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Wednesday, July 23, 2008

Supernova 2008 - Part 5

Description of image I learned a lot at Supernova as I do every year. It is difficult to explain the depth and breadth of what transpired at the conference, but hopefully I will hit some highlights and provide links where you can learn more. One of the many interesting topics was "networks" -- something that we take for granted. Three experts talked about the diversity of very large types of networks including baggage routing networks of an airline, electrical grid networks, natural gas distribution, the global aviation system, the Internet, and of course our social networks. The big picture is that social networks are evolving to the point that the entire World Wide Web is likely going to become the Social Web.

A social network is a structure consisting of nodes (people or organizations) that have a common interest or increasingly a dependency. The tie that binds us can be one or more of many things: values, visions, ideas, financial exchange, friendship, kinship, food likes or dislikes, buy or sell trading, links to each other's blogs, epidemiology, or airline routes. The resulting ontologies are very complex. Research in a number of academic fields has shown that social networks operate on many levels, from families to countries. The use of the networks is beginning to be a key tool in collaboration to solve problems, how people achieve their goals and even how organizations are run.

In its simplest form, a social network is a map of all the relevant ties between the nodes (people). One of the first social networks was Linkedin and I have been a member of it from nearly the beginning. Hardly a day goes by when I don't get several invitations to become a "friend" or "colleague" with another Linkedin member (or Plaxo Pulse or Facebook). To gain the real "network effect" I recommend being selective in dealing with these invitations. Otherwise you end up connected to everybody which is as valuable as being connected to nobody. There are many people who are looking for people to send press releases to or to throw you into a recruitment pool or just be able to say they "know" someone or is their "friend" because they saw your name in the paper or saw you at a conference. The real power is not in the numbers per se but to really know someone who knows someone who knows someone and to have the credibility with the person you know such that they are willing to help you to connect to someone else. I have 178 trusted friends and colleagues in my Linkedin network. Two degrees away -- friends of friends; each connected to one of my connections -- there are more than 60,000 people. Three degrees away -- members who can be reached through a friend and one of their friends -- is 3,200,000 people. If you are discerning about it you can develop considerable social capital.

There are many issues in the social networking space. One of them is that there are so many networks. If you take a look at the end of this story you will see -- and if you like the story and click on the green icon, a dialogue box offers you three functions. You can send an email link to the story to friends. A second choice is that you can post the story to your own blog. Perhaps most important is the third choice which is to post the story at one or more of your favorite social networks. The dialogue box displays icons for the various social networks -- Facebook and thirty-nine other of the top forty networks! A few mouse clicks and you have the ultimate chain letter. I think ShareThis has great potential.

How many social networks should you belong to? Certainly not forty. I belong to Linkedin, Plaxo Pulse, Facebook, and MySpace. Four is enough for me. But is it? There are many niche networks -- such as A Small World -- that will be of interest to m any. But do you want to create a profile of your personal information at each of the networks you choose? And keep them up to date? And tell your connected friends what you are doing and exactly where you are (latitude and longitude) and what music you like or even what song you are listening to at the moment? To me the glass is half full. I am hopeful that protocols will emerge such as OAuth, OpenID, and OpenSocial that will level the playing field. We will be able to use one single "sign-on" for all our web sites and create *one* profile and have control over which networks and which parts of the profile it appear in. For example, it would be nice to create a comprehensive profile that is encrypted and totally under the user's control. You may choose to have your favorite songs be accessible through Facebook but not your medical records from Google Health and your Google Health electronic medical record to be accessible to your primary care physician and your hospital but nobody else. The application you create for your consulting business or a new game you created could be available through *all* the social networks.

Social networking is the next turn of the crank of the Internet. By combining networks, such as a mobile phone networks, mobile payment systems, the Internet and a network of people all sharing a common cause, a viral effect can take place resulting in a lot of money or assistance flowing to the need -- political, emergency response or (hopefully) humanitarian.

Security and privacy issues with social networking? Another story to come soon.

