Am citit atat articolul lui Adrian Plesu despre cultura de internet cat si schimbul de replici intre Dragos Butuzea si Adrian Ciubotaru pe marginea lui si as vrea sa fac public ce gandesc despre acest schimb de opinii.
As incepe prin a expune anumite caracteristici ale internetului care-l fac diferit de mediile de comunicare precedente: costurile extrem de mici de distributie ale continutului (*) si gradul de dispersie pe care aceste costuri (**) il implica. 

Mediile de comunicare anterioare aveau costuri extrem de mari: distributia era facuta manual (***), costurile hartiei sau pergamentului erau ridicate. Aceste costuri mari au creeat entitati care administrau continutul prin triaj si au decis atat nature continutului cat si nature organizatiilor care administrau. 
Initial distributia se rezuma la a copia un manuscris de mana pentru a-l trimite unui destinatar. Costurile prohibitive ale acestei operatii dictau ca singurele entitati care putea distribui continut sa fie cele care isi puteau asuma aceste costuri direct (curti regale, etc…) sau cele specializate in distributia de continut pentru care aceste costuri sunt relativ mici (diferite institutii bisericesti care erau specializate in acest domeniu datorita faptului ca erau singurii consumatori de continut. Continutul in cazul lor se rezuma in general la o singura carte: Biblia).

Odata cu introducerea tiparului costurile de distributie au scazut, mai precis s-au mutat de la copiat pur si simplu la fabricarea de linotipuri sau de tiparuri pentru paginarea continutului. Odata cu scaderea acestor costuri capacitatea de distribui si implicit cantitatea de continut in circulatie, a crescut, dar a atins limitele superioare impuse de noile costuri. Pentru a administra aceasta cantitate de continut s-au infiintat diverse entitati (cluburi literare, diverse reviste, etc…) care distribuiau continutul dupa cum era finantati. In acest interval de timp continutul reflecta in mare parte idealurile si interesele “sponsorilor” acestor entitati si este predominant artistic. De asemenea Europa se afla in plin proces de urbanizare, ceea ce ridica numarul celor care pot consuma acest continut (in marea majoritate mici burghezi care se pot dedica consumului de carte in timpul liber). Oferta de continut generata de scaderea costurilor de distributie isi gaseste un match perfect in cererea de continut generata de procesul de urbanizare.
Este marea epoca in care cei putini ii “educa” pe cei multi, epoca care dureaza atata vreme cat costurile de distributie a continutului se mentin constante(****).

Pe masura ce distributia devine mai eficienta costurile ei scad, ceea implica ca mai mult continut (in volum si in diversitate) poate fi distribuit. In acelasi timp numarul consumatorilor creste, ne aflam intr-un moment in care atat oferta cat si cererea de continut se afla in crestere (inca o data oferta si cererea par se mearga la unison). Apar sub-genuri literare, literatura “populara”, incrucisari intre sub-genuri, specializare crescanda in interiorul aceluiasi domeniu, etc… De remarcat gradul ridicat de dispersie al producerii si consumului de continut: comunitatea incepe sa se rupa in granule din ce in ce mai mici si mai specializate, oferta si consumul de continut fiind intermediata in interiorul acestor granule independent unele de altele.

Costurile de distributie ating un platou inferior pana la introducerea internetului care propune un mediu in care costurile de distributie sunt nu chiar zero, dar destul de aproape (faptul ca nu sunt chiar zero are niste implicatii care nu vor fi discutate aici). Faptul ca aceste costuri sunt din ce in ce mai mici fac ca gradul de dispersie sa se mareasca. Granulele mentionate mai sus devin din ce in ce mai mici, dar si din ce in ce mai efemere si mai fluide, poti trece de la o granula la alta cu foarte mare usurinta. Gradul de specializare se mareste pe masura ca cantitatea de continut care trebuie consumata se mareste in volum si diversitate.

