aspects of how to finance this house.

Happily the stars aligned one evening when I was walking over to the house of my then-future, now-current roommates.  It was quite common for me at the time to walk those several blocks to sign yet another thick stack of papers to give to some agent or broker or other helpful professional.  Along the way I noticed a four-leafed clover in the grass, and picked it up.  In grade school I spent a surprisingly large amount of my recesses scanning the lawn for these botanical mutants, and once had quite an eye for finding them.  So it wasn't an unusual or significant event for me, but it had been years since I'd found one.  We taped the clover onto the application-du-jour which was going to a small local bank, in an act that signified frustration, exhaustion and powerlessness more than hope.  This bank ended up financing our house.

So that took up most of my year.  Trying to buy a house for about the first half, with moving and settling.  Then a wedding followed by a fabulous honeymoon.

I'm also giving an Ignite talk.  I wanted to make it something of a motivational speech.  Encourage people to think about their own roles in helping bring about the robot revolution.  I also wanted an excuse to share some of my thoughts on how to build an alarm bed.  I'll post my slides after the conference, or at least link to somebody else who does.  But for now, I've got the credits and content licensing posted.

Chrysler goes bankrupt

First some background.  Chrysler is being restructured under
bankruptcy.  This doesn’t mean they’re going out of business.  It means
that they owe more money than they have or will be able to pay.  So
with the help of a judge, they’re sitting down with everybody they owe
money to and telling them frankly “you’re not getting everything we owe
you.  Sorry, but there just isn’t enough to go around.”  So everybody
has to compromise.  The idea is that by striking some bargains to
reduce debt the company can get back in the game and become profitable
again.

UAW owns Chrysler

One of the biggest debts Chrysler has is to the UAW, the United Auto
Workers.  This is the labor union which represents all the
“blue-collar” workers who actually make the cars.  Chrysler owes them
benefits like pensions and health benefits.  Part of the settlement is
that the UAW will own 55% of Chrysler stock.  That’s a majority.  So
the workers will own the company.  Personally I think this is great and
makes a ton of sense, and I’ll tell you why.  But not everybody does.

If you’re lucky enough to be blissfully unaware of labor relations in
Michigan, this is downright bizarre.  Chrylser corporation is
“management.”  UAW is “labor.”  These two groups traditionally have not
gotten along.  I don’t think the word “hate” is out of place.  People
say the UAW will try to unwind this position as fast as they can.  I
heard one “expert” say that the UAW is placed in a position of conflict
of interest representing both Chrysler stockholders and UAW workers.
Why?  Because their responsibility to stockholders is to increase the
value of the company, but their responsibility to the union is to save
jobs, and these two goals are diametrically opposed.

Cooperation is the only way

Hold on.  The goals of the workers and the goals of the company are
diametrically opposed? This kind of adversarial thinking underlies how
Detroit got into trouble in the first place.  In truth the UAW’s goals
and Chrysler “management” goals are very strongly aligned.  This
painful truth of this fact is excrutiating today.  Chrysler and GM are
on the verge of ceasing to exist.  If and when this happens, the UAW
workers will lose their jobs.  What’s bad for management is bad for
labor.  But figuring out how to keep Chrysler building cars that can
compete with Japan and everybody else is a really hard problem.  Solve
it and both labor and management win.  If ever there was a time for
labor and management to come together and cooperate it’s now.  To be
extremely blunt for those still harboring grudges: if you two don’t
figure out how to play nicely together, you’re both doomed.

Historical tensions caused these problems and SUV’s too

Conventional wisdom cites two reasons for why Detroit is in this mess:

• They only built big gas-guzzling cars as consumer preferences shifted towards smaller, more fuel-efficient vehicles
• Union labor costs for things like pensions and health care are so
  high compared to foreign competition that the company just can’t compete

I believe both these are true.  But more interestingly (and something
I’ve never heard reported in the press) I believe there’s a causal link
here.  It is precisely because of these high labor costs that Detroit has focused on building gas-guzzlers. Smaller cars are cheaper and are subject to more intense price competition, meaning the margins are lower.  In business school
we learn about two basic types of product strategies: low cost and
high-end.  In the low-cost strategy you try to be more efficient than
your competitors.  You do things cheaper and still maintain a good
enough product.  This is what Japan did with cars.  But because UAW
kept labor costs high, Detroit couldn’t go this direction.  Their small
lower-end cars would just cost more because of the higher input costs.
So they had to go after a high-end strategy where they made bigger,
more expensive vehicles that came with higher profit margins.

Sophie’s Policy Choice

So UAW workers collectively bargained their way out of jobs.  That is,
they bargained up their salaries beyond what their labor is actually
worth in the modern economy.  So what should we do?  Let the market
correct itself so many of them lose their livelihoods?  Or sustain them
publicly somehow?

There is no easy answer to this question from a policy perspective.
China is facing this same question with hundreds of millions of
uneducated peasant farmers.  A relatively modest investment (on the
national scale) in farm machinery could replace a good fraction of
their output.  But the economically efficient choice comes with a high
human cost.  In this country we believe governments exist to serve the
people.  We’ll see how it does.

Background on SLRs and DSLRs

(If you what “f-stop” means, feel free to skip ahead to the next section.)

