Ficod 2011 pdf (with notes)

Some Context for Thinking About the Future of Media Tim O’Reilly O’Reilly Media Ficod 22 Noviembre, 2011Friday, November 25, 11

You may know me as a computer book publisherFriday, November 25, 11 I want to start out by giving you an idea of the kinds of things I do in my business. I publish technical books, both in print and online. We sell our books direct to consumer as well as through retailers, and we’ve built a production pipeline that lets us produce books in multiple formats. And in the context of all the current US hysteria about increasing copyright protection on the Internet, I want to note that our books are always DRM free, and we’ve had no problem building a huge and successful paid content business. We don’t need additional legal protection against piracy. Existing copyright protections are sufficient.

Friday, November 25, 11We also have an online ebook subscription service that services millions of readers, and contains more than 14,000 books andvideos from several dozen technical and business book publishers.

Friday, November 25, 11 I run technical and business conferences, like the Web 2.0 Summit and Web 2.0 Expo.

Friday, November 25, 11Like the open source convention.

Friday, November 25, 11Like our Tools of Change for Publishing Conference.

Friday, November 25, 11We have an online technical school.

Friday, November 25, 11We publish a print and online magazine for technology enthusiasts.

Friday, November 25, 11We also have an associated event that brought more than 100,000 people to San Mateo, CA last spring.

Friday, November 25, 11We even have an early stage venture capital ﬁrm.

A diversified media company that focuses on emerging technology communities and what we can do for themFriday, November 25, 11We don’t think of our business as being about books or magazines or conferences or videos or investments, but about a missionto serve communities of users. It’s essential to think this way, because in the end, nobody cares about the form of yourproducts. They care about the job that your products do for them. And the product needs to change as their needs change.

Steve Jobs on Design “In most people’s vocabularies, design means veneer. It’s interior decorating. It’s the fabric of the curtains and the sofa. But to me...design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service." http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/08/business/how-steve-jobs-infused-passion-into-a- commodity.html?hp=&pagewanted=allFriday, November 25, 11You have to think deeply about what job your product or service does for the user.

This was once a book!Friday, November 25, 11This is the Google driverless autonomous vehicle. It’s a really important piece of technology to think about for a number ofreasons, and we’re going to return to it later in this talk.

Friday, November 25, 11But what I want to start with is the idea that we used to think of a map as a piece of physical media. A set of maps might becollected into an Atlas.

Friday, November 25, 11The ﬁrst evolution of this into digital content turns the map into a database. It’s much more useful than the old print version.

Friday, November 25, 11In addition to maps, there are all kinds of new services that used to be books - travel sites replacing travel guides, restaurantapps replacing restaurant guides.

The continued evolution of digital content: increasingly richer, but also more context-aware. Content disappears into services. Customer is owned by platform players, not content providers.Friday, November 25, 11But once you go mobile, it’s even more transformative. Your phone is more context aware.But notice too how on mobile devices, the content is increasingly provided as a service by the platform provider.

The information vanishes into the device or serviceFriday, November 25, 11And by the time you get to the driverless car, the service is nearly invisible. You don’t look at the map any more. You just tellthe car where you want to go.

Friday, November 25, 11We see this with Apple’s Siri as well. Technology like this is increasingly going to disintermediate websites in the same way thatwebsites disintermediated brick and mortar and print media.

“The future is here. It’s just not evenly distributed yet.” - William GibsonFriday, November 25, 11These trends are already well advanced. You just have to look around you.

“The skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think.” -Edwin SchlossbergFriday, November 25, 11 But it’s a lot easier to notice those early signs of the unfolding future if you have a framework that makes sense of them.

Friday, November 25, 11For the past decade, I’ve been talking about the idea that we’re building an Internet Operating System.

The Internet as PlatformFriday, November 25, 11In 2004, we branded that idea as “Web 2.0” Now to be clear, that wasn’t a version number, but a statement about the webcoming back after the dot-com bust, that it wasn’t over, as many people thought. But it was also a series of assertions aboutwhat distinguished sites that survived the bust from those that didn’t - things like better use of user participation, what I called“collective intelligence”, and the use of the internet as a platform that developers could build on, rather than just a broadcastmedium.

