Joi Ito's Web

A new look for joi.ito.com »

Jul 26, 2003 - 11:03 UTC »

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Boris aka Bopuc has been working on fixing the look and making the page more valid based on lots of feedback I've received. It's still a first pass and we are going to work on the navigation and other things, but let us know what you think.

Please post feeback on wiki page if possible.

Interview at CNN Today »

Joichi Ito

Jul 25, 2003 - 15:29 UTC »

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Rebecca MacKinnon, CNN Tokyo Bureau Chief

I was interviewed at CNN today by CNN in Atlanta in a "live to tape" format. The segment is about generational changes in Japan and the youth culture. I was part of the "studio discussion" after they watch the video. I think I'll be on for about 10 minutes. We talked about a variety of things including the export of Japanese culture to the rest of the world. The interviewer asked whether I thought Japanese music would be the next big thing after anime. I said that I thought Japanese music is a good export. I said I thought mobile device culture where the producers are the consumers was more interesting and that this culture would be the bigger export. It was "live" so the question caught me off guard and I didn't express myself well. I didn't get a chance to say "mobblog" on CNN. ;-p

The show should be aired on CNN International next week or so depending on whether there is other "breaking news". I will be a talking head in my own little box. I've been on CNN before, but this is my first "Max Headroom" appearance.

Rebecca, the Tokyo Bureau Chief is a fellow GLT and a friend. I set her up with an IRC client and got her logged into #joiito. She has an exciting and sometimes dangerous job. It definitely looks like a lot of fun. She had a gas mask and a helmut in her office...

Hecklebot arrives and appears in New York Times »

Joichi Ito

Jul 25, 2003 - 05:45 UTC »

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On July 4, I mentioned here that I thought it would be cool if we made a hecklebot and I started a wiki page about it. Many people from #joiito contributed. Then on July 12, David Beckemeyer aka twostop actually built one. I received it yesterday and got it running. The same day, the hecklebot project was mentioned in the New York Times.

New York Times
In the Lecture Hall, a Geek Chorus
By LISA GUERNSEY
July 24, 2003
[...]
Meanwhile, Mr. Ito is already creating a new riff on the concept. He said he was working with a group on designing a "hecklebot," a light-emitting diode screen that displays heckling messages that are typed during online chats at conferences. "I want to make something that I can put in a suitcase and take to conferences," he said. He describes it as a subversive device that will get people thinking about the significance of the back channel. From the chat room, he said, "you could send something like, 'Stop pontificating.'

What's so great about all this is that it's like the good old days of TCP/IP and HTML when most projects are small enough that one person can hack together really useful tools and everything moves quickly without proposals, flowcharts and approvals. The idea to working demo time cycle is SO short right now. With weblogs, wikis and IRC, feedback, support and testing is extremely efficient.

Ross blogged about the article first and Liz has some thoughtful comments about the article and the idea of the back channel.

Dan also blogs about the article.

Thoughts on micro-content, metadata and trends »

Joichi Ito

Jul 22, 2003 - 13:36 UTC »

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My investors, my readers and a variety of other people keep trying to get me to explain what I'm interested and why I'm interested in it. Here's a first shot at this. Thanks to Steph, Kevin Marks and others on #joiito for a first pass edit. I've put it on the wiki as well so we can continue to work on this.

Continue reading Thoughts on micro-content, metadata and trends.

Context instead of content

Attention is moving from commercially produced content to dynamic or contextual content. An example of this is the shift of Japanese youth spending from CD purchasing to karaoke to cell phone messaging. CDs let you passively consume content produced by companies. Karaoke is more interactive - you are part of the content. With Cell phone messaging, the customer creates the content. From a copyright viewpoint, CDs are strongly protected. Karaoke is less protected and usually licensed in bulk, and messaging has very few copyright issues. With 20 million camera phones in Japan alone, text messaging is adding photo sharing, making conversations look more and more like content publishing. Small morsels of content, created by users and shared is called micro-content, as opposed to expensive commercially produced and protected content.

