On June 9th, the Federal Communications Commission issued  an interesting document, “The Information Needs of Communities – The Changing Media Landscape In A Broadband Age,” authored by Steven Waldman and The Working Group On Information Needs Of Communities.  (A two-page summary of the document is available here.)

The document introduction states:

In culmination of its work over the last year, the FCC Working Group on the Information Needs of Communities delivered a report on June 9, 2011 addressing the rapidly changing media landscape in a broadband age. In 2009, a bipartisan Knight Commission found that while the broadband age is enabling an information and communications renaissance, local communities in particular are being unevenly served with critical information about local issues.

Soon after the Knight Commission delivered its findings, the FCC initiated a staff-level working group to identify crosscurrent and trend, and make recommendations on how the information needs of communities can be met in a broadband world.

I enjoyed reading the statement by FCC Commissioner Michael J. Copps that accompanied the document’s release; here are a few excerpts:

Let’s begin with a basic truth: the future of our country’s media is an issue that goes to the heart of our democracy. A well-informed electorate is the premise and prerequisite of functioning self-government. To make this compact work, it is imperative that the FCC play a vital role in helping to ensure that all Americans have access to diverse and competing news and information that provide the grist for democracy’s churning mill.

…

The Digital Age holds amazing promise for expanding the scope of our democratic discourse. The Staff Report recognizes this and the present Commission has focused tremendous energy on both broadband deployment and adoption. But let’s recognize up-front that building a new town-square paved with broadband bricks and stacked with good news and information is not going to happen on auto-pilot.

…

An open Internet is not the entire solution for robust Twenty-first century journalism. It’s tougher than that, and I, for one, don’t believe we’ll get there absent some positive public policy solutions. We have never had successful dissemination of news and information in this country without some encouraging public policy guidance, going back to the earliest days of the young republic when Washington, Madison and Jefferson saw to it that newspaper were financially able to reach readers all across the fledgling young republic.

…

These issues mean a lot to me because I believe they mean a lot to our country. I have been outspoken about them–and sometimes blunt, I know. I intend to keep speaking out on them in the months and, if needed, the years ahead. This nation faces  stark and threatening challenges to the leadership that brought us and the world successfully through so many dire threats in the century just past. Now we confront fundamental new uncertainties about the revival of our economy, where new jobs will come from, how we will prosper in a hyper-competitive global arena, how to support the kind of education that our kids and grandkids will need to thrive–indeed to survive–in this difficult time, how to open the doors of opportunity to every American, no matter who they are, where they live, or the particular circumstances of their individual lives.We’ve got a lot to get on top of as a country and if we don’t have the facts, don’t have the information, and don’t have the news about what’s going on in the neighborhood and the town and the nation and world around us, our future will be vastly diminished. That’s why so much rides on the future of what we are talking about today.

I think these are valuable objectives, but it isn’t clear where this document will lead.  One author commented, “FCC Report on Media Offers Strong Diagnosis, Weak Prescriptions.”

I personally feel sensitive to this changing landscape.   I love the innovation of the USA Today and Wall Street Journal iPad apps, but I still enjoy reading the local paper-based newspaper over breakfast.  But my favorite local newspaper went out of business a couple of years ago, and the surviving newspaper is steadily shrinking in size.  This local newspaper’s online presence falls far short of the USA Today/WSJ readability model.  It will be interesting to see how this all plays out.

To start with, I think I’ll transfer the whole 465-page report to my iPad and read it there.

PS.  I think the FCC has an ugly logo.  That’s all.

An interactive “Provider Guide” provided by JanRain shows what personal profile data maintained by popular social networks is available to applications that connect to these networks.  It is not surprising that Facebook offers the most information; LinkedIn is second in terms of available profile attributes.

With these many attributes about subscriber identities available through published API’s, it isn’t surprising how the stock market placed a huge premium on LinkedIn, and will presumable do the same with Facebook.  Perhaps the most valuable attributes are the connections to other people – friends on Facebook, contacts on LinkedIn.  The Network Effect arising from the interconnectivity of all those online members triggers extreme value momentum, particularly when all those relationships can be exposed to third parties.

The Department Of Commerce
Internet Policy Task Force
recently released a “green paper” document entitled, “Cybersecurity, Innovation and The Internet Economy”

Secretary of Commerce Gary Locke stated in his introductory message:

The following report – or green paper – recommends consideration of a new framework for addressing internet security issues for companies outside the orbit of critical infrastructure or key resources. While securing energy, financial, health and other resources remain vital, the future of the innovation and the economy will depend on the success of Internet companies and ensuring that these companies are trusted and secure is essential. This is the area of our focus.

The report recommends that the U. S. government and stakeholders come together to promote security standards to address emerging issues. It also proposes that the government continue to support both innovations in security and on the Internet more broadly. We believe this framework will both improve security at home and around the world so that Internet services can continue to provide a vital connection for trade and commerce, civic participation, and social interaction around the globe.

I haven’t yet read the complete document but, but look forward to understanding the policy recommendations laid out in the document and seeing how they influence the improvement of information security in the years going forward.

I wonder … is this app GPS-enabled?

I’d love to meet that old Non Sequitur guru – and buy that app!

