Web Development Live

Call them the spies who came in from the cold. Two CIA employees discussed to a point the government agency’s Web 2.0 project, Intellipedia, at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston this week.

While you wouldn’t think that the CIA has evangelists, that’s how Sean Dennehy, chief of the CIA’s Intellipedia Development and Don Burke from the CIA’s Directorate of Science and Technology, described themselves. Both talked about how they went about creating a secure Web 2.0 environment for the intelligence community.

In a video interview with new media consultant David Spark of N.Y.-based Spark Media Solutions, Dennehy described Intellipedia as a Wiki available on three networks a top secret network, a secret network and a sensitive but unclassified network available to the intelligence community.

“Something that’s very important to make clear is that these are intelligence community tools and not necessarily CIA tools,” Dennehy said. “We are encouraging the adoption of these tools but they are community-based and provided by what’s known as the DNI or director of national intelligence.”

“He laid the philosophical groundwork for how the world is changing under our feet and what we need to do to adapt to that reality,” said Dennehy. “We wanted to know how to improve communications within the CIA and disparate intelligence organizations.”

Of course, there are differences between Wikipedia and Intellipedia. All edits are attributable and are not limited to being an encyclopedia. And also unlike Wikipedia, there are also many contributors from different agencies with attributable points of view.

The evangelists said Intellipedia is still in the nascent stage and initially met with resistance from a lot of naysayers in the intelligence community. Dennehy described these hesitant users as having “Wikipause.”

“A person has to go through that process of taking the courage to hit “return,” to submit their information to the platform and then see the benefit later,” he said. “It’s an act of faith actually to start publishing to the platform.”

YOU’VE probably heard of the term Web 2.0. It was invented by
computer book publisher Tim O’Reilly and refers to the increasingly
large number of internet applications that are collaborative and
interactive.
There are many examples - Wikipedia, Second Life, social
networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace, photo sharing site
Flickr and a host of others. These have emerged just in the last
few years and have already changed the way many of us use the
internet.
Indeed, they have changed the way many of us live. This tends to
be especially true of younger people, to whom cyberspace is almost
as big a part of life as the “real” world.
Until now, Web 2.0 applications have mostly affected
individuals. Companies and government organisations have largely
retained more traditional methods of communication. The primary
collaborative technology for most organisations in the modern world
has become email, which is very much a Web 1.0, or first
generation, internet application.
That is now changing. Web 2.0 applications are increasingly
finding their way into the enterprise. This phenomenon has,
inevitably, been dubbed Enterprise 2.0. That term was invented last
year by Harvard Business School professor Andrew McAfee, who has
emerged as something of an international authority on the subject.
Last week I heard a remarkable presentation by Professor McAfee on
the state of play with Enterprise 2.0 worldwide. His talk was
beamed in via Skype from Orlando, Florida, where he was attending
an enterprise search conference. He spoke to 200 of us assembled in
a conference room in Sydney’s Luna Park to discuss Enterprise 2.0
in Australia.
First, Professor McAfee defined the subject. Fair enough. He
invented the term, after all. “Enterprise 2.0 is the use of
emergent social software platforms within companies, or between
companies and their partners or customers.”
Those “emergent social software platforms” are the Web 2.0
applications we looked at above. Professor McAfee refers to these
as “free and easy” applications, in contrast to something like
email which he describes as “a channel which closes down after each
message”.
Another key point about these “emergent applications” is that
the important thing is how the software is used, not about how it
is delivered, or how it is developed, or how it is integrated. The
key to Enterprise 2.0 is usage - getting more people in the
organisation using software applications that enable them to share
ideas and information.
The event I attended where we heard Professor McAfee’s words of
wisdom was the grandly named “Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum”, run
by Sydney company Future Enterprise Network (FEN). FEN
(futureexploration.net) is run by Ross Dawson, who has become one
of Australia’s leading internet gurus in recent years. He also runs
regular events on the future of media.
We also heard, via the wonders of a Skype videolink, from Euan
Semple, formerly head of knowledge management at the BBC. Mr Semple
reported to us from his sister’s kitchen in Munich, where he was
working as part of his new career as an adviser to European
companies on Enterprise 2.0 issues.
We also heard, from real live individuals within the room, about
a number of Australian companies and their use of Enterprise 2.0
technologies. Westpac is using Second Life for staff training.
Bionic ear company Cochlear uses a wiki for software development.
Pharmaceutical company Janssen-Cilag has developed a blog-like
corporate internet for internal communications. Clearly, Enterprise
2.0 is here.
But there is reluctance to embrace the technology in many
quarters. Mr Semple told of some of the problems he had introducing
the technology at the BBC. “There are significant cultural hurdles.
Many senior managers are not comfortable with the tools. I often
found it was easier to go around barriers rather than confront
them. It is easier to apologise afterwards than to ask permission
up-front.”
He spoke about one manager who could not initially believe that
staff could be trusted with social networking tools in a work
environment. He was worried that they would waste time, or that
material in blogs could be read by people outside the organisation
and give away corporate secrets.
These sorts of issues, as many speakers discussed, are common
barriers to the introduction of Enterprise 2.0 technologies in many
organisations. But the common theme was how these barriers can be
overcome and the many benefits that the technology can bring to the
organisation.
“It’s cheap, it’s easy and it conforms to the way knowledge
workers work,” Professor McAfee says.
“Among strongly tied co-workers, a wiki can function as a kind
of online whiteboard. Among those with looser affiliations, social
networking tools are very important, and can serve as bridges to
other networks, just as they do in the personal sphere.
“And blogs are great ways of coming across serendipitous
information, helping innovation and fostering new ideas.”
We’ve been hearing for years that companies need to be smarter
and more responsive and that they need to find new ways to tap into
employees’ capabilities. Enterprise 2.0 tools would seem to offer
just those capabilities. This may scare some people of my
generation but with the Gen X and Gen Y types coming through, they
will have no choice.
graeme@philipson.info

