Grid Thinking

I watched the TechCrunch Roundtable session last friday about "Whose Cloud Is It Anyway?". The session addressed some interesting questions and was focusing on the issue “Is the cloud really different from the way we work now” and if it’s different, what are the benefits..

One conclusion was: Cloud computing will really change our world (it’s a paradigm shift (the biggest in 20 years) and it’s the next big evolution of the web and the way we use IT as businesses and consumers.  The way TechCrunch bring this news: “The Cloud Is The New Dotcom”

One of the topics I liked most where the Background stories from Werner Vogels (Amazon CTO) and  Amitabh Srivastava (Corporate VP, Windows Azure). They both told a short story about how their companies started with the Ideas for their ‘Platform as a Service’ products (EC2 and AZURE) and what their primary goals are. Check the second clip to see Werner's answer. And Microsoft Vision we know from Ray Ozzie's PDC 2008 keynote.

In my opinion:
Amazon and Microsoft have the best position for becoming the biggest ”Platform as a Service” companies.  SaaS is important too, but the platforms will bring the real innovations. 
 
Our current IT and Web platforms are like DOS (poor interfacing and expensive to deploy) and these ‘Platforms as a Service’ (PaaS) providers will bring us the next Operating Systems. A (Web) OS that works on-demand, has pay-per-use and has extremely scalable computing resources without the need for (internal) IT. 

I can’t what to bring the first “Cloud OS” based applications in production...

Wow, I tried to restart this blog a year and twenty days ago, but it didn't took off. Let’s see how I will do this time.

Much is changed since i started this blog more that 4 years ago. It's great to see that after 5 years of dreaming about it, Cloud and Grid Computing really are getting mature. Application Server Providers are growing into "Software as a Service" Factories and Cloud Computing Platforms like Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Microsoft’s Web Operating System (AZURE)  are flexible, feature rich and extremely scalable.

What good things can be done with this easy Connectable and Extreme Virtualized Computer Grids?

I have some ideas how to use Cloud Computing the way the world could need it. I mentioned some ideas earlier on this blog and I have created a bunch of new ideas in the past few years.…

We are moving towards 2010 and a new totally new decennium is almost starting. Since the “economic storm” started in 2008 company and country budgets are changing rapidly. And for the last decades  innovation skyrocketed like never before. The 2010’s will bring a lot of Paradigm Shifts due to the combination of Social and Economic disruptions and the new possibilities of cloud computing , bioscience and nanotechnology.

Let’s try do find positive good purposes for this power.!

Yes, you are seeing this right.
A blog post after almost 2 years of silence..
Things have changed, technology has reached antother level. It's time to pick up this trail.


For some reason 1-2-2008 is an interesting date.

TODAY:
Google launched the “Social Graph API' and Microsoft Proposes Acquisition of Yahoo! for $31 per Share
Both news items could have a big impact on the internet in 2008.


Because I'm changing my personal strategy at the moment, I feel this could have impact on my choices (I will write about this later).
The new Internet ripple that has formed in the last couple of months could be a full new wave of (semantic web) innovations.

I wanne be part of it when the Semantic web (for the version freaks: WEB 3.0) really starts rolling... 

Because I'm changing to another Internet Provider my blog and RSS URL will change.

If you have subscribed to : http://feeds.feedburner.com/GridThinking You don't have to change a thing.

But if you are subscribed to: http://blogger.xs4all.nl/mvisser0/Rss.aspx, you will have to change the feed to the above feedburner adress (this one)
(The site will stay available at: www.GridThinking.org)

Expect new postings soon...
Some things have happend that got me thinking about a new way to restart this project...

Let me start the new year with a promise to myself.

I will stop using the term ‘web2.0’. For the last weeks I saw this term wrongly used most of the time. There are a lot of bloggers and journalists who just don’t have any idea where there writing about…  Most of the time, you can’t blame them.

The future of the internet can’t be tagged by one word and a version number (read my last post why).

In my opinion only experienced developers have the knowledge and the ‘frame of reference’ to imagine the possibilities of the latest internet developments. This isn’t something that can easily be understood (or described). You need a deep understanding of the technology behind the internet, you need understanding of the new web standards and you got to have the creativity to imagine the near future possibilities..

I have spoken with a lot of people about new concepts for using the internet, and I noticed that even people with a IT background or people with a high IQ (but without IT knowledge) have problems with understanding these concepts…

When I think of the potential of the new web standards,  I get a very powerful and energetic feeling in my stomach.  When I start imagining the possibilities, I always get exited because of the unlimited ways in how to use this technologies.