Thanks to Non Sequitur for revealing how a new definitive date for the Apocalypse will be determined.

I hadn’t realized that the eternal GPS system was involved.

A bit of wry humor from Ben and Patty …

… but is it too far from the truth?

I was intrigued by a headline I read this morning, “How Facebook Can Put Google Out of Business,” by Ben Elowitz (@elowitz), co-founder and CEO of Wetpaint.

Elowitz started by stating his admiration for Google:

I used to envy Google and the vast digital empire that Schmidt commanded.  Google had one of the most intricate monopolies of all time. It had the most impressive dataset the world had ever seen; the most sophisticated algorithm to make sense of it; an audience of a billion users expressing their interest; and more than a million advertisers bidding furiously to reach those consumers at just the right moment.

What’s more, it had captured the ultimate prize: increasing returns to scale. Only Google could spread such huge R&D costs among an even more humongous query volume, all while offering advertisers the chance to reach most of the population with one buy. Google had earned its success.

However, he as concluded that Facebook offers more inherent value than Google, and can beat Google at its own game:

While Google has amassed an incredible database consisting of the fossilized linkages between most Web pages on the planet, Facebook possesses an asset that’s far more valuable—the realtime linkages between real people and the Web.What does this mean, and what are the implications here?

Well, in a nutshell, Facebook has stored a treasure trove of distinctive data that, if fully utilized, could put Google out of business.

I’m not astute enough to predict whether Facebook or Google will win, but I believe Elowitz has identified an important distinction between the inherent value of linkages:

“linkages between real people and the Web” [and, I might add, linkages between real people] –  primary Facebook value

or

“linkages between Web pages” – primary Google value

We call linkages between people “relationships”. In my previous post, each line on my LinkedIn connection map represents a real life relationship. Some of my Linkedin relationships are closer in real life than others, just like some of my Facebook “friendships” are closer than others.  But they are real.  They do exist.

My real-life relationships represented by Facebook or LinkedIn have inherent value to me.  Both Facebook and LinkedIn provide real value to me through the services they provide.

Google has proven that there is great business value in “linkages between web pages”.  I believe companies like Facebook and LinkedIn are beginning to how to business value can be derived from “linkages between people”.  Google is clearly trying to catch up in the relationships business, where Eric Schmidt admits they have failed.

It will be interesting to see how they, and other companies of their ilk, will continue to succeed for fail in business as they leverage (in a positive sense) their understanding of my relationships, hopefully without exploiting (in a negative sense), the private information I entrust to them.

The interesting diagram included below is a visualization of my LinkedIn network.  It represents the 1,220 contacts I have connected to via LinkedIn, since I joined as the 8,638th member of LinkedIn way back in 2003 or 2004.

The blue cluster in the upper right contains primarily contacts from the Arizona business community.   The small cluster in the lower right corner contains contacts from Eyring Research Institute, the company where I spend the first dozen years of my career.  The big, multi-colored cluster to the left grew from my interaction with Sun Identity Management and Telecommunications groups, with many people transitioning with me to Oracle or other companies, plus folks I have added since the Sun Acquisition.

You can get your own map at InMaps, from LinkedIn Labs.

Cloudbook.net is not just an attractive website and rich repository of information.  It is a community dedicated to cloud computing:

Cloudbook was founded to help accelerate the adoption of cloud computing by providing a comprehensive and educational resource community. Cloudbook brings together top thought leaders, experts and specialists to share their insights and experiences with the broader public. Their contributions are indexed into a comprehensive resource directory that is easy to navigate and allows users to familiarize and connect with the authors.

Cloudbook has also compiled a number of additional resources including events, products & services, research projects, news articles and more to deliver a complete resource for the community.

This evening I registered on the site and applied to be a contributor.  We’ll see what they say!

I began my career in 1977 as a digital electronics designer.  My first engineering project was to design a color graphics display, powered by a 16-bit microprocessor and interfaced to a Data General Eclipse minicomputer that was at the heart of a Minuteman II missile simulator at Hill Air Force Base in Utah. So when Tracy Kidder wrote his seminal work, “The Soul of a New Machine,” about the development of the Data General MV/8000 computer, I was immediately hooked.  I still have that book on my office bookshelf.

On May 19th, Tom West, the leader of the Eagle Project which spawned the MV/8000 computer, passed away.

The New York Times article reporting his death was appropriately entitled, “Tom West Dies at 71; Was the Computer Engineer Incarnate.”

Mr. West and his team of engineers at the Data General Corporation, in Westborough, Mass., developed a 32-bit microcomputer that briefly led the field of digital processing in the early 1980s, when the computer industry was poised between the eras of the mainframe and the PC.

…

Joseph Thomas West III was born in Bronxville, N.Y., on Nov. 22, 1939, the son of an American Telephone and Telegraph executive who moved the family often. Mr. West attended four different high schools before enrolling at Amherst College, where both his father and grandfather had received their degrees. Because of low grades, however, the college asked him to take some time off. He spent a year playing folk music and working part time at the Smithsonian Observatory in Cambridge, where he first became interested in computers, before returning and finishing his studies with a major in physics.

Thanks, Tom, for inspiring me at an early stage of my career!  May you rest in peace as your legacy lives on.