YOU’VE probably heard of the term Web 2.0. It was invented by
computer book publisher Tim O’Reilly and refers to the increasingly
large number of internet applications that are collaborative and
interactive.
There are many examples - Wikipedia, Second Life, social
networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace, photo sharing site
Flickr and a host of others. These have emerged just in the last
few years and have already changed the way many of us use the
internet.
Indeed, they have changed the way many of us live. This tends to
be especially true of younger people, to whom cyberspace is almost
as big a part of life as the “real” world.
Until now, Web 2.0 applications have mostly affected
individuals. Companies and government organisations have largely
retained more traditional methods of communication. The primary
collaborative technology for most organisations in the modern world
has become email, which is very much a Web 1.0, or first
generation, internet application.
That is now changing. Web 2.0 applications are increasingly
finding their way into the enterprise. This phenomenon has,
inevitably, been dubbed Enterprise 2.0. That term was invented last
year by Harvard Business School professor Andrew McAfee, who has
emerged as something of an international authority on the subject.
Last week I heard a remarkable presentation by Professor McAfee on
the state of play with Enterprise 2.0 worldwide. His talk was
beamed in via Skype from Orlando, Florida, where he was attending
an enterprise search conference. He spoke to 200 of us assembled in
a conference room in Sydney’s Luna Park to discuss Enterprise 2.0
in Australia.
First, Professor McAfee defined the subject. Fair enough. He
invented the term, after all. “Enterprise 2.0 is the use of
emergent social software platforms within companies, or between
companies and their partners or customers.”
Those “emergent social software platforms” are the Web 2.0
applications we looked at above. Professor McAfee refers to these
as “free and easy” applications, in contrast to something like
email which he describes as “a channel which closes down after each
message”.
Another key point about these “emergent applications” is that
the important thing is how the software is used, not about how it
is delivered, or how it is developed, or how it is integrated. The
key to Enterprise 2.0 is usage - getting more people in the
organisation using software applications that enable them to share
ideas and information.
The event I attended where we heard Professor McAfee’s words of
wisdom was the grandly named “Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum”, run
by Sydney company Future Enterprise Network (FEN). FEN
(futureexploration.net) is run by Ross Dawson, who has become one
of Australia’s leading internet gurus in recent years. He also runs
regular events on the future of media.
We also heard, via the wonders of a Skype videolink, from Euan
Semple, formerly head of knowledge management at the BBC. Mr Semple
reported to us from his sister’s kitchen in Munich, where he was
working as part of his new career as an adviser to European
companies on Enterprise 2.0 issues.
We also heard, from real live individuals within the room, about
a number of Australian companies and their use of Enterprise 2.0
technologies. Westpac is using Second Life for staff training.
Bionic ear company Cochlear uses a wiki for software development.
Pharmaceutical company Janssen-Cilag has developed a blog-like
corporate internet for internal communications. Clearly, Enterprise
2.0 is here.
But there is reluctance to embrace the technology in many
quarters. Mr Semple told of some of the problems he had introducing
the technology at the BBC. “There are significant cultural hurdles.
Many senior managers are not comfortable with the tools. I often
found it was easier to go around barriers rather than confront
them. It is easier to apologise afterwards than to ask permission
up-front.”
He spoke about one manager who could not initially believe that
staff could be trusted with social networking tools in a work
environment. He was worried that they would waste time, or that
material in blogs could be read by people outside the organisation
and give away corporate secrets.
These sorts of issues, as many speakers discussed, are common
barriers to the introduction of Enterprise 2.0 technologies in many
organisations. But the common theme was how these barriers can be
overcome and the many benefits that the technology can bring to the
organisation.
“It’s cheap, it’s easy and it conforms to the way knowledge
workers work,” Professor McAfee says.
“Among strongly tied co-workers, a wiki can function as a kind
of online whiteboard. Among those with looser affiliations, social
networking tools are very important, and can serve as bridges to
other networks, just as they do in the personal sphere.
“And blogs are great ways of coming across serendipitous
information, helping innovation and fostering new ideas.”
We’ve been hearing for years that companies need to be smarter
and more responsive and that they need to find new ways to tap into
employees’ capabilities. Enterprise 2.0 tools would seem to offer
just those capabilities. This may scare some people of my
generation but with the Gen X and Gen Y types coming through, they
will have no choice.
graeme@philipson.info

