It's the only way to be.

The New Wisdom of the Web

Newsweek's article "The New Wisdom of the Web".

The massive success of MySpace and the exemplary strategy of Flickr are milestones in a newhigh-tech wave reminiscent of the craziness of the early dot-com days. This rebooting oweseverything to the enhanced power and pervasiveness of the Web, which has finally matured to thepoint where it can fulfill some of the outlandish promises that we heard in the '90s. The generic termfor this movement, especially among the hundreds of new companies jamming the waiting rooms ofventure-capital offices, is Web 2.0, but that's misleading-some supposedly Web 1.0 companies likeand Google have been clueful about this all along. A more fitting description comes from MaryHodder, the CEO of a social-video-sharing start-up called Dabble. (Since Dabble has not yet launched, I can't explain exactly what that means.) "This is the live Web," she says.

My Impressions of YAPC::Asia 2006 in Tokyo

I found a summary report of YAPC::Asia.
http://perlmonks.org/index.pl?node_id=540854

O'Reilly and Japanese companies including Hatena.ne.jp (a blog site) and Mixi.jp (a social networkingsite), Yahoo! Japan, Six Apart, Cybozu Labs (business software) and Brazil (razil.jp, they make opensource software including the full text search engine Senna and the web crawler Xango, and search bigchat sites) were sponsors.

O'Reilly and many Japanese companies sponsored the Conference.

One interesting thing was that the sponsors were also developers and very approachable, and they are both good-sized services that use Perl. Also there were a bunch of Livedoor people there, Livedoor is a big portal site and also infamous for its currently imprisoned management. In particular I was happy to see Catalyst being used heavily (I think it was in Hatena?) and with additional modules developed for it. My only problem was that since I shuttled between that talk (Catalyst Everywhere, IIRC) and Ingy's "Wikiwyg" talk, so I probably missed the best parts of both.

Sponsors were also developers and provide good services using Perl.

So YAPC had some of the same people there I'm sure, and indeed with Ruby coming from Japan it wasmentioned prominently by a number of speakers, including Larry who said that Ruby took the bestfrom Perl5 and now Perl6 was taking the best from Ruby and then some.  Also interesting was Larry'ssummarization of many languages in a single sentence expressing an idiosyncracy of each language'sdesigner and how the language makes you think.  So while Prolog was "Everything is a theory", andwas IIRC "TMTOWTDI", Python was  IIRC "There is only one way to do it, our way."  I guess thereis a good deal of rivalry with the Python camp still.

Other light weight languages people were also there. Many people told about Ruby (from Japan).

I didn't know there wouldn't be simultaneous translation (no budget) but would have volunteered if I'dknown, however between the subtitles and lots of bilingual people I think everybody came awaysatisfied with the enthusiasm and information exchange.

No simultaneous translation, but satisfied with the enthusiasm and information exchange.

Now I know what the fervor about YAPC is all about, and I'm glad I finally got a chance to meet Larryand Damian and say "Thank You".  I also got a chance to meet some great people on the Japan side, both Japanese and foreigners (including a programmer at NTT and another at a securities firm), andam sure this will make developing in Perl a lot more fun for me in the future too.

I feel envious that he could say "Thank You".

Creating a Gem of a Career

Today, I'll introduce Fast Company's Creating a Gem of a Career.

The ensuing 10 years have seen everything from the rise of online job boards to the Brand Called You, the birth of blogs to offshoring. All of these developments have had a significant impact on the way wemanage our careers--and the next 10 years promise to be just as dramatic. A number of technologicaland demographic trends still in their infancy will shape the way you develop and guide your professionallife in the decade to come. Here's how to ride those waves.

How can we survive next 10 years.

Now even an average student who doesn't think much about networking in the traditional sense willalready have dozens of "friends" in his or her Facebook network (an online directory for college andhigh-school students and alumni) before leaving campus.

Facebook is a SNS service that many students in school use.

"We are amazed by the sheer number of grads staying connected to others today," says Christopher Morris, the director of MBA career management at the Wharton School.

