New York Times reports
Faculty members are scheduled to vote on a measure that would permit Harvard to distribute their scholarship online, instead of signing exclusive agreements with scholarly journals that often have tiny readerships and high subscription costs.
In this guardian article, Nick Carr says
That would be nice, but I have my doubts. When we all have equally precise, equally up-to-the-second information on traffic conditions, the odds are that we’ll all respond in similar ways. As we all act in unison to avoid one bottleneck, we’ll just create a new bottleneck. We may come to look back fondly on the days when information was less uniformly distributed.
This is plain rubbish. The technology that informed people to move from the first bottleneck due to real time traffic information will also inform people about how traffic is diverging away from the first bottleneck. It will help drivers make an informed decision about their route and, in fact, an intelligent system may even help the driver route better based on instantaneous analysis of traffic divergence from the first bottleneck. The above statement is just nonsense. Technology doesn’t work selectively. Period. He shouldn’t be making such statements just to fill up a column that is due.
I posted my thoughts on Sun’s acquisition of MySQL on TechBizMedia. Feel free to add your comments on the topic.
The so called virtual reality Guru, Jaron Lanier, long known for his criticism of “Wisdom of Crowds” attitude of Open Source development model and the Internet Collectivism (so called Web 2.0), recently wrote an article called Long Live Closed Source Software. I call his article as “Ignorance of an Individual”. In his article, he argues against open source process and calls upon the scientific community to not fall into the trap of the open source development model. I don’t know much about this dude but he comes out as someone who thinks that he can talk about science just because he attended a scifoo camp (a meeting where most of the participants are from the fringes of science. They do invite some hardcore scientists but mostly can be classified as a fringe group of geeks and people with experience in science. Well, such a meeting is important because it helps drive discussion about the interface between science and technology. But, my argument is that attending a scifoo meeting alone doesn’t make an individual a scientist). He uses Martha Stewart and Science in the same sentence and I am sure it talks about how much science he knows. If he had ever been in the hardcore academia, he would have understood that science is not trying to take the open source approach and, in fact, open source approach is an outgrowth of how science is done in the academia. Richard Stallman didn’t jump out one day and talk about free software. It was his experience in an academic environment that raised his awareness about the importance of sharing software code. If Mr. Lanier shows iPhone as an example of innovation, I can list Rockets, Theory of Evolution, Splitting of Atoms, Quarks, Nuclear Energy, and every other scientific innovation as an example of open source innovation because the academia’s approach to science is the predecessor to open source approach. In front of all the innovation listed above, Iphone comes as a kid’s toy made in a third world country. This is the kinda problem we face when engineers, marketers and business community start poking their nose into science. They just talk rubbish. I am not saying that these people should be kept away from science. They are very important for the commoditization of scientific innovation. They are the ones who takes the fruits of science to the ordinary citizens. My argument is that they should realize the scope of their role and not poke their nose into hardcore science. Science knows how to progress and thatz why the world is where it is today. I don’t expect people to understand the scientific process but I expect people to keep the “ignorance of individuals” away from science. Just because someone got to hobnob with Martha Stewart in a scifoo meeting doesn’t give the person right to talk nonsense about how science should be done. Lemme quote a paragraph from his article which clearly shows his ignorance about how science is done in the universities.
Academic efforts are usually well encapsulated, for instance. Scientists don’t publish until they are ready, but publish they must. So science as it is already practiced is open, but in a punctuated way, not a continuous way. The interval of nonopenness—the time before publication—functions like the walls of a cell. It allows a complicated stream of elements to be defined well enough to be explored, tested, and then improved.
Lemme explain here about what happens inside the walls of science laboratories. As a person who has spend 8 years doing physics in academia and someone who is still involved in academia due to some personal reasons, I can talk with clarity. There is some amount of secrecy today among certain groups in the scientific community but it is a recent phenomena. Partly, it is due to the competition for patents started off by companies in areas like chemistry and biology. This has spilled over to other branches of sciences too. If you start looking at the golden period of physics when people like Einstein, Bohr, Dirac, etc. were hobnobbing with each other to even the later periods of Feynman, Murray Gellman, etc., you will understand that science was done in a perfectly open source approach. Unlike what Mr. Lanier portrays, science was not done in bursts of secrecy. He calls the period between start of a research project to the publication of the results/findings in a scientific journal as a period of secrecy. I am pretty convinced that he has never participated in a scientific research project. Anyone with a background in science know about the level of communication that happens between scientists from around the world using letters (now email), telephone calls, discussions during conferences, even visits to other universities/institutes for discussion, etc.. All these communications takes place without the need for any kind of NDAs. If the approach of scientists during the so called period of silence was anywhere close to what Apple, Microsoft or Google do, they wouldn’t have conversed with fellow scientists in their field (including their competitors). Even in the 1990s, when I was doing science, I have done the same thing. This approach continues even today in most of the scientific community. Such actions by scientists is what we, in the software field, call as open source approach. In fact, this kinda sharing takes place even during the current day ultra competitive environment with companies in the scientific mix. Another point which he is quoting but failing to understand about the scientific process is that all the scientists in academia publish their research in scientific journals. Anyone, in any part of the world, can build on the published work, make modifications to the published experimental methods, extend the models, etc. This is open source approach.