The backers of the Cape Town Open Education Declaration, announced on Tuesday, said the initiative is designed to echo the disruptive effect that open source had on the proprietary software world by opening up the development and distribution of educational materials.

The scheme is the result of a meeting of 30 open-education leaders in Cape Town, organised by the Open Society Institute and the Shuttleworth Foundation ?the philanthropic organisation set up by Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth.

“We have seen over the last 20 years how open-source software, which is produced collaboratively, has been used to solve individual problems but then shared to solve everyone’s problems,” said Shuttleworth. “Today, I hope we will launch a process that will build something similarly compelling but for the educational field. It will be extraordinary one day to have teachers in New Zealand collaborating with students in China to create documents that will be used by learners in South America.”

According to the declaration, publishers and governments should make publicly funded educational materials freely available online. This will give students access to constantly updated course materials, just as Wikipedia has done in the world of reference materials, the organisers claimed.

“Open education allows every person on earth to access and contribute to the vast pool of knowledge on the web,” said Wikipedia founder Wales, one of the authors of the declaration. “Everyone has something to teach and everyone has something to learn.”

The backers of the Cape Town Open Education Declaration, announced on Tuesday, said the initiative is designed to echo the disruptive effect that open source had on the proprietary software world by opening up the development and distribution of educational materials.

The scheme is the result of a meeting of 30 open-education leaders in Cape Town, organised by the Open Society Institute and the Shuttleworth Foundation ?the philanthropic organisation set up by Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth.

“We have seen over the last 20 years how open-source software, which is produced collaboratively, has been used to solve individual problems but then shared to solve everyone’s problems,” said Shuttleworth. “Today, I hope we will launch a process that will build something similarly compelling but for the educational field. It will be extraordinary one day to have teachers in New Zealand collaborating with students in China to create documents that will be used by learners in South America.”

According to the declaration, publishers and governments should make publicly funded educational materials freely available online. This will give students access to constantly updated course materials, just as Wikipedia has done in the world of reference materials, the organisers claimed.

“Open education allows every person on earth to access and contribute to the vast pool of knowledge on the web,” said Wikipedia founder Wales, one of the authors of the declaration. “Everyone has something to teach and everyone has something to learn.”