SLR stands for Single Lens Reflex.  Practically speaking it refers to a camera where you can change the lens.  You look through the same lens that actually takes the picture, letting you put any lens from an ultra-wide angle fisheye to a telescope-length zoom lens.  You can also put filters on the front like star filters or color shifters or polarizers.  Imagine a classic 35mm camera — like what a P.I. would carry to snap pictures of your wife having an affair — that’s an SLR.

SLR’s require a mirror that physically moves to divert the light into one of two places — your eye, or the film / CCD. The mirror was important when the only technology for capturing images was chemical film.  But nowadays we have various electronic devices like CCDs that digitize an image.  DSLR cameras use a CCD to get many of the benefits of digital imaging, but still have the same physical form factor as an old chemical-film SLR.  They can use the old lenses, which is one of their big appeals.  But so many things about these cameras just don’t make sense.

The problems with DSLR cameras

First there’s the noise. The sound of the mirror slapping against its stops as it switches positions is very recognizable. We used to accept sounds like that as a necessary part of taking
pictures.  Today it just annoys me.  Especially when I’m at a small
event and some photographer is there making loud clicking noises all
the time while I’m trying to enjoy whatever it is they’re digitizing
with their dinocam.  In 99% of all use cases, it’s totally unnecessary.  CCDs can continuously capture images and display them on a screen, creating a digital light path that doesn’t require loud expensive mechanical assemblies.  These displays aren’t as good as what a human eye can pick out, so this doesn’t work all the time.  But if you don’t need interchangeable lenses, then the camera can have a second optical path just for the eye, which doesn’t need to be as good.

One argument against a separate optical viewfinder is that youc can’t put filters in front of the lens.  This is very true, but filters are also obsolete.  With few exceptions, everything that a physical filter does can be done later in photoshop with more control and accuracy.  Color tinting, sparkle, gradients, soft, mist, etc — these all used to be rendered in physical glass out of necessity.  Polarizing filters are probably the most important exception to this — since CCD’s don’t record a light’s polarization state, it can’t be adjusted later.  But for the most part, filters aren’t necessary anymore, meaning you don’t need the whole single-lens thing.

But what about interchangeable lenses?  Isn’t it useful to have the same camera body and be able to change lenses?  (I hear you cry.)  Yes, sorta.  There are definitely situations where one lens won’t be able to do everything you want.  But those situations are getting rarer and rarer.  And in the few exception cases, I’ll argue that interchangeable lenses aren’t the right solution.  The reason these cases are getting less and less common is that zoom lenses are getting better.  When SLR cameras first came on the scene zoom lenses basically didn’t exist because they sucked when they did.  You needed a different lens for each amount of magnification you wanted, so people had lots of lenses.  But with computers to help us design the lenses, and vastly improved manufacturing processes, zoom lenses are getting better all the time.  Nowadays a lens with a huge 10x zoom can even win accolades from camera snobs.  And lenses as versatile as 26x cover every situation most of us would ever want, and at a quality we’ll be thrilled with.  So for almost all situations, a single zoom lens is good enough today.

What about the situations where that’s not quite good enough?  Where you need that 14mm fisheye that captures people standing immediately to the left or right side of the lens?  Or that 8000mm super- long telephoto telescope?  It turns out in either of these challenging cases, getting the lens to fit the standard SLR form factor becomes the hardest part.

Why SLR’s cripple even the extreme lens cases

With ultra-wide fisheye lenses, the problem is the space reserved for that stupid mirror.  In this case, the focal length is very short, so as a
lens designer, you’d naturally want the focal plane to be very close to
the glass.  (Like about 14mm.)  But the place where the lens attaches to the camera body necessarily needs to be a certain distance away from the imaging plane.  That distance was determined by the size of the mirror, which was determined by the size of your chemical film — 35mm, which is more than you’d really want for a 14mm lens.  Even on today’s 2009 DSLR cameras, that distance is exactly the same as it was a generation ago in order to ensure backwards compatibility with old lenses.  The literal tons of carefully polished glass represent a very real barrier to improvement since people have invested lots of money in them.

So if you really want a camera that’s good at taking super-wide angle pictures, you don’t want your lens to have to be that far away from the imaging plane.  You’re better off with a specially built camera.  The lens will be simpler, cheaper and higher quality.  But super-wide starts to look funny, no matter what.  Funny meaning
distorted, because if your eye is more than a couple of inches away
from the reproduced super-wide image, then it won’t look right.  And it’s not super useful to capture 360 degrees in one shot — you can shoot a dozen pictures and stitch them together later in software, and it’ll look more natural.  This is all why people don’t pay a lot of attention to how super-wide lenses get anymore.

On the super-telephoto side of things, the SLR legacy is even worse.  To get a super-long telephoto lens you need lots of big glass.  This gets expensive quickly simply because it’s a large mass of carefully manufactured stuff.  The amount of glass you need for a lens is proportional to the cube of the length of your imaging plane, which for legacy chemical-film is 35mm. But CCD’s just don’t need to be that big.  On almost every DSLR they’re only about 20mm across, and on high-quality non-SLR cameras are as typically about 6mm across.  So that size legacy means you would need literally 200x  the almost 40x the amount of physical glass to make a good telephoto lens for an SLR vs a non-SLR camera.  This ridiculous discrepency is just going to get worse.