I strongly suggest that Mr. Lanier should go around marketing Iphone and leave science to people who are capable of doing it. Science is better off without such nonsense. Open Source has done remarkably well by shifting the whole marketplace towards another era. Ignorance of an individual cannot demolish the wisdom of the crowds. Period.
This is the first post in the Facebook-Scoble Fiasco Series. I want to use this incident to raise the awareness of the users of social networks. This incident brought into focus many claims and counterclaims. Some of them are valid and the rest are plain bullshit. I hope this series helps people make a distinction between what is correct and what is incorrect. This post is not about whether Scoble is right or wrong. It is about things we should be worried before jumping into the social networking bandwagon.
The most important aspect is the data ownership. There are many people who are pounding on this topic ever since the word social networks became part of the tech vocabulary. We upload quite a bit of our data into the social networking services, in the form of personal information, social graph (if thatz the term people want to use), audio, videos, photos, etc. Now the question of ownership of such data comes into picture. I upload my information into facebook. I spend quite a lot of time adding friends into my facebook account and interact with them. They are all fruits of my labor. Facebook just offers me a platform to network with my friends and they make money in the form of advertisement directed towards me and my friends. The more friends I bring to facebook the more value is added to their service (Network Effect). The role of facebook (or any other social networking site for that matter) ends at this stage. The only other role I could visualize for them is to ensure that no law is broken inside their platform. Everything else is at my discretion and responsibility. I decide who becomes my friend and I decide who can see what information about me. Facebook plays no role in this decision except offering granular privacy feature in their platform. Facebook doesn’t tell me that I can only be friends with X or Y. They also don’t tell me what I can show to A or B or C. Every other action of mine inside the facebook platform is done at my discretion, without the influence of facebook. The data generated by my actions are my own data and no one else can claim ownership to this data. Facebook or any other social networking service cannot tell me that I cannot take this data, which was generated by me, to any other service. I can quote a real world analogy here. Suppose if you go to a bar regularly and socialize and let us say you have aggregated a group of people who eventually turn into your friends. Letz say you are bored with the bar you frequent or you had a bad experience with that bar. You now want to move to a new bar. You want to invite your friends to come over to the new bar. Now, if the manager of the old bar says that you cannot take your friends to the new bar and if he argues that you can’t even remember the name or phone number or any other personal information of your friends, outside his bar, would you agree with the manager of the old bar? Don’t you think it is highly ridiculous? Don’t you think your relationship with your friends in the old bar is your personal matter and the old bar is just a place where you socialized with them? If you said no to the first question and yes to the next two questions, you are well aware of what is right and what is wrong. All you have to do is to apply the same kinda thinking to facebook or other social networking systems. Like the old bar, facebook is just a place where you meet with your friends. Like how you have every right to take your friends to a new bar and how you can remember the information about your friends outside of your old bar, you should be able to take your friends to any social networking service you want and you should be able to carry the information about your friends to any social networking sites you want because it is you who own your information and your friend’s information. Facebook or any other social networking service has no right to take ownership of your data. Every social networking user should be able to understand the ownership of the data they generate inside the social networking service and make claims their data when some service tries to hold the data to a ransom. Even though I have used facebook in my discussion above, it applies to all the social networking services. If at all anyone can ever stop you from taking friend’s information, it should be that friend in question and not the social networking service. It is very important that the users of social networking services have a clear understanding about the ownership of data. The users of social networking sites only allow the sites to mine their data and build a business model out of it either using advertising or any other approach. They don’t transfer the ownership of data to the social networking site. It is like renting out your house to someone to live. The tenant cannot take ownership of the house. In the Libertarian speak (disclaimer: I am not a Libertarian and I am just borrowing the term from them), data ownership is similar to property ownership. Understanding this is very crucial to long term security of your identity and data. Imagine if Microsoft told you that every document you create with Microsoft word is theirs, would you accept it? (well, in a way, they tried to tell that but lost it). It is the same case with your data in social networks. Please think carefully about this issue before you jump inside any social network.
In my next article in the series, I am going to talk about another misunderstood topic, your addressbook. The tentative title of the next post is “Do you own your addressbook?”.
I am going to write a series on Facebook-Scoble fiasco. Scoble has an issue with facebook on a personal level (his account got disabled and he was on the verge of losing all his social data) but I have an issue on a more philosophical level. There are so many misconceptions about the issue and I have tried to convince people of their misconceptions on twitter and also on some blogs. I thought I will take each and every point offered in support of facebook and discuss it here. I will try my best to publish my first post by tonite. If not, I assure you that it will be up tomorrow. In a way, I am upset about Robert Scoble losing his account but this is much more than one person getting kicked by some company. It is more about a philosophy and this is an opportunity for me to create an awareness about a fundamental right of each and every user in this world. I will be back soon with my first post.