As little as a decade ago all these innovations had yet to be dreamed of. Think back to the days before the internet existed. Think back to a world before google became a verb, before a user-generated encyclopedia called Wikipedia replaced Britannica and before Trade Me turned the country into one big garage sale.
Its easy to forget that as little as a decade ago all these innovations had yet to be dreamed of. The effect can scarcely be overstated and there appears to be no slowing in the number of new ways that are being invented to use this new connectedness.
A decade from now, Ive no doubt well be similarly astounded with the way these technologies will have reached even further into our lives, says John Allsopp, a software engineer, author and founder of the influential Web Directions conference series.
But predicting exactly what will be the next thing is fraught with difficulty.
What follows is a smorgasbord of websites, services, concepts and gadgets that give a picture of where our brave new networked world may be heading.
The Chumby
The Chumby, due to be launched this year, is a wireless internet device about the size of a rugby ball. It has no keyboard or mouse but instead uses software called widgets to display pretty much anything you want it to — all the time.
It can act as an alarm clock, play your music or show you constantly updated news.
And the really interesting thing is that it is designed to be hacked — everything from the software code to the specifications for the case are freely available. No-one, including the manufacturers, knows what owners will make Chumbys do once they are released. www.chumby.com
Microblogging
This involves sharing short messages among a group. Messages are typically posted from mobile phones via text or instant messaging.
The best-known microblogging service is called Twitter.
Twitter has also spawned a host of imitators such as Pownce and Jaiku. Microblogging fans claim that, at their best, the mini-messages are almost haiku-like, while detractors question the usefulness of being bombarded with messages such as Just made cup of tea. www.pownce.com and www.jaiku.com.
EveryBlock
This is still in development but EveryBlock is the work of Chicago journalist and programmer Adrian Holovaty.
He is the brains behind chicagocrime. org, which overlays crime statistics from the Chicago Police Department on maps, thus providing a graphic overview of crime in the city.
EveryBlock will use some of the same techniques to create hyperlocal news.
The kinds of information Holovaty wants to provide include the results of house sales, scores from youngsters sports events, local crime figures and stories written by local people. www.chicagocrime.org
23AndMe
23AndMe allows anyone to unlock their own genetic history — and likely future.
For $US1000 ($1145) the service will reveal whether you have a predisposition to arthritis or Alzheimers or, more frivolously, why you cant stand tomatoes.
Peer-to-peer lending
Kiva expands on the concept of microfinance — making small loans to the working poor to help them establish or expand businesses. So, instead of giving a donation to an organisation such as Oxfam to distribute, peer-to-peer lending lets you invest small amounts directly in a particular entrepreneur. More than $US15 million has already been lent through Kiva — and the default rate is claimed to be just 0.23 per cent. www.kiva.org
Mob rules
The concept of a mob of networked citizens forming an irresistible force has been proposed and developed by, among others, futurist Harold Rheingold and Sydney web theorist and author Mark Pesce. In just a decade, well have gone from half the world never having made a telephone call to half the world owning a phone, Pesce said recently. He says the people are the network and when that mob of people get together and decide to go in a particular direction they are virtually unstoppable. Just ask former Philippines president Joseph Estrada, who was forced from office in 2001 by mass protests co-ordinated by waves of text messages. www.rheingold.com.
Guerilla Wi-Fi
Meraki is an internet start-up that aims to provide cheap — or free — wireless networks. Meraki sells a device called the Meraki Mini for $US49 ($NZ63). Plug it into your internet connection and it will instantly provide shared access to other users up to 50m away.
Put several Merakis together in a neighbourhood and they will form a mesh network, giving internet access to anyone in the area. www.meraki.com.
World Community Grid
The World Community Grid project is one of the latest examples of a concept called distributed computing. The idea involves harnessing the computing power of many thousands of idle PCs around the world to try to crack complex scientific challenges. World Community Grid aims to establish the worlds largest public computing grid to tackle projects that benefit humanity.
So far 343,000 members have donated 128,000 years of computing time. Projects include one aimed at giving scientists a better understanding of cancer and another that is modelling the effects of climate change in Africa.
Loopt
One of many social networking services that capitalise on the global positioning software now standard on many mobile phones. Loopt members register with the site and then, when one of their friends is nearby, their location is shown on a map plus a note about what they are doing at that time. You might not want your location to be always visible so, thankfully, users can turn off the service. www.loopt.com.
One Laptop Per Child
The One Laptop Per Child programme is a bid to help bridge the digital divide with a machine called the XO Laptop. Under a Give One Get One scheme, donors give $US399 ($NZ518) and they receive a child-sized XO machine and another will be sent on their behalf to a youngster in Haiti, Afghanistan, Cambodia, Mongolia or Rwanda. More information: www.laptop.org.

Powerset wants to leapfrog the current generation of search services from established providers Google, the market leader,

and Yahoo, Google’s closest rival.

The 2-year-old company has licensed so-called natural language processing technology, developed over three decades at the

legendary Xerox Corp PARC research center in Silicon Valley, to create consumer Web search services.

The goals of natural language search lie at the heart of the classic debate over artificial intelligence and whether computers

are capable of understanding human speech.

Many existing uses of natural language search dodge that debate by simply tackling specialized jobs like answering basic

customer service queries or making inferences about market sentiment for traders.

By trying to create a general-purpose conversational search engine, Powerset is more ambitious.

Its technology reads every sentence on the Web to extract their meaning and build a semantic index of facts that take

advantage of the sentences’ underlying linguistic structure.

In simple terms, the process is a computer-automated version of parsing sentences into subjects, verbs and objects.

“Search today is like talking to a 2-year-old,” Powerset Chief Executive Barney Pell said in a presentation at TechCrunch 40,

a product showcase conference. “We actually index facts that occur on a page rather than just words.”

