Sunday, March 03, 2002

The Economist.  Wow.  The US economy was out of the recession in the fourth quarter.  The fourth quarter numbers were revised upwards from an estimate 0.2% growth rate to a 1.4% rate, marking this recession as one of the mildest on record if it was one at all (a recession, if I remember correctly, is strictly defined as two sequential quarters of negative GDP growth).  Is this something new?  Should it have a new name? Granted, the last year and a half felt like a recession (or a depression in the technology industry) but was actually merely a stasis period were our growth slowed as a means to sort out excesses (look at all the great purging of poorly run companies going on).   Further, if our economy's new bottom during a stasis period is nearly 1% growth, it will have a major impact on our long-term wealth and the wealth of the world.  This is an extremely gross simplification, but the historical formula for our economy's growth was: two steps forward - one step backward.  Contrast this to what we just saw:  three steps forward - one step forward   Effectively, this is four times as fast as historical patterns.  As Flashman would say:  Huzzah! 11:14:33 PM    Comment_ Trackback []

W3C's open source Amaya browser.  Interesting concept (full WYSIWYG editing mode, SVG graphics, and annotations).  It does have a long way to go, but it points in the right direction.  Note my comment about the browser in a next gen P2P system in the item below.  It doesn't have to be IE.  A new post-Web network should have a next generation browser too.  The next gen browser should make it easy for personal publishing, interactions with published content, and developers/designers to create exciting interfaces.  7:55:24 PM    Comment_ Trackback []

Next Generation P2P Systems The biggest problem with Kazaa, Morpheus, etc is the inability to create subnets where an individual can create publish great content that is only shared with people they trust.  There isn't any trust on these systems.  There isn't any room for homesteaders of original content or high quality organization.  Just a bunch of anonymous users sharing content of low quality they don't have a right to redistribute.  To get to the next level in P2P there needs to be three things: 1) The ability for individual users to create subnets where authorization is required before use is enabled. 2) The ability to publish structured content such as a complete web site or web app to a  multi-million person network without flooding the publisher's PC.    3) The ability to connect subscribed users in a given subnet to each other via Web Services in order to enable a new class of applications that share information (but don't utilize centralized resources). To top it all off, this system needs a complete development environment that enables users to build new Web apps for the system.  A platform.  Notice, that in this system, the P2P transport is important but generic -- it is just a pipe.  Granted, there is some heavy lifting yet to done in the P2P space to address scaling and indexing issues, but in this system it doesn't have to be completely decentralized to avoid legal action.  It also doesn't need to use IE.  Read Reed's law to get a feel for how this works. This is going to come.  Who has the vision and the $$ to pull it off????  Note that in this system, copyright infringement is an attribute and not the sole purpose of the network.  This has been a dream of mine since I wrote a report on this topic at Forrester in 1996.  It is going to happen, but when? 5:45:44 PM    Comment_ Trackback []