How can you call it an operating system? • No kernel • No memory management • No processor Photo: Patrick Tufts http://www.flickr.com/photos/zippy/50537423/sizes/o/Friday, November 25, 11Bram Cohen of Bittorrent still thought that the idea that the net was an operating system was silly. At the ﬁrst Web 2.0conference in 2004, he gave a talk making fun of my idea.

The Internet Operating System Controls Access to Data An application that depends on cooperating cloud data services: - Location - Search - Speech recognition - Live Traffic - ImageryFriday, November 25, 11But it’s pretty clear today that the internet is indeed an operating system, one that provides data services to our mobile devices.

Friday, November 25, 11You can also see it in the data ecosystem growing up around the Facebook platform.

What’s Next?Friday, November 25, 11

3.0? The Semantic Web? The Sensor WebFriday, November 25, 11A lot of people keep trying to make a case for the Semantic web as “Web 3.0” but whenever people ask me what’s next, I’vealways said that it’s what happens when the collaborative applications of Web 2.0 are driven by sensors rather than by peopletyping on keyboards.

A device that augments our senses as well as our ability to retrieve information.Friday, November 25, 11You can see this with your mobile phone. It’s got all kind of senses in it that let it do its magic. A GPS sense, for example. Butit’s also got eyes and ears and a sense of motion.

A device that augments our senses as well as our ability to retrieve information. And a device that maps sensory data onto a machine learning database.Friday, November 25, 11You can see the kinds of new services that can be possible when you use the senses of the phone to retrieve information.Shazam can listen to a song and identify it. And of course Siri listens to your voice.

The spread of sensors • sensor platform slideFriday, November 25, 11And a whole host of applications use sensors to monitor your activity, and increasingly, your health. We’re going to see a lotmore of these. For example, Sanoﬁ-Aventis now offers a glucose meter that attaches to the iPhone.

Software Above The Level of A Single DeviceFriday, November 25, 11By the way, there’s an interesting design pattern here that Apple ﬁrst exploited with the iPod, in which the interface wasseparated across several devices - with the iPod interface becoming simpler because many of the functions were controlled fromiTunes. Dave Stutz of Microsoft referred to this pattern as “software above the level of a single device.”

Friday, November 25, 11You see this coming to fruition in a new class of wearable computing devices like the Jawbone UP, which has no interface at allon the device. You use your phone to access the information it uploads to the cloud.As digital media becomes embedded in services, you have to think about far more than just print, web, and mobile phone.

Getting Beyond Media and “Information Retrieval” Sensors + Algorithms = ServicesFriday, November 25, 11But the real thing to keep your eye on here is that sensors plus big data algorithms are leading us from the world where “contentis king” to one where content is simply one component of a service.

Friday, November 25, 11Returning to Siri, you can see it as part of this trend for information and media to disappear into services. When Siri was ﬁrstintroduced, its creators called it a “do engine.” that is, rather than retrieving a web page (media) that you consume to make adecision, it just does things for you. “Find me a restaurant near here.” “Make me a reservation.” Media will become part of adatabase back end rather than a media front end.

Artificial Intelligence “the science and engineering of making intelligent machines” -John McCarthy, 1956Friday, November 25, 11A lot of this magic comes from algorithms - what we used to call “artiﬁcial intelligence.” No one seems to think that themachines are actually intelligent, but they can certainly do a lot of things that used to be hard for computers.

The Google Autonomous VehicleFriday, November 25, 11In that regard, let’s return to the Google driverless car. It’s really important to understand just how the car works.

2005: Stanley Wins the DARPA Grand ChallengeFriday, November 25, 11You see, back in 2005, when a car named Stanley won the DARPA Grand Challenge, it went seven miles in seven hours.