CCD’s are silicon devices, so they share manufacturing improves along with CPU’s and follows a Moore’s law-like improvement curve for performance.  A key way they improve is in pixel density, but also by simply getting smaller.  As they get smaller, high-quality zoom lenses get smaller and cheaper too.  But only if the lenses are specifically designed for the new smaller CCD’s.  With an SLR system they can’t be — the size must be fixed in order to maintain backwards compatibility.  So while sensor technology improves at Moore’s law speed, lenses for non-SLR cameras improve as well, but SLR lenses do not.  Expensive zoom lenses for modern cameras just don’t need to be that big or expensive — It’s like having to build a cell-phone big enough to hold floppy disks.

To illustrate this point, consider the popular Canon SX10IS camera which does not feature interchangeable lenses.  It features a zoom lens that goes from pretty wide (28mm equivalent) to really very far zoom (560mm equivalent).  Because its CCD is only 6mm across, it can do all this for under $400 and weigh in under a pound for the whole camera.  For comparison, a comparable SLR lens weighs in at over 11lbs and costs upwards of $7,000, just for the lens.  No doubt this lens can take better pictures than the tiny Canon, but a smaller lens built for a modern CCD could take pictures that are every bit as good for a fraction the price.

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the noise floor on these sensors.  When the scene is dark, you need more light to get a good image.  A bigger hunk of glass captures more light.  This all makes intuitive sense and is mostly accurate.  CCD sensors can take more accurate pictures in low light when they are bigger.  But the limits here are electronic noise, which is also improving.  At some point we’ll hit some other barrier like the thermal noise in the sensor, although a piezo cooler could work around that.  Ultimately there’s the the quantization of photons, but if you’re taking pictures in a scene that dark, you probably can’t see what you’re pointing at anyway.  My point is that while there are advantages in low light for larger glass and sensors, technology is erroding away at those too.  We’re seeing ISO equivalents of 6400 as fairly common in cameras these days, with an economic competitive pressure to improve that.

In summary, the problems with the SLR format are that it ties its owner to a physical legacy that denies them the advantages of advancing technology.  There are cases where specialized lenses are still important.  But those cases are dwindling.  Personally, I’m going to be happier carrying around a full featured small camera that can transform itself into whatever I want without needing interchangable parts than a bag full of bits that were standardized before email.

Creative Commons licenses can either allow somebody to make commercial use of your material, or not, at your discretion, assuming you’re the one who created the license.  Independently, you can allow anybody to modify, adapt, or remix the content.  Or not.  Or you can allow modification so long as the modified content shares the same license, a so-called “Share Alike” license.  Here’s a nice page that shows you the options and allows you to pick a license appropriate for your material.

A CC attribution license is in many senses more realistic in the modern world than an all-rights-reserved license.  It is practically impossible to stop people from using or distributing your work.  The all-rights-reserved license is a threat to take legal action to prevent somebody from using your work.  But suing somebody is such a hassle that it almost never happens for personal content.  Asking somebody to put a link to your website is a pretty reasonable thing and easy to accomplish.   An all rights reserved copyright is for most individuals a bluff.

CC content is also easier to use.  Negotiating terms of licensing under a traditional copyright is daunting.  It necessarily requires a back and forth with the author and probably a whole lot.  The underlying mindset is that content costs money, so if you’re going to use my content, then you’re going to sell it and I deserve some of that money.  As the music industry is slowly, painfully learning, in modern times this model doesn’t work so well.  Access to information is generally free, and those who are making money here are doing so by providing value-added services on top of merely distributing the information.  (Think ads by Google, or concerts for music.)  With a CC license the terms of use of the license are right there.  No need to negotiate.  Just follow the attribution instructions and do what you will.  Instead of requiring negotiation and payment in the traditional economy, this is payment in the nascent reputation economy.

The first full biography of Paul Dirac, the greatest British physicist
since Newton – and one of the strangest geniuses of the twentieth
century, who may have suffered from autism.

Paul Dirac was a
pioneer of quantum mechanics and was regarded as an equal by Albert
Einstein. He predicted, purely from what he saw in his equations, the
existence of antimatter. The youngest person ever to win the Nobel
Prize for Physics, he was also pathologically reticent, strangely
literal-minded and almost completely unable to communicate or
empathise. His silences were legendary and when he spoke, he betrayed
no emotion. Through his greatest period of productivity, his postcards
home contained only remarks about the weather. He is said to have cried
only once, when his friend Einstein died.

I’m very much looking forward to reading it, mostly because somebody
wrote a whole book about somebody in my family. I recently met Francis Crick’s granddaughter and she said how fun it
was to read her grandpa’s biography and wished somebody would write
them about all of her relatives!  I’m waiting for Amazon to ship me my copy, but they say it’ll still be a couple of weeks, although apparently I can get it faster from Amazon.co.uk so I might just do that.  I’ve had a few chats with Graham Farmelo, the author, over the last few years as he’s been working on it, but I hadn’t been in touch with him recently and was tipped off to its publication by the Economist’s book review.

I’m also very happy to see that Graham is being upfront about the possibility that Autism or Asperger’s was at the root of his strangeness.  Many of us in the family suspected this, but it hasn’t been talked about publicly much if at all.  I’m happy to see this out in the open especially with the dramatic rise of Autism in the world today.  When people hide or just don’t talk about medical conditions, it creates a stigma that makes them that much harder for the afflicted to deal with.  Moreso, my grandfather can be a role model of what is possible to accomplish even with a potentially debilitating condition like that.