Current search engines rank pages by what keywords or credible inbound links are on them, among other criteria.

Pell, an entrepreneur with a doctorate in artificial intelligence (AI), and his two co-founders believe the exponential

increases in computer processing power in recent years, combined with renewed research efforts in the field, promise to allow

Powerset to overcome obstacles to AI.

The San Francisco-based firm is letting Web users sign up to try out features of the system at http://www.powerset.com/.

It plans to invite hundreds of users to its Powerset Labs site each week over the coming months.

The feedback will help it finalize the underlying software algorithms before investing in the huge computer systems needed to

start crawling the Web ahead of the launch of a consumer service next year.

Powerset is initially showcasing its service with a limited set of data - the more than 2 million articles created and edited

by Wikipedia volunteers - rather than investing in the massive computing power needed to index the World Wide Web.

Powerset Labs will feature two technology demonstrations rather than full-featured products.

“Cases” shows how natural language queries such as “What do politicians say about Iraq?” can find more relevant information

than keyword searches, whether or not a speaker is described as a politician.

It compares Powerset side by side with “the other guy” - Google - and lets users vote on which works better.

“Powermouse,” a second demonstration service on the test site, lets users see how Powerset technology breaks down a user

search into its grammatical parts, then reveals the underlying links to data to see how it arrives at particular results.

One analyst said it was too early to say whether Powerset’s bid to involve consumers in improving how Web search works will

succeed, in part because of the laziness of many users who want immediate answers instead of searches that take several steps.

“The real problem is to get people to use the service and interact with the search results, which I don’t think they do,”

said Om Malik, a Silicon Valley technology commentator and publisher of the GigaOm network of technology review blogs.

Wales told a conference of software developers in Portland, Oregon, that his commercial start-up, Wikia, has acquired Grub, a pioneering Web crawler that will enable Wikia’s forthcoming search service to scour the Web to index relevant sites. “If we can get good quality search results, I think it will really change the balance of power from the search companies back to the publishers,” said Wales, chairman of San Mateo, California-based Wikia. “I could be wrong about this, but it seems like a likely outcome.” Wikia %26#150; which has helped groups set up thousands of Wikipedia-style sites on topics ranging from popular TV shows to specialist health or travel %26#150; plans to develop an “open source” Web search service with the help of volunteers. Wales founded the anyone-can-edit Wikipedia encyclopedia, a non-commercial project that is one of the Web’s most popular sites. He also co-founded the Wikia ad-supported network of self-edited wiki sites. However, the two organisations have no formal ties. The new Wikia search service will combine computer-driven algorithms and human-assisted editing when the company launches a public version of the search site toward the end of 2007, Wales said in a phone interview. Human editors would help untangle terms with multiple meanings, such as palm, which can refer to location like Palm Beach, or generic topics like trees or handheld computers. Search results are generated via another open-source software project called Lucerne. Wales said he is looking at options to enhance Lucerne, but would not detail his plans. Grub was originally an open source project that was freely available to software makers to enhance as long as they shared any improvements they made. Wikia has acquired Grub from LookSmart Ltd., which had halted work on the project. Wikia plans to open up Grub to other developers to make improvements or to incorporate the crawler into other sites. Terms of the deal between Wikia (http://wikia.com) and LookSmart were not disclosed. However, last week, San Francisco-based LookSmart, which provides banner and search-based online advertising to Web sites, said it had agreed to supply advertising across Wikia’s network of wiki sites. Wikia had been using Google’s advertising service. “We have interest from a lot of other commercial players in the search space,” said Wales. Grub relies on distributed computing technology to power the crawler. Computer users who download the software at http://www.grub.org can share computer processing time when they are not using their machines, cutting the cost of Wikia developing its own network of computers to crawl the Web. Open search is part of Wikia’s broader push to promote the spread of free content publishing on the Web. Wales’ objective is to make explicit the editorial judgments involved in modern Web search systems. Proprietary search systems such as Google Inc. keep secret key details of how their search systems work to prevent spamming and for competitive reasons. Ultimately, Wales wants the Wikia search service to be available to other Web sites and smaller publishers who would be able to install a custom version of the service that points Web site visitors only to links with a specific site. Target customers might include local newspapers, for example. He detailed his plans at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) in Portland, an annual gathering of open source software developers. More details can be found at http://search.wikia.com. Wikia has raised $US14 ($NZ18.08) million in outside financing, including its latest round of $US10 million from Amazon.com, according to a regulatory filing by the company.