Andrew's shared items in Google Reader

Doctoring Photographs without Photoshop

2008-08-27T12:27:27Z

It's all about the captions:

...doctored photographs are the least of our worries. If you want to trick someone with a photograph, there are lots of easy ways to do it. You don't need Photoshop. You don't need sophisticated digital photo-manipulation. You don't need a computer. All you need to do is change the caption.
The photographs presented by Colin Powell at the United Nations in 2003 provide several examples. Photographs that were used to justify a war. And yet, the actual photographs are low-res, muddy aerial surveillance photographs of buildings and vehicles on the ground in Iraq. I'm not an aerial intelligence expert. I could be looking at anything. It is the labels, the captions, and the surrounding text that turn the images from one thing into another. Photographs presented by Colin Powell at the United Nations in 2003.

Powell was arguing that the Iraqis were doing something wrong, knew they were doing something wrong, and were trying to cover their tracks. Later, it was revealed that the captions were wrong. There was no evidence of chemical weapons and no evidence of concealment. Morris's mockery of the sweeping interpretations made in Powell's photographs.

There is a larger point. I don't know what these buildings were really used for. I don't know whether they were used for chemical weapons at one time, and then transformed into something relatively innocuous, in order to hide the reality of what was going on from weapons inspectors. But I do know that the yellow captions influence how we see the pictures. "Chemical Munitions Bunker" is different from "Empty Warehouse" which is different from "International House of Pancakes." The image remains the same but we see it differently.

Change the yellow labels, change the caption and you change the meaning of the photographs. You don't need Photoshop. That's the disturbing part. Captions do the heavy lifting as far as deception is concerned. The pictures merely provide the window-dressing. The unending series of errors engendered by falsely captioned photographs are rarely remarked on.

Building a RESTful Enterprise Integration with Oracle and SnapLogic

2008-08-27T05:46:00Z

In the enterprise space, integration problems abound. IT must connect numerous legacy systems in new applications to adjust to the changing needs of the business. Technologies to achieve such integrations include SOAP based Web Services (WS-*) and binary protocols such as CORBA and RMI. This blog entry discusses a different approach - integration using lightweight REST APIs.

To illustrate the concept, a demo has been created showing how to combine data from Oracle's WebLogic Portal product with data from Oracle Database. This demo is accomplished using RESTful APIs as the data transport mechanism, and is orchestrated by a third party data integration product called SnapLogic. This demo was showcased at a REST Symposium I organized for Oracle employees in July, which featured speakers from Oracle, SnapLogic and Yahoo! (see below for details).

What is REST?

REST is an acronym for REpresentational State Transfer, and was coined by Roy Fielding in his PhD thesis published in 2000. It is not a technology, a standard, or a product. REST is an architectural pattern that describes the underlying architecture of the World Wide Web and how it came to be such a massively scalable computer application. The WWW is known to have the following qualities:

Highly scalable - millions of websites
Fault tolerant - at any given time, many websites are offline, but the web continues to work
Performance- HTTP allows for intermediaries to help improve performance via caching
Interoperable - nearly every computing platform has a browser, and websites are written in a myriad of languages
Distributed - websites and clients span the globe
Self describing - there is no user manual required for users to navigate the WWW

Aren't the above qualities desired for any enterprise systems as well? The power of REST lies in the idea that the same fundamentals that work so well for the WWW can also work with great success within the enterprise.

There are plenty of resources on the web that explain the principles of REST, and so I have no intention of duplicating that material. In essence REST describes an architecture in which:

Application resources (objects, in the OO world) are exposed as URIs
HTTP requests are used to retrieve and update data on the server
The HTTP requests utilize the standard HTTP verbs (GET, POST, PUT, DELETE) to define the API operations, helping client developers by providing a consistent interaction model

An example is the following:

A client issues a request to the following URI: http://wlp.bea.com/dvt/api/content/autos.jsp
The server response contains a list of automobiles, described in a format such as XML
The client consumes the XML document and outputs the entries that match the user's criteria

This pattern is seen most often with Rich Internet Applications (RIA), where the client is a browser and the API is being invoked via Ajax (more precisely, the JavaScript XmlHttpRequest facility). While this is a very powerful use of RESTful APIs and is alone enough to justify the creation of RESTful APIs, this use case is not the focus of this blog entry. I would encourage you to research Ajax application development for more background.

Instead, we will look more closely at how RESTful APIs can also make data integration easy.

RESTful Integration in Concept

RESTful APIs expose data in a way that is easily consumed. Invoking the API is as easy as issuing an HTTP request, which is possible to do from almost any programming language/platform. While enterprise data integration can be implemented using a wide variety of technologies, the purpose of this blog entry is to show how it can be done with RESTful APIs.

As stated in the preamble, there are non-RESTful approaches to solving this problem. A SOAP based solution could be implemented and for some cases is the preferred approach. If your use case requires the support of the WS-* family of standards, then WS-* is the way to go. What this example shows is that REST offers an alternative and is appealing in its simplicity.

Instead of discussing the theory, it is more useful to look at a working example.

Example: Oracle WebLogic Portal + Oracle Database + SnapLogic + REST

Consider the following example:

An insurance company is using the Content Management capabilities of Oracle WebLogic Portal to store auto claims. Each claim contains a photo of the damaged vehicle, and some data about that vehicle such as make, model, year and a description of the damage.
The insurance company also has a Oracle Database that is populated with industry data regarding the fair market value of the cars, and the salvage value. These values are specific to the make, model and year.
The insurance company wishes to put the repair of the damaged vehicles out to bid to a community of auto repair shops. The intent is to allow shops to bid on the vehicles they are willing to repair using the industry data and the information from the claim.

The insurance company decides to use a quick and lightweight approach to build a data mashup with a web UI. The implementation is achieved using RESTful APIs, and orchestrated using a product called SnapLogic. SnapLogic is an open source server that provides:

Many pre-built connectors to expose native data sources as RESTful APIs (e.g. database, spreadsheet, XML)
Sophisticated data manipulation capabilities, such as joins, filtering, sorting, and computations
A variety of output formats for the completed RESTful feed

The data integration demo was implemented as follows:

A RESTful API is configured for the WebLogic Portal (WLP) Content Management system. In this example, the RESTful API was custom built as a JSP, but this capability will come pre-built in a future version of WLP.
The Oracle Database schema is exposed as a RESTful data API using an out of the box Database Reader component of the SnapLogic server.
The two data sources are joined using a SnapLogic pipeline. The pipeline reads the claims from WLP CM and the industry data from the database using the RESTful APIs.
The joined data is converted into an ATOM syndication feed via the SnapLogic server (using an Xml Writer component)
The ATOM feed is displayed in a ATOM reader, in this case the Google Mashup Editor UI

All of this is achieved via configuration, not code. The architecture is depicted in this diagram:

The resulting web application appears like this:

For more detailed information on the implementation of this mashup, consult the companion entry on SnapLogic's blog:

SnapLogic CTO Mike Pittaro's blog entry on the Oracle mashup

Oracle and REST

This is a simple demonstration that shows the ease of implementing integrations using RESTful techniques, especially when combined with a REST integration enabler such as SnapLogic. It is a stated goal of some of the Oracle product groups to provide RESTful APIs for access to product data. Check with the roadmap for each product to understand when these APIs will be available.

