Web Simple

Eric Schmidt’s talk at the Washington Ideas Forum last week was chock-full of interesting ideas. A couple of the money quotes:

“Washington is an incumbent protection machine”
“Technology is fundamentally disruptive.”
“People are always shocked at how real disruption occurs and how much change can occur through empowerment.”
“The first message about human nature is that human nature is overwhelmingly positive.”
“Google policy is to get right up to the creepy line and not cross it”

See more Ericisms on The Register.

Schmidt said that technology can “completely change the way government works,” and seemed to want to change government to something more transparent, more populist, and more connected to what people want.

“I would say the average American doesn’t realize how much the laws are written by lobbyists,” Schmidt replied to the interviewer’s question about the government-people disconnect. It’s “shocking,” Google’s CEO continued, “now having spent a fair amount of time inside the system, how the system actually works. And it’s obvious that if the system is organized around incumbencies writing the laws, the incumbencies will benefit from the laws that are written.”

So what does Google, an incumbent organization with a strong lobbying presence, want to do? Here’s one idea:

We’re at a point now in technology where we really can change the entire political discourse if we want to. Typical example would be that everybody here has a mobile phone. In fact, you have more than one. The fact of the matter is that in Washington, and I’ve been part of this for years, people write lots of reports about things. But they never test them. But with the mobile phone you could just ask. You could measure everything. And you might be surprised at to what people actually do versus what they say they do—one of the first rules of the Internet. So it seems to me that you could completely change the way that government works and the way the discussion works.

I like the idea of actually testing stuff in the real world, vice relying on thinktank papers. But I’m not sure what he actually means. Last time I checked, members of Congress only wanted to use their cellphones to collect voter’s cell numbers in order to SMSpam them.

Or, as The Atlantic parsed Schmidt’s statements, “Mobile phones and personal technology, for example, could be used to record the bills that members of Congress actually read and then determine what stimulus funds were successfully spent.

The Google message seems to be that putting technology into the hands of more people is “disruptive” to the current (corrupt) political process, and Google is part of the social solution.

Ars Technica rightly points out that “To a degree unique among communications enterprises, Google represents itself and what it does as part of a process of nation building. To some extent, it can pull this off because the company is relatively new; it does not reside in the tainted auto or financial services sectors. And so Google can claim to stand outside outside politics, offering business tools and a philosophy that could guide America back towards redemption.”

You can watch the video here.

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I’ve been trying to find a web-based video-conferencing service that I can use to chat with about 5 people simultaneously. For free. I’ve narrowed it down to three options, but they each have their drawbacks.

TinyChat
TinyChat uses a browser-based flash client to share your “broadcast” with up to 11 other people. You can password-protect this, in theory, but I have not been able to get it to work in any way except a randomly-generated unprotected chat. It also can’t handle multiple people talking at once, and is a little cranky about microphone feeds. In theory the Twitter chatrooms work better, but most of my interlocutors aren’t on Twitter and don’t want to be.

Openmeetings
Openmeetings is a Google purchase, and it’s pretty robust for a free product. It’s also not for the technophobic. You can use their demo servers (which are in Germany), their Facebook application, or build your own server to host it. That last option is the best, but I don’t want to go through all that when I can just use Skype.

Skype
Definitely the go-to for video chat, Skype’s beta version offers multi-party conferencing. As usual with Skype, the user interface is extremely easy. So far I haven’t noticed any degradation of voice or video quality with additional participants. The one drawback here is that it’s PC only, and a couple folks I want to include in my conferences have Macs, but once it’s cross-platform and in full release, we’ll have a winner!

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Wikipedia’s Book Creator tool is useful for all sorts of things. At base, it’s a social bookmarking tool for your picks from the millions of articles on Wikipedia, but it also allows you to compile your own reference manual, for example, or research library.

The ability to make your book into a PDF and print it is nice. I am a little dubious about that, because that will freeze the information in time, but if you need access to the info when you’re off the grid, this is very nice to have.

