Monday  2002-07-15   Web of Services

Interactions breed more interactions

Doc Searl's JabberConf presentation, "Anarchy and Infrastructure" notes that

Hollywood sees the Net as a plumbing system for intellectual property and other "content".

Searl dismisses Hollywood's effort as futile and urges develpers to build more infrastructure that facilatates more and more interactions.

Wired magazine's recent article "The Bandwidth Capital of the World" covers online gaming mania in Korea and points out

In Asia, where copyright law is only loosely enforced, massively multiplayer online games are less risky for media developers than movies, music, TV programs, or console games. Unlike freestanding content, online worlds are almost impossible to pirate. Someone could copy the client application, but the game itself lives on a centrally maintained network. Even if that person were able to duplicate the backend system (it costs millions to run Lineage [a very popular online game] as a reliable service), there is no way to replicate the presence of 2 million people and the dynamics that occur in a human system of that scale. The value isn't bound up in the content. It's bound up in the interactions — in the group experience.

South Korea's broadband commons challenges North American assumptions about what bandwidth is for and why it's relevant. In the US, cable, telephone, and media companies spin visions of set-top boxes and online jukeboxes, trying to "leverage content" and turn old archives into new media streams. There is a profound fear of empowering consumers to share media in a self-organizing way on a mass scale. Yet this is precisely what makes South Korea the broadband capital of the world. It's not a futuristic fantasy that caters to alienated couch potatoes; it's a present-day reality that meets the needs of a culture of joiners — a place where physical and virtual are not mutually exclusive categories.

Again interactions breed more interactions. But how far will they go? Remember that some of the interactactions must involve lawyers, lobbyists, trade groups, government trade representatives, NGOs, law enforcement and tax authority. And these interested parties act as control rod of interaction fission. Who will operate these rods to what end?

 
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Thursday  2002-06-27   Web of Services

Cult of Google

Google Weblog has many interesting tidbits including screenshots of Google on original web browsers.

Even more minimalistic google page

 
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Thursday  2002-06-27   Web of Services

Glue, Gaia, and the services grid

Glue, Gaia, and the services grid - Jon Udell's short summary on this topic as well as snippets of conversation with Graham Glass.

See also Graham Glass on Gaia vs Jini.

 
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Wednesday  2002-05-22   Web of Services

Programs are Programs

John Walker's 1993 essay Programs are Programs on subscription service for software-on-demand has stood test of time rather well.

 
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Monday  2002-05-13   Web of Services

Graham Glass on Gaia vs Jini

Graham Glass, CTO of the Mind Electric, explains differences between Gaia and Jini (from Glue mailing list at Yahoo). The Mind Electric is the makers of Glue (web services platform) and Gaia (P2P platform).

From: "Graham Glass" <graham@t...> Date: Mon Apr 15, 2002 1:30 pm Subject: RE: [MindElectricTechnology] a little more information about GAIA

Hi Luis,

GAIA is only like Jini in the sense that one of its goals is to make it easy to locate and share services. However, unlike Jini:

• it is neutral with respect to platforms and services
• it has built-in support for load balancing, clustering, failover
• it provides these features for data as well as services
• it has native integration with web services standards
• it is simple to use ;-)

GAIA does not treat services in a special way, so there is no "service announcement" as a standalone concept. GAIA makes it easy to publish information, to locate information, and to be informed when certain kinds of information become available. Similarly, there is no "directory service". Instead, GAIA nodes function as a kind of distributed information pool.

Cheers, Graham

 
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Wednesday  2002-05-01   Web of Services

IBM's software chief speaks out

IBM's software chief speaks out on his company's strategy on Java, web services, XML, tools, etc. He understands important points even architects fail to grasp at all: "I write an application in Java and the application logic is written in Java. Nobody would write an application in XML. It doesn't make a lot of sense. You want to define data elements and interfaces in XML, it makes things interoperable by using XML." Sadly there are too many people who do it backwards.

On P2P as B2B: "Our model is business, not consumer. ... [P]eer-to-peer computing, inside a firewall or in a closed b-to-b environment needs to be scalable, secure, reliable, recoverable, and therefore the peer relationships between systems are server based. And server based peer-to-peer computing has been with us for decades, and that's principally what we do, is server based peer-to-peer computing."

On WebSphere: "[it is a session service control mechanism] that provides in a commercial world, management for a set of application functions, that provides control of the scheduling of tasks and processes and the attachment of users or threads to those processes..."

IBM Systems Journal may provide additional insight on these issues.

 
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Saturday  2002-04-27   Web of Services

Web of Services

not just web services or soap or xml-rpc but also Jini, tuple-spaces, grid computing, P2P, messaging systems (MQ, JMS), etc.

 
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