Attendees to Oracle Open World 2008 will have several sessions related to Oracle product groups and REST:

Oracle Internal REST Symposium

For Oracle employees, more information is available on the company intranet. I organized an internal symposium on REST amongst the product groups on July 28th, 2008. The event included speakers from Yahoo! and SnapLogic.

The agenda covered a number of RESTful topics, including:

Explaining REST (Subbu Allamaraju of Yahoo!)
Industry product landscape - SnapLogic (Mike Pittaro, CTO SnapLogic), and other products
Enabling technologies - RESTlet, JSR 311, WADL, JSON marshalling
Oracle Product efforts - presentations by various products groups on their REST efforts

Access to the recordings and slide decks can be found on the intranet here.

Resources

You may find the following links helpful:

The hosted WLP CM REST feed of crashed automobiles
The WLP CM REST API implementation (offered as a JSP for easy distribution, but could be a servlet)
The hosted demo on Google Mashup Editor
SnapLogic website.
SnapLogic CTO Mike Pittaro's blog entry explaining the implementation
SnapLogic CEO Chris Marino's blog entry discussing his thoughts on the REST Symposium
REST wikipedia entry

Technorati Tags: REST,Oracle,SnapLogic,WebLogic,WebLogicPortal,integration,HTTP,GoogleMashupEditor

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Minigeek - Ed. 21

2008-08-24T13:26:14Z

Download minigeek-21.comicdoc

Judge restricts online reporting of case

2008-08-25T02:16:53Z

“A judge has today taken the unprecedented step of banning news websites from naming two men charged with murder while allowing newspapers, radio stations and TV networks to reveal who they are.”

Link to NZ Herald below:

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/1/story.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10528866

Using Google Maps

2008-08-27T02:22:50Z

When:
Friday, September 26, 2008 from 08:30 AM - 10:30 AM (GMT+1200)

Where:
The Terrace Conference Cenre
114 The Terrace
Wellington
New Zealand (Aotearoa)

Hosted By:
Jan Zawadzki Ltd.

We're a consultancy specialising in enterprise information management. We help organisations develop, communicate and deliver effective information management strategies, and align these with business strategies and outcomes.

Register for this event now at :
http://googlemaps-rss.eventbrite.com

Event Details:

Using Google Maps

Google Maps is a great tool for making your data more accessible to your staff, your customers, or the public. Using Google Maps as your platform, you can:

	make it easy for all your staff to benefit from the geospatial information you already maintain
	link information stores to Maps and help users find and interpret information faster
	engage your public with interactive Maps-based applications

In this two hour session we will cover:

What types of information can be presented using Google Maps

How to use Google Maps to visualise your existing information sets

How to augment your systems with Google Maps as a front-end

Examples of effective use of Google Maps

What is involved in piloting your first Google Maps application

Licensing for Google Maps and differences between the Free, Premiere and Enterprise versions

How Primitive

2008-08-24T23:38:18Z

The post on LLPrimitives is coming soon. This interstitial post is just to convey my frustration in trying to deliver a simple blog post with 2D vector (pseudo-3D) graphics. Never mind my original aim to use SVG with interactive sliders to help explain some basic 3D prim concepts.That could still probably be done, but not easily in Wordpress, I’m discovering. And frankly, I don’t have any time left to play around with it, or hack my PHP.

So the final solution seems to be to deliver a basic Word (2003) doc to Scribd and let you experience it that way, which is to say, as Flash. The fact that most of the world still delivers its graphics as bitmaps means, to me, that even the 2D world has a long, long way to go.

It’s funny. I encounter alot of people in my travels who distrust 3D solutions (with good reason) and assert (somewhat naively, IMO) "Why not just do it in 2D? It’s easier."

My answer is now going to be, "No, it’s not! 2D sucks just as much for doing anything novel and interactive that works across browsers and systems. If you have to start over anyway, why not do it in 3D?"

There. I feel much better now.

P.S. Let me know if you can’t see the test below. I may not have made it public on Scribd, but it’s just a few overapping circles.

Read this document on Scribd: test

TSA Follies

2008-08-21T14:12:22Z

They break planes:

Citing sources within the aviation industry, ABC News reports an overzealous TSA employee attempted to gain access to the parked aircraft by climbing up the fuselage... reportedly using the Total Air Temperature (TAT) probes mounted to the planes' noses as handholds.
"The brilliant employees used an instrument located just below the cockpit window that is critical to the operation of the onboard computers," one pilot wrote on an American Eagle internet forum. "They decided this instrument, the TAT probe, would be adequate to use as a ladder."

They harass innocents:

James Robinson is a retired Air National Guard brigadier general and a commercial pilot for a major airline who flies passenger planes around the country.
He has even been certified by the Transportation Security Administration to carry a weapon into the cockpit as part of the government's defense program should a terrorist try to commandeer a plane.

But there's one problem: James Robinson, the pilot, has difficulty even getting to his plane because his name is on the government's terrorist "watch list."

It's easy to sneak by them:

The third-grader has been on the watch list since he was 5 years old. Asked whether he is a terrorist, he said, "I don't know."
Though he doesn't even know what a terrorist is, he is embarrassed that trips to the airport cause a ruckus, said his mother, Denise Robinson.

[...]

Denise Robinson says she tells the skycaps her son is on the list, tips heavily and is given boarding passes. And booking her son as "J. Pierce Robinson" also has let the family bypass the watch list hassle.

And here's how to sneak lockpicks past them.

EDITED TO ADD (8/21): Ha ha ha ha:

Even though its inspector's actions caused nine American Eagle planes to be grounded in Chicago this week, the Transporatation Security Administration says it may pursue action against the airline for security lapses.

And a step in the right direction:

A federal appeals court ruled this week that individuals who are blocked from commercial flights by the federal no-fly list can challenge their detention in federal court.