How many years has it passed?

The result? People are entering the workforce with hundreds of contacts--and they're eager and readyto deploy them.

It's awful fact indeed.

"They're far more open about discussing their private lives, from what they did at that party thisweekend to salary information about their jobs," says Morris.

The only option, predicts Masie, will be a "high level of honesty and transparency" and theincorporation of rewards for those employees who use their networks on the company's behalf.

I think so too.

Your network may make companies transparent to you, but you're transparent to employers as well. Anything online, whether easily available or tucked away in a private network, is fair game. "It's a bigproblem when someone's Facebook profile says that her favorite thing is to get s--tfaced on aSaturday night," says Masie. "Google is the first stop for finding info [on potential hires], thenFacebook," he says. So there may be a number of versions of "you" being projected into the world. Not all of them will necessarily be what you want an employer to see. Can you control that? If not, canyou live with it?

As the next problem, employers can see information. Employees shold control their infos.

"We've got 70 million people identified," says ZoomInfo founder and CEO Jonathan Stern. "We're ableto create power searches to find people with specific certifications, who have worked at specificplaces, or have specific affiliations." Stern calls it "comparison shopping" for the kinds of peoplecompanies would like to hire.

ZoomInfo gathered information of 70 million people.
We can fine many people by ZoomInfo.

First Screen Shots of Riya

Now we can finaly use Piya.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2005/10/26/riya-prepares-to-launch-alpha/

Riya (formerly Ojos) will be opening its doors to 10 or so lucky alpha testers tomorrow morning.

Now we can register the site, and start to use.

That’s when the fun starts. In my case about 400 pictures were uploaded. I was presented with aview of facial thumbnails of everyone in my photos. Riya asks that you begin to educate it by tellingit who the people are…it then very quickly starts to auto-tag pictures with a surprising level ofaccuracy.

 

The accuracy level is very high. I'll try it today.

Riya also recognizes text in photos, and lets you select any area of a photo and tag that as well. For instance, you could select just the Eiffel Tower in a photo and tag it as such. Within moments, everything of importance in all of my photos was tagged. And more importantly, it was searchable.

Riya also recognizes text in photos. We can search photos by tags.

Riya is going to be successful. They have real technology. And, as people use it to tag photos, Riyawill create a database of unique attributes of people. Once enough people start using the service, Riya will be able to auto-tag people’s names with less and less training by the user. At that point, why would anyone try a competing service? Riya will have technology (protected by patents) and anincredible network effect as well.

 

Riya has patents and network effect. It's really competitive.

In fact, Riya could become so ubiquitous as to actually cause real privacy concerns. One question Iasked the team today was - “what if you get so much data on people that I could take a picture of acrowd, upload it to Riya, and instantly have the names of every single person in the crowd?” Apparently, their technology is not that powerful - yet. Riya’s ability to know who’s in a photo islargely based on who you are and the people you are connected to.

   

It seems to have privacy problems, indeed. But it's very interesting and significant technology. It'll be successful.

Google's Schmidt Clears The Air

Google's CEO, Eric Schmidt held a lunch with many journalists.
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,1939258,00.asp

Schmidt said he was in New York to sign the previously announced deal with Time Warner and to reviewthe company's operations in the city, which has grown to include about 500 employees.

Employees in New York are now 500 people!

He said the decision of how to act in China was "one of the most controversial decisions the companyhas ever made," and it took over a year of internal arguments before the company came out with itspolicies. "It is a hard call, but it is a clear call" to do business in China, he said, and do as theChinese government requires it to.

It was most controversial dicisions that ever made. But its call is clear now.
I think that it was a arguments between "suits" and "geeks", wasn't it? It's good choice to enhance business in China, but it's not Google. It shold be free, not censered.

Overall, Schmidt said, he expects advertising will be the growth engine of Google for a very long time, but not just text ads, also display ads, adding that the main Google.com search pages wouldremain with just text ads. Overall he said the ad market is at least half a trillion dollars in revenue, so Google has a lot of growth potential.