Other patrickWeb stories about conferences
Other patrickWeb stories about Internet technology

Blogging, Conferences, Internet Technology, Public Policy July 23, 2008 09:35 PM

Friday, June 27, 2008

Temporarily Out of Service

Two nights ago, for some mysterious reason, my entire web site disappeared from the server. I have been using the Dreamhost shared hosting service in Southern California for a couple of years now and have been quite pleased with the price, performance, reliability, and support, but they were as puzzled as me as to how it happened. It took me a few hours to notice the problem and some more time to get things back to normal -- there are thousands of docuemtns, audio, video, and other content. I apologize for any inconvenience to visitors and readers. As always, incidents like this show the critical importance of regular backups. Dreamhost makes what they call snapshots every hour, day, and week. After nearly fourteen years of adding content to the web site I would hate to lose it!

Blogging, Personal Computing June 27, 2008 10:02 AM

Tuesday, June 24, 2008

Supernova 2008 - Part 2

Description of image Supernova began last Monday morning at the UCSF Mission Bay Conference Center. There is no sign of recession in the Mission Bay area -- construction cranes everywhere. The 300 acre former rail yard was created in 1998 as a redevelopment project and seems to be flourishing. It has attracted a lot of biotechnology research and development and is the headquarters of the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine. It also has fiber to the premises communications.

Kevin Werbach kicked off the conference with his view of the "Ten Challenges for the Network Age". If it wasn't already, Supernova made it clear that decentralization is happening and that there is an accelerating shift underway to network-based computing, services, business processes, marketing, entertainment, social relationships, connectivity, and culture. The shift is changing our assumptions about how the world works. There are big opportunities ahead for those who grasp the shift and peril ahead for those who don't.

A panel with Bob Iannucci from Nokia, Esther Dyson, and Clay Shirky (New York University) how the Internet is changing the way the world works -- especially how people are doing things differently. In Clay's new book "Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, he tells a story of how a woman left her cell phone in a cab and someone stole it and started using it rather than trying to find out who owned it (which would have been easy). The woman's friend took the matter as "wrong" and launched a campaign on the Internet through blogs and social networks to get the thief to return the phone. Based on messages the person had sent from the phone it was determined who she was. Her MySpace profile led to where she lives. The police would not take the case. They said it was just lost, not stolen. The bloggers did not give up and eventually brought the NYPD around. The phone got back to the owner and the thief was arrested. More than one million people followed and/or participated in the effort. Talk about "Power to the People"! (which I have been writing about for fifteen years). ! highly recommend Clay's book.

In a similar manner, Facebook groups are providing valuable input to businesses and surely will cause them to change direction on some issues. Intel found this out years ago when they denied problems with the then new Pentium chip. They were forced to come clean. Collective opinions will be making more and more of a difference. Another emerging business tool is the the Virtual Company Project which is building online tools to provide governance for a virtual company. People with common interests and appropriate skills will be able to develop a business and collaborate online to provide products and services.

On the political scene the bloggers of America have been having a heyday for the last five years and are becoming more and more effective. In 1999 there was considerable strife in Kosovo. Part of the strategy by the government was to control information so that the people would not know exactly what was going on. Journalists were expelled from the country. The independent radio station, B92, in Belgrade was closed down. Local media was either shut down or censored. But the radio station set up a web site and began to publish text, audio and video. They reported when air raid sirens were going off. Up to the minute news was provided to the population. There was no way to shut down the Internet site because the government didn't’t know where the server was. If they had known and shut it down another server would have been put back online. From a coup in Thailand to London bombings, information becomes available and it becomes public. In Zimbabwe text messages went out to tell people where to vote as the government tried to keep it a secret. Governments can put people in jail but they will not be able to confiscate 3-5 billion cell phones. As long as there is information the Internet provides a way to share it. Power to the People.

One of the most subtle but most powerful capabilities of today's Web 2.0 that was not available ten years ago is tagging. People take pictures with their phone and upload them to Flickr. They then apply tags: London, bombing. Someone else finds the pcitures and adds their own tags: train, terrorism. As more people find, view, and tag, the pictures become more valuable -- they gain more context. This is a key element of social networking. Not only can people report something, but they can also join in a collaborative effort to find a criminal or a loved one. Awesome stuff and we have only seen the tip of the iceberg.