Leading Men

2008-08-24T12:01:40Z

Shared by Andrew
There are so many reasons that this single statistic is not relevant.
Some of which are:
1. 50% are Cisco employees, Cisco biases every outcome.
2. Certification is roundly ridiculed in many circles, can anyone say france?
3. I haven't heard of CCIE anyway.

Leading indicators are measurements that change over time and suggest future trends for important second-order results like population growth and economic development. Economists in particular are often looking for indicators that have been known historically to lead the overall economy. If unemployment goes down, for example, it is a good bet that shortly thereafter income will rise and the economy will improve. It's for this very reason, then, that economists and Wall Street fund managers are always looking for newer and better leading indicators. But such indicators needn't be limited to the economy: they can apply to technology and technical culture, too, which has its own feedback loop to economic development. My friend George Morton, who figured this all out, says that by knowing the right numbers to look at we can have a good idea what countries will be leading in technology -- and presumably in economic development and power -- in the years ahead. The measure George likes is the number of Cisco Certified Internetwork Experts or CCIEs.

The CCIE is Cisco's top certification category and VERY hard to earn. Being a CCIE doesn't mean you have Len Bozack on speed dial, but it might as well. Cisco products dominate the Internet and CCIEs are Cisco gurus, so if you are serious about the Internet as a nation you'll have CCIEs hanging about, or that's the theory. Conversely, if you just talk a good game as a country with technological aspirations, maybe you won't have many CCIEs at all -- maybe none. It's one way to determine who the posers are.

Cisco publishes the total number of CCIEs and their geographical distribution four times per year and George used the Internet Archive to track down the last nine years of data to look for trends. All of this is behind one of this week's links.

Where I took a step further was to divide the number of CCIEs into each country's population, then do the same for each country's Gross Domestic Product and correct for widely varying populations and states of economic development. For a baseline, then, the U.S. has at present 5,863 CCIEs, which is 1.947 CCIEs per 100,000 population and $2.2 billion of GDP per CCIE.

It is logical to assume that nations with adjusted numbers that exceed those of the U.S. for CCIEs per 100K are Internet up-and-comers and ought to fare well in the decades ahead. Beyond the population statistic, countries that have significantly less GDP per CCIE are those that would seem to have made networking a national priority. Countries that are significantly behind the U.S. on one measure or another are just that -- behind the U.S. -- which is not good.

Here, then, are some of the numbers I calculated:

Canada, not surprisingly, is similar to the U.S. with 2.2 CCIEs per 100K and $2.45 billion per CCIE, as is the UK with 1.5 CCIEs per 100K and $2.12 billion in GDP per CCIE. Ireland is very similar to the UK with 1.48 CCIEs per 100K and $2.95 billion in GDP per CCIE. The really interesting European numbers to me come from Germany, with 0.74 CCIEs per 100K and $4.3 billion per CCIE, and France, with 0.36 CCIEs per 100K and $8.11 billion per CCIE. Both of these countries appear to be underinvesting in network technology, with France especially lagging.

Latin America is dramatically behind Europe and North America, though I found it interesting that Argentina, with 0.17 CCIEs per 100K and $8.94 billion in GDP, is 50-100 percent ahead of both Mexico and Brazil.

It is especially interesting to compare India with China and Japan with South Korea. India has 0.036 CCIEs per 100K to China's 0.22 per 100K -- a 7X differential -- while India has $10 billion in GDP per CCIE to China's $3.3 billion. There is no doubt that there is plenty of network expertise in India, but these numbers show that expertise isn't making it out of the technology centers to the rest of the country. China, on the other hand, is developing its IT infrastructure much more broadly. This also doesn't take into account the simply huge numbers coming out of Hong Kong, where there are 3.3 CCIEs per 100K and $1.13 billion in GDP per CCIE -- numbers that might properly be added to the rest of China in some accounts.

Japan has 1.23 CCIEs per 100K to South Korea's 1.9, but the significant difference between these two countries is the $4 billion per CCIE in GDP for Japan compared to $1.28 billion in South Korea, which is clearly investing massively in network infrastructure.

Looking 30 years into the future I think it is clear that the regional leaders will be China and Korea, NOT India and Japan.

Israel has numbers very similar to Korea with 1.43 CCIEs per 100K and $1.4 billion in GDP per CCIE, which is more than double on both scales that of the other Middle Eastern leader, Saudi Arabia, with 0.42 CCIEs per 100K and $3.2 billion in GDP per CCIE.

And don't count out corporate haven Bermuda with its five total CCIEs and its population of 66,000. That's 7.5 CCIEs per100K and $900 million in GDP per CCIE.

"When looking at the countries a key element for IT is the English language," said George. "Yes I know Harvard still publishes diplomas in Latin. Where English is a first language, or an important second language is key to the number of CCIEs. Sorry C, PERL, JAVA, Cisco IOS, Basic, &t. are all English context. The Moore's CCIE Law also brings into question the ability of countries to attract IT capital with open or closed network infrastructure.
The last point -- over 50 percent of all CCIEs in the US work for Cisco. In Mexico, and India I bet it is over 50%. Both are very large call centers for Cisco Support. Morton's CCIE Law = Moore's Law accelerated by the technological support available to exploit Moore's Law. The degree of acceleration is measured by the available number of CCIEs. It's Newton's Second Law: F=ma, (or Force = Moore's Law * CCIEs)."

What we're talking about here is the future of world power in this century, but I can understand if your eyes have glazed over a bit. Maybe something more interesting would be the big question reverberating through the hallways at Google: why the heck can't they make any money from YouTube?

This is, on the face of it, the same question that eBay must be asking about Skype. Both were fairly large investments yet neither is contributing significant revenue to the parent company. Poor Skype can't feed us ads before or after every phone call, especially since the only way to have contextual data to make those ads more valuable would be to listen in on the calls -- a no-no. But for YouTube the problem is different because it ought to be fairly easy to figure out what a video is about then sell ads against that metadata.

Easier said than done, my friends. The problem with YouTube and advertisers is that the nature of the videos, themselves, is too varied and the metadata too easily wrong. A hotel chain that might well want to advertise before a video of the Paris Hilton, for example, might be extremely reluctant to advertise before a video OF Paris Hilton, yet from the perspective of metadata both are extremely similar. This is a HUGE problem for Google and all the other streamers of user-generated videos, which leads some people to believe that amateur night will eventually end and the Internet will return to being like most television -- a place for predominantly professional video.

What's funny about this is I think I have the problem figured out. The answer seems obvious to me, but I'm not sure Google would even listen if I told them my answer.

The Future of the Desktop

2008-08-19T12:33:53Z

Shared by Andrew
Hmmmmmm, I don't know.
I want to find the underlying visual metaphor for the webOS, but is there one, or many.

