Sowing Light

For the next 10 days or so, the second round of voting is happening at change.org. 90 issues passed the first round, and the top ten vote getters will be presented to the Obama administration on January 16th.

One that gets my attention, but hasn’t yet worked it’s way to the top ten, is Lawrence Lessig’s proposal for publicly funded elections. See his presentation and vote here. It may well be the best idea I’ve ever seen in American politics. Moreso, without this or a similar measure, it’s easy to see America suffering greatly as corruption eats away at the heart of its political system.

The 7 minute presentation is well worth watching, and is, I believe, a cause for hope.

Poltics Unusual, The Developing Future

There’s been a firestorm of late about the amount of repetitive stories on RSS, particularly in the technical blogs. Michael Arrington declared open war on embargoes, which touched off an insightful article from Louis Gray. (Thanks to this article from Smoothspan for sending me over.)

Louis writes:

While I look forward to banging through my Google Reader feeds every day, I can pretty much bank on seeing the same story, spun a different way, a good dozen or two dozen times by every single tech blog - even if it’s clear that they are just reporting that someone else reported the news. If you see a story has been covered already and you have nothing to add - leave it alone.

What is most interesting to me here is the personal and societal. We’re the guinea pigs in a new media reality. I would really love to hear a voice as incisive as Marshall McLuhan’s to help me understand what that is doing to my brain. We have here a media that can be treated either as hot or as cold. It is neither entirely overwhelming or intensively participatory. Neither is is somewhere in between - it’s something other than the media we’ve seen up until now. Its character is entirely dependent on the reader.

This media calls to the forefront each person’s ability to choose, and it’s likely for this reason that it’s becoming the arena for a brilliant hashing out of interpersonal ethics - When do I speak and when am I silent? What obligations do I have to the people who listen to me? What obligations do I have to myself when I participate in this? How much responsibility do I bear for the overall state of the media?

Still cooking these ideas…any insight welcome.

Social Media, The Developing Future McLuhan, RSS

Lawrence Lessig just won me as a new fan. I feel like I can breath better after listening to this interview (below).
(For those of you reading via syndication, click through to the original post to see the video.)

Topics include Professor Lessig’s relationship with Obama, national emergencies, transitional government, trust, the virtues of amateur creativity, hybrid economies, copyright (the entrenched policy, the dangerous reaction, and a more reasonable reform), remix as fair use, Creative Commons, his shift into focusing on corruption as the core underlying problem, the influence of money on politics, how to break the political dependency on money, and getting congress to put their reform chips on the table.

Favorite Quote:
“These are not the hard things that congress are getting wrong; these are the easy things that congress is getting wrong.”

Update: Here’s the powerful presentation on changing congress that he refers to in the video.

Poltics Unusual, Smart Folks, The Developing Future

First Israel, then Denmark, some cities in Australia, and now the Bay Area.  Full details aren’t out yet, but this has to be the highest profile coup of Better Place.  More power to ‘em.

http://venturebeat.com/2008/11/20/california-to-set-up-a-1b-electric-car-network/

The Developing Future Better Place, Energy

Amazon has announced it’s next software-as-a-service play - SimpleDB - and the technical world is all a-flutter. You can see the breathless reporting all over the net. Is this the beautiful panacea of unleashed database power it’s being reported as?

A few months back, I examined S3 and EC2 (two of Amazon’s earlier web service offerings) and came away with the sense that Amazon is changing the rules of the game in a big way, but that there is still no good way to implement an online scalable database with these services. (I know that there are attempts to put a relational database on EC2, but they seem to be quite painful.)

In short, S3 is a great scalable online file system, and EC2 is a great scalable processor. Neither one of them allows us the sort of slicing, dicing, remixing, and re-serving of data that the world has come to expect from a database.

So when the news of SimpleDB hit the wires, I figured that Amazon was stepping up to answer my cry and providing an online scalable database. Well, they are, and they aren’t.

They are providing a way to store structured information online, but it’s hard to call it a database. In fact, it’s a bit disingenuous of them to do so.

Those who are concerned about the details can quickly find out for themselves that SimpleDB has nothing to do with the Relational Model that has been the basis for databases for the past 40 years. To call something that doesn’t even smell like the relational model a database is pure marketing.

But let’s leave the marketing aside - the service is in the field, it’s a totally new beast, and it’s called what it’s called. What does it look like? It looks like a place to store object instances. No classes, no schema, they-are-just-what-they-look-like, object instance. Besides coming with a whole new metamodel, it comes without a lot of the sugar that mature database systems have led us to expect. There’s no fulltext search, queries are lexicographic (so they don’t deal well with numbers or dates), the set of operators on a query is more limited than we’re used to, there’s no verification of the data, no triggers, etc.

All this is fun, but the real kicker is this - reading data from SimpleDB immediately after a write may not reflect the latest updates. This is called eventual consistency. That’s what you tell your customers - it’ll get there eventually.

What happens now? What happens now is that the developers start to relearn the way they handle data. No existing database applications - back-end, front-end, or middleware - can be easily ported to run on top of this new beast. You can’t tell your customers that the data will get there eventually, so you tell your developers to cover the gap. This service might save you a database administrator, but in the near term, you’ll need another developer to take his place.

In the long term, we’ll start seeing SimpleDB, S3, and EC2 aggregated under another layer - one that presents the tried and true relational model. SimpleDB will handle the tuples, S3 will handle the BLOBS, EC2 will grind the queries, and the application developer won’t have to worry about it. Whether Amazon delivers it or someone else does, it’s coming - the reliable online scalable database.

(Some of the sharper analyses: O’reilly compares pricing of SimpleDB to S3, Marcelo smells a familiar data model, Inside Looking Out lays out some of the technical hurdles, rc3 wonders how to tune it, and the comment from daveadams sings a love song to the relational model)

The Developing Future AWS, Databases, EC2, S3, SimpleDB

Nicholas Carr argues that a key factor in Kindle’s downfall is the lack of an already living and healthy market for free reading material. I share his misgivings about the Kindle, but I don’t agree with his reasoning. Although new books are generally locked up in copyright, there’s no lack of free reading material. That’s what we (as humans) have been busy developing for the past 15 years or so. It’s called the Internet.

And that’s really where Amazon is missing the ball. By locking down their device to access a tiny percentage of the potential content, and making it difficult to get the free content on and off, they’ve painted themselves into a proprietary corner. What they could have done was put a lightweight web browser into our hands - now that would have been fun.

The Developing Future browser, kindle, mobile