Blogging, Conferences, Internet Technology, People June 24, 2008 03:33 PM

Tuesday, June 10, 2008

Net Attitude on Kindle

The Kindle is quite an amazing device (see "Kindlized") and I am irrevocably hooked. In addition to buying a growing number of Kindle books, I now have one for sale. Net Attitude continues as a book but I suspect the Kindle version will have the edge going forward. The patrickWeb blog will also soon be available for the Kindle. Amazon is having growing pains as try to ingest a lot more blogs than they expected. The blogs will be updated daily so that Kindle users will always have the latest postings for all the blogs they subscribe to.

Blogging, Favorites, Gadgets, Net Attitude, patrickWeb June 10, 2008 04:40 PM

Wednesday, May 28, 2008

Reflections

I began to write "reflections" in 1997. Some were about visits to an IBM customer, a university campus, or just to reflect on some issue of the day that struck me at the time. The Reflections were not an attempt to be profound.... just to share. Needless to say, this was a precursor to blogging. Some of the postings in patrickWeb are based on reflections but eventually they will all get edited and moved to the blog for posterity. Here is the list of Reflections from 1997 to 2002.

Blogging, Favorites May 28, 2008 03:01 PM

Wednesday, April 16, 2008

Apology

Error My apologies for the serious typo in my latest post. I can not explain it. Thank you to the many who were kind enough to send timely email about the error which enabled me to fix it quickly. There are some things the spell checker doesn't catch.

Blogging April 16, 2008 08:09 PM

Saturday, April 5, 2008

patrickWeb Blogroll

patrickWeb Blogroll

The patrickWeb blogroll has been around for more than ten years. A blogroll is basically a list of blogs of other people. In my case, it is a list of blogs of people who are either good friends, people whose opinion I respect, or blogs I have found useful. I learned about blogrolling from my friend Joi Ito and then learned how to actually do it from blogrolling.com.

Now that we all live in a world of social networking, there are many ways to share not only links to your favorite blogs, but links to your favorite anything. (There are also numerous specialized ways to "tag" stories, pictures, songs and videos). At sites such as del.icio.us you can put all your bookmarks in one place and share them with anyone and everyone. But, it is still ok to have a good old fashioned blogroll.

One of the entries in the patrickWeb blogroll is The Guidewire. Guidewire Group is a market intelligence firm that is focused on technology entrepreneurship, early-stage companies, and emerging technology markets. The insight they have developed over the years is quite valuable to their clients and the community that has built up around them. The Guidewire Group analysts meet with hundreds of innovative companies each year and a subset of the companies ends up launching their product or service at a DEMO conference.

There are a number of stories about the DEMO conferences here in this blog but over at the The Guidewire blog there is quite a buzz going on. There are always debates about the future of emerging technology and whether we are living in a post-bubble or pre-bubble period . Now there is a debate about the future of the emerging technology conferences. The latest story is called Let's Get Real: Business is Not Personal.

patrickWeb blogroll
patrickWeb stories about conferences

Blogging, Conferences April 5, 2008 04:31 PM

Saturday, February 24, 2007

The Peak of Blogging?

Blogger The market research firm, Gartner, has reported that less than 2% of all Internet users are frequent contributors to content on the web. The Gartner researchers also said that 200 million people already have given up blogging and that the total number of bloggers will peak during the first half of this year at around 100 million. Quite a few journalists and bloggers picked up on the Gartner predictions and you can find a lot of different reactions. Mine is simple. Blogging is just beginning!

There are quite a few stories here on patrickWeb about blogging (you can see the list here) where I have shared my vision about the future of blogging but the bottom line is that it has grown to it's infancy. The folks at Gartner are very smart and I suspect that they are looking at the U.S. only and at people like me and others who write stories. To me that is a small subset in multiple ways. For openers, 100 million people would be less than 5% of China and India alone. Total Internet users in 2007 are estimated at 1.1 billion which is slightly less than 17% of the world. I think we could all agree that those numbers are going to continue to grow, especially with explosive growth of the mobile Internet being made possible by technology such as Opera Mini.