Everything is moving to the cloud. As we enter the third decade of the Web we are seeing an increasing shift from native desktop applications towards Web-hosted clones that run in browsers. For example, a range of products such as Microsoft Office Live, Google Docs, Zoho, ThinkFree, DabbleDB, Basecamp, and many others now provide Web-based alternatives to the full range of familiar desktop office productivity apps. The same is true for an increasing range of enterprise applications, led by companies such as Salesforce.com, and this process seems to be accelerating. In addition, hosted remote storage for individuals and enterprises of all sizes is now widely available and inexpensive. As these trends continue, what will happen to the desktop and where will it live?

This is a guest post by Nova Spivack, founder and CEO of Twine. This is the final version of an article Spivack has been working on in his public Twine.

Is the desktop of the future going to just be a web-hosted version of the same old-fashioned desktop metaphors we have today?

No. There have already been several attempts at copying the old-fashioned "files and folders" desktop interface to the Web, but they have not caught on. Imitations desktops to-date have simply been clunky and slow imitations of the real-thing at best. Others have been overly slick. But one thing they all have in common: None of them have nailed it. People don't want to manage all their information on the Web in the same interface they use to manage data and apps on their local PC. The Web is an entirely different medium than the desktop and it requires a new kind of interface. The desktop of the future - what some have called "the Webtop" - still has yet to be invented.

The desktop of the future is going to be a hosted web service

Is the desktop even going to exist anymore as the Web becomes increasingly important? Yes, there has to be some kind of place that we consider to be our personal "home" and "workspace" -- but it's not going to live on any one device.

As we move into a world that is increasingly mobile, where users often work across several different devices in the course of their day, we need unified access to our applications and data. This requires that our applications and data do not reside on local devices anymore, but rather that they will live in the cloud and be accessible via Web services.

The painful process of using synchronization utilities to keep data on our different devices in-synch will finally be a thing of the past. Similarly an entire class of applications for remote-PC access will also become extinct. Instead, all devices will synch with the cloud, where your applications, data and desktop workspace state will live as a unified, hosted service. Your desktop will appear on whatever device you login to, just as you left it wherever you last accessed it. This shift harkens back to previous attempts to revive thin-client computing - such as Sun Microsystems' Java Desktop - but this time it is going to actually become mainstream.

The Browser is Going to Swallow Up the Desktop

It's a classic embrace-and-extend story - the Web browser began as just another app on the desktop and has quickly embraced and extended every other application to become the central tool on everyone's desktop. All that remains is the desktop itself - and the browser is quickly making inroads there as well. In particular Firefox, with it's easy extensibility and huge range of add-ons, is rapidly displacing the remaining features of the desktop.

If these trends continue, will the browser eventually swallow up or simply replace the desktop? Yes. In fact, it will probably happen very soon. There just isn't any reason to have a desktop outside the browser anymore. What we think of as "the desktop" is really just a perspective on our information and applications - it's really just another "page" or context in our digital lives. This could easily exist within a browser. So instead of launching the browser from the desktop, it makes more sense to launch the desktop from the browser. In this way of thinking, the desktop is really just our home page - the place where we do our work and keep up with our world.

The focus of the desktop will shift from information to attention

As our digital lives evolve out of the old-fashioned desktop into the browser-centric Web environment we will see a shift from organizing information spatially (directories, folders, desktops, etc.) to organizing information temporally (feeds, lifestreams, microblogs, timelines, etc.). The Web is constantly changing and the biggest challenge is not finding information, it is keeping up with it.

The desktop of the future is going to be more concerned with helping users manage information overload - particularly the overload caused by change. In this respect, it is going to feel more like an RSS feed reader or a social news site than a directory. The focus will be on helping the user to manage and keep up with all the stuff flowing in and out of the their environment. The interface will be tuned to help the user understand what the trends are, rather than just on how things are organized.

Users are going to shift from acting as librarians to acting as daytraders.

As we move into an era where content creation and distribution become almost infinitely cheap, the scarcest resources will no longer be storage or bandwidth, it will be attention. The pace of information creation and distribution continues to accelerate and there is no end in sight, yet the cognitive capabilities of the individual human brain are finite and we are already at our limits.

In order to cope with the overwhelming complexity of our digital lives, we are going to increasingly rely on tools that help us manage our attention more productively -- rather than tools that simply help us manage our information.

It is a shift from the mindset of being librarians to that of being daytraders. In the PC era we were all focused on trying to manage the information on our computers -- we were acting as librarians. Filing things was a big hassle, and finding them was just as difficult. But today filing information is really not the problem: Google has made search so powerful and ubiquitous that many Web users don't bother to file anything anymore - instead they just search again when they need it. The librarian problem has been overcome by the brute force of Web-scale search. At least for now.

Instead we are now struggling to cope with a different problem - the problem of filtering for what is really important or relevant now and in the near-future. With limited time and attention, we have to be careful what we look for and what we pay attention to. This is the mindset of the daytrader. Bet wrong and you could end up wasting your precious resources, bet right and you could find the motherlode before the rest of the world and gain valuable advantages by being first. Daytraders are focused on discovering and keeping track of trends. It's a very different focus and activity from being a librarian, and it's what we are all moving towards.

The Webtop will be more social and will leverage and integrate collective intelligence

The Webtop is going to be more socially oriented than desktops of today -- it will have built-in messaging and social networking, as well as social-media sharing, collaborative filtering, discussions, and other community features.

The social dimension of our lives is becoming perhaps our most important source of information. We get information via email from friends, family and colleagues. We get information via social networks and social media sharing services. We co-create information with others in communities. And we team up with our communities to filter, rate and redistribute content.

The social dimension is also starting to play a more important role in our information management and discovery activities. Instead of those activities remaining as solitary, they are becoming more communal. For example many social bookmarking and social news sites use community sentiment and collaborative filtering to help to highlight what is most interesting, useful or important.

Sites such as Digg, Reddit, Mixx, Slashdot, Delicious, StumbleUpon, Twine, and many others, show that collective intelligence may be the most powerful way to help individuals and groups filter content and manage their attention more productively. The power of many trumps the power of one.

The desktop of the future is going to have powerful semantic search and social search capabilities built-in

Our evolving Webtop is going to have more powerful search built-in. It will of course provide best-of-breed keyword search capabilities, but this is just the beginning.

It will also combine social search and semantic search. On the social search dimension, users will be able to search their information and rank it via attributes of their social graph (for example, "find documents about x and rank them by how many of my friends liked them.")