In acest nou mediu intermedierea dintre cerere si oferta nu mai este facuta de catre case de editura, diverse mecene sau autoritati in domeniu, pentru ca aceste entitati nu fac fata volumului imens de continut produs, ci de catre diverse motoare de cautare si aplicatii scrise pentru ele care devin mediatorii schimbului de continut. In afara motoarelor de cautare (care actioneaza orizonal, la un nivel deasupra granulelor) in interiorul granulelor activeaza lideri de opinie care filtreaza continutul (asemanator cercurilor literare care i-au precedat) cu care intra in contact si-l distribuie mai departe.

Am scris cele de deasupra pentru ca Adrian Ciubotaru s-a referit la diferitele etape prin care mediile de comunicare au trecut in istorie si am vrut sa clarific, mai mult pentru mine, care sunt fortele care au schimbat aceste medii de comunicare de-a lungul timpului, pentru a putea raspunde mai bine intrebarilor puse de cei 2.

Andrei Plesu deplange amatorismul care decurge din usurinta cu care cineva are acces la informatie, dar acest amatorism nu se datoreaza accessului usor la informatie cat mai ales faptului ca cei care consuma produsele acestui amatorism probabil ca nu sunt in stare sa consume mai mult. Daca majoritatea romanilor se multumesc cu dictarea pe sticla a unor pasaje din Wikipedia ce rost are sa le oferi mai mult? S-ar putea sa nu fie in stare sa consume altceva si aceasta dictare din Wikipedia e chiar optimala, s-ar putea sa genereze interes pentru anumite subiecte. Parerea mea este ca Adrian Plesu face greseala de a se concentra exclusiv asupra ofertei de continut de la TV (saraca din punctul sau de vedere) dar scapa din vedere cererea de continut de pe acelasi canal (care e la fel de saraca). 

Adrian Ciubotaru se intreaba care este miza spirituala a internetului si cum va arata cultura viitorului. Internetul in sine poate fi gandit ca un depozit imens de carti indexat mai mult sau mai putin eficient care intermediaza interactii intre producatori si consumatori de continut. Intr-un asemenea depozit de carti (in care Plato, Voltaire, Shakespeare, etc… sunt pusi pe acelasi raft cu manualul de utilizare al ultimului aspirator GE) nu exista notiunea de spiritualitate pentru ca internetul este o constructie electronica. Notiunea de spiritualitate se poate aplica eventual oamenilor si interactiunilor dintre ei, dar este foarte greu de formulat o idee, un concept, ceva care sa se aplice la toti participantii pentru ca numarul imens de participanti si de relatii intre ei implica o foarte mare varietate care nu poate fi cuprinsa atat de usor. SIngurul mod in care Internetul poate fi tratat este statistic.

Singurul lucru care apropie internetul de spiritualitate pe care-l vad este faptul ca a devenit foarte usor de a creea nise destructive, care pot accelera anumite tendinte destructive si amplificarea fenomenelor de izolare pe care le traiesc anumiti indivizi care prefera noile moduri de comunicare (prin scris) vechilor moduri de comunicare (verbal). 

Faptul ca noile medii de comunicare creeaza relatii cu cost de oportunitate scazut (practic orice relatie de pe internet poate fi terminata si inlocuita cu o noua relatie relativ rapid) antreneaza relatii superficiale (practic nu faci o investitie importanta cand incepi o relatie pe internet).

As zice ca miza spirituala a internetului este cum sa te re-atasezi de persoane in contextul in care formele de comunicare si relatiile generate de ele devin din ce in ce mai impersonale.

In ceea ce priveste cultura viitorului parerea mea este ca ea va fi fragmentata, specializata si extrem de accesibila din punct de vedere fizic (poti sa intri in contact cu oricine oriunde), dar greu de inteles din exterior (din cauza specializarii), o multime de nise care interactioneaza unele cu altele prin diferite mecanisme. 

P.S. Acest post a fost scris in mai multe reprize, n-am reusit sa gasesc o pauza suficient de lunga pentru a-l scrie in liniste ci in reprize de cateva minute, sper ca nu am facut prea multe greseli de ortografie. Imi dau seama ca nu este scris incredibil de bine si este mai mult o lista de idei, dar n-am avut timp sa lucrez prea mult la el.
Am incercat sa aplic anumite concepte economice diferitelor medii de comunicare. 
Nu am facut nici un fel de cercetari in ceea ce priveste diferitele medii de comunicare. 