I’m also happy that it will provide authority to improve his wikipedia page.  I’ve tried making corrections and additions myself in the past, but I quickly learned that wikipedia’s editorial policy does not allow me to include anything I know about my grandfather in the article, until it has been "published" by somebody else, otherwise it’s "original research."  I include the quotations because the definition of publication is rapidly becoming less clear these days — is this blog published?  How about an IM conversation in a chat room that is persisted at a public URL?  But I digress — this policy is big part of why wikipedia is the important modern reference that it is, so I can’t really begrudge it.  And now that Faber & Faber has blessed Graham’s work into dead trees, wikipedia’s policy will allow his extensive research to be included on their summary.

http://www.yellowpagesgoesgreen.org/stop-yellow-pages/

and stop the unsolicited deliver of unwanted phone books.  Even if recycled, these books waste resources through paper processing, transportation and the recycling process which produces a lower quality paper, supported by inefficient advertising.

While I’m on the subject, if you haven’t tried Google SMS, it’s a great way to look things up.  Just send a text to 466453 ("GOOGLE") with the name of the business you want, and a location specified in writing or zip-code and it’ll respond with what you’re looking for.  It does all sorts of other good things too.  Works on all phones.  I’m a big fan.

Lessig’s book sounds interesting, and since I’m tearing through non-fiction right now, I ordered a copy. I was very surprised to see that the inside flap declares “Copyright © Lawrence Lessig, 2008 All rights reserved.” Below that it says:

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of the book.

(As I write this I half wonder if I have violated the stated copyright by typing that in. But seriously I think it’s a clear of fair use.) I expected the book to be released under a Creative Commons license, as Lessig espoused in his interview. I recently started reading Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother which is available for free download from his website under a Creative Commons Non-Commercial Share-Alike license.

What’s going on? Could it be that Doctorow is ahead of Lessig in the practicalities of modern book licensing? Or was it that the publishers were enforcing something? I bought a physical copy of Little Brother, and saw that it too has a traditional Copyright note at the front: “Copyright © 2008 by Cory Doctorow. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.” Okay that just doesn’t make sense. I can download the book under CC, but the print edition is All rights reserved. What gives?

Maybe I’ll have a better answer after I’ve read Lessig’s book. Or maybe Lawrence can explain himself. His website also says that “The book will be available under a Creative Commons license from Bloomsbury Academic. Stay tuned for launch.” I’m waiting.

• http://movabletype2blogger.appspot.com/
• http://wordpress2blogger.appspot.com/
• http://livejournal2blogger.appspot.com/

Well I tried this with my blog, and the resulting file it spit out was almost empty.  I think my blog is just a bit too large, since when I ran it on my local machine it came out to 1.03 megs.  So if your blog is smaller than mine you can probably use the online tool.

After a couple of bX-xji785 errors, the file imported into blogger about as well as could be expected, which is to say okay but not great.  The blog is mostly there.  Feel free to take a peak at http://leo-embracingchaos.blogspot.com/ but please don’t make any permanent links to that URL as it’s really just for testing.  The posts and drafts all made it with the right dates and times, along with the comments and tags.  But as previously noted, the TypePad export format does not include URLs.  So if I were to actually use this conversion, all the inbound links to pages other than the homepage of my blog would break, which is totally unacceptable for me.

I started a thread on the discussion group if you’d like to follow along.

If you’d like to hear more about BNCO, consider coming to their annual fund-raising Gala on February 21st.  Guaranteed good food and entertainment on top of all the worthwhile stuff.  Or read the Times story.  It mentions my wonderful fiance (did I mention that I’m engaged?) and her ongoing efforts to support the clinic.  I’m really looking forward to seeing it in person when it’s built and operating!

I worked hard to make this feature possible when I was working at Real.  The fact that I couldn’t get it re-launched was a big motivator for me to move on to greener pastures.  I saw making Rhapsody social as an important evolution of the music catalog’s organizational schema.  It’s also an attempt to bring the product into what Tim O’Reilly would call Web 2.0.  Tim’s canonical essay is long-winded, but I really liked how he summarized it in a recent interview on NPR — basically the product gets better as people use it.  The millions of people who use Rhapsody are an asset that has been almost completely unused, except to take their money.  I saw it as a way to take on one of the product’s biggest shortcomings.

Rhapsody has tons of music.  TONS.  Rhapsody almost certainly has something you want to listen to right now, regardless of who you are or what your current mood or situation is.  It’s a strong statement, but there really is that much music.  The problem is figuring out what you want to listen to.  Rhapsody has a great categorical index of music, so if you know you want to listen to D&B or Emo or Vocal Jazz, no problem.  Or if you know specifically the name of something you want to listen, just search for it.  Other than that, you can take the homepage recommendations, browse the catalog manually, or sift through Playlist Central, a dumping ground for unvetted playlists that is a case study in how not to use user-generated-content (UGC) on a website.