Semantic search on the other hand will enable more granular search and navigation of information along a potentially open-ended networks of properties and relationships. For example you will be able to search in a highly structured way -- for example, search for products you once bookmarked that have a price of $10.95 and are on-sale this week. Or search for documents you read which were authored by Sue and related to project X, in the last month. The semantics of the future desktop will be open-ended. That is to say that users as well as other application and information providers will be able to extend it with custom schemas, new data types, and custom fields to any piece of information.

Interactive shared spaces will replace folders

Forget about shared folders -- that is an outmoded paradigm. Instead, the new metaphor will be interactive shared spaces. These shared spaces will be more like wikis than folders. They will be permission-based environments where one or many contributors can meet, interact synchronously or asynchronously, to work on information and other tasks together.

There are many kinds of shared spaces already in existence, including discussion forums, blogs, social network profiles, community sites, file sharing tools, conferencing tools, version control systems, and groupware. But as we move into Web 3.0 these will begin to converge. We will store information in them, we will work on information there, we will publish and distribute information through them, we will search across them, and we will interact with others around them.

Our next-generation shared spaces will be nestable and linkable like folders, but they will be far more powerful and dynamic, and they will be accessible via HTTP and other APIs such as SPARQL enabling data to be moved in and out of them easily by other applications around the Web.

Any group of two or more individuals will be able to participate in a shared space that will appear on their individual desktops, for a particular purpose. These new shared spaces will not only provide richer semantics in the underlying data, social network, and search, but they will also enable groups to seamlessly and collectively add, organize, track, manage, discuss, distribute, and search for information of mutual interest.

The Portable Desktop

The underlying data in the future desktop, and in all associated services it connects, will be represented using open-standard data formats. Not only will the data be open, but the semantics of the data - the schema that defines it - will also be defined in an open way. The value of open linked-data and open semantics is that data will not be held prisoner anywhere: it will be portable and will be easy to integrate with other data. The emerging Semantic Web and Data Portability initiatives provide a good set of open standards for enabling this to happen.

Due to open-standards and data-portability, your desktop and data will be free from "platform lock-in." This means that your Webtop might even be portable to a different competing Webtop provider someday. If and when that becomes possible, how will Webtop providers compete to add value?

The Smart Desktop

One of the most important aspects of the coming desktop is that it's going to be smart. It's going to have to be. Users simply cannot handle the complexity of their information landscapes anymore - they need help. There are a range of tasks that the desktop should automate for users including: organizing information, reminding users when necessary, resolving data conflicts, managing versioning, maintaining data quality, backing up data, prioritizing information, and gathering relevant information and suggesting it when appropriate.

Most other features of the future desktop will be commodities - but intelligence will still be difficult to provide, and so it will be the last remaining frontier in which competing Webtop providers will be able to differentiate their offerings.

The Webtop is going to learn and help you to be more productive. As you use it, it's going to adjust to your interests, relationships, current activities, information and preferences. It will adaptively self-organize to help you focus your attention on what is most important to whatever context you are in.

When reading something while you are taking a trip to Milan it may organize itself to be more contextually relevant to that time, place and context. When you later return home to San Francisco it will automatically adapt and shift to your home context. When you do a lot of searches about a certain product it will realize your context and intent has to do with that product and will adapt to help you with that activity for a while, until your behavior changes.

Your desktop will actually be a semantic knowledge base on the back-end. It will encode a rich semantic graph of your information, relationships, interests, behavior and preferences. You will be able to permit other applications to access part or all of your graph to datamine it and provide you with value-added views and even automated intelligent assistance.

For example, you might allow an agent that cross-links things to see all your data: it would go and add cross links to relevant things onto all the things you have created or collected. Another agent that makes personalized buying recommendations might only get to see your shopping history across all shopping sites you use.

Your desktop may also function as a simple personal assistant at times. You will be able to converse with your desktop eventually -- through a conversational agent interface. While on the road you will be able to email or SMS in questions to it and get back immediate intelligent answers. You will even be able to do this via a voice interface.

For example, you might ask, "where is my next meeting?" or "what Japanese restaurants do I like in LA?" or "What is Sue's Smith's phone number?" and you would get back answers. You could also command it to do things for you -- like reminding you to do something, or helping you keep track of an interest, or monitoring for something and alerting you when it happens.

Because your future desktop will connect all the relationships in your digital life -- relationships connecting people, information, behavior, preferences and applications -- it will be the ultimate place to learn about your interests and preferences.

Federated, open policies and permissions

This rich graph of meta-data that comprises your future desktop will enable the next-generation of smart services to learn about you and help you in an incredibly personalized manner. It will also of course be rife with potential for abuse and privacy will be a major function and concern.

One of the biggest enabling technologies that will be necessary is a federated model for sharing meta-data about policies and permissions on data. Information that is considered to be personal and private in Web site X should be recognized and treated as such by other applications and websites you choose to share that information with. This will require a way for sharing meta-data about your policies and permissions between different accounts and applications you use.

The semantic web provides a good infrastructure for building and deploying a decentralized framework for policy and privacy integration, but it has yet to be developed, let alone adopted. For the full vision of the future desktop to emerge a universally accepted standard for exchanging policy and permission data will be a necessary enabling technology.

The personal cloud

One way to think of the emerging Webtop is as your personal cloud. It will not just be a cloud of data, it will be a compute cloud as well. When you need to store or retrieve information it will provide that service. When you need to do computations, it will provide that to you as well. The cost of harnessing the capabilities of your cloud may be based on a monthly subscription or it may be metered, or it may be ad-supported.

Your personal cloud will have a center - provided by your main Webtop provider, where your address will live -- but most of its services will be distributed in other places, and even federated among other providers. Yet from an end-user perspective it will function as a seamlessly integrated service. You will be able to see and navigate all your information and applications, as if they were in one connected space, regardless of where they are actually hosted. You will be able to search your personal cloud from any point within it. It will look and feel like a single cohesive service.

The WebOS

No discussion of the future of the desktop would be complete without delving into the topic of the WebOS. The shift from desktop to Webtop - the move from a local desktop to a hosted desktop - is a necessary step towards the entire operating system moving to the Web as well. Many of the services that comprise an operating system are already available as Web services, but they are not yet integrated into a single cohesive WebOS. However it seems clear that the major players are aware of this opportunity and are positioning their services to capture it. Just as the desktop OS wars were won by capturing the "high ground" of the desktop, I would not be surprised if the same principle holds in the battle to own the WebOS. Whomever wins the Webtop will win the whole stack.

Who is most likely to own the future desktop?

When I think about what the future desktop is going to look like it seems to be a convergence of several different kinds of services that we currently view as separate.