* Continut este folosit in intelesul cuvantului “content” din engleza.
** Pentru a vizualiza efectele pe care costurilor de distributie le au asupra continutului care este distribuit inchipuiti-va o palnie prin care continutul este pasat catre consumatori si a carei deschidere este invers proportionala cu costurile de distributie: cu cat costurile scad cu atat palnia se deschide mai mult si cantitatea de continut in circulatie (atat in volum cat si in diversitate) creste.
*** Initial a distribui un document se rezuma la a angaja un copist care sa copieze acel document de mana. Odata cu introducerea tiparului distributia unui document se rezuma la creerea unui linotip sau al unui tipar care urma sa fie folosit la creerea unui numar mai mare de copii. Costul per copie scade odata cu introducerea tiparului, dar nu este zero, nici macar aproape, daca iei in consideratie faptul ca inca se apela la munca manual si faptul ca nivelul de calificare cerut pentru aceasta functie era mare in comparatie cu celelalte ocupatii.
**** De remarcat ca echilibrul economic intre oferta de continut (constransa de costurile de distributie relativ mari) si cerere (in crestere datorita urbanizarii) din aceea vreme este considerata de multi romani ca fiind un echilibru economic optimal in care o fiinta umana se poate dezvolta armonios, modelata de entitatile care finantau distributia continutului. Mediul actual de comunicare, definit de costuri extrem de mici, este vazut cu multa ingrijorare de catre o buna parte dintre romani.

I was reading this post on BW’s Blogspotting and I think that link-less is not going to work because the content producers will be pushed out of the equation like it is explained below:
But what Raghavan is describing sounds very much like an effort to push relevant Web pages down, or even out of the equation. “We’re not giving you pages, we’re giving you information synthesized from other pages,” he says.
In this scheme, Web pages cease to be destinations. They simply fork over information, gratis.  

Yeah, like I would ever want to fork-over my content to Yahoo so that they can put an ad next to it. There is a sense of ownership to the content that you are creating (not necessarily monetizable) that would enrage many content producers if Yahoo would neglect it.

If search engines master this transition, how will the Search Engine Optimization crowd tweak their Web pages?

If search engines get around to this SEO will transform itself into a business that would protect your content from being pulled out of your site and plastered on Yahoo’s link-less search.

Chrome, the browser developed by Google is about to be released. I get a pretty weird feeling from this, because Google was known to support Firefox, because it comes on such a short-notice and because I don’t see any benefits to Google, at least not immediately.

Firefox is a pretty decent browser, or more likely, a pretty decent browsing platform onto which you can install various plugins which will make you browsing experience better. Not too bad, even though I have a lot of problems with their address bar.

I think that what sets Google’s brower apart from the Firefox and IE, the browsers currently with the biggest market share, is the vast mass of data that Google has upon browser users and the way they will leverage this data to gain market share and the number of web-applications that it has in its portfolio. This browser will probably be integrated with Google’s other offerings such as GMail, Google Apps, etc… I think this sets them so far apart that the browser to come out of Google may not look like a browser anymore, but rather as an integration tool between your email (GMail), your RSS reader (Google Reader), your office documents (Google Documents), instant messaging (Google talk), etc… Who knows, maybe it will integrate even with Google Android ;-).

As I have said before, Google has put together a large amount of data that helps it describe the typical user that browses the web, and I think that this data will be leveraged in order to get ahead of Firefox because it Google may develop better ergonomics with of this data. Google will probably battle against Firefox for market share and this battle will be a battle between application designers (Firefox) and statistics on usage (Google). It will be interesting to see how it unfolds.