And I know one thing… 2006 will be a great year for the internet! 

WK
Large-scale collaboration is one of the most interesting emerging kinds of technologies. Broadcast messaging, the ability to reach out across your enterprise and ask questions or interrupt people, is probably just the tip of the iceberg here. I’m reading The Wisdom of Crowds (Doubleday, 2004) by James Surowiecki, who talks about the long-recognized phenomenon that if you ask a lot of people a question where there’s a lot of uncertainty and then look at the mean tendency of the answer, it tends to be correct.

It’s like the audience lifeline in “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” Ask a question of the audience and let them vote on the answer. So the question here is, can technology help a large collective of people cooperate with each other, maybe pool their abilities and knowledge, to make more intelligent decisions? And, really, would we want it to if it could?

RO
It’s an intriguing question. What we already know is that MSN Search and Google and others like that have proven that the long tail of the Internet has answers to many questions. Many of us pose questions in the form of queries to these engines and we get back answers that you would never expect given the size of the corpus out there.

There have been several attempts to build systems where you pay people to answer interesting questions. I don’t think that they have done what you’re suggesting in terms of collecting the answer from a number of people and taking the mean. I haven’t seen that kind of thing, at least on the public Internet, succeed anywhere near the degree of the pure information-based one.

WK
The data-mining approach?

RO
Yes. I’m still more focused on the data-mining approach, particularly within enterprises, because I think one of the big promises of all of this technology is to make it easy for people to leave trails of artifacts that can be used later when you don’t really expect it. Groove Networks did quite a bit of work with the government, particularly in the realm of post-9/11 information-sharing across agencies. Again, the problem is that people hold information close to the vest. The promise is that we can develop systems where people create artifacts and query engines that can get relevant answers to questions at a time disconnected from when the information was produced. I think there’s a lot of promise in this area. I just don’t know what form it’s going to take.

Ray Ozzie is a great IT pioneer and visionary.

I have never been a real fan of Lotus Notes, but 'his' Groove software is really good and I love SSE!

During the last three months there was a lot of writing on the net related to the ‘web 2.0’. Reading all this enthusiastic ideas and blogposts gave me a great feeling. And I love trying new internet services, so It has been a great time for me. Some ideas and services where great, others just another mashup of two existing services.

But.. 

My personal interest was not so much about the web 2.0 (this is a logical next step), but more about the semantic web 0.2 ;). 
I have been reading a lot about the developments related to the Semantic web and the standards that are in development now (w3c).

I am convinced that the only way to create a good and lasting platform for future web communities, we need the Web 2.0 standards (RSS, AJAX, Webservices) AND we need Semantic web standards (like RDF, RDFS, OWL, SPARQ). After realizing this, I took some steps backwards and started thinking about the basics needed to build the first prototypes.

I will post more on this topic soon..

It's been two months since my last post on this blog. The publications stopped, but I gathered a lot of new insights.

When I started my research on my Gridthinking vision, I was focussing on technologies like RSS and Webservices.
For the last months I did a lot of reading and thinking. This resulted in a better view on the way i see our connected future.

I will try to share all my new ideas before the end of the year..

The people behind the 'Programmableweb' made a great lists on Web 2.0 API's and sites that combine (Mashup) Web 2.0 Api's! Check it out:

http://www.programmableweb.com/mashups (in a alphabetical list)
http://www.programmableweb.com/matrix (in a great 'matrix' view)


When all these services will get together, things are beginning to look really interesting..

I would also like to link to this post where you can find a good collection of links related to the Semantic Web (and RDF). 

Do you know the feeling when you are experiencing a 'brain wave' and lots of ideas are just keep up popping up in your head? This can happen after a hour of concentrated working or just happen when you are driving your car…

Well.. I like to distinct 3 ranges of brainwaves.

Event 1: On your own
You can experience a brain wave on your own. If you have a flow of ideas then in most occasions you haven’t got enough time and possibility to write everything down. Because of this you never use the full potential of your creativity.

Event 2: In a (small) group

You can experience this with a group on a specific geographic location. A lot of people cal this Collective Iintelligence. If your lucky multiple people are taking notes or someone is recording the event. It only takes place occasionally that a group of people are experiencing together a ‘common brain wave’ and that results are recorded efficiently.

Event 3: In a large group

You could have a experience where maybe thousands of people share and experience the same brainwave at the same time all at differtent places. This event could maybe never have happened before…

Gridthinking is about finding the technology to realize category 3 events and use this collective creativity to solve the difficult problems on our planet.

