December 30th, 2006

How long to the Star Trek replicator?

Posted by Mitch Ratcliffe @ 12:17 pm

Categories: Business & Technology

Tags:

This fascinating video explains how a desktop device using reservoirs of basic materials will be able to assemble almost anything from scratch. While this isn't the way I'd want to cook a meal, like the replicator did for the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise, the opportunities implicit in nanomanufacturing devices are extraordinary. Imagine being able to design and build anything to an atomic levelWe'll hear we don't need or can't afford home nanomanufacturing, just as we did with computing of precision on your desktop with the waste products consisting of air and water. 

On Star Trek, the advent of the replicator makes money irrelevant, since anyone can have whatever they want. Somehow, that seems a bit Utopian to me, since the financial foundations of nanotechnology rest firmly on the profit-driven investment by venture capitalists. At some point, scarcity will become totally irrelevant, but I imagine that we'll see more than a few people along the way try to declare that there is enough manufacturing capacity in industrially operated nanotech systems, basically that all we need is "mainframe" nanomanufacturing, just as we once heard that no one will need a computer in the home. Of course, the people making those arguments will own the systems they say are sufficient to serve everyone—at a reasonable profit, of course.

When we're talking about unlimited wealth, better to talk about spreading it around rather than concentrating it in the hands of the one percent that control half the world's resources today. How soon can we get to the point where every home or every village around the world might be offered the Apple II of nanomanufacturing? That's a goal to aim for at the beginning of a new year.

If you're working in the field, give me a ring at "godsdog" on Skype and let's talk about the economic models that might support home nanomanufacturing systems.

UPDATE: Listen to a podcast interview with the founders of the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology about this posting.

 Loading ...

December 29th, 2006

Rational Rants On-The-Ether: godsdog on Skype

Posted by Mitch Ratcliffe @ 9:57 am

Categories: Business & Technology

Tags:

2007 will mark a different tack in my blogging/podcasting efforts. For many years, including those preceding the arrival of the "blog," I've been writing postings (neé columns) about events in the technology and business world, not to mention a lot of political and policy issues. The form feels exhausted to me, or maybe it is just that I am exhausted with writing to a kind of template when the real problem these days is thinking fast about changing tactics in the midst of rapidly evolving technologies and strategies.

So, I'm opening my Skype account to all comers for almost-real time discussions that will be podcast here. Call it Rational Rants On-The-Ether. You can start the discussion or respond and I'll have the fun of having to think faster on my feet, in a format that I predicted in 1995 in a Digital Media editorial about the rise of the online personality.

I'll still be writing, but I'll be writing shorter and (it will probably be seen as) more abrupt postings to invite you, the readers and other bloggers or companies trying to participate in the conversation to join me in discussion. My Skype address is open to you to ring any time, though I don't always promise to be available, in which case we can schedule a call, that I'll record and distribute here.

Whatever the issue, whether it is something I wrote or said, something you want to say, the opportunity to talk about your product or strategy, even politics—just ring me up and we'll record it and make it available. Want to discuss your business or product idea, or practice your pitch before going to VCs? Just remember, the people are listening.

This is an experiment and we'll see where it goes. The guidelines for people who want to show a product to me are that you should IM me on Skype to discuss how to arrange a presentation and, if I need to use the product for a bit before the recording, we need to arrange that. For people who just want to talk about something, just call. Only understand that every word will be recorded and distributed.

You'll get my frank response to whatever you want to talk about. Anything, anytime. If I don't have an opinion or don't know enough to give you a fair hearing, I'll tell you, and the audience will hear it. Likewise, if you make an ass of yourself, that goes public, too, so let's aim for reasoned discourse.

Here's the way to connect: Call or IM "godsdog" on Skype.

Let's see where this goes and what happens. 

December 18th, 2006

When (and why) social media fails...