Later edit: I have been using Chrome for an hour or so and it feels more like a desktop than a browser. It manages to hide away, yet make available when needed, a lot of browser-specific functionalities. It feels like Firefox when run in full-screen mode, it gives you more space and manages to stay in the back-ground. A web-application should take advantage of all this space. The web is the new desktop…

My assumptions about Chrome’s design were largely wrong, from what I see Chrome is pretty much concerned with getting the browser out of the browsing experience by using a minimalist design rather than with implementing some funky ergonomics.
I think that its biggest hit is the extra space given to its user and I get the impression that  this extra space will make more of a difference for people WORKING thru the browser rather than simply consuming some passivly thru it, because this extra space makes you more productive. I don’t even see Chrome, yet with a few keystrokes I get any browser-specific functionality I need. I get the feeling that web-applications will need to be re-designed to work in Chrome and take advantage of Chrome’s extra space, for example Wordpress works atrociously in Chrome. 

Oh yeah, and the address bar is way better than Firefox’s. A few more tests and Firefox is history.

Later Edit: Firefox is history as far as I am concerned, I will be using Chrome.

Last thoughts on Chrome: Chrome is taking the browser out of web- browsing, it is almost invisible, when I am browsing I don’t see it at all, it has no edges and no menus, you only get the page that you are working on and its menus (this is why I said that web-applications may need to be re-designed in order to take advantage of the extra space that Chrome gives you, I am a bit confused when I am using Wordpress because where I now see Wordpress’s menus I was used to see Firefox’s menus). When I am toggling between pages I feel like I am toggling between 2 different applications.

Today when I went to check my RSS feeds on bloglines I was presented with the following:

Quickly I realized that I was cut-off from any source of information that I use because I access sites mostly thru their RSS feeds and my RSS feed reader was down. It was out of the question to go to those sites and read the news from their homepage (*) because those sites (BW, FT, Forbes,, Le Monde, infoq, etc…) have tons of content and I would not be able to navigate it in order to find what I like (this was what my RSS feeds were doing).
It was a pretty weird feeling to see how underlined how dependent I am on my feed reader and that my feed reader has become a single point of failure in my contact with various content providers. Take bloglines out and I am pretty much out of contact with pretty much anything I am following. And I don’t think that I can do much about it (**).
I can only hope that they come back up quickly…

* BTW, for a pretty interesting analysis oh how RSS changes browsing patterns please check out this post on Guy Kawasaki’s blog. The concept that “any page is a homepage” due to the various channels which are sending users to that page will change a few things in the content publishing business.

** Actually I could turn to my Google reader account to read the feeds from there, but this would mean that I need to update the OPML of my Google account, determine what stories are new and which ones I have read, etc… I could get past this single point of failure, but there are costs associated with it. Strangely enough, using Google reader as a replacement for Bloglines is similar to some work-arounds used for avoiding single points of failures in enterprise systems (synchronizing redundant machines).

… then all you have to do is download and install Firefox 3 (download link is not provided on purpose, I do not want to feel guilty for directing people towards it).

I was pretty happy with Firefox 2 and I started using Firefox 3 only after a friend recommended it. I had some doubts, mainly when I was seeing the horrific address bar that Firefox 3 decided fit to implement. I have installed it, and after 3 days I wanted back to Firefox 2. My only beef (but a big one) with Firefox 3 is the address bar and the way it searches thru your browsing history and displays possible addresses you are trying to type. It is a great exercise in obfuscation, the new address bar manages to both hide away what you are typing (the font of the address bar is smaller than the font of the browsing history search results) and obfuscate the results of the browsing history search (bold-ing the hits of the word you type in the address bar causes further confusion as you are reading the results of the browsing history).

To make things even more confusing FF3 changed the way it searches the browsing history. Previously it was matching the address that you are typing against former URLs, now it tries to match the address that you are typing against URL, page titles, URL snippets, etc… in a pathetic attempt at mining your browsing history. In FF2 I used to be able to find my address with a few key-strokes, now my eye keeps scanning this list that FF3 dumps on the unsuspecting user:

I thought pretty seriously to go back to Firefox 2, but Firefox 2 will be discontinued in December. So I am stuck with this browser, let’s call it this way for lack of a better name. Frankly, I am waiting to run IE7 on my computer, it cannot be dumber than FF3.

Firefox 3 is to Firefox 2 what Vista is to XP. Period.