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Remember MIT’s Sixth Sense interface concept? The same folks now have a prototype of a way to use a mouse with your computer…without the mouse.

This would be great for business travel (or any travel really) when you want to take a laptop but don’t want to pack any more peripherals than you have to.

As someone who destroys mouses (gaming) or avoids them when possible (I use a stylus at home), I could really go for this. Check out the video demonstration.

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Internet watchers, particularly business types involved in marketing, have been predicting that the Internet will become more tribal as it becomes more pervasive. The parallel might be the rise of Industrial Age cities: people left their local communities and moved to big anonymous cities, but then the cities got so big that people organically developed boroughs, gangs, neighborhoods, etc. The social internet of the old usenet days is the pre-city world; Facebook and Twitter represent the megalapolises. And now we the citizenry are self-organizing into tribes.

Tyler Newton thinks this will happen now, in 2010:

The tribal Internet–Social networking and Internet content will evolve into networks of sites and information streams focused around common interests. Whether it’s for work, hobbies or issue advocacy, interest groups will form virtual “tribes” online, sharing content, ideas, opinions, advice and information among themselves. Magazines, blogs, e-mail newsletters and video content are already interlinked and shared and promoted via RSS feeds and social networks like Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. Because these tribes are built around natural affinities, in many ways they will have a more powerful hold on us than our existing groups based on schools and location. Marketers will not be successful with old-fashioned advertising that interrupts this flow of content. Successful marketers will be those that are able to join and gain the trust of the tribes, where people WANT to receive the marketing message.

You know how billboards are different depending on what part of the city you’re in? You’ll see that with tribal-based marketing. But aside from marketing, what does the tribal internet mean?

Organic Organization. Information will organize itself around the tribal centers that produce and consume it. If you want to find out about Iranian politics, you’ll go to the Iranian dissident tribe. This has been the case for a while, but it will become more explicit and become the shared understanding of the internet denizens. This should make it easier to find information and sort the wheat from the chaff; something’s going to need to.

This also means that in future internet, news finds you.  Your tribe will act as a filter and aggregator, sort of a Google Reader on steroids.  Rather than matching a search string you’ve set, actual humans who know you (at least a little) and are like you (at least a little) will throw information your way.

Working Topically. Wikipedia and the USG’s Intellipedia have long been proponents of this. Rather than organizing information by, oh, which academic institution did the study, which journal published it, or which author wrote it, the pedias organize information by its topic and let you see the sources of the data. Mainstream journalism has been opposed to this, since their bread-and-butter is getting people to go to them, the source, and take what info they provide. With the decline of that business model, a few traditional media outlets are partnering with Google on the Living Stories project, which provides the news topically, the way tribes want it.

Other tools for working topically including tags, social bookmarking, Twitter lists, and hashtags.

Metanet. The population of the internet has hit the point where we can no longer lump everything and everyone together as “the Internet.” There’s the internet of things, as more and more devices come online of their own accord, and more and more sensors are added. There’s the cloud, where data is stored and processed, there’s the commerce internet, there are the walled gardens of intranets and private instances, and there’s social media, now the main way people interact with the internet.  I’m starting to call these the metanet, the macronet, the micronet, and the me net. Just like you travel a city differently if you are considering its architecture and structure, if you are attending class or doing business, if you’re shopping, if you’re having a private club meeting, or if you are going out with friends, you’ll engage with the internet differently. Transitions from one net to another will usually be transparent, but just like going through an airport or into a government building, there will be areas where you will still have to show your creds and leave a lot of your gear behind.

The metanet is the overarching concept – the grid, the net, the feed of cyberpunk – while the macronet is the public world of commerce, education, and business.  The micronet is your neighborhood, your regular stomping ground.  The me net is your intimate group of trusted friends and family.  By the time content is filtered through all these layers, it will be pretty well targeted to you.

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