Picking good music is difficult.  This is what DJ’s get paid for.  I originally wanted this feature to be called "DJ Pages."  The idea was to give a voice to the small fraction of Rhapsody users who are fanatical about the product.  People who are serious music buffs love Rhapsody, and if given a voice would and still might add tremendous value to the music catalog.  Right now the editorial voice in Rhapsody is controlled by a politburo of paid editors.  They’re really good, but they’re just a handful of hands.  DJ Pages would democratize the music editorial process so anybody with an opinion can contribute.  The social graph becomes the voting process to select who’s worth paying attention to, just like with pagerank.  What Tim calls Web 2.0, I like to refer to the democratization of information.  Partly because it’s fun to call people Communists when they cling to control of information, but mostly because the analogy is apt and helpful.

The Rhapsody team has made an important step in this direction of openness.  I hope they keep running with it.  If you want to see what’s been playing on my Sonos at home, check out my profile page.  But most importantly, I’d like to express my CONGRATULATIONS to everybody who made this possible again and the first time!!!!11!!1

• Better WYSIWYG editing in Blogger.  (I can’t change any font characteristics in Typepad without going into raw HTML. Ugh.)
• Typepad’s lack of support for Chrome, Google’s awesome new browser
• The awkward and limiting way Typepad assigns human-readable URLs to posts
• Blogger is free, while Typepad costs >$100 per year
• Cool new features being added to Blogger like Followers
• Adding new features in Typepad is a p.i.t.a. (i.e. I’m too old to be messing with perl-based templating languages.  Did more than my share of that in 1996.)

Typepad has long supported an export feature, which dumps out all the posts, drafts, comments, etc into a text file.  And now blogger has an import feature, which takes an XML file that looks kinda like an Atom feed.  I looked around for a tool to convert between the two and found only others asking the same question. 

So I thought here’s a chance for me to contribute something to
society and help myself at the same time.  Converting one text file to
another shouldn’t be that hard.  So I rolled up my sleeves and started
playing with it.  I realized one problem fairly quickly — the typepad export format
doesn’t include the URL for each post.  I really don’t want to break
all the previous inbound links because
that’s how people get to my content.  But I’m going to need to crawl
the old blog to get those old links.

Since the blogger format looks like a regular Atom feed, I thought I’d try to just grab the Atom feed off the blog and import it into Blogger.  Well to that, blogger said:

Blogger does not currently support import files generated by TypePad.

Fine.  But what are the differences?  The blogger format includes a bunch of fake "entry" elements which are really configuration — like a giant "layout" node and a bunch of other settings.  So I tried grafting the two together — just taking the legitimate "entry" nodes from the typepad feed and putting them into the blogger export that includes all the layout and settings.  By converting everything to look like the blogger format, it imports, but that also loses information.  So I set about looking for the minimal set of changes that will work.

One that definitely breaks it is a side-efect of being hooked-up to feedburner.  There’s extra stuff in there like the feedburner:origLink tags:

    <feedburner:origLink>http://www.embracingchaos.com/2008/12/repairing-a-deg.html</feedburner:origLink>

These break the import, which shouldn’t be much of a surprise since the feedburner: namespace isn’t defined in the Blogger export.

I gave up looking for today because blogger was having too many server errors on import.  They’re intermittent, so I was happy to refresh through them for a while.  But at some point 90% of my imports gave me funny error codes like bX-gxxw6w so I’m giving up for now. 

I wrote a stub of a python program to do the merge.  I called it typepad2blogger.py and happily donate it to the public domain.  It’s definitely not done and is useful only insofar as it shows one way to approach the problem and has enough stuff in place that somebody else should be able to get a running start.  I’ll hopefully continue work on this at some point.  But even a couple hours of work on it has triggered my RSI so I’ll have to take a break.  If you want to pick this up, let me know and we can coordinate efforts.

To convince myself that the repair was successful, I unplugged one of the previously functional drives, and saw that all my files were still there when the array was running just on the new drive and the other previous drive. I recommend this to anybody who thinks they’re running a RAID system — until you’ve seen the RAID array work with a drive removed, how can you be sure it’s really working? If your system is set up better than mine is, you’ll get some kind of warning message too.

My advice for people seeking reliable storage: go with a hosted solution.  Understanding the arcane nuances of these software systems is an extremely specific skill that doesn’t translate well to many real-life necessities.  If you’re smart, you can figure it out, but it doesn’t teach you much of anything except how to do exactly that.  Each person who understands this stuff should be keeping petabytes of data happy, rather than one couple’s pictures and music collections.  I hear Microsoft’s "home server" actually makes this pretty easy, but I can’t recommend anybody willingly lock themselves into Microsoft’s business model.

Background

So I bought a new drive, following my own advice about picking drives from different manufacturers when building a raid array, and plugged it in to the mobo and booted the machine.  After futzing with /etc/fstab to get it to find the boot disk and load up, I logged into evms and got these messages:

MDRaid5RegMgr: RAID5 array md/md1 is miissing the member  with RAID index 0.  The array is running in degrade mode.

and

MDRaid5RegMgr: Region md/md1 is currently in degraded mode.  To bring it back to normal state, add 1 new spare device to replace the faulty or missing device.

Conceptually easy.  I’ve got a new 500 GB drive in the system.  Linux sees it.  It didn’t take me too long to figure out it’s called /dev/sda, while the previous 2 disks in the array are sdb and sdc, with a small boot drive at sdd.  Now the fun part is figuring out EVMS terminology enough to tell it to use the new disk.