Posted by Mitch Ratcliffe @ 6:32 pm

Categories: Business & Technology

Tags:

I'm just getting back to real life after having lost power after the storm that hit Seattle last Thursday night—we got electricity last night. It was interesting to me that all the blog/social media created around the event, mostly by the various news outlets, managed to add precisely nothing to the information flow.

My family was hunkered down in a single room in a hotel downtown, because the temperature dropped into the 20s after the storm. What I wanted to know was: When will my neighborhood be reconnected to the grid? Driving back and forth to check was completely impractical, because there was a run on gas—and everything else that could be bought and sold, though I noted that Safeway did have plenty of beer on hand last night unlike during the legitimate Northwest disaster I lived through, Mount St. Helens. That was a party and a disaster!

The blogs created by the Tacoma News Tribune, for example, pointed to the power company sites, where I was able to read myself whatBeing a news junkie trumps relying on citizen journalism in a crisis where you are actually in the middle of things. was breathlessly recounted on the Trib blogs by reporters playing at blogging (which means they didn't have an editor to review the posting). I usually found the power company news releases long before the blogs got the information. Simply repurposing news releases doesn't a journalism make.

Being a news junkie trumps relying on citizen journalism in a crisis where you are actually in the middle of things.

The Tacoma and Seattle papers blogs didn't link out to people's blogs. The citizen submissions on their blogs did deal with facts—there were arguments between people about the "fact" power was on in a particular city when anyone could see the failure was checkerboarded phenomenon, which then devolved into complaints about neighborhoods, power companies and city government. No one stayed on topic and there was, and still is, a very pressing need for information.

Talk radio, which fielded questions from callers and then collected answers, such as "where can you get gas?" did a much better job than local blogs.

And, it was evident that as soon as the news organizations recovered it was back to editorial process as usual, when there was still a need for much more specific and personal reporting by citizens. The wrap-up stories, punctuated by the tragedies of people killing themselves to keep warm, were not sufficient in a time when many people are still wondering when their lives will get back to normal.

My blog was down, because I host it at home. So, there was no ability to contribute to an emergent response locally. Interactive mapping and other easily accessible technologies were not deployed. And, looking back at Katrina, one can see they were never deployed there to give a view of the long-term success and failure of the response by government and the people. Instead, the news cycle moved on and the community goes un-virtualized.

My conclusion: We're still creatures of the moment (always have been or we would not be repeating history so often). That means there is a new discipline to be developed if we are to better document events. Simply treating the subjects of interest as news without a long-term perspective is not the foundation for social growth.

Here are my suggestions for whomever might want to invest in the infrastructure for a civic journalism. Read the rest of this entry »

December 15th, 2006

When the power fails.... Give to the Red Cross

Posted by Mitch Ratcliffe @ 8:34 pm

Categories: Business & Technology

Tags:

It was a pretty big storm. So, just after hanging up from a phone call with a Yahoo exec yesterday, the lights started flickering here in the Pacific Northwest. By 8 PM local time, the lights were gone and still are today. Hard to blog, let alone keep up with work when you live in a "disaster area," as the media have labeled my little part of the world.

The Seattle area is still standing, Windows Vista is still coming, like it or not.

But, folks, a power outage is nothing compared to what's going on in many parts of the world today. There may be a million homes in the Pacific Northwest The Seattle area is still standing, Windows Vista is still coming, like it or not.without power, and the Amazon and Microsoft sites, among others, may be a little slow, but this is a cakewalk compared to the folks who are still waiting for help after Hurricane Katrina, the 500 killed and tens of thousands displaced by Typhoon Durian in November, and the humanitarian crises in Sudan and Iraq.

My power's out. I couldn't blog until we checked into a hotel to wait out the two or three days the electrical grid is expected to take being repaired. No damage to the house, but the neighbor's place ended up with a tree laying across the overhead wires above its garage. My kids think this is a mini vacation. And I have EV-DO and am warm.

This is not a disaster, just a part of being alive in a world that is generally indifferent to the creatures living on it.