The other major factor behind my comment that blogging is just beginning is that blogging is not just about people writing stories. Blogging has now entered the phase where it is a fundamental technology -- one that is enormously profound and is altering how information is documented, distributed, syndicated, and archived. As with all fundamental technologies, there are a lot of myths in the early stages -- like "The Internet is free" or "The web is for documents, not for applications". Add to the list that blogging is a vanity tool for people to write about themselves or their hobbies. Sure there are many personal blogs. Someone may write a blog that is only read by the blogger's mom. That's ok. A volunteer parent on a school trip may write a daily posting for the other parents to read. Pundits may write a "column" that is read by very large numbers of people. Some people view blogging as a way to document and archive their activities or their thoughts over time with the thought that someday their children's children will find it interesting to read. The "diary" aspect of blogging is important, but there is a lot more to blogging than people writing their personal accounts or views.

Blogging is a very effective way for departments of companies to stay on top of what is going on. We all know that special person in the department who always knows who is working on what. That special person is now blogging and providing the departmental "news column". It is not a task that can be assigned to someone, it is a task sought out and enjoyed by that special person who loves to write, takes the extra time to add useful links to what she writes, and is a very effective communicator. Similar persons are providing customer support or valuable insight to customers and business partners. In every walk of life, the "authors" among us arise to share their skill with others. The old saying, "I could write a book", is true. Millions of people have a book in them but prior to the power of blogging they had no practical way to publish. And blogging is not just about individuals who are writing.

How about warranty expiration notices, product recalls, press releases, weather updates, shipment notices, doctor appointment reminders, auction completions, stock trading activity, and wine harvests? Blogging is not limited to traditional documents or notices. For example, a patient on a hospital gurney moving from the ER to the recovery room can generate important information as the patient is wheeled through the doorways of the hospital. An RFID tag could trigger a short blog posting which gets delivered to the primary care physician's Patients folder. A periodic glance at the doctor's blog reader would indicate whether there are any new postings advising of patients whereabouts. Primary care physicians today are too busy to go to the hospital and visit patients -- but they do care what is going on and want more data. The bottom line is that it will become very hard to justify publishing any kind of information in anything other than a blogging format. See BlogOn 2005 for more about the blogging format and other aspects of blogging.

Other patrickWeb stories about blogging

Blogging February 24, 2007 02:34 PM

Wednesday, June 14, 2006

Behind The Scenes In The Blogosphere

People talking Last month I got an email from Nora Barnes who is a professor of marketing at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. She said she was conducting the first academic study about blogging and wanted my input, which would be combined with that of dozens of others. Her goad was to report on what motivates bloggers, how they handle legal and ethical issues, and how blogs have helped promote their businesses or points of view.

This morning Dr. Barnes reported that her blog study is now finished and up on the UMD Center for Marketing Research web site. The report is in pdf format and you can find it here. Nora's study takes the emotion out of the subject and adds some substantive research and a great deal of insight. She said that what started out as "just another researcher trying to study something interesting" revealed what makes bloggers "different from those of us watching (reading)". I am certain her report will be quite valuable to institutions of all kinds who have not yet gotten their blogging strategy to the level they want.

Other patrickWeb stories about blogging

Blogging June 14, 2006 08:33 AM

Wednesday, May 31, 2006

How to be a better blogger -- and still keep your day job

News I have known David Strom for a dozen years or so. He is one of the best writers out there. Whether it is hardware, software, audio, or how to do things, David digs deep, analyzes what's out there and writes comprehensive stories. His latest is about blogging, and I was happy to provide some input. If you are looking for tips about blogging, David's story is an excellent reference. His cardinal rule is to "tell the truth". He explains why it is important to find your voice and stick to it. Above all, he says, "be professional at all times". Many organizations are not capitalizing on the power of blogging, but it is not too late. David says "Craft your corporate blogging policy now, understand the mechanics and know your tools". As in all of his stories, this one offers really solid advice.

Other stories about blogging at patrickWeb are here.

Blogging May 31, 2006 05:31 PM

Tuesday, April 18, 2006

Behind on the Blog

Board room A colleague at a board meeting in NY this morning reminded me that I am behind in writing about what I learned in Rome. He is right, I am definitely behind but committed to write the stories previously outlined. So much to do, so little time. e-tirement is challenging!

Blogging April 18, 2006 05:54 PM

Saturday, March 11, 2006

FeedBlitz

Blogger I greatly appreciate the readership and feedback from those who visit patrickWeb. Readers "visit" in one of three ways. Most use one of the many blog readers that are available. The Opera browser is a good choice -- it has a very nice built-in RSS (blog) reading feature. When you click on the orange XML icon on a web page, Opera will ask you want to subscribe. It keeps all your blogs up to date under an RSS tab in the browser. I can also recommend BlogBridge, especially if you like to keep track of a large number of blogs. See "blogspace" for a list of additional popular blog readers. Some patrickWeb visitors just go to the patrickweb.com homepage when they feel like taking a look for new stories.

