IESS 1.0
Just back from the First International Conference on Exploring Services Sciences at the University of Geneva, and my head is buzzing with questions – proof that it was a good conference. A truly multi-disciplinary event, with computer and social scientists mixing with marketing and corporate strategy folks. Mostly academic this year, but there is a real desire to widen it to include more practitioners next year, and there is an exciting initiative to break the traditional distance between paper authors, reviewers and readers by making this an interactive exchange over an extended period, rather than the “all or nothing” ways of most conference paper submissions.
All of the conference slides are available here, and you can get an instant feel for the range of topics covered by flicking through the tag clouds of all the papers presented. My own paper presented my work on service architecture reviews, and the prezi I used to give the talk is publicly available here.
A somewhat prickly moment on day 1 provided plenty to talk about, with a dispute over the definition of “service” and whether it necessarily contains a degree of co-creation. I think we could have spent the entire conference debating the definition of “service”!
And is there really such a thing as “services science”? Perhaps not, on the same basis as the physical sciences, but we can surely pool knowledge to improve our understanding of how to design and operate services, just as we continue to (struggle to) do with software.
Desktop synchronisation
For home desktop backup and synchronisation, I have been using a combination of Foldermatch and Carbonite. Carbonite offers unlimited online backup storage for a single machine for less than $60 a year, and Foldermatch allows me to synchronise folders across machines. Although neither works directly with Linux, I can run Foldermatch on a Wintel desktop and synchronise files from my Linux Netbooks, then backup the whole Wintel machine in the cloud with Carbonite.
However, it is a bit clunky, and relies on all machines being connected on my home network.
Now I am trying out Dropbox, a service that synchronises folders using Amazon cloud storage. It runs on Windows, Linux and Mac, and even offers 2Gb storage for free. At $120 per year for 50Gb, it is still pretty good value, and is running nicely and unobtrusively on my Wintel and Linux machines. The big drawback is that it points at a single parent directory on each machine, though I suspect that some smart symbolic linking can get you around that limitation.
Goodbye to the year of the Wave
Will 2009 be remembered as the year of the Wave? Google Wave is still in trial, and having played around with it for a bit, it is clearly still a bit rough around the edges. One tends to try and use it like we use email, and knowing where to put waves, where to find them, how to navigate, gets difficult.
It is a bit frustrating, and many people seem to think it is a solution waiting for a problem. However, it also has a very “right” feel to it, but it is caught in a dilemma – it cannot replace email until everyone is using it. As long as one wants to link it to old-style email with warnings and notifications, then it will remain just another collaboration environment. I think it is more than that, but I don’t yet see how Google will get it there. I long for the day when it can replace email, wikis, instant messaging, Lotus Notes, all in one simple online tool.
In the meantime, it seems to have sparked some creativity in the form of mini-movies (from the same folks that did that wonderful Pulp Wave Fiction):
Does everything grow exponentially?
An interesting talk by Ray Kurzweil, well worth the 40 minutes’ investment. Did he come up with Moore’s Law before Gordon Moore thought of it? Just how universal is it?
Not everyone likes what he says. Douglas Hofstadter, who wrote the best book I’ve ever read, said of Kurzweil’s and Hans Moravec’s books:
“It’s as if you took a lot of very good food and some dog excrement and blended it all up so that you can’t possibly figure out what’s good or bad. It’s an intimate mixture of rubbish and good ideas, and it’s very hard to disentangle the two, because these are smart people; they’re not stupid.”
ONS Web Strategy
I was asked to present the ONS Web Strategy to a programme board last week, and also include some material on data mashups. I searched for good simple but visually stimulating demos, and was disappointed to find very little new material. I returned to the Yahoo Pipes demo I created two years ago, and found it still a very powerful way to convey the potential of data mashups. I think the audience found it helpful too (at least I have been asked to make it more widely available).
So, here it is running as a Flash “movie” condensed into just 5 minutes. Alternatively, you can run the pipe live (and copy it if you like).
Before that, I ran the excellent “The Machine is Us/ing Us” video from Michael Wesch. This and other fascinating videos can be found on his Digital Ethnography site. His key message about separating content from form really is the driver for everything that is happening with data on the web at the moment.
To illustrate the ONS strategy, which has Mass Collaboration at its heart, I used two case studies, the first of which involved a prop made by my 9-year-old son, Robert.
“Spike” is a Lego Mindstorms robot. What does it have to do with Mass Collaboration? The first version of Mindstorms was not a great success, but it was reverse engineered by some fans, and once Lego had decided not to sue them, they instead asked them to help design a better product. It is all the better for the involvement of its customers in its development. Lego have gone even further now, by giving away their design tool and allowing enthusiasts to design, publish and rate their own models.
The second case study was AuctionMapper, which uses the eBay API to create a totally new way of exploring eBay Auctions. Another great example of the fruits of publishing an open API and letting in customer creativity.