If we want to realize this we need a tool that helps us get control on all available streams of information and filter these streams for keywords and concepts that are the most close to our life, work, hobbies and other interest.

All information that's recorded in the world should be automatically gathered and ordered, so that you get control over the information you need to live and on a daily basis. This way you will never have to search for answers anymore. They will be automatically presented based on what you do at the moment or in the phase of your life.

Next to having al the necessary information in your face, you can also publish feedback back into these steams of information. This drops of feedback can grow into ripples and by floating true the ‘world wide information streams’ these ripples will soon be visible again in your ‘real-time filtered information stream’, so that you get answers and results from unlimited angles and sources. 

I have been thinking about the next steps for this project and I have also tried to write them down in a ‘short and clear’ text... 

THE  GOAL

The current primary goal for this project is to build the first small parts that can realize our new Connected Future. In this Connected Future we will need a platform to share ideas, work together on common goals and make local, country or world wide (democratic) decisions in groups.

The short term goals for this project will be to create a couple of simple and open (web)applications. These applications could be seen as experiments, and can be used to learn about these new concepts. I am aware of the fact that I could never do this project on my own and that the project will need many insight from different people to become a success.

That’s why I invite everybody who would like to share any input to join a Yahoo group that I have started today. Using this tool we can setup the first direct communication channel between everybody who’s interested in this project and the related subjects.

You can go here to join the group

In the next month I would be great to try to visualize and build the first concepts on how to:

•  ‘sync brainwaves and the chain of thoughts from people that share common goals or interests’, and
•  ‘build democratic and creative idea gardens to collectively shape our future’.

I can't wait to hear about your ideas on these concepts!

All project goals can be found in the Lists Feed/Project Lists category.

It has been six weeks since I last posted here…

But this doesn’t mean this the project stood still …..

I’ve had some weeks of vacation and I also spend less time online. This gave me the possibility to clear my head and do some defragmentation, or in human language, I sorted things out.  One of the things that I sorted out, is this project.  Two months ago I started writing about this concept that I have, which I named GridThinking. This ‘vision of the near future’ that I have, needs to be sliced and served in ‘eatable’ (chunk) sizes. This is what I will try to do from today.. 

In the next weeks I will free  time and I will start building some real working concepts. I will get myself some extra time by taking the train to work in stead of my car. The train takes round 70 minutes to get there, and I can spend them writing and posting on the internet by using my UMTS/GPRS /WLAN card and my laptop.

I'm looking forward to it...

I want to point you to this article on Wired, called 'We are the web'
In this article the author (Kevin Kelly) writes about a meeting he had with Ted Nelson.
This guy already tried to build the first 'hyperlinked pages' based on his own envisioned scheme in 1965!

This is what Kevin writes about this meeting with Ted Nelson in a dark pub in 1984:

Although Nelson was polite, charming, and smooth, I was too slow for his fast talk. But I got an aha! from his marvelous notion of hypertext. He was certain that every document in the world should be a footnote to some other document, and computers could make the links between them visible and permanent. But that was just the beginning! Scribbling on index cards, he sketched out complicated notions of transferring authorship back to creators and tracking payments as readers hopped along networks of documents, what he called the docuverse. He spoke of "transclusion" and "intertwingularity" as he described the grand utopian benefits of his embedded structure. It was going to save the world from stupidity.

I believed him. Despite his quirks, it was clear to me that a hyperlinked world was inevitable - someday. But looking back now, after 10 years of living online, what surprises me about the genesis of the Web is how much was missing from Vannevar Bush's vision, Nelson's docuverse, and my own expectations. We all missed the big story. The revolution launched by Netscape's IPO was only marginally about hypertext and human knowledge. At its heart was a new kind of participation that has since developed into an emerging culture based on sharing. And the ways of participating unleashed by hyperlinks are creating a new type of thinking - part human and part machine - found nowhere else on the planet or in history.

Not only did we fail to imagine what the Web would become, we still don't see it today! We are blind to the miracle it has blossomed into. And as a result of ignoring what the Web really is, we are likely to miss what it will grow into over the next 10 years. Any hope of discerning the state of the Web in 2015 requires that we own up to how wrong we were 10 years ago.

This guy was way ahead of his time!  The docuverse.. hmmm. Bad name, but such great ideas, more that 20 years ago…  Il love the rest of the article to. Worth reading if your interested in the history and the future of the internet..

I have realised that a big part of my ideas around the concept of GridThinking are about using the Semantic web to realizing Collective Intelligence.