There is a large group of readers who prefer to receive an email version of new patrickWeb stories. The advantage of the email approach is that the new stories become part of the inbox and many people "live in their inbox." FeedBlitz automatically sends an e-mail to all subscribers whenever I write a new story. If you are currently a Bloglet subscriber, no action is necessary -- I have added all existing Bloglet subscribers to the new FeedBlitz model. Feedback on the transition is welcomed.

Subscribing To patrickWeb

There are various ways to subscribe to my weblog. Many people prefer the email approach. If you would like to know when I have written a new story, the simplest way is to enter your email address below and click the subscribe button.
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As far as privacy at patrickWeb goes, be assured that I will not loan, rent, sell, or share your email address with anyone. You can view my policy on this and related things here. More about about subscribing to my weblog is here.

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Blogging March 11, 2006 09:50 PM

Thursday, February 23, 2006

Babel Of Business

Blogger at work We have all read the "hype" about blogging over the past few years. More recently there was a story saying "Blogged Out -- The Fad May Be Fading". The reality is that the reality is bigger than the hype and we have only seen the beginning of the blogging revolution. I have no doubts that blogging will continue to change the way information is created, published, distributed, syndicated, archived, and searched. I did my best to lay out a point of view on this in a story called "The Babel of business: do we over-communicate?". The story was pubhlished last month in a magazine called the European Business Forum. The web version is now live here.

Other patrickWeb "in the news" stories

Blogging February 23, 2006 10:51 AM

Sunday, January 15, 2006

Two New Books

Books Two new books arrived this week that may be of interest.

Naked Conversation - How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel is very timely with all that is going on in the world of blogging. I know Robert from Microsoft. He has been active in evangelizing the potential of blogging and very much practices what he preaches, even when his postings may at times not be consistent with company practices. The book explores how blogging has changed the rules of communication and competition and gives business owners the tools to launch an effective blogging strategy. Robert and Shel interviewed many business leaders including Mark Cuban of the Dallas Mavericks, Bob Lutz from General Motors and Johanthan Schwartz of Sun Microsystems.

Let Go to Grow - Escaping the Commodity Trap by Linda S. Sanford with Dave Taylor is about strategy and management practices. Normally pretty boring stuff, but Linda and Dave have organized the book in a way that makes it flow very nicely. It is all about driving innovation and gaining productivity -- both urgent topics for anyone in a leadership position today. The book explains the concepts of componentization, outsourcing, and off-shoring in a clear but strategic way and then lays out an approach for leveraging the concepts across an enterprise. Practical case studies about Dell, eBay, GE, Procter & Gamble, and Toyota bring it all home. I have known Linda for quite a few years. She has had a number of top-level executive positions in systems, storage, and global sales and is now Senior Vice President of IBM's internal On Demand Transformation and Information Technology initiatives. In addition to being one of IBM's highest-ranking women, she also serves as a member of the Women in Technology International Hall of Fame and the National Association of Engineers. She was named one of the 50 Most Influential Women in Business by Fortune magazine, one of the Top Ten Innovators in the Technology Industry by Information Week, and one of the Ten Most Influential Women in Technology by Working Woman. She is also a nice lady!

Other patrickWeb stories about blogging

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Blogging November 19, 2005 04:12 PM

Sunday, November 13, 2005

The Future Of Journalism

Today's New York Times has a story called Trying to Wean Internet Users From Free written by Joseph Nocera. Mr. Noceera did a good job of explaining some of the issues facing both newspapers and journalists due to the "ruthless efficiency of the Internet". He cites the music and telephony industries as victims so far and poses the question about whether newspapers are next.

We all know that newspaper circulation has been on a steady decline for twenty years and much has been written about the reasons for this. A continued decline of 2% per year would mean in fifty years there would be no newspapers. Financial pressures would cause failures long before that. I am making no predictions on the demise -- most things that have been predicted to disappear are still with us. In the case of newspapers there are many attachments in addition to reading them -- people use them to wrap fish, cover their head from rain, protect the floor when painting, pack dishes for shipping, and a myriad other things. What I would like to opine about is the future of journalists.