Advertising will be the growth engine of Google for a very long time.

I asked if customers understood how Google was targeting advertisements, and Schmidt respondedthat they don't understand it very well. "We try as hard as we can to disclose it," he said, but that'swhy issues of trust are so important, he said – they need to trust that the information won't be abusedby Google or by governments.

Google will increase the types of ads and personalize ads. To disclose information behind the results or not is difficult problem.

Already, he said, video sites like video.google.com are growing very fast and are in a  constant stateof overload.  But, he said, "The next 6 months is when video really takes off."

He said he didn't know whether the biggest market for video would be free videos with ads, videos for sale, or a hybrid model.  "One of the things about the Internet is that every experiment is tried," he said.

Video will really takes off in the next 6 month. I agree with that market in video(TV) ads is very big. But isn't it also the dicision of "suits"? Do geeks in Google want to do that with their own heart?

But he did say he saw Microsoft and not Yahoo as the long-term primary competitor, because of itsmoney in the bank and history.  However, Schmidt was quick to say that the acquisition of Writelywas not meant to create a competitor to Microsoft Office, which he said solves a complicated andimportant problem of work productivity. Writely is a server-based editing system where you canmove your files around, he said, and there are places where a rich text editor is useful in Google. 

"Office is not the business we're in," Schmidt said, saying the company wanted to do new things.

It was not for entering Office market to acquire Writely. They will do new thing. What's that?

Schmidt said he saw Writely and other server-based tools  as another way to collect and organize the world's data. "All the world's information includes personal information," he noted.

But Schmidt also said the company can't possibly be doing all the things that people say it is working on. "We're not really that exciting," he said.

But he also noted that the company's image also gives it a certain aura within the technology industry. "The mystique works in our benefit," he said. "It's an engineering recruitment tool."

They may gather all information from Google Desktop and make them searchable, and they'll need office software. Is it the answer?

Finally, Schmidt addressed the topic of Google Base, which has been rumored as a potential eBay competitor. Schmidt called that concern an overstated one, and he said Base is instead just a database of structured information, which is easier to index and rank than regular web pages. Most Google Base information points to eBay or similar sites, he added.

It was overstated that Google Base will be a potential eBay competitor.

What's the Biggest Change Facing Business In the Next 10 Years?

It's 10th anniversary of "Fast Company". Now we can read many special featured articles.

What's the Biggest Change Facing Business In the Next 10 Years? is a article that interviews many significant readers about next 10 years.

Esther Dyson says,

When a company messes up, it will be very visible. People will blog about it, review it, and expose acompany's flaws and pitfalls. Businesses will have to respond to this increased transparency by hiringand retaining better people. And in any case, we'll see a new wave of smaller companies focused onspecific needs, in part because they can outsource or partner for the commodity part of theiroperations or offerings.

   

Because of online world, it'll be very visible, transparency.

Empowered people are going to begin to realize this. When they walk into a Wal-Mart, they're goingto want to know how a product was made and under what conditions. They will assume they have theright to ask because they can do so on the Web. And over time, people will start to expect that sameresponsiveness from all institutions, not just from online businesses. What kind of tax breaks on real estate are my elected officials getting--and why? And why isn't my hospital as responsive as a hotel?

   

People will ask manythings to many real comapanies like online companies.

What does all this say about individual responsibility? If people control their own lives, then they areresponsible for those lives. They can't simply complain about things being bad. In a world of choices, your responsibility does not end with complaining."

What's the next of "just complaining". Suggeting idea? Pointing out errors?

Tim Brown says,

The implication for designers is that their responsibilities are broadening. In general, designers havethought of themselves as representing the point of view of the user, the consumer. In the future, they're going to have to be much more sophisticated when they're conceiving new ideas, and think about how they're going to speak to the market and how those ideas are going to contribute tomarketing rather than just sending it down the line.

Designers become more important.