The hierarchy of the array in EVMS land seems to be as follows:

• Logical Volume teraraid (contains)
• Region md/md1 (which contains)
• Segments sdb1 and sdc1 (which are built on)
• Logical disks sdb, sdc.

What I tried, and what seems to have worked

I see that logical disk sda has no segments.  So I try Action -> Create -> Segment.  It only gives me one choice for "Segment Manager" which is "GPT Segment Manager."  But when I choose it, it doesn’t let me make a segment on sda.  Only the tiny free space on sdb and sdc.  So sda needs something else done to it before we can use it.  What?

sda also shows up in the list of Logical Volumes, next to Teraraid and the formatted boot partition.  Hmmm.

Well I tried converting it to an EVMS Volume.  It complained that sda does not have a File System Interface Module (FSIM) associated with it, but it made the new logical volume anyway.  This wasn’t getting me anywhere.  So I erased it.

Next I tried "Add" -> "Segment Manager to Storage Object".  I noticed that all of the Disk Segments associated with the array were listed as using "Plug-in" "GptSegM" and this gave me the choice of adding Gpt Segment Manager to sda.  W00t.  I said "No" to make this a system disk.  This seems to be working.  Now I see a bunch of Disk Segments starting with sda, including a big one (465 GB) labelled sda_freespace1. 

Now when I tried to Create -> Segment, it let me use GPT Segment Manager on sda_freespace1 and allocate a 450 GB disk segment to match the others.  (I left 15 GB off each disk with the idea I could put a boot segment in that space, but I’ve never gotten around to it.)

Now in "Available Objects" there is sda1 with 450.0 ready for me.  Alrighty we’re getting there.

Now I look at "Storage Regions" and in the context menu for md/md1 I see an option that says "Add spare to fix degraded array…"  I didn’t see it there before — it might have not shown up when there weren’t any spares, or maybe I was just being thick.  In any case, selecting it now gives me a menu with one choice — sda1. 

Now in details of md/md1 it shows:

 Na┌──────────────────── Detailed Information - md/md1 ─────────────────────┐ ──│                                                                        │── lv│     Name                    Value                                      │ lv│ ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────── │ lv│     Major Number            9                                          │ md│     Minor Number            1                                          │   │     Name                    md/md1                                     │   │     State                   Discovered, Degraded, Active               │   │     Personality             RAID5                                      │   │ +   Working SuperBlock                                                 │   │     Number of disks         3                                          │   │ +   Disk 1                  sdb1                                       │   │ +   Disk 2                  sdc1                                       │   │     Number of stale disks   1                                          │   │ +   Stale disk 0            sda1                                       │   │                                                                        │   │                                                                        │   │                                                                        │   │                                                                        │   │                                                                        │   │    Use spacebar on fields marked with "+" to view more information     │   │                                                                        │   │ [Help]                                                          [OK]   │   │                                                                        │   └────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

That last line about the Stale disk is new.

Actions -> Save commits these changes to disk.  Now looking at Detailed information for md/md1 shows

 Na┌──────────────────── Detailed Information - md/md1 ─────────────────────┐ ──│                                                                        │── lv│     Name                    Value                                      │ lv│ ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────── │ lv│     Major Number            9                                          │ md│     Minor Number            1                                          │   │     Name                    md/md1                                     │   │     State                   Discovered, Degraded, Active, Syncing =  0 │   │     Personality             RAID5                                      │   │ +   Working SuperBlock                                                 │   │     Number of disks         3                                          │   │ +   Disk 1                  sdb1                                       │   │ +   Disk 2                  sdc1                                       │   │     Number of stale disks   1                                          │   │ +   Stale disk 0            sda1                                       │   │                                                                        │   │                                                                        │   │                                                                        │   │                                                                        │   │                                                                        │   │    Use spacebar on fields marked with "+" to view more information     │   │                                                                        │   │ [Help]                                                          [OK]   │   │                                                                        │   └────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

Emotionally I feel like I should be done now.  But I don’t hear the thrashing noise of a half-terabyte of of checksums being unwound and copied onto a fresh disk.  And it says "Syncing = 0".  Hmmm.

I quit evmsn and reload it to see two new messages.  One familiar:

MDRaid5RegMgr: Region md/md1 is currently in degraded mode.  To bring it
back to normal state, add 1 new spare device to replace the faulty or missing device.

And one novel:

MDRaid5RegMgr: RAID5 array md/md1 is missing the member  with RAID index 0.  The array is running in degrade mode.  The MD recovery process is running, please wait…

But this novel message saying it’s recovering is "Number 0" implying that it came before the other message (Number 1) which tells me I need to take action for it to fix itself.  And the drives are not thrashing.  Again I look at the details for md/md1 and now I see:

 Na┌──────────────────── Detailed Information - md/md1 ─────────────────────┐ ──│                                                                        │── lv│     Name                 Value                                         │ lv│ ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────── │ lv│     Major Number         9                                             │ md│     Minor Number         1                                             │   │     Name                 md/md1                                        │   │     State                Discovered, Degraded, Active, Syncing =  0.3% │   │     Personality          RAID5                                         │   │ +   Working SuperBlock                                                 │   │     Number of disks      3                                             │   │ +   Disk 1               sdb1                                          │   │ +   Disk 2               sdc1                                          │   │ +   Disk 3               sda1                                          │   │                                                                        │   │                                                                        │   │                                                                        │   │                                                                        │   │                                                                        │   │                                                                        │   │    Use spacebar on fields marked with "+" to view more information     │   │                                                                        │   │ [Help]                                                          [OK]   │   │                                                                        │   └────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

Which really seems to say its doing its thing.  Maybe I don’t hear the disks because it’s formating the disk first, which is a linear process.  Or maybe the whole copy process is very linear and I won’t hear it thrashing.  Its progress implies it’s going to take a couple/few days to finish, which is what I’d expect.  So maybe it’s working. I’ll let it run for a while and see what happens to the array if I try to unplug one of the previously working drives.

