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| Tuesday, December 24, 2002 |
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And to all a good night... 
| | Merry Chistmas (or whatever you might or might not be celebrating), everybody. |
Blogs of mass construction
Blass
| | What do you call a class comprised of bloggers in which everybody teaches and everybody learns? That explains the headine. |
| | What brings it to mind this Chrismas Eve is Eric Norlin's ceaseless insistence that we continue figuring out the real New Economy of the Net. |
| | He's back this morning with some real good points about anonymity, reputation and other stuff. He begins: |
| | The Internet brings (in essence) ubiquitous Access and Connectivity [attribution to phil becker on this], but it does so with a high degree of anonymity and an inefficient implementation of reputation. |
| | A thought: In the absence of Net-native identity services, anonymity is the default, and its degrees are largely matters of exposure. There are no control mechanisms native to the Net at all. |
| | To explain what I mean by an absent service, consider the difference between mail and print. The Net has mail services, thanks to protocols like SMTP, IMAP and POP3. But Net doesn't have print — that most elementary of LAN services — at all. Sure, you can use proprietary print services from Microsoft or somebody to print over the Net. But those services not native to the Net. [(If they are, I'm not aware of them... I'm sure somebody will correct me. (See?)] In any cse, they're not available to everybody in the manner of the Net's mail services. Same goes for identity services, including reputation. We don't have those services yet. We need to build them out. That's what we're really working on here. (For more background read Craig Burton's Web Renaissance and Internet Services Model pieces.) |
| | My point since the beginning in this "blass" is that the results of our infrastructure-building efforts won't be Net-native unless they're NEA: nobody owns them, everybody can use them and anybody can improve them. If they're owned by some company (e.g. Microsoft) or some association (e.g. Liberty Alliance); if they only run on certain platforms (e.g. Windows); and if they can only be improved by one company or organization (e.g. Microsoft or Liberty Alliance), they won't be native to the Net. They'll be something that runs on the Net, sure; but they won't be part of the Net. |
| | Anyway, if what we're working toward is new identity infrastructure for the Net, we're on the same page. And if that we includes Microsoft and Liberty, and they're working toward that same thing, all the better. |
| | IF the transaction/exchange that occurs in the Net world is to be made as efficient as it can be made to be (something that economics *assumes* will happen over time), then the problems of high degree of anonymity and inefficient reputation mechanism MUST be solved. |
| | A thought: it's less a matter of efficiency than availability. Without Net-native identity services (which, again, are absent... it's not a matter of degree), we depend on reputation mechanisms from outside the Net. |
| | So thinking in terms of degrees and efficiency today requires conflating the present identity mechanisms outside the Net and the absent ones inside it, and then ascribing the resulting low values to the Net. |
| | What we need is the Net-native services themselves. That's the first step. Maybe those services will come from Microsoft and Liberty — at least partially. Maybe they'll come from independent developers and groups of interested geeks. Wherever they come from, those services themselves are what will enlarge the public domain that is the Net itself. In the process we'll be terraforming this new world. |
Blog grok
| | I'm not sure what to make of this, but I thought I'd point to it anyway. Gang blogging by businesses, or something. |
Sweetness and light
| | In recent years I¹ve taken to singing holiday songs. I don¹t sing the usual lyrics, which I either don¹t know or don¹t like, but rather my own lyrics, which are the same for every song. If nothing else, this simplifies things. |
| | This year I have decided to share a sample song with my readers. I nearly went with Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer (which cannot be beat for jauntiness, whatever the lyrics), but in the end chose the more somber, more sober, more ³oblivioian,² Silent Night. I hope you approve. |
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