Later Edit Maybe I got too carried away, but what they have done to the address bar and to the address completion algorithm it is horrific. I really liked the way FF2 was displaying the addresses, it was clean, uncluttered and to the point. None like FF3’s address bar…

If you read literature on economic development you are probably familiar with the declining American high school graduation rate and its effects on inequality due to the differences in income between the educated and non-educated members of society. A person which has not graduated from high-school will have quite a lot of problems securing an income in an economy where the low-skilled, labor-intensive jobs have been moved to China.

One reason that I see for this problem is the current misalignment between early education providers (such as high schools) and labor market. High school’s main goal is creating “better” human beings, its mandate is more social than economic. However with the tilting of the labor market towards jobs which require education it appears that education providers should also find a way to respond to economic concerns about the students entering an educational establishment.

I would say that we need shift the way we think about education towards economic concerns and insert some incentives into the educational process that reflect these economic concerns.

I don’t have time to finish this post, I will probably re-visit it later.

I was reading this post on BW’s Blogspotting and at first I agreed with it, maybe in the future the companies that currently hold our data to release it to the outside so that it can be mashed-up with other data that we have created and that is stored in other applications.

A pretty nice picture of the future, but I don’t think anymore it will happen at a large scale because I think that data is the primary way that a company uses for binding an user to its services, an issue that I have briefly touched upon in this post. If the datastores get opened then the cost of user migration from one service to another goes down and with it the risk of seeing your users migrate to your competitors. The data a user creates while using a service, and not service’s functionality, is what makes a user continue to use that service because migrating to a similar service implies losing what the data that it has created.

One other road-block to exporting data and using it outside of the place where it originated is the way it will interact with the outside systems and the possible problem of standards: how will data from one service be packaged so that it can be consumed easily by other services? Exporting the data in some RSS format and mashing it up in a Yahoo Pipes fashion could provide a way around the thorny issue of standards.
Security is another issue that comes to mind when dealing with exporting data.

For some companies binding users to their services by locking their data down doesn’t apply and Netflix is a pretty good example: Netflix can open up their users data because their service is about renting hard-to-find movies and not about hoarding user’s data in one form or another (email services, RSS readers, on-line newspapers, etc… are all about storing users data and applying some sort of functionality to it).

So we will have to wait and see how this un-folds. Frankly I do not think that data will get freed any time soon, in a world in which user loyalty exists only in history books companies will try anything it takes to bind users to their services and this includes data hoarding.
Data will probably get shared (later edit: but it will not be free in the sense that we can cherry-pick who is using it and who is not) between the different services within a large corporation not across corporations or between various companies thru partnerships, but data will not be freed without constraints. Controlling the way a service’s data is made available to other services will bind a user to that service even more because giving up on a service will mean giving up on the data stored within that service as well as giving up on the integration between that service and its partner services (within or without the original service’s corporation).

Later edit: This is one example of how our data will be shared among various entities. The new portal as envisaged by Catherine Holahan is simply a way of storing user information and disseminating it into its partner sites. Interesting to watch…

You must have heard about the latest offering from Spring Source, the SpringSource Application Platform, a platform based on OGSi which aims to help developers partitions their application into logical units (called bundles) and then manage the interactions between them. A very interesting product from Spring Source in an environment which seems familiar: application management. To a certain extent the SpringSource Application Platform is the logical extension of their first product, the IoC container: an IoC container is managing the relationships between classes, the SpringSource Application Platform is managing the relatioships between components.

I have looked a bit at this product, but for now I do not have the time to try it out, so I read up a bit on it and read some blog posts. The award for the most imbecile post written about S2AP goes pretty easily to Marc Fleury who manages to get it wrong from the title: SpringSource`s Application Server. To him S2AP is an application server which is coming too late to the market, the market being currently dominated by, you must have guessed it, JBoss. Pretty hilarious as well as also his musings about VCs. The point is that S2AP is not an application server because it doesn`t provide the services that an application server typically provides, it is just a platform for putting together an application.

Another interesting post comes from Peter Kriens about S2AP extending the OSGi container: probably Spring Source is leveraging the market share it enjoys in order to add some headers that it finds necessary for doing a better logical partition of an application. It is confusing to the people behid OSGi, and probably a bit unfair(**), but I guess it it part of the game.