This can be done by the first building blocks of the web 2.0. To name some:  RSS, OPML, REST and/or WS-* (webservices).

We got to the point that we can start building this concept,  based on standard that will probably last a while…
If you want to read more views and ideas on the Web 2.0, check the TalkDigger for some interesing Links (like the web20 tags on IceRocket, Del.isio.us , Feedster, Technorati.....) While getting information based on the  'web20' Tags.
Google also does a nice job! This by displaying some intersting links of diffrent ' TAG collectors'. Even one that i didn't know of yet...

An OPML file is a XML based file that holds a collection of RSS Feeds.
OPML files can be created and managed by individuals, organisations or software to collect all RSS feeds about a specific topic or common goal. 

It would be nice when a user could add a OPML file to the desktop and use custom or predefined filters based on parameters like your background, news interests, work, projects and hobbies. New items based on your filters will result in a (popup) notification as soon as they are published. A popup in a specific filter will only be shown when the status on your desktop is set to a particular mode. For example, when you build a filter with the category ‘WORK – Research”, new items will only be show when your desktop is in the ‘Work-Reseach Status’. This mode can be set in the same way this is done with Instant Messaging (IM) clients.

This software will automatically filter out all interesting RSS items you would like to know about and will present this at the moment you are working on this specific subject.

Here are some images on this idea:
OPML-FilteringNotification
Filtering2
OPML-StatusFiltering

With GridComputing computers share resources, CERN's definition: The Grid: "a service for sharing computer power and data storage capacity over the Internet".

A part of  'GridThinking' could be in the same direction:  GridThinking is: "a service for sharing brain power (input and feedback) and memories over the Internet”.

When I was thinking about names for describing this technology I write about, I thought about a 'Collective Interaction Network'.
So like always, I tried it on the search engines.. And then i found something really interesting ....

I found a site about a 'Collective Intelligence Network project, called RU3. This project has some really cool content! 

As with most ideas, for some reason multiple people think about the same (direction of) ideas!

This is just where this whole concept came from in the first place! There always multiple people working on the same kind of ideas, without knowing it.

Ideas and projects are shared using channels which have a very limited reach.  
Finding a solution for a complex problem on the internet is very hard, when you don't know how to describe your problem. In every language or culture you could describe and spell out the same idea or problem in at least 10 different ways. This is why we need a system that really connects our ideas, and realize automated naming (based on your own concepts). Another good thing could be the ability to format, sort (slice and dice) or group (data mining) all available publications (like ideas), information and media in a way that it will fit you personal knowledge and experience (frame of reference). Yeah. That would be great!  he Web 2.0 will start making this difference...  The personal and 2 way internet experiance.

Today I found more great information here. It’s about using Wikipedia’s as a Collaboration and Brainstorming tool..

I found this at the OpenBC Social Capital & Collective Intelligence Forum. A place where only 59 people can currently access the content. This content should be open to everybody. This forum holds very interesting stuff! 

I hope that (in the near future), when you think of something, you would be able to find EVERYTHING that is ever written on that subject. This then should be ordered in a way, where the most important publications (for you) are on top and you will have differtent approaches to easaly resort all information...
Can't wait for that to happen...

Concepts
Symantic web / web 2.0

Collective Intelligence

Interesting Standards that play a role in this wave

XML (DTD an'd XML Schema)
RSS 

OPML

AJAX ?
REST / WS-*  (Webservices)

Service Oriented Architectures (SOA)

Feed Search / TAG Brokers

IceRocket

Feedster

Technorati
Del.licio.us
43Things.com

Facts archives

Wikipedia

Encarta

MSN Virtual Earth

Google Earth

Google Maps

Tags at the Desktop
Grease monkey and Technoproxy

Algorythms

Fuzzy interfaces? http://ru3.org/ru3/project/concept/interface.htm

THis is just the v0.1 version of this list...
THere's lot more to come...

Video's (MS Research)
 

1. Backchannels: Power and the Active Audience by Liz Lawley and Richard Hodkinson

2. Visualizing Social Interactions and Collaboration History  by Fernanda Viegas

3. From Trees to Tags by David Weinberger.

4. Tesla, Tagging for the DeskTop by Matt McLaurin of Microsoft Research

5. Exploring the Social Institutional Dimensions of MoSoSo Design: Are Smart Mobs Institutions for Collective Action? by Howard Rheingold

For the past year i'm loaded with thoughts due to what’s happening with internet standards and innovations. It seems that the most important standards are in place. We got webservices, RSS and applications that can publish and subscribe to RSS Feeds like blogging tools and podcasting studio's to publish feeds with content and RSS Aggregators and podcasting clients to subscripe to content.