 

YAPC::Asia 2006

YAPC::Asia will held in next week at Tokyo, Japan. Yesterday, speakers were listed on the site. Let's look into the members.

Audrey Tang

Audrey Tang (Traditional chinese: 唐鳳) is a Taiwanese free software programmer, best known forinitiating and leading the Pugs project, a joint effort from Haskell and Perl communities to implementthe Perl 6 language.

Pugs project and implementation on Perl 6.

On CPAN, Tang maintains over 100 Perl projects, including the popular Perl Archive Toolkit (PAR), a cross-platform packaging and deployment tool for Perl 5. She is also responsible for setting up smoke test and digital signature systems for CPAN.

Over 100 projects on CPAN.

Being a high school dropout, Tang is a vocal proponent for autodidactism and individualist anarchism.

Vocal proponent for autodidactism and individualist anarchism.

            

• Introduction to Pugs
• Learning Haskell

       

Introduction to Pugs

Started in February 2005, Pugs is an implementation of the Perl 6 language that contains an interpreter based on Haskell and a compiler that targets multiple backends, including Parrot and Haskell. In this talk, Pugs author Audrey Tang presents the design of Pugs and the current state of the project. This talk also covers ways to put Pugs to immediate practical use and the roadmap for future development of Pugs and Perl 6.

I've already heard of the implementation, but I didn't know that she is a woman.

Chia-liang Kao

Chia-liang Kao used to live in the mountains in Taiwan and travels around the world to motivate himself to write svk that allows working offline. He now lives in London and works for Fotango.

Oh, he is like a hsien.

            

• Marrying perl with other languages
• SVK: Version Control without the Headaches

       

Damian Conway

Dr Damian Conway is a professional Perl sensei.

A well-known member of the international Perl community and a widely sought-after speaker and trainer, Damian is also the author of numerous popular CPAN modules, a member of the technical committee for The Perl Conference, a keynote speaker at many Open Source conferences, a former columnist for "The Perl Journal", the author of the books "Object Oriented Perl" (Manning 2000) and "Perl Best Practices" (O'Reilly 2005), and a co-author of "Perl Hacks" (O'Reilly 2006). In 2001 Damian received the first "Perl Foundation Development Grant" and spent 20 months working on projects for the betterment of the world-wide Perl community.

What's "sensei"? Is it Japanese? He wrote many perl books and is a authority or Perl.

Most of his spare time is spent working with Larry Wall on the design of the new Perl 6 programming language.

He settled an IT training company, and designs Perl 6 with Larry.

            

• Perl Best Practices
• Perl 6 Update
• Sufficiently Advanced Technologies

Dave Rolsky

       

Dave Rolsky has worked as a Perl developer since the end of 1998. Currently he is employed bySocialtext, Inc. developing their enterprise wiki application. He has contributed to a number of free software projects including Mason, and co-wrote Embedding Perl in HTML with Mason for O'Reilly, published in 2002.

Mason author.

Ingy döt Net

Ingy döt Net  is the Spiffy Perl Hacker who brought you Inline, YAML,  Kwiki, Spork and other ridiculoustop level namespaces. Lately he has been doing way too much Javascript. He is currently employed bySocialtext who lets him live anywhere in the world, which is exactly where he resides.

Dave and Ingy also employed by Socialtext. Isn't it a interesting company?

Jesse Vincent

Why he spends an awful lot of time on airplanes?

Kang-min Liu

garagebands? coffee machines?

Larry Wall

Writer, Author and Creator of Perl.

Introduction is too simple.

Leon Brocard

An eurohacker .

Marty Pauley

He is from 火星?

We can meet with many lovable geeks next week.

Open, but not as usual 2

Today is the continuance of the last day's "Open, but not as usual".
http://www.economist.com/business/displaystory.cfm?story_id=5624944

Traditional profit-seeking firms cannot usually rely on their customers to play an active role in theirproduct development. In fact, they often strongly resist any such interference. For decades softwarewas “proprietary”, because secret code could not be copied or used without payment. Moreover, theclosed approach is seen as a way to prevent exposing possible security flaws. By contrast, opensource encourages sharing, and its greater scrutiny may translate into cleaner code. As a cherishedopen-source adage has it: “Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.”