It will be hosted on the cloud and accessible across all devices. It will place more emphasis on social interaction, social filtering, and collective intelligence. It will provide a very powerful and extensible data model with support for both unstructured and arbitrarily structured information. It will enable almost peer-to-peer like search federation, yet still have a unified home page and user-experience. It will be smart and personalized. It will be highly decentralized yet will manage identity, policies and permissions in an integrated cohesive and transparent manner across services.

By cobbling together a number of different services that exist today you could build something like this in a decentralized fashion. As various services integrate with each other it may simply emerge on its own. But is that how the desktop of the future will come about? Or will it be provided as a new application from one player - perhaps one with a lot of centralized market power and the ability to launch something like this on a massive scale? Or - just as with the previous desktop hits of the past, will it come from a little-known upstart with a disruptive technology? It's hard to predict, but one thing is certain: it is going to happen relatively soon and will be an interesting process to watch.

Image via Arnaldo Licea

Richard MacManus - NZ's most influential man online

2008-08-19T10:52:52Z

Shared by Andrew
Oh boy, I didn't know readwrite web was written barely 20km from where I am now.
Read Write Web is a cool source of good thoughts about the business.

No, it’s not Trade Me’s Sam Morgan. He’s probably our leading export in the online space and is highly regarded as far away as Silicon Valley, but you’ve probably never even heard of him. Tech blogger Richard MacManus talks to Georgina Bond about the success of ReadWriteWeb.

Professional blogging has an esoteric appeal many of us can only dream of. But few succeed in making a career out of it. So it’s almost exasperating to hear Richard MacManus put his meteoric rise in the blogosphere down to the basics: hard work, long hours and passion for his subject.
There must be more to it than that, but MacManus is level-headed about the success of his weblog ReadWriteWeb, ranked the world’s 9th most popular blog according to tracking website Technorati and the only New Zealand blog to be in its top 100.
“Obviously it’s fantastic to be ranked that high,” says MacManus. “It vindicates what the site has been about and we’re keen to crack into the top ten and keep up the growth.”
Launched in 2003, ReadWriteWeb is one of the most widely read and respected blog in the world, providing daily news, reviews and analysis on the latest technology.
To put its popularity into perspective, there are more than 50 million blogs at our fingertips. ReadWriteWeb attracts more than 1.6 million page views per month, and with an influential audience tracking the site — including high-level media executives from Google and Microsoft — it has the power to push new visitors in their tens of thousands to start-up sites around the world.
Its global reach can be traced back to MacManus’s Lower Hutt home, where he spends a good part of the day editing and managing the site in his pyjamas.

So web 2.0
Choice selection of writing talent has been one of the keys to the site’s success. MacManus and his team of five regular writers — all US-based web enthusiasts — are quick off the mark with their analysis of web tech developments, ranging from start-ups to industry giants such as Yahoo and Microsoft. This international perspective on technology is admired. MacManus says the analytical posts on products and trends, rather than industry news, are the point of difference from the competition.
MacManus studied commerce and English literature, so an IT-related career might be regarded as something of a surprise. But he ‘clicked’ with the web during the 1990s and it was while following internet trends as a website manager at Contact Energy in 2003 that he created ReadWriteWeb, maintaining it in the evenings.
“Initially I was just writing about web technology and linking to that space. There wasn’t a lot of money in blogging back then. When 2.0 tipped, things started to ramp up and suddenly — this is a media business.” The two-way interaction users have with the web in this post-dot-bomb era —with users contributing their own text, audio and video — is exemplified by websites such as Wikipedia, YouTube, MySpace and Trade Me.
MacManus learned to bootstrap his business from the moment it was profitable and he advises budding bloggers to do the same. But he says it’s easy to underestimate the effort to get the blog ramped up to begin with and the long hours that go into design, management and getting ads. “I wouldn’t recommend starting out with the mindset of cracking the top 100. It’s virtually impossible to do, it takes time and you’ve got to be very passionate about it to get any momentum to begin with. You’ve just got to do whatever it takes to keep the business growing and to get in people’s faces.”

Laser-focused
It took three years of hard slog before ReadWriteWeb could sustain MacManus full time. Now, advertising generates monthly revenue in the tens-of-thousands of US dollars, providing a profitable career.
The creation of two network blogs has also fuelled its expansion. Last100 provides news, reviews and industry analysis on products and services related to the digital lifestyle and Alt Search Engines is a definitive destination for everything related to alternative search engines. MacManus also produces ReadWriteTalk, a podcast about the people behind the web.
MacManus has remained laser-focused on web technology from day one and as the reputation of the blog continues to grow, his passion for this niche remains essential. “A lot of people are trying to make money from blogging, but they’re not really interested in the topic. That can be very hard.”
Being too focused on the home audience is another mistake Kiwi bloggers often make, he says, and this insular focus is evident in their blogs.
New Zealanders make up just 1 per cent of ReadWriteWeb readers. The blog’s focus has been global right from the start and it draws more than half of its readers come from the US and 7 per cent from the UK. To an extent, this has prevented networking with local IT companies and MacManus is now trying to get more involved; particularly in the IT cluster burgeoning in his own backyard in Wellington.
He hails the tremendous talent and innovation in the IT space in New Zealand, but thinks psychological barriers needs to be broken from some companies about reaching offshore markets using web technology, particularly the US.
“I don’t think New Zealanders think globally enough sometimes. The talent is here in New Zealand and time and culturally-wise, we’re not that much different from Silicon Valley. Maybe New Zealanders just need a bit of a push to think they can achieve over there in the US.”

MacManus went largely unnoticed at Webstock in Wellington this year, but his obscurity at home hasn’t bothered him. He’s keeping his mind open to exciting opportunities to push ReadWriteWeb further ahead of the competition. Two media companies are prospective buyers. He’s also exploring ways to fund the next stage of growth independently. Either way, he expects big changes by mid-year. “There’s plenty of scope for the brand to ramp up and expand into more vertical niches, such as mobile in Asia. Monetising by premium content is another option—a tricky thing to do in the blog world, but we’re looking at options.”
Much is possible with MacManus and, as with the internet, much is to be imagined. Whichever path he takes, MacManus still wants to be the one to take it to the next level. “I’m not finished yet, by a long shot.”

MacManus on Building a profitable weblog
•    Focus on a niche.
•    Blog every day.
•    Be passionate about your topic and become an expert.
•    Get other experts to blog for you.
•    Build a community around your blog.
•    Get involved in topic-focussed communities.
•    Reach out to others on the same subject.
•    Post on other related sites to build an online reputation.