So, I hope you'll join me in donating to the Red Cross today to help the people who really need help. Go, donate now. Who knows when it may really be our turn for suffering. If you match my donation of $100, I'll send you a copy of the upcoming book from Steve Mack and I.

December 11th, 2006

Best blogging moves of 2006

Posted by Mitch Ratcliffe @ 1:01 pm

Categories: Business & Technology

Tags:

From Amazon's AStore to MyBlogLog's community-building widgets, some things have worked very well for my personal blog and here at ZD Net. But there is also a trend toward hard-and-fast rules of blogging being declared that needs a firm rejection if the medium is going to continue to evolve.  So here are my best blogging moves of 2006:

• Best revenue enhancer: RatcliffeBlog Store, supported by Amazon's aStore program, which creates a virtual retail environment for any site, and that has produced a 4,565 percent increase in referral revenue compared to the second quarter of 2006. I wrote about my initial experience here, but the program continues to surprise me. To date, my blog has generated $216.16 in revenue this quarter—by the end of the year, it appears, revenue will near $300. By contrast, I made $5.72 in the second quarter and, running an aStore for only month in the third quarter, saw $44.22 in revenue after the program was introduced. The reason is that people are now using my aStore to shop in order to support my site rather than going to Amazon. The products I link to directly account for less than 10 percent of the referral fees generated. Instead, people are browsing and adding products completely unrelated to the topics I write about. For example, people have ordered clothing, a wet/dry shop vaccuum, coffee and the complete works of Bach on CD through my aStore—Amazon doesn't tell me who bought this stuff, but thanks for thinking of me when you did. I strongly recommend aStore to anyone looking for a community-friendly (that is, without simply resorting to intrusive advertising) way to build blog revenue. At the current rate of growth, I'll be able to cover my annual book-buying through Amazon in about two more quarters.

• Best community tool. MyBlogLog has introduced a new dimension of insight into my blog traffic. The Web service tracks inbound hits on my blog pages, giving me information about which pages, specifically, are driving traffic to my site, along with information about the actions of those users on the site, including where they left my site. MyBlogLog also enhances my site with some drop-in code that displays a list of recent readers and highlights, on mouse-over, the links people are following, so there is a kind of social intelligence being built into my site by visitors, telling others where they went. MyBlogLog, however, has some limitations. Its statistics cover only those pages that are linked from another page, not visits directly to my site or from an RSS reader, and it doesn't tell me anything about RSS readership. I like the service' community aspects (click to see who has "joined" my blog community), but it also focuses so much on blogger-to-blogger relationships that I feel it blinds me to most readers' interests. And it cannot be easily dropped into a group blog, like ZD Net's, to provide tracking and community.
  
  
• Best browsing tool for building postings. I have a spatial memory, requiring me to put stuff someplace in particular to find it later. Blue Organizer from Adaptive Blue, has been a very handy plug-in to use as I surf the Web, because it allows me to catalog rather than simply pile up my bookmarks. It is a Firefox plug-in available here. By setting the applet to create a Blue Mark (an enhanced bookmark) for any page I visit three times, it also gives me the opportunity to look back at my browsing to find out what has been capturing my attention that I may not have noticed the first few times. Three is a tendency for Blue Organizer to get a little like Fibber McGee's closet, with a lot of junk tumbling out if you don't spend some time managing the collection when the plug-in is set to add Blue Marks automatically.
• Best advice for bloggers. Ignore most, if not all, advice about blogging. I've had this conversation with a lot of folks, from Dan Farber about how to blog for ZD Net to blog-based discussions, but my advice to bloggers is not to take the flood of advice about how and when to blog without a lot of skepticism. Rules for blogging, such as "Successful bloggers blog several times every day" are like the counsel of a business guru whose own skill and luck produced a unique product or company. It's not likely to produce the same for anyone else. I mean, for instance, that as many times as occasionally bankrupted Donald Trump writes a business how-to book, not a lot of people are going to replicate his results. You can be a successful blogger with one posting a month, maybe even one great posting, or it may take frequent posting. As they say in the 12-step world, "take what works and leave the rest."