Pretty cool that I didn’t even need to unmount the array to do this.

Now if I could just figure out why my laser printer periodically decides it needs to print it internal test page, I’d be even happier.

I’ve been thinking about writing this post for quite a while, and I figured tonight might be my last chance.  Plenty of people have been worrying about how the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) could destroy the planet by creating small black-holes that might suck in the entire earth.  As the good folks at CERN re-assure us, everything is fine.  I pretty much believe this.  That is to say, I’m pretty sure LHC will not destroy all life as we know it.  Pretty sure.  Otherwise, we’ve all got a few more hours to live.

So long as my buddy Stephen Hawking’s theories about black holes are true, we’re fine.  They’ll dissipate by themselves and will not suck in the planet.  But to be clear, we are testing this theory.  (I just heard a scientist on the radio trip all over himself as he tried to spurt out a believable
"there really is no chance these black-holes will devour the entire
earth.")

Last year I wrote about a then-briefly-popular idea that all the world we see is actually a computer simulation.  (Pointless personal anecdaote — I had this idea in grade-school and tried to marry it with special relativity’s universal speed-limit in terms of a primitively digitized simulation where exceeding the speed of light would cause objects to skip pixels during a single time step.  Anyway.)  It’s all as if our whole universe is a game of The Sims on some hyper-intelligent alien teenager’s computer.  In a fairly religious way, this idea is unrefutable.  It’s like a virtual machine trying to hack its host operating system.  Can’t do it.

Some theories of simulated worlds hold that what we experience is a simplification of real physical laws.  If this is true, high-energy experiments like LHC could probe the limits of these simplifications.  It could cause an exception to get thrown in the simulation code.  Us clever scientists set up some extremely complex scenario that caused one of the simulation’s assumptions to fail.  What happens when the simulation crashes?  Maybe it’s a dialog box saying "Abort, Retry, Ignore."  Maybe it’s a universe-scale Blue screen of death.  Teenager’s response?  Maybe Abort.  How different is that from our whole planet getting sucked into a black hole?

Don’t panic.

My girlfriend has a kindle that she very much enjoys.  One of the biggest benefits from it she gets is having a large amount of content in a very small device.  She is a scientist who is very much an information worker.  Having access to a great many research papers in searchable form is very useful for her.  (If only the PDF import worked on multi-column papers!)  She also tends to live out of a backpack, so being able to have several interesting things to read at any give time is very appealing.

So she’s often reading her kindle on the bus.  She’s noted one interesting difference between reading her Kindle and reading a regular book while on the bus.  When she’s reading a normal book, people will ask her what booj she’s reading or will look at the cover and just talk to her about the book itself.  With the kindle the question is always "how do you like the gizmo?"  Which gets old after a while.

Here’s a suggestion to Amazon on how to address this social problzem: offer full-color PDFs of the covers of books that you purchase for the Kindle, so people can print out their own covers.  These could slide into a convenient holder on the Kindle’s attractive leather case.  Long-term it’d be great to have a color e-paper cover for the book, but we’re not holding our breath for that one.

Last week I went to a different kind of Dork Bot meeting here in Seattle called the Catastrophic Cacophony Workshop.  It was a maker-style event where we broke up into teams of people and in 90 minutes had to build a robotic musical instrument out of one supplied motor and whatever other parts we could scrounge together. 

Our team started with the basic idea of a repetitive percussive instrument with multiple hammers hitting multiple objects.  So we constructed a platform to hold the motor and used tennis rackets to make a rotating frame that held a series of arms that struck objects as they went around.  We then built frames to hold up things like pot lids or copper pipes to be struck, and attached everything from small chains to bundles of spaghetti to the rotating frame to strike them.  The real enabling insight came from the women on the team who realized that by spacing the arms un-evenly we could create an interesting rhythm.  The one-two-and-three rhythm across a variety of instruments ended up sounding much like a drum circle that actually got people dancing.

Thanks to Espressobuzz for capturing our creation on video.  Thanks to Josh Kopel for bringing the event to Seattle, and Shelly Farnham for organizing.  And to my wonderful teammates whose energy and creativity made the Spinning Spaghetti Monster possible.

Diversifying from hardware

Since Jobs pulled the company
out of the doldrums, Apple has been a
manufacturer of high-end hardware.  This is a very nice place to be.
Their margins are very high.  If you compare the hardware bits that go
into a Mac to those in any PC, Apple’s prices are much higher.  PC manufacturers
squabble over low single
digit margins because their product is almost completely commoditized.
HP, Dell and IBM struggle to differentiate themselves in the market.
Meanwhile Apple can charge a hefty premium for good industrial design
and software that is slicker than windows.  iPod followed in this
tradition of high margins by setting the bar for usability in portable
media devices and following up with fantastic marketing.