How to increase your page views
•    The more you get, the more you can charge advertisers.
•    Link to others sites and get them to link back to yours.
•    Focus on what key words you can rank well in Google.
•    Post to top news aggregators and social sites such as Digg, Flash Dots, TechMe.

Tips for Kiwi Web 2.0 start ups
•    Think globally from day one; don’t limit yourself to the local audience.
•    Bootstrap and try to do as much as you can yourself early on.
•    Don’t give away a lot of your equity to an investor up front and there’s no need to staff up too quickly.
•    Don’t forget marketing basics: identify your target audience and your value proposition to them.
•    Avoid “me too” — too many start ups want to be the next MySpace or YouTube.

Richard MacManus - NZ's most influential man online

2008-08-19T10:52:45Z

Shared by Andrew
Oh boy, I didn't know readwrite web was written barely 20km from where I am now.
Read Write Web is a cool source of good thoughts about the business.

Mapping the social media landscape - a guide for understanding

2008-08-19T01:15:00Z

It can be very daunting for communications professionals to build an understanding of the social media landscape, grasping its scope and diversity and use this knowledge to select the right tools to meet their communications needs.

On occasion I've spoken to other marketers and PR professionals who have said that the sheer diversity and complexity of the social media landscape makes it easier to simply avoid the area, rather than spend the time necessary to make good decisions.

Increasingly organisations will need to take their first steps into this area - social media is in widespread use by internet users and they are talking about you.

The first step to understanding any landscape is to map it - fortunately there have been a few efforts in this regard already.

Possibly the first consolidated attempt was by Robert Scoble, who published the Social Media Starfish last year.

Pictured below, the Starfish provides one way to visualise the different categories of interactions and capabilities of the different social media tools.

A video explanation of the Starfish is also available as below.

A second approach, released more recently, is the Conversation Prism, pictured below.

This was released by Brian Solis, principal of Future Works and author of PR 2.0.

In a report in ZDNet, Brian describes the Conversation Prism as a tool that "helps chart online conversations between the people that populate communities as well as the networks that connect the Social Web." The article, ‘Conversation Prism’ helps corporations visualize social media strategies, provides a good overview of how the tool works.

Of course these maps are only a start. The social media environment is evolving as technology improves and smart people come up with new ways to facilitate human interactions via digital channels.

However now that we do have these maps, we can begin to understand the social media landscape in more detail, and apply the right tools for our communications needs.

eGov AU

eGovernment thoughts and speculations from an Australian perspective

Slingshot caching private pages!

2008-08-18T01:33:19Z

Shared by MiramarMike
Wholly crap - what muppets!

Update: Our ISP Slingshot is caching private Gmail, Trademe, Facebook and Digg pages!!! I - and others on Slingshot - can see other people’s account info! We have had caching issues with them before, but never on private pages and this is RIDICULOUS! We rang Slingshot this afternoon and they admitted the problem!!!

Click to enlarge screenshots (blurred partially to protect privacy of other people’s accounts):

Three different Gmail accounts:

Three different Facebook accounts:

Trademe account:

Posted earlier:

This afternoon I tried logging into Gmail as I usually do to check my email and discovered that I was logged into someone else’s account! I got a real shock and tried a few more times, the same thing happened again.

I then tried using a different browser (IE7 instead of Firefox 2) and this time when I logged in I saw a different person’s Gmail account! In both cases I get a pop-up window appearing saying the following:

You have been signed out of this account.

This may have happened automatically because another user signed in from the same browser. To continue using this account, you will need to sign in again. This is done to protect your account and to ensure the privacy of your information.

What was interesting is that the email accounts all look to be those of other New Zealanders as there are TradeMe emails in both (New Zealand’s version of Ebay).

As of now I still can’t access my Gmail account and am seriously concerned about what is going on.

Slingshot caching private pages!

2008-08-18T01:15:20Z

Shared by Andrew
Arrggghhhh no!!!!!
This is probably the reason I had problems signing into Gmail last night, google is probably trying to fix things.

Click to enlarge screenshots (blurred partially to protect privacy of other people’s accounts):

Three different Gmail accounts:

Three different Facebook accounts:

Trademe account:

Posted earlier:

What was interesting is that the email accounts all look to be those of other New Zealanders as there are TradeMe emails in both (New Zealand’s version of Ebay).

As of now I still can’t access my Gmail account and am seriously concerned about what is going on.

What is a Virtual World?

2008-08-16T18:43:54Z

Which reminds me…

I got an email the other day that asked me if my comments in a recent interview indicated that Microsoft "was going to get into Virtual Worlds in a big way."

I was somewhat taken aback, to be honest. Not to be overly ego-centric on behalf of my new employer, but by my standards, Microsoft is into Virtual Worlds in a big way already — consider Virtual Earth (mirror world), Halo 3 (multi-user worlds, with very good machinima/storytelling capabilities), and even MSN Messenger’s video chat (2D telepresence) as examples of virtual worlds.

You can argue if "big" means "everywhere" or what sort of ultimate market share or technology it implies. But I don’t see any timid offerings in the lot.

Now, if the question was assuming virtual worlds are defined as 3D Avatar Chatters, then look back about 10 years to the work Linda Stone’s team did at Microsoft (she’s also the one who defined "continuous partial attention"). Did it hit the big time? Was it better then modern offerings? No, IMO. But companies might still learn something very valuable from that experiment.

I mean, even if 3D is richer and more ubiquitous today; even if the browser-embedded approach makes it a little easier for people to adopt, there’s still a fundamental question of "what is 3D good (and better) for and why?"

And that’s the question I think everyone in the industry should be asking themselves on a daily basis. I know I spend a part of each day thinking about just that.

But, just in case it helps people, here are a few bits of tech jargon I’ll be promoting around town:

Virtual Worlds are a general human-to-human (or even human-to-computer-to-human) communications concept. Although we identify things like Second Life and Lively as "Virtual Worlds," the terms is much broader. Common traits may include a sense of place/spatiality, presence/immersion, identity (not always your own), etc..

Common categories of VWs include:

Social Worlds	generally speaking, includes chat & IM, networking tools, and sometimes home spaces, from Habbo to IMVU to Lively
Narrative Worlds	most 3D games fall into this category, even those with very weak plots or backstory. The point is to tell a participant: "there’s this world, and these things happen. Now go be in it."
Creative Worlds	add User Created Content and building tools to the mix — think Second Life, Lego, Roblox, but include any 3D game with a user-friendly, preferably in-world editor.
Productive Worlds	meant to improve "process," "context," and "productivity" through the use of computer-mediated communication. Often called "serious" worlds to distinguish them from "fun." But who wants their work to be un-fun?
Mirror Worlds	as in, "reflecting the real world" — includes Google Earth, Virtual Earth, etc..
Augmented Worlds	sensory additions, based on the real world, but adding magic.