That's what I learned this year. What did you figure out about blogging? Join the discussion in comments!

December 6th, 2006

Swivel: Fun for stats geeks and everyone else, with some caveats

Posted by Mitch Ratcliffe @ 12:29 pm

Categories: Business & Technology

Tags:

I like the idea behind Swivel: Allow anyone to upload any data set and compare it with other data. At this writing, on the service's first day live, there are 13,364 different graphs on the site.

This is fun for stats geeks writ large. The company is opening a fascinating new field of endeavor where the data we collect as nations, states, cities, companies, leagues and individuals will be able to flow together for analytic use. A great pooling of data creates many opportunities for novel analysis and insight.

As a kind of data porn, this will be great fun for everyone other than stats fanatics, too, if they choose to treat Swivel as a curiosity rather than a source of truth. Statistics are, after all,Swivel should consider some "pro" level of service that allows private analysis of data and the ability to publish data and analytics for a fee. the most malleable form of data man has ever invented. You can tell the truth with statistics, but it's also incredibly easy to lie or create spurious "facts" that mask the truth. For instance, this graph on Swivel, which compares violent crime in the United States and wine consumption since 1980 that apparently shows that the more wine consumed the less violent crime happens. But, in fact, wine consumption doesn't have much to do with violent crime, unless you count the incidence of teenage brawls during Strawberry Ripple binges.

Data is fun and profitable. If you can find a meaningful correlation say, between the batting averages of right-handed left fielders during home games in the World Series and global grain prices you might make a killing on the market, but such correlations are usually nonsense. Nevertheless, I believe that in the coming century, so much data will be shared with the world that a kind of occult hobby will emerge, like alchemy used to be, though which folks searched for unlimited wealth and life, in the errata of history.

Swivel is already littered with badly formulated and malformed graphs, like this one, and this one and this one, all of which are literally useless. The challenge for the company will be to surface meaningful analyses using tags and other forms of social collaboration and Read the rest of this entry »

December 3rd, 2006

Best business and technology books of 2006

Posted by Mitch Ratcliffe @ 9:15 pm

Categories: Business & Technology

Tags:

Last week, I reported what retailers were saying about what the hot gifts this year, as well as some ideas of my own. Giving the gift of a good read is a great option for family and friends, but particularly for colleagues who you have to think with every day.

The thing about a book is that you don't even have to agree with the arguments it makes, as long as it gets you thinking. This year's crop of business books, as usual, included a lot of me-too titles that were easily put down and forgotten after a few pages or chapters, because they contained little new, nothing thought-provoking. Downright crazy ideas are better than none, and challenges to the status quo invaluable, so don't shy away from shaking your colleagues' mental trees with a good book.

Here are a few of the books from the past year that stood out for me this year:

• Naked Conversations, by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel. No one in business believes blogs are irrelevant to their company anymore, and many came to that conclusion after reading Scoble and Shel Israel's book. It's hard to believe the hardcover came out in January, because it is cited so frequently in conversations, partly because of the effective marketing of the book through the blog on which it was publicly written, which only reinforces the message that a blog can shape a market.

• World Changing, edited by Alex Steffen and authored by many friends. Need an idea? About virtually anything from carbon credits to increasing transparency in government and markets? This is your book. A Whole Earth Catalog for the new century, World Changing is packed with informative thinking. Turn to any page and learn. Did you know that there are companies building lighting that channels natural sunlight through buildings using fiber optics to replace electric light during the day? I didn't. Ever wonder how to build a no-energy, carbon-neutral home? The answer, and many more, are here.
• The Elements of Influence, by Alan Kelly. I've spent several years thinking about and building technology for identifying and measuring influence. The question remains, now that we can measure it, what about a strategy Read the rest of this entry »