During Scoble’s early days of facebook evangelism, I voiced my concern about data being locked up inside the walled gardens of facebook (in one of his kyte.tv sessions). At that time, he said he doesn’t care about getting struck inside a walled garden. I wanted to argue with him about the consequences of such a thinking but didn’t do it for some reason. Later, probably due to the influence of people like Marc Canter, he started embracing the notion of open standards. He even signed the Bill of Rights for Social Networks. I wrote about Scoble’s change of heart in a positive direction sometime during Sept. 2007. Today, his facebook account is disabled because he tried to take his own data with him. I am pretty sure he has fully understood why I tried to convince him long back about data portability. I am sure he has understood how dangerous it is to put the data behind a walled garden. Now, I am calling on him to become the champion of data portability in social networks. He has a huge following and he can use his position to create an awareness about the dangers of having your data behind walled gardens and the importance of data portability. If he takes up this call, he can get back at facebook, by forcing them to change their ways because of pressure from the users (remember beacon?) and he will also get a satisfaction that he played a role in creating a civilized world where users are empowered rather than greedy companies. Will you be the champion for openness, Robert?
Today Google announced their new project, Google Knol. Their idea is to encourage people who know a particular subject to write an authoritative article about it. My first take on Google Knol is
If it is done correctly, it might kick the butt of Mahalo and if it is done wrong, it will add splog kinda pages messing up the search results
Before we I explain my reasoning, let us take a look at the two other competing projects, Wikipedia and Mahalo. In the case of Wikipedia, the collective wisdom of crowds are used to develop “authoritative” pages on different topics. Mahalo tries to become a “better” search engine by using a small group of paid employees and tipped “volunteers” to write search result pages which can be considered as “authoritative” collection of information on certain topics. Wikipedia founder, Jimmy Wales, is planning to develop a search engine which will also put the “wisdom of crowds” to good use. I am pretty convinced that Mahalo cannot be a Google beater. Only an algorithmic search engine can solve the world’s search problems. I still stand by it. Mahalo kinda products can only add a layer of filtering to algorithmic engines. They cannot replace them. I am not sure what Jimmy Wales is going to do with his project but I am pretty convinced that it can only succeed if there is an algorithmic engine at the center with the “wisdom of crowds” offering a filtering layer. I have listed down my reasons to justify these arguments already, in the post criticizing punditry about Mahalo overthrowing Google. Also, if Jimmy Wales’ project takes off and gets a following like Wikipedia, then their filtering of algorithmic search results will be far superior than Mahalo’s results because of the sheer number of volunteers lending their “brain’s processing power” for Wales’ project.
Letz get back to the discussion about Google Knol. The knols on different topics are meant to be the first thing someone who searches for a topic for the first time will want to read. Now, Wikipedia plays this role in Google searches. Google is expecting their knols to replace Wikipedia in the search results. This has started a discussion in the blogosphere about the demise of Wikipedia. Any such talk is premature. The big differentiator between Wikipedia articles and Knol is that Wikipedia has one (well, in most cases) article on a single topic which is edited and tweaked by the “wisdom of crowds” whereas Knol gives an option for anyone and everyone to write a separate article on any particular topic. For example, a topic like evolution could have thousands of articles offering two entirely opposing views, thereby confusing the readers. There is no “collective” wisdom to weed out the nonsense from sense. Thus Google’s Knol project lacks the “authoritativeness” of Wikipedia. This requires Google to come up with another algorithm that can rank the Knols on the same topic based on rating, comments, etc. Such a system is also a good breeding ground for another SEO like cottage industry. This is where my statements about “Google doing right or wrong in Knol” assumes significance. We have to wait for this project to become mainstream before we can know if it is going to work or not. Google has a very difficult job of bringing in “authoritativeness” in these Knols, in a totally unbiased manner. It is not an easy task. There are way too many topics where it will be difficult to establish the “authoritativeness”, when there are hundreds or thousands of articles on the same topic. It is easily done in the case of Wikipedia where the wisdom of crowds is applied to a single article. However, if Google manage to get it right, they are going to have a pretty neat system that will augment well for their search results. If Google has “good” search results as a result of Knols, Mahalo loses the meaning of its existence, unless they shift gears to offer something else along with their search results. If Google messes up, Jason Calacanis’ criticism of increased spam in Google search results will get amplified. We have to reserve our judgment on Google Knol till it used in a widespread manner and becomes part of mainstream search experience. But we can be sure that it is definitely not a Wikipedia killer.
For me, there’s really no appeal in spending a lot of time creating “user-generated” content via a social networking application. That’s like remodeling the kitchen in a house you rent.