Networked consumer electronics devices will make PCs less relevant

With each new wave of computing devices, from mainframes to mini-computers to PCs to game consoles to consumer electronics devices, there is a huge increase in volume causing a dramatic decrease in cost. The users and application developers also shift to these new platforms for better performance and smaller sizes. We still have mainframes and mini-computers but they are less relevant. PCs will become less relevant as the number of consumer electronics devices with networking features increases. Eventually digital cameras, phones, TVs, PVRs and other devices will all be connected to the Internet. People will be publishing, sharing, viewing and hearing content from the Internet without having a PC. They will be as irrelevant to consumers as mainframes.

New open standards for micro-content and metadata

The third important trend is the blossoming of open standards built for creating, publishing, syndicating and viewing/hearing micro-content. Open standards have been around for a long time, but the weblog community is making them popular. These open standards are currently being tested and developed primarily for PCs, but many of the standards could be used in consumer electronics devices, allowing smaller developers to write applications and web services for consumer electronics devices. This is very similar to the way in which TCP/IP allowed the developer community to write software for communications leapfrogging the large telecommunications companies. There are many standards for consumer electronics devices, but they are complex and mired in committees, rather like CCITT's x.25 standard that TCP/IP quickly replaced in many applications.

Multimedia

As broadband becomes cheaper and computing power increases, everything we're learning and building around text micro-content and metadata will be useful in dealing with multimedia micro-content and metadata. Because it is more difficult to extract meaning from images and audio, metadata about this content will become vital.

So what's going to happen?

Microsoft will continue to dominate the desktop, but it will become less relevant as consumer electronics companies embrace open standards and use Internet web services and applications to make consumer electronics devices rich with content. The content will be micro-content such as photos, audio clips, video, text, location information and presence information of friends. Digital rights management and copyright will become less relevant. Organizing your network of friends and your network of trust become more important, so that you publish to the people you wish to hear you and you are able to sort information which is relevant to you. These trust networks will require privacy and security as well as methods of managing and using the networks for a variety of applications.

As web services and metadata create a more and more decentralized and semantic web, searching will become more decentralized and contextual and less about html page scraping and one dimensional page rank.

In the future, you should always be able to see the status of your friends (if they choose to let you), create any kind of content you wish to share or communicate and publish it easily from any device. You should be able to find and view/hear any content you have access to, using your network of trust, location, keywords and timing to search for the information. The boundaries between email and web publishing will become blurred and you will be having conversations with the web.

Key Technologies:

Creating and managing identities while protecting privacy
Creating and managing networks of friends and trust
Searching metadata and creating context for metadata
Design and interface for publishing and viewing micro-content
Syndication standards and technologies
Network infrastructure to enable location and mobility
Technologies to move and share micro-content, especially as it grows larger
Web services that interact with micro-content and the physical world such as photo printing, purchasing of real world products, connecting people, etc.

The cutting edge:

Audio blogging (Audblog), mobile picture blogging with location information (Tokyo Tidbits), personal information and information about your friends in web pages (FOAF), machine readable copyright notices allowing micro-content aggregation and sharing (Creative Commons), Amazon book information and affiliate information embedded in blogging tools ( TypePad ), convergence of email and micro-content syndication (Newsgator), searching for micro-content based on context (Technorati)

#joiito is turning into MAS*H »

Joichi Ito

Jul 22, 2003 - 13:19 UTC »

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Ever since Reverend A. K. M. Adam aka AKMA started hanging out on IRC, I've started to think that #joiito is a lot like M*A*S*H, the American TV show about the people in a medical camp during the Korean War. As a Japanese who never went to Western churches, my first exposure to a chaplain was on M*A*S*H. AKMA plays a great chaplain on #joiito. ;-) Like the TV show, there is funny chatter like the doctors chatting during surgery. There are visits by guests who pop by to say hi. There are even battles waging on blogs and the wounded show up at #joiito to hang out and recharge.

Anyway, I'll stop pushing the metaphor now.