The fact that you have more control over the way you partition an application into bundles will drive the specialization of components further. In the future you will probably buy specialized bundles which target a very speficic functionality and wire them up in the SpringSource Application Platform, Billy Newport`s hits the nail on the head in this post. You will not need to buy an application server from IBM or BEA or someone else only because you need a state of the art transaction manager and not use, while paying for, the rest of the capabilities that that application server comes with, but rather you will be able to buy only the transaction manager, plug it into your application as a bundle, expose its services and then integrate it into your application’s components.
This is probably where Spring has the potential to do the most damage to the traditional app servers vendors in the future because it will force them to un-bundle their app servers into offerings that will be sold on the market as single bundles (a transaction manager, a JMS engine, etc…) rather than integrated solutions. It remains to be seen how this will un-fold, but the potential for damage is there. The road towards un-bundling of application servers into specialized components is a very disruptive process (*) to both app server vendors and their customers and as a result it will take a while to become mainstream but I think that this is where we are going: to specialized components bundled into applications.

I would conclude by saying that the future of S2AP is a bit uncertain, it is a brand-new product targetting a fairly new market, the market for composing applications out of components in OSGi (***). If there is a need for this type of application composition probably Spring will occupy a large part of the market leveraging their brand, their product portfolio and know-how.
I wish them a lot of luck in this enterprise and I will follow it closely.

* I think that this is the most disruptive product to be released by the Spring people since the IoC container. It took a while for the IoC container to start having an effect in the JEE world, but once its benefits were recognized it revolutionized JEE. Let’s see if this will happen again.

** As Glyn has pointed out the OSGi-like headers are syntactic sugar. They created a bit of a confusion, but apparently it is getting straightened out.

*** Later Edit: I don’t know why but I get the impression that setting up a marketplace for these components would help their adoption. At the very least this would open a venue for people interested in trying them out and people interested in selling them.

Like many other people I use a Bloglines for reading various RSS feeds to which I am subscribed. Bloglines has a pretty nifty feature, it lets you pin various items in an RSS feed so that you can re-visit them later. Pretty nifty, and I use it a lot.

Except that I find right now that I am pinned to Bloglines. Let me explain.
Any feed reader lets you export your OPML file which contains your feeds grouped into categorie and this feature pretty much lets you travel from feed reader to feed reader without many headaches. No feed reader would take its users hostage by refusing to export their OPML file because every user will refuse to be taken hostage in such a way.
However, if you use Bloglines’ pin feature a lot you will find yourself hostage to Bloglines because you cannot export the items that you have pinned and leaving Bloglines would also mean leaving behind the items that you have pinned and that are probably important to you. You cannot export these pinned items typically because this is a feature which is not widely-used by other feed readers and when it is used by other feed readers it is implemented in a variety of flavors which makes its export inefficient.

So I would say that I pretty much taken hostage by a feature. A niche feature, which makes a pretty interesting case for niche products: if you manage to get your user to create data while using your niche product, chances are that your user will be hostage to the data that it created and the feature consuming this data because this data cannot be exported easily to your competitors’ services. Pretty interesting…
P.S. Initially when I started pinning items on Bloglines I realized that I will be taken hostage to this feature and I thought about bookmarking them on del.icio.us. But I decided that I am too lazy for this. So I guess I’ll have to use Bloglines for quite a while…

I was walking down the aisles at Walmart the other day when I came across this product: fair trade coffee.

You have to wonder what is the relationship between Walmart and the producers of fair trade coffee: does Walmart reins in the urge to apply its enormous clout in order to drive the prices down on these producers, most of whom are pretty small and un-organized? Or it does apply its clout, but reluctantly? Or it doesn’t exert any price pressures on fair trade coffee producers and uses fair trade coffee to increase its appeal among a particular demographic?

Strange, I was a bit shocked to find this on a Walmart shelf…

BTW, the price for that coffee was pretty high by Walmart standards, I could have bought 2 1-liter coffee jugs (I can’t believe that coffee can be bought this way unless you have a coffee shop or something) for the price of 250 grams of fair trade coffee.