Two big parts

• The first part is creating new methods to realize efficient ways to share ideas and have realtime brainstorming sessions with large amounts of people.
  A part of this could focus on new and better (structured) methods to connect publications and comments. This could be done by using tags and topics, but also based on a ‘Mindmaps way’ of connecting publications (text, audio/video). 

• This second part of the idea basically comes down to realizing new ways for connecting and sorting publications, but now based on a combination of 'social tagging and rating' and using algorithms in software (business intelligence) to do the tagging and rating. This system could also be used form monitoring the topics and trends in a (corporate) blogosphere.

I seems like a good idea to find new ways for adding posts and comments on blogs as 'branches of a mindmap'. This way conversations, discussions and related items can get connected based on the contents. Like this you will have structured commenting and you would be able to navigate trought comments on a post, based on your deeper interest and directions you take within the branches (in the comments or added facts).

If you want to add comments or participate in a discussion, it would be very easy to directly publish your input (like text, media or other files) and also connect to multiple existing 'information branches' in other mindmap structured discussions. When all of this would be done wih the same standards, you will get a very interesting three dimensional connected representation of topics and comments.

Yes, in a big way this is already happing in the form of blogging, comments, permalinks, tagging, folksonomy, social networks and services like Technorati, Bloglines, Newsgator, Del.isio.us and more.

The technology that these services are based on are extremely interesting, because they ad the 'community aspects' we know in 'real life socializing' like direct suggestions, shared interests and opinion leaders.  The aspect of 'mass communication' add the 'human factor' to clustered publications. And things will really become interesting when information will automatically be sorted and formatted in a way that it best fits you information need.

We need to think of more effective ways of structuring and consuming information.

Gridthinking  is about the key technology behind the first version of a Computer Network that realizes Collective Thinking between the community of internet connected people who wish to share information and thoughts on all kind of subjects and interests. (related blogs)
 
Gridthinking could be about the Google Grid. But is more that this alone.  Yes it's about recorded media (EPIC?), but it's also about people and the possibility to real-time share thoughts with the rest of the world no matter where you are. And GridThinking is connecting al related thoughts and finding the right thoughts, ideas and facts just at the moment you need them (or even didn’t know you needed them).
GridThinking is about a new evolution in collaboration and communication and large parts of it can be build with technology that's available today (the web 2.0)....
 

By connecting data based on tags, topics, auto search and (datamining) clusters you get a layer of data concerning the same type of information. To sort this flat data layer, we will need and extra system to rate the quality for this data, this realizes the Fourth dimension in the grid.

The value of the data in a data layer can be rated based on the background of the person or organisation who published it. This means that the fourth dimension consist of a system where data like the age of the person who published it, the work experience of a person on particular subject or the credibility of a media company must be stored together with a unique profile of every person, organisation or webservice on the internet. With virtually unlimited parameters, and enough people working on it (like Wikipedia), you could build really objective ratings…

So we have to design tags for publishing entities, to rate them on knowledge on a specific subject. We need this to rate a post from a 60 year old math professor above that of a first year math student. So that if a maths professor post a item on the web about  math, this item could get a 8 out of 10 (weighing) for 'quality of data', this could be based on: the rating on the university he works for , a rating given by all his former students, rating based on the performance of students concerning maths after they left the school, rating of colleges, friends, etc.

You want a thought question?  We need a central system and organisation who checks the integrity of the data profiles of publishing entities…  But which organisation do we trust with this hard to stay 100% objected and limited affected by commerce?
Could we build a system for this?  Just a combination of algorithms, tags and

Webspiders (searchbots). Or should it be a collective system, where the profiles and published items are checked by all the people using the system, like an advanced e-bay or the Internet Movie database system?

That thing are changing can be noticed, in the form of new groundbreaking software design standards like XML, webservices and SOA architectures. But also the development suites supporting webservices and SOA architectures. The news in June 2005 about the deep adoption of RSS in Operating systems of Microsoft and Apple will probably are going to play a huge roll in this all….

The at the moment, important new use of standards are formed on the area of:

RSS, (audio/video) Blog , tags, Folksonomy,  social networking,  Semantic Web,  WS-AllYouCanThinkOff.

SHARE unlimited files and ideas on a way that almost everybody know how to use it. Add a publication model, based on a model where people who delved parts for a idea, product or media file get automatically paid based on the importance of there role in the end result. This could be done in simple XML formatted contracts where global percentages can be set on how thing ar diveded.