A journalist is a person who practices journalism, the gathering and dissemination of information about current events, trends, issues and people. (definition from Wikipedia). Columnists go beyond just gathering and disseminating information -- they add their opinion and thereby have an influence over individual and public opinion. What the New York Times has done with their new "TimesSelect" is to cordon off their top columnists and put them behind a wall that is only accessible to subscribers. If you are already a print subscriber (which costs hundreds of dollars per year) you can subscribe for free, otherwise the cost is $49.95 per year. So far they have attracted 270,000 -- half of them from each category. The move is controversial from a business model point of view, but the bigger issue may be the influence aspect.

If the columnists are behind the curtain, will they continue to have influence when tens of millions of bloggers are out in the open? Not only are the bloggers more accessible but their content has context -- each posting can have tags that reflect what their story is about. The tags make it easier to find the stories of interest and increase the likelihood of them being read. Some say, yes but they are just bloggers out there. How do we know they are creditable sources of facts and opinion? There are two answers to that question. First is that sites such as Technorati show how many inbound links there are to a particular blog. If a large number of people are reading a blog it is likely worth reading. By looking at the blog's comments and by looking at other things the blogger has written you can get a feel for whether you want to trust that particular blogger. Contrast this with the columnist that the New York Times has behind the curtain. How do you know whether the columnist is creditable? Because they work for the New York Times? That may be good enough for some -- not so for others. Do you know how many inbound links there are to the columnist's story? No. But bloggers have strong opinions about things and are ranting or raving about things. And columnists are not? Columnists have no agenda? Their editors have no agenda? Will people pay $49.95 per year just to have the ability to browse the columnist's story. Not likely. This is not a sanguine situation for columnists. So what are they to do?

Some will stay behind the curtain and hope that the management of the newspapers will figure out the right business model. Others will see a bigger opportunity by becoming bloggers themselves and then replace their current salaries by charging fees -- not for their blogs but for speaking and consulting engagements. The years of experience and honed writing skills should attract a lot of attention in the blogosphere. That in turn will generate a lot of links. Companies, associations, and governments will pay fees to bring in expert points of view to their board rooms, customer meetings, and conferences. John Perry Barlow, former lyricist for the Grateful Dead, told me ten years ago "give away the music and charge for the concerts". I think he had it right.

Other patrickWeb stories about blogging

Blogging November 13, 2005 04:41 PM

Saturday, November 5, 2005

Technical Update

Toolbox On infrequent occasions I have something to say about the technical aspects of patrickWeb. Today I made a change that is important to me but will go unnoticed by close to 100% of the people who read this blog. From now on Atom is the protocol I use to publish the index to what I write. There is a debate in technical circles about what protocol to use -- RSS or Atom. For the most part, the issues are technical. Both protocols accomplish the same thing -- they provide an index that allows blog readers (aggregators), and other applications like iTunes, to be able to display the date, title, category or categories, and the content of what I write. The reason I am making the change is that I believe that Atom is a longer term approach. As you know from the many things I have written here about Linux and ODF, I am a firm believer in open standards. Atom was developed by Sam Ruby from IBM and a number of collaborators. The development of the details behind Atom was done out in the open for all to see and supported by a working group within the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), which is the closest thing we have to a body responsible for how the Internet works and insuring it remains open. In summary, there is nothing wrong with RSS -- it is widely used -- but I believe that Atom is a superset of what RSS has to offer and that Atom will continue to evolve and adapt to the rapidly changing world of blogging, podcasting, videocasting, and whatever comes next.

A comparison of RSS and Atom by Tim Bray
More details about Atom

Blogging, patrickWeb November 5, 2005 05:31 PM

Thursday, October 27, 2005

Blogs and Bots

Hospital surgery The story about some possible future roles for blogging brought a number of comments from readers. Pito Salas at BlogBridge liked the hospital application I described and took it to the next level. He feels that aggregators (blog readers) do not have to be limited to displaying their results as a time-ordered series of posts. For example, BlogBridge recently introduced "Photo Feeds", where they display the results of a blog feed full of pictures not as posts but as a photo album. Taking this concept into the healthcare arena, Pito envisions the vital signs of a patient being taken every 15 minutes and placed into a blog feed. The aggregator would then display the information as a graph or chart. Seems to me this would have a lot of potential in the area of home healthcare such as the remote monitoring report I wrote about a year ago. Even beyond that, medications could be administered on an automated basis in response to an incoming feed of data from the hospital laboratory which in turn is receiving that data from automated samples taken at bedside.