Being a niche retailer of high-end products is a comfortable and stable
place to be.  However, having a single line of revenue isn’t good for a
large company, so diversifying makes a lot of sense.  Thus Apple’s current push into services.

The iTunes music store was an important pre-cursor to the current push
into services.  Even though iTunes moves a massive volume of music, if
you work through the accounting confusion, they’re not actually making
much money there.  Because the established music industry giants are
completely fucked and have no
idea what to do, they drive the margins of all big online retailers
down to a pittance.  But iTunes did something very important for Apple: it established a billing relationship with customers. Cellular operators have this
kind of ongoing billing relationship with their customers which enables
them to push high margin, low utility products like ring-tones. Similarly, people
are used to spending small quantities of money in iTunes to get music.
So iTunes is the perfect precursor for an App Store.  In this way,
Apple doesn’t even need to rely on the carrier’s billing relationship
to build a services business.  This will be very important for Apple in
coming years as carriers increasingly become just another provider of
wireless bandwidth.  In the coming decades, the value will not come
from piping bits around.  It will come from the services built on those
pipes. 

MobileMe is a very Apple service

MobileMe is a cloud-hosted email, contact and calendaring solution.
There’s nothing revolutionary about this.  Google offers all of these
services for free.  By charging for these services, Apple is implicitly
promising to provide a better solution.  Considering their vertical
integration into popular hardware, it’s not hard to imagine that they
will succeed at this.  Google will probably remain committed to supporting
open standards for working with hardware.  By using proprietary
protocols, Apple can provide a higher-quality product and support it
better on the few platforms they care about.  It’s a classic story
we’ve seen in this industry before.

MobileMe’s launch was a
disaster.  This isn’t surprising as Apple is yet to demonstrated great skill in online services.  Personally I believe they’ll figure it out, because it’s
important to their long-term objectives, and they’re a smart company, and the skills to do this well are getting easier and easier to find.
But from a marketing perspective, MobileMe is nothing new for Apple.  Because
MobileMe is a premium service for which there is a very good free
alternative, MobileMe still targets Apple’s classic market segment.
They’re still targeting people who are willing to pay extra to have
something really polished.  They can stick to their classic bag of
tricks, like the ads that make fun of people who aren’t as cool as the
mac devotees.

App Store is new: a platform play

App Store on the other hand is going to be much harder for them to pull
off.  For App Store to succeed, their primary challenge is not to
attract paying customers, but developers.  Because independent software
developers (ISVs) are the ones who are actually creating value in the
App Store.  App is just a distributor taking a cut on that.  So what
attracts developers to the App Store?  Customers do.

It’s a real chicken and egg problem.  Nobody’s going to build software
unless there are customers to buy it, and it’s hard to get customers
without cool apps.  Well right now Apple has the whole farm, but it’s a
very small farm.  There are millions of iPhones out there, representing
potential customers.  Moreover, the iPhone SDK is very rich and capable
when compared to its competitors.  Qualcomm’s BREW, Windows Mobile,
Palm OS, Blackberry and Symbian have all faltered for one reason or
several.  Google’s Android holds much promise and hope, but at this
point it’s complete vapor-ware.  So for now, Apple has almost all the
mindshare of mobile application developers.

But how long will this dominance last?  Software platforms are natural
monopolies, meaning the
economics tend to be winner-take-all.  The chicken and egg “problem”
can easily turn into a virtuous cycle, pushing a winner to the top.
Application developers are fickle and will code to whatever platform
has the best distribution.  iPhones are very popular, but they are
still only used by a small fraction of all mobile subscribers.  Until the distribution of iPhones reaches a critical mass, their dominance as a mobile application platform is very shaky.

The mobile app challenger is HTML

But the laundry list of alternatives shows that the competition is
fragmented.  What could unseat Apple?  IMHO it’s not another
application platform, open or proprietary.  It’s the web.  Every
high-end phone can display web pages, and increasingly they’re using
high-quality javascript engines that can run real web applications.
Webkit, the super-fast open-source HTML/JS engine behind Safari is
showing up in Symbian devices, Blackberries
and Windows Mobile phones.

Apple’s challenge is to make the proprieray iPhone SDK compelling to
developers.  The alternative is to build a web application that works
well on webkit, and works on every high-end phone.  They can attract
developers in two basic ways — make the native features of their SDK
more compelling, and provide a large market for distribution of the
applications.

Charging for distribution of these applications is a gimick that won’t
last long.  Soon all the interesting applications will be free, but
tied to cloud services that have their own business models independent
of the mobile client.  Premium applications will start to seem a lot
like premium ringtones pretty fast.  Still, it will help bootstrap this
market for Apple so long as there are no serious competitors.

To stay on top, iPhones need distribution quickly

One thing that ties all these points together is that Apple’s continued
success with App Store hinges on having wide distribution of iPhones.
They are currently throttling the distribution of iPhones for some reason, possibly
because of software glitches.  But the aggressive $199 pricing is
clearly aimed at attracting a new larger customer base that will help
maintain their dominance in the mobile application space.

Long term they might be happy getting by offering premium versions of
applications that are freely available on the web.  But something tells
me they’re actually trying to break open the mass market on this one.
This is Jobs’ big play.  It’ll be really interesting to see how it
works out once Android hits the streets.