Obviously, any Virtual Worlds technology can address more than one category. A "Metaverse" typically implies at least two of those together (usually social + creative). But thus far, most offerings have their one big dominant trait with other features much less so.

‟most of the media here are foreign-owned”

2008-08-17T13:19:00Z

In the reply to a comment on his new blog, Winston Peters highlights that media corporations have aims that conflict with informing the public:

Winston says: “You raise some interesting points. One of the problems is that most of the media here are foreign-owned. That means their profits are sent overseas and they cut costs to achieve maximum returns. Informing the people is not a high priority. … Media accountability is non-existent in this country. …”

The news media have a powerful voice in society. Presently that voice is too often manipulated to promote political agendas at the detriment of informing the public. For example, the news media propagated a pejorative re-naming of the Crimes (Substituted Section 59) Amendment Bill. By labelling it the “Anti-Smacking” bill, the news media favoured the position of those in opposition to the bill. Imagine how the emphasis of the debate would have changed if they had labelled it something like the “Prevention of Violence to Children” bill.

Last year, the New Zealand Herald ran a vigorous campaign against the passing of the Electoral Finance Bill. To achieve their aims the NZ Herald mis-stated facts in order to promote public opposition to the bill. In April this year, the Press Council ruled the Herald’s front-page editorial last year contained a “mis-statement of fact”, which the paper should have promptly corrected. Ironically, despite all its rabble-rousing of opposition to the bill, the Herald itself failed to make a submission on the bill to the Justice and Electoral Committee.

A top priority of TheyWorkForYou.co.nz is to inform the people of New Zealand. At present I’m brainstorming new ideas for how to do that in a better way leading up to the election. If you have ideas you’d like to share, please drop me a line:

Lessons on Blogging from Jon Stewart

2008-08-17T16:09:15Z

The New York Times today has a fascinating profile of Jon Stewart, host of The Daily Show, entitled Is This The Most Trusted Man in America? The article is a wonderful celebration of the person and the spirit of the show he's created.

But perhaps more interestingly in the internet context, this article is a must-read for anyone who cares about the future of journalism. It shows how the informality and attitude that we take as characteristic of blogging can be combined with the tough-mindedness, research, and craft that is displayed by the best investigative reporters.

Let's start with passion about stuff that matters, something top bloggers and top journalists ought to have in their genes:

MR. STEWART describes his job as “throwing spitballs” from the back of the room and points out that “The Daily Show” mandate is to entertain, not inform. Still, he and his writers have energetically tackled the big issues of the day — “the stuff we find most interesting,” as he said in an interview at the show’s Midtown Manhattan offices, the stuff that gives them the most “agita,” the sometimes somber stories he refers to as his “morning cup of sadness.” And they’ve done so in ways that straight news programs cannot: speaking truth to power in blunt, sometimes profane language, while using satire and playful looniness to ensure that their political analysis never becomes solemn or pretentious.
“Hopefully the process is to spot things that would be grist for the funny mill,” Mr. Stewart, 45, said. “In some respects, the heavier subjects are the ones that are most loaded with opportunity because they have the most — you know, the difference between potential and kinetic energy? — they have the most potential energy, so to delve into that gives you the largest combustion, the most interest. I don’t mean for the audience. I mean for us. Everyone here is working too hard to do stuff we don’t care about.”

Much like blogging, a key to the show's success is its authentic, personal voice, and its ability to synthesize news with viewpoint:

Ms. Corn [the show's executive co-producer] noted that while things “may be exaggerated on the show, it’s grounded in the way Jon really feels.”
“He really does care,” she added. “He’s a guy who says what he means.”
Unlike many comics today, Mr. Stewart does not trade in trendy hipsterism or high-decibel narcissism. While he possesses Johnny Carson’s talent for listening and George Carlin’s gift for observation, his comedy remains rooted in his informed reactions to what Tom Wolfe once called “the irresistibly lurid carnival of American life,” the weird happenings in “this wild, bizarre, unpredictable, hog-stomping Baroque” country.
“Jon’s ability to consume and process information is invaluable,” said Mr. Colbert. He added that Mr. Stewart is “such a clear thinker” that he’s able to take “all these data points of spin and transparent falsehoods dished out in the form of political discourse” and “fish from that what is the true meaning, what are red herrings, false leads,” even as he performs the ambidextrous feat of “making jokes about it” at the same time.

But there's also a lesson for bloggers that the show, however personal, is finely honed, with lots of research:

“We often discuss satire — the sort of thing he does and to a certain extent I do — as distillery,” Mr. Colbert continued. “You have an enormous amount of material, and you have to distill it to a syrup by the end of the day. So much of it is a hewing process, chipping away at things that aren’t the point or aren’t the story or aren’t the intention. Really it’s that last couple of drops you’re distilling that makes all the difference. It isn’t that hard to get a ton of corn into a gallon of sour mash, but to get that gallon of sour mash down to that one shot of pure whiskey takes patience” as well as “discipline and focus.”

And:

The day begins with a morning meeting where material harvested from 15 TiVos and even more newspapers, magazines and Web sites is reviewed. That meeting, Mr. Stewart said, “would be very unpleasant for most people to watch: it’s really a gathering of curmudgeons expressing frustration and upset, and the rest of the day is spent trying to mask or repress that through whatever creative devices we can find.”
The writers work throughout the morning on deadline pieces spawned by breaking news, as well as longer-term projects, trying to find, as Josh Lieb, a co-executive producer of the show, put it, stories that “make us angry in a whole new way.” By lunchtime, Mr. Stewart (who functions as the show’s managing editor and says he thinks of hosting as almost an afterthought) has begun reviewing headline jokes. By 3 p.m. a script is in; at 4:15, Mr. Stewart and the crew rehearse that script, along with assembled graphics, sound bites and montages. There is an hour or so for rewrites — which can be intense, newspaper-deadlinelike affairs — before a 6 o’clock taping with a live studio audience.
What the staff is always looking for, Mr. Stewart said, are “those types of stories that can, almost like the guy in ‘The Green Mile’ ” — the Stephen King story and film in which a character has the apparent ability to heal others by drawing out their ailments and pain — “suck in all the toxins and allow you to do something with it that is palatable.”

What a call to action! What a way forward for all of those trying to understand the future of news! Point of view fused with fact checking, bluntness and informality fused with ruthless editing, a humanistic vision that acts as a filter to make sure that the stories covered actually matter!