An interesting thing happens when a medium has enough bandwidth to be “rich medium.” It crosses a threshold from merely being an informational medium to being an evocative medium.

Consider radio, which was initially used to carry Morse code over the wireless tracts between ships at sea and shore. The entire communications payload of a message could be perfectly preserved in notating the discrete dots and dashes. Like digital media, the informational content was completely preserved regardless of whether it was carried by radio, telegraph, or paper. But when radio started carrying voice, there was communication payload that was not completely preserved in the context of other media. The human voice conveys more subtlety than mere words.

Thus far, the Internet has been mostly informational. We do use it to transmit individual sound and video presentational work, but the Internet platforms in these situations are merely the road on which these travel rather than the medium itself. (My kids say they are listening to a song or watching a video, rather than that they are using the Internet or that they are on-line. The medium is the music and video.)

So, what happens when an Internet platform supports voice and video, both live and prerecorded, and allows individual works to be combined and recombined and annotated and added to and for the whole process to be observed? Do “sites” become evocative? Do presentations on them become a performance art? Do we loose veracity or perspicuity as the focus shifts to how things are said rather than what is said? Here's a radio performance musing on some of this and more.

I think maybe this is the point where the medium becomes the message. If a technology doesn't matter because everything is preserved in other forms, then the technology isn't really a distinct medium in McLuhan's sense.

I'm sure getting a lot of junk mail lately. In the war between spammers and spam filters, the spammers are winning. I remember Paul Graham speaking five or six years ago at the AI lab about his ideas for Bayesian spam filters. I don't think there was a single person in the room who didn't think, “But why don't the spammers just send their message in an image?” Well, pretty much all mail clients and many institutional filter's have implemented Paul's ideas anyway. It worked for a good while, but now of course the bad guys are sending pictures. I feel that I'm missing something important in not understanding why it has taken them so long. [Read More!]

I wanted to tell you a wonderful short story I had heard.

Listen to this woman - clearly from within a couple hundred miles of that region between Cologne and Katmandu. She'll tell you a tale pulled from the darkest depths of her distant memory. You’ll learn something about how all of us perceive things.
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I've written before about my belief that we're inexorably entering — and some of us resisting — a paradigm shift in how humans think of information, imagination, creativity, freedom, and non-real property. So I was unexpectedly delighted to receive this letter to all of the university's Division of Information Technology staff, from our new (heh heh) interim CIO, Ken Frazier. (Below the fold.) [Read More!]

We've talked about allowing objects to come out of the application in which they have been embedded, and how that removes the lines between applications, operating systems, content, program, etc. and also between user and developer. And the University of Minnesota has been doing some neet work with software robots. I think this is pretty much where it's all headed. Pleasant dreams, John!

The choice of which school would turn out to accept cartoon character Alex Doonesbury was decided by on-line poll. Heh. Those other schools never had a chance.

13,6-1,'86 IHTFP

It is being reported that the guys at Smallthought have gotten some funding for their DabbleDB product. That's cool.

I like the core capability: multiple-view, spreadsheet-like shared-Web access to arbitrary user-created databases. That is, server-side Web2.0 plus Group Forming Network math, as applied to databases. Built on Smalltalk.

I also think this is a nice example of building a small and simple downmarket application, and then using modest revenues to build features to head upmarket on top of your core capability. (Christensen, Moore, etc.) The eventual target presumably being Oracle's PeopleSoft.

I'm surprised that they they took as much money as they did this early. I think this is good, but not a change-the-world killer app. Lots of folks can do this. (Laszlo (where John works) and Curl (where John and I used to work) should approach stuff this way rather than chasing the enterprise from the start.) Maybe Web-Winter is thawing?
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Sorry that I haven't been writing. To busy coding. News soon. But a cute thing happend today that I have to share...

I was starting a demo of some Internet-accessible collaborative spaces, and someone else was there! Frank Wattenberg, a colleague at the US Military Academy was in the same space. I had to use the in-world communications facilities to ask him if he wouldn't mind leaving for a little while.

I guess it was only a matter of time. Time and a lot of effort to get to the point where accidents like this can happen.

Hmmm. Frank's been trying to find the time for some instruction on how do WAN Croquet. I think he's figured it out!

A number of folks here have independently started to plan conferences in which Croquet would be used for presentation and interaction during the conference, and would continue after the physical conference ended. I think there's a good reason that people want to do this.

Face-to-face meetings and conferences are very high-bandwidth encounters, but do not persist well.

Sharing ideas by publishing (e.g., papers in a professional journal) has excellent persistence, but is extremely low bandwidth.

Croquet is multi-bandwidth.
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Key invitation-only conference on the future of collaborative virtual worlds.

Metaverse Roadmap site

CNET story

A Microsoft blogger, with pictures

Good blog

A key thread in all this seems to be a desire for an open-source framework that works. It looks like the only concerns voiced about Croquet for this was a mistaken impression about the licensing. (See the comments in the “Good blog”, above.)

BTW, We're still trying to set up cool demos over the now-released Croquet Software Developers Kit. The demo at Metaverse was actually the demo we produced at the University of Wisconsin for C5 '05 in Kyoto, which was built over the Jasmine proof-of-concept. The current release is so much better, but lacking in some of the visible bells and whisles. We're working on it...