There are 500,000 people who download test version codes, and one-fifth of them report plobrems. Proprietary company can't do that.

“These are not anarchistic things when you look at successful open-source projects—there is realstructure, real checks and balances, and real leadership taking place,” explains Josh Lerner, aprofessor at Harvard Business School.

Succeccful open source projects always have structure, checks and balances, and real leadership.

For example, making the code open encourages a group of users (who may one day become payingcustomers) to become familiar with it. This creates a talent pool that the firm can draw upon forfuture employees. Companies developing software products that work with MySQL are potentialacquisitions.

Free riders are also worthful for MySQL. They may become future employees or customers.

As problems of vandalism, prejudice and inaccuracy ensued, Mr Wales was reluctant to clamp down. In the end, he had to. The site has set down policies to mediate debates; it has banishedunco-operative contributors; it locked down entries that were frequently vandalised (such as one onGeorge Bush)—changes come only from contributors who are designated as leaders on the strength oftheir work. A blunt new policy was promulgated: “Don't be a dick.” And after the furore over thebiographical entry last year, Wikipedia changed its rules so that only registered users can editexisting entries, and new contributors must wait a few days before they can start new ones.

As the second example, Wikipedia is introduced. The number of articles and contributers in Wikipedia is growing up. But many problems have occured, and rules have changed.

There are two doubts about its staying power. The first is how innovative it can remain in the long run. Indeed, open source might already have reached a self-limiting state,

Forms in open source projects are hierarchical than ordinary company. It's like Darwinian meritocracy not like a democracy. There're 2 doubts.

“Linux is good at doing what other things already have done, but more cheaply—but can it doanything new? Wikipedia is an assembly of already-known knowledge,” he says.

Can open source do anything new?

The second doubt is whether the motivation of contributors can be sustained.

But the benefit of open-source approaches is that they can tap into a far larger pool of resourcesessentially at no cost. Once the early successes are established, it is not clear that the projects canmaintain their momentum,

After successes, what maintains their motivation? It's interesting question.

For example, Toyota has organised its teams in ways that stress the same sort of decentralisation, flexibility and autonomy that exist in the Linux community, according to Philip Evans and Bob Wolf ofthe Boston Consulting Group in an article in the Harvard Business Review last July. As such, conventional companies would do well to embrace the work-style, the authors note, such as sharingknowledge widely, establishing reputation systems, and creating a community in which people workfor peer recognition as much as remuneration.

Toyota adopted open-source like process. I read the article about a fire in Aishin-Seiki. But is it like open-source?

But it's sure that many company should adopt the process to battle with open projects.

Open, but not as usual

Today, I'll introduce the article of Economist.com "Open, but not as usual".

As “open-source” models move beyond software into other businesses, their limitations are becoming apparent

Apache, Wikipedia and developing drugs projects are introduced.

Though these might not contain any software “source code”, the “open-source” label can now applymore broadly to all sorts of endeavour that amalgamate the contributions of private individuals tocreate something that, in effect, becomes freely available to all.

 

"Open-source" label is used in many products which don't have any source code.

But the biggest worry is that the great benefit of the open-source approach is also its great undoing. Its advantage is that anyone can contribute

The great benefit and undoing of open-source is that anyone can contribute.

With software, for instance, the code is written chiefly not by volunteers, but by employeessponsored for their efforts by companies that think they will in some way benefit from the project.

The code is mainly written by employees not volunteers.

Of the roughly 130,000 open-source projects on SourceForge.net, an online hub for open-sourcesoftware projects, only a few hundred are active, and fewer still will ever lead to a useful product. The most important thing holding back the open-source model, apparently, is itself.

There are 130,000 projects on SourceForge, but only a few hundred are active, and fewer useful product.

It'll be continued..

Open

I decided to write blog everyday. Today is the first day.