Technorati talks FOAF »

Joichi Ito

Jul 21, 2003 - 17:38 UTC »

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Technorati reads the FOAF file from your blog and creates a profile. Your picture from your FOAF file and a link to your profile shows up when you appear in people's cosmos listings. A good reason to get a FOAF file. TypePad has FOAF built in. If you want to build a FOAF file, you can go to this foaf-a-matic site (thanks for the link Sifry) and make a FOAF file. Put the FOAF file on a server and point to in from your blog with a link tag like this:

<link rel="meta" type="application/rdf+xml" title="FOAF" href="http://joi.ito.com/foaf.rdf" />

FOAF stands for "Friend of a Friend" and it is a project to create a machine readable format for putting information about yourself and your friends on web pages.

Here's Marc Canter's profile

Update: As Dave Sifry says in the comments section, you must get an account on Technorati and "claim your blog" before it will make a profile from your FOAF. You can do that here.

David Weinberger on Howard Dean »

Joichi Ito

Jul 21, 2003 - 13:44 UTC »

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David Weinberger blogs about some of the negative comments from "The Net" to Howard Dean's blogging. He says:

David Weinberger
Before this, what would you have had to do to get the ear of a potential president of the United States? You could have a column in a national newspaper or you could get a hernia toting sacks of cash to the campaign headquarters.

Can we at least pause for a moment of delight before we become blasé?

I totally agree. This is SO MUCH BETTER than what we have today with other candidates. I don't think we need to necessarily "cut him a break" but I think we can be more encouraging.

Ray Ozzie wants RSS email and character-by-character collaboration with real-time link creation. Me too! »

Joichi Ito

Jul 21, 2003 - 13:12 UTC »

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Ray Ozzie
I'm curious; perhaps someone out there knows...
Has anyone yet attempted to create "RSS email", where the "feeds" served to a feedreader might be automatically synthesized from the emails themselves as things such as Person (from or to), Thread, Folder, etc? (One could probably easily implement this as a straight layer on top of IMAP.) Rather than just inserting RSS into an email client paradigm as in Newsgator, it might be amusing to invert the solution and explore the usability issues of rethinking email as being just another form of feed served up to a reader, with plug-ins for creating & replying, etc. Hmm.

Has anyone yet attempted to create what I guess I'd refer to as a "Hyki" - that is, a character-by-character real-time collaborative (Hydra-like, Groove Text Tool-like) editor with automatic creation of real-time linked sub-documents when CamelCase words are typed, etc. ??

I'm curious too. That would be great.

Ray, if you find something or someone else knows. Let me know too!

netomat beta »

Joichi Ito

Jul 21, 2003 - 11:12 UTC »

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I met Kris and Maciej of netomat at Supernova and just got around to downloading and playing with the beta. It looks interesting. It's like an email/wiki/link sharing tool. It's written in Java and runs on Mac and Windows. It's pretty easy to use and is more "rich" than a wiki because it has things like drawing tools that let you annotate pages in a way similar to a white board. You create pages with your netomat client. You can publish it with editing enabled so anyone can modify it. It keeps a history of changes. You can email pages to people. You can include lots of things in pages including audio, images, links, etc.

If anyone else is running the beta, send me netomat mail so that we can mess around. I am jito on netomat. My first netomat page is here.

Software and music piracy linked to terrorism »

Joichi Ito

Jul 20, 2003 - 08:59 UTC »

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Software and music piracy linked to terrorism!

The RIAA was trying to assert this last year and I thought it was pretty silly. Now the head of Interpol is saying it.

News24
Piracy linked to terrorism
16/07/2003 14:27 - (SA)

Paris - The head of Interpol called on Wednesday for a global crackdown on software and music piracy, saying the illicit proceeds help finance al-Qaida, Hezbollah and other terrorist networks.

No wonder they're trying to make file sharing a felony. :-(

Via IP

Joi Ito's Web

Joi Ito's conversation with the living web.

A new look for joi.ito.com »

Categories:

Interview at CNN Today »

Categories:

Hecklebot arrives and appears in New York Times »

Categories:

Thoughts on micro-content, metadata and trends »

Categories:

#joiito is turning into MAS*H »

Categories:

Technorati talks FOAF »

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David Weinberger on Howard Dean »

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Ray Ozzie wants RSS email and character-by-character collaboration with real-time link creation. Me too! »

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netomat beta »

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Software and music piracy linked to terrorism »

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Reading »

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