The “intelligent” devices of the future are cloud-connected “We don’t have better algorithms. We just have more data.” - Peter Norvig, Chief Scientist, GoogleFriday, November 25, 11Yet here, only six years later, the Google autonomous vehicle has driven hundreds of thousands of miles in ordinary traffic.What’s different? Peter Norvig says that the AI isn’t any better. Google just has more data. What kind of data? It turns out thatGoogle had human drivers drive all those streets in cars that were taking pictures, and taking very precise measurements ofdistances to everything. The car is actually remembering the route that was driven by human drivers at some previous time.That “memory”, as recorded by the car’s electronic sensors, is stored in the cloud, and helps guide the car. As Peter pointed out,“picking a traffic light out of the ﬁeld of view of a video camera is a hard AI problem. Figuring out if it’s red or green when youalready know it’s there is trivial.”

Human-Computer Symbiosis “The hope is that, in not too many years, human brains and computing machines will be coupled together very tightly, and that the resulting partnership will think as no human brain has ever thought and process data in a way not approached by the information-handling machines we know today.” – Licklider, J.C.R., "Man-Computer Symbiosis", IRE Transactions on Human Factors in Electronics, vol. HFE-1, 4-11, Mar 1960. EprintFriday, November 25, 11All of this is an example of something that JCR Licklider called “Man-Computer Symbiosis” in a 1960 paper. By the way, Lickliderwas the DARPA program manager who originally funded all of the early work that led to the internet.

Towards a global brainFriday, November 25, 11All of this is part of a long term trend that is taking us towards what we could call a global brain.

Friday, November 25, 11Now, we all have images from popular culture of what a global brain might be - an inimical AI that is out to get us, as in theTerminator movie series.

A few key assertions • We are building a network-mediated global mind • It is not skynet • It is us, augmentedFriday, November 25, 11But instead, the global brain is a human-computer symbiosis. The google vehicle is only the latest of a long series ofdevelopments that show how we are augmenting ourselves and connecting ourselves into something bigger. This picture is arouting map of the internet. It’s striking how much it looks like a map of the synapses in a human brain. It’s nowhere near asdense yet, but the imagery alone is suggestive. But there’s a lot more here than just imagery.

Harnessing Collective Intelligence “global consciousness is that thing responsible for deciding that pots containing decaffeinated coffee should be orange” – Danny Hillis (via Jeff Bezos)Friday, November 25, 11It was our communications technology that shared knowledge of Sanka’s brand color, and turned it into a common image fordecaffeinated coffee. The ability of communications to share ideas from mind to mind is at the heart of all human culture.

Friday, November 25, 11But what’s different now is the way that electronic media speeds up that process. Using twitter, we can instantly learn abouttrending topics around the world, and share in the responses of others.

Friday, November 25, 11Even Google has become a real time source of news. And increasingly, as humans are augmented with cellphone cameras(electronic sensors again), the ability of events to become a shared experience is vastly increased.

“Would you be willing to cross the street with information that was five minutes old?” -Jeff JonasFriday, November 25, 11

“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I dont know which half.” - John Wanamaker (1838-1922)Friday, November 25, 11That leads me to the whole topic of feedback loops. It isn’t just that this information is going mind to mind. We are increasinglytaking this information and creating electronic feedback loops, which might include humans in different ways. Increasingly,technology is solving what we can call “the Wanamaker problem.”

Friday, November 25, 11the shift from pay per impression to pay per click advertising was a watershed moment in advertising. Again, it’s important tounderstand just how much this is man-machine symbiosis. Google’s Adwords were always more effective than competitorsbecause Google was better at learning from human input - instead of selling ads to the highest bidder as competitors such asYahoo did, they used machine learning algorithms to predict which ads were more likely to be clicked on. They might choose anadvertiser who only wanted to pay half as much if their ad was 3 times as likely to be clicked. Google was the ﬁrst to harnessthe collective intelligence of their users to improve ad results.

“Only 1% of healthcare spend now goes to diagnosis. We need to shift from the idea that you do diagnosis at the start, followed by treatment, to a cycle of diagnosis, treatment, diagnosis...as we explore what works.” -Pascale Witz, GE Medical DiagnosticsFriday, November 25, 11We’re now seeing this same idea spread to other areas of the economy. For example, in healthcare, personalized medicinerequires new kinds of diagnostic feedback loops.

Friday, November 25, 11In the city of San Francisco, you’re seeing something similar, where all the parking meters are equipped with sensors, andpricing varies by time of day, and ultimately by demand. I’m calling these systems of “algorithmic regulation” - they regulate inthe same way our body regulates itself, autonomically and unconsciously.