Earlier this week, I got some hands-on experience with another healthcare solution which points to the future. Intuitive Surgical demonstrated their da Vinci® Surgical System in the Danbury Hospital auditorium. The emerging field of robotic-assisted minimally invasive surgery has great potential to enable surgeons and hospitals to improve clinical outcomes and help patients return to active and productive lives more quickly after surgery. The da Vinci® robot has 10X 3-D vision and four mechanical arms. Those of us in attendance got to spend a few minutes at the console. It was quite an experience to operate the arms and pick up tiny pieces of rubber and move them around. Rather than traditional open surgery, the robot enables the surgeon to operate through four tiny incisions. It doesn't replace the surgeon -- it augments the surgeon's ability. There is more precision and more flexibility. For the patient there is less bleeding and faster recovery. The surgeon would normally be seated at the console "operating" by manipulating the robot's arms while looking through binocular-like lenses. Even the shaky hand of a coffee-drinking surgeon can be made steady as a rock. The surgeon could even collaborate with another surgeon who may be thousands of miles away!

Other patrickWeb healthcare related stories

Blogging, Healthcare October 27, 2005 04:23 PM

Sunday, October 23, 2005

BlogOn 2005

The Copacabana Hotel in Manhattan is said to be an excellent place to enjoy salsa. This week it was also a place to enjoy a discussion about the past, present, and future of blogging as more than three-hundred people gathered at BlogOn 2005.

One of the ways that you can tell if a new Internet technology is going to be successful is to look for skepticism. When people begin to say the hype exceeds the reality, it means we are on the way toward the reality exceeding the hype. I am not referring to new business models that are going to make water run uphill, but rather to fundamental technologies such as the Internet itself, the Web, Java, Linux, WiFi, and others. All of those were discounted in the early days. Blogging has now entered the phase where it is in the category of a fundamental technology -- one that is enormously profound and is altering how information is documented, distributed, syndicated, and archived.

As with all fundamental technologies, there are a lot of myths in the early stages -- like "The Internet is free" or "The web is for documents, not for applications". Add to the list that blogging is a vanity tool for people to write about themselves or their hobbies. Sure there are many personal blogs. Someone may write a blog that is only read by the blogger's mom. That's ok. A volunteer parent on a school trip may write a daily posting for the other parents to read. Pundits may write a "column" that is read by very large numbers of people. All of these take advantage of the "diary" aspect of blogging, but there is a lot more to blogging than people writing their personal accounts or views. (read more)

Blogging, Conferences October 23, 2005 03:23 PM

Tuesday, May 17, 2005

Irving's Blog

Basebal bat and baseball I first met Irving Wladawsky-Berger sometime in 1992. I was impressed with his keen interest in technology and the things I was working on. We have continued as friends and colleagues ever since. Irving has had a distinguished career at IBM including heading up the IT group in IBM Research, getting IBM into the supercomputer business, managing IBM's UNIX systems business, starting the Internet division, leading the charge with Linux, and now focusing on the new area of collaborative innovation. All of these important assignments have been intellectually challenging and not surprisingly, Irving has always been up to the challenge.

My first experience working with Irving was when he asked me some questions about the ThinkPad. No matter how technical an issue may have been, Irving got it instantly. In the early days many people had difficulty grasping the significance of the Web. Not Irving. With every new idea presented by anyone, Irving has always had an uncanny ability to see the implications even beyond the person with the idea. My ten years working with him were certainly the most rewarding of my 38 years at IBM. When I e-tired, Irving wrote a nice letter.

More recently, Irving has started up a new blog to focus on his interests in various aspects of information technology including the Internet, servers and supercomputing, standards and open source initiatives like Linux, the evolution to Web services, and content management. Irving has always been interested in public policy issues and I am sure he will be writing about key issues in health care and education, support for R&D, intellectual property, and other areas.