Friday, November 25, 11This shift requires new competencies of companies. The ﬁeld has increasingly come to be called “Data Science” - extractingmeaning and services from data - and as you can see, the set of skills that make up this job description are in high demandaccording to LinkedIn. They are literally going asymptotic.

• strataFriday, November 25, 11That by the way is the focus of our Strata conference, which focuses on cloud data and the skills required to make services thatwork this way.

“How can applications be better when they are social?” -Mark ZuckerbergFriday, November 25, 11OK. Moving on to another of the big trends in digital media - social media.

Friday, November 25, 11I’m a big user of social media. Google Plus is my preferred network for sharing extended content. It’s growing very fast, and thelevel of engagement is extraordinarily high. After only a couple of months, more than160,000 people have me in circles.

Friday, November 25, 11And of course, twitter is my network of choice for sharing links. I do, by the way, often link to my own Google plus posts, andthe two networks work well together.

retweetradarFriday, November 25, 11I want to talk brieﬂy about how to use social media. Someone did a word cloud once of my tweets, and you’ll see that far andaway the biggest Word is RT (retweet). That is, I’m always passing on other people’s content, not my own. This is, after all, asocial network.

nivi and the @timoreilly bumpFriday, November 25, 11You can only push so much through a single channel. How do you deal with this? You use YOUR channel to build others. I buildup the reputation and strength of those in my network by showing off SOME of their work; you go to the source for more. Thinkof my tweet stream as a sampler from an amazing community

This is important! • In social networks, you gain and bestow status through those you associate with • A key function of a publishing brand is the bestowal of status by what you pay attention to • If you only pay attention to yourself, you aren’t as valuable to your community – You don’t learn as much from your readers – You don’t bind them to you by amplifying their voiceFriday, November 25, 11

“People tell me: Its great you played such a big role in the Arab spring, but its also kind of scary because you enable all this sharing and collect information on people. But its hard to have one without the other. You cant isolate some things you like about the Internet, and control other things you dont.” -Mark Zuckerberg http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-20066789-93.htmlFriday, November 25, 11I want to talk a little bit about the idea of privacy, and how that is changing.

Friday, November 25, 11Let’s return to this idea of the global brain.

The Web Has an “Architecture of Participation” • Small, modular pieces • Joined by open communications protocols • An open, standard data format • Extensibility by designFriday, November 25, 11The global brain is enabled by some technologies more than others.

The Web Has an “Architecture of Participation” • Small, modular pieces • Joined by open communications protocols • An open, standard data format • Extensibility by design This is also true of open source software projects like Linux and Apache, and open content projects like Wikipedia This is what makes emergent behavior possible, with no prior agreement between the partiesFriday, November 25, 11The global brain is enabled by some technologies more than others.

Friday, November 25, 11When you think about social media, you don’t usually think about Wikipedia, but it’s important to look a little more deeply.Consider the Sendai earthquake in Japan earlier this year, which created such problems with Fukushima reactors. Here’s thewikipedia page as it ﬁrst appeared, a simple note that the earthquake had happened.

Friday, November 25, 11Let’s watch that in action.

wikipediaFriday, November 25, 11Through the efforts of about 1300 contributors making over 5000 edits, it quickly grew into a full featured and detailedencyclopedia article.

Friday, November 25, 11Every wikipedia entry has a talk page. Here’s a discussion of why they changed the page to be about the Tohoku earthquakerather than the Sendai earthquake. It turns out that’s how it’s referred to in Japan.

“Wikipedia is not an encyclopedia. It is a virtual city, a city whose main export to the world is its encyclopedia articles, but with an internal life of its own.”Friday, November 25, 11Michael Nielsen

“The architecture of attention”Friday, November 25, 11

Kasparov vs. The World (1999) “The greatest game in the history of chess.” -Gary Kasparov “Although Krush was inferior to Kasparov in nearly all areas of chess, in this particular area of microexpertise, she surpassed even him”Friday, November 25, 11It’s about harnessing micro-expertise. There was an earlier game, Karpov vs the World, in which Anatoly Karpov handilydefeated “the crowd.” But that was a speed game where there was no time to organize the community. In Kasparov versus theworld, the game took over four months. There was a group of moderators who managed the community - much like Wikipedia -even though anyone could suggest a move, and the moderators argued for them, it was the popular vote that decided eachmove. It was thus an exercise in persuasion. A key point in the game occurred on the tenth move. One of the moderators, IrinaKrush, an American champion, had studied a particular possibility and had even written a paper about it. So on that one move,she had more expertise than even Kasparov.

Friday, November 25, 11This idea of harnessing distributed micro-expertise is also what’s behind corporate social networking sites like Yammer and thevarious sites used to do brainstorming or petitions. I think the We the People site introduced by the White House is a goodexample.

Friday, November 25, 11They’ve built some great social dynamics into the site. Anyone can author a petition. But you have to get at least 500 signatureson your own before it becomes publicly visible. Then anyone can vote on it. If enough people vote it up, the White Houseresponds - it doesn’t mean that they take action, but they do have to take a public stand in response.

Friday, November 25, 11Here are some of the trending petitions on the site right now.

Friday, November 25, 11Here are some statistics after only a few weeks of operation.

Friday, November 25, 11As an example of harnessing micro-expertise, we develop a number of our books collaboratively online.

Friday, November 25, 11Here you can see the web version of the book

Friday, November 25, 11But it’s also connected into Github, just like a software project, and readers can ﬁle bug reports, suggestions for improvement,and corrections.

Friday, November 25, 11They can even pull down their own copy of the source ﬁles and make changes. You can see that someone has begun to do aspanish translation.

Don’t forget about the community that creates your contentFriday, November 25, 11It isn’t just about how many people you get to follow you - it’s how you engage them, and who you engage

The power of platforms: Create value for othersFriday, November 25, 11This whole idea of building community leads me also to the idea of platforms, which create value for a whole ecosystem. SteveJobs talked about the value created for iPhone and iPad developers. The App Store itself was the killer app for the iPhone, thething that has made the phone a worthy rival to the web as the platform, and made paid content cool again.

The power of platforms: Create value for others 4Friday, November 25, 11This whole idea of building community leads me also to the idea of platforms, which create value for a whole ecosystem. SteveJobs talked about the value created for iPhone and iPad developers. The App Store itself was the killer app for the iPhone, thething that has made the phone a worthy rival to the web as the platform, and made paid content cool again.

Friday, November 25, 11Google also thinks hard about their economic impact. Their key business model depends on the success of others - drivingtraffic to their sites, and producing ad results. Google only does well if their partners do well. Of course, there are signs thatthey are forgetting this point, as they substitute their own services for those of other companies, and directing traffic tothemselves.

Friday, November 25, 11Contrast this with how ﬁnancial ﬁrms, who once positioned themselves as the enabler of the economy, creating liquidity andtrading on behalf of clients, began to trade against them, and increasingly created products - from the mortgage backed loansthat brought down the global economy to even more reprehensible trading practices that drive up the cost of food for starvingmillions. This is capitalism gone wrong.

Friday, November 25, 11I want to return in that context to our Safari books online service. We started it in 2000 as a joint venture with our biggestcompetitor, and now offer books from everyone in our ﬁeld. We knew that for publishers to survive, we had to create paidcontent business models, and not just rely on the idea that “free” was our destiny. Safari is now one of our largest channels. Butmore than that, it is creating value for everyone in our segment, not just for us. For authors, for readers, and for otherpublishers.

Friday, November 25, 11Henry Ford is a great example. It’s easy to forget that in addition to being the Steve Jobs of the automobile era, he understoodthat an economy is an ecosystem. He didn’t just invent the assembly line, he invented the 40 hour week and the weekend, andhe paid his workers above prevailing wages, because he realized that he needed to create a class of people who could afford hisproducts. That’s system thinking - so far ahead of the financial firms that are today turning our economy into a wasteland byextracting profits without concern for the consequences.

Create More Value Than You CaptureFriday, November 25, 11In the end, a company is most successful when it makes all of its stakeholders successful, not just its shareholders.

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Ficod 2011 pdf (with notes)

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