In addition to Irving's depth in business and science, he is also a delightful person to know. Born in Cuba, Irving has not only supported diversity efforts but has taken time personally to mentor numerous high potential people in the company. I also have no doubts that Irving's love of baseball will find a place in his blog. I for one look forward to reading his future postings. I have placed a link in my blogroll and also subscribed to his RSS feed in the new Opera 8 browser.

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Blogging, IBM, People May 17, 2005 10:55 AM

Sunday, March 27, 2005

Blogging Beginnings

Blogging at PC Someone asked me this week when I started blogging. The precursor to blogging for me started after a talk at Internet World in Washington, D.C. in December 1994. In my talk I shared a vision about the future of the Internet (which I have been talking about ever since). People would call my assistant at IBM and ask if we could mail them a copy of the "slides". It did not take too many of these requests before I got the idea to build a website and put a copy of my presentations there for anyone who wanted them. The website was ibm.com/patrick. Wish I could recall the date when it started. The ibm.com site went live on May 22, 1994. I think my homepage was about a year later. There were a number of people and technologies involved in the "/patrick" website and it's evolution, but that is a story for another day.

I have enjoyed writing for a long time and in 1996 I got the idea to write short stories, which I called "Reflections", and share them at /patrick. The Reflections were similar to blog postings in that they were a way to share thoughts with others -- there are roughly 50 of these stories here. The first story was written in January 1997 about a trip to Asia. What Reflections did not have was the consistent and structured context tags (date, title, author, category, and content) of a blog nor the syndication features of a blog that allows others to subscribe in various ways. I guess you could say I was a blogger in spirit but not in reality. I do plan to convert all the Reflections into blog postings.

In trying to piece the timeline together, I culled through my archives and so did my former colleagues Mary Keough and David Singer. As best we can determine, the first real blog on /patrick was born in June 2001 using software called Greymatter. It was not the easiest thing to use and I am grateful to Aniket Patel for his assistance in setting up the software back then. A year or so later I switched to Radio Userland software and then on March 1, 2003 I switched to Movable Type which I currently use and with which I am quite pleased. I write my stories using Macromedia Dreamweaver and then post the stories into the blog using Movable Type. There are now more than five-hundred stories posted.

In December 2002 I wrote a story about "The next big things" and said blogging was one of them. It made some people laugh. Blogging? You have to be kidding. I still think blogging is one of the next big things. We are at the very beginning. In David Strom's latest Web Informant, he writes about examples of new uses for blogging that go way beyond story writing. One that he cites is package tracking. Today we go to shipper websites and check the status on a shipment. With blogging, you could create your own subscription to the shipper's information. When your package moves from point A to point B, your "news" feed is updated. There are many things that might be in the category of "tracking" where blogging technology would be useful. Notification about a song, book, or wine which you are specifically interested in. Progress of a hurricane or news item. An upcoming doctor appointment or automotive checkup. Why not do all these things with email? For most of us, the email inbox is a jumbled array of all forms of communication. It is easy to miss something important because it is buried in the midst of a lot of things that are not important. There are tools to filter and organize mail but it takes a lot of time and thought. With blog feeds, you proactively subscribe to something you want to know. If you use Newsgator, your blog feeds are all nicely organized in folders -- like email except that everything in your blog folders is something you care about and you know exactly where it is. In a way you could say that it is self-organizing.

I see blogging as the tip of the iceberg -- the beginnings of the semantic web -- a web where all content has context and everything is related to everything else. Context is the subtle power of blogging. A number of us were talking about "tagging" at PC Forum last week. Tagging of music and pictures has accomplished more in the past year or so than AI (artificial intelligence) has in decades. There is a lot of focus on search (several new search companies at PC Forum) these days -- finding things you are looking for among the billions of web pages. Blogging comes at the problem from the bottom up. Content created with blogging has tags: date, title, author, category, body. The tags allow people to find things more easily. And of course we are not limited to those simple tags. How about part #, listing date, price, # of bedrooms, genre, etc. As sure as I can spell my name, I am certain that blogging remains as one of the next big things. We haven't seen anything yet.

Other patrickWeb stories about blogging

Blogging March 27, 2005 10:30 AM

Friday, March 11, 2005

Two New Books