innovation in the wild, wild web
DESCRIPTION
This is a talk I gave on April 23rd at the WWW 2009 Conference in Madrid, Spain. I talked about innovation in the wild, that I have tended to look for and follow enthusiasts involved in technology. Enthusiasm is a quality I seem to recognize in others, perhaps because I see it in myself and in O'Reilly (both the company and Tim.)TRANSCRIPT
INNOVATION IN THE WILD, WILD WEB
GEEKS, ENTHUSIASTS, AMATEURS, PIONEERS, SCOUTS, SAVANTS, SEERS, PROPHETS,
FORECASTERS, HOBBIESTS, EXPLORERS, SCAVENGERS, COLLECTORS, MAKERS, EVEN
ARTISTS.
Who Are These Innovatorsin the Wild?
A WILD-EYED ENTHUSIASTTIM BERNERS-LEE
User Manuals
“Users of products and servicesare increasingly able to innovate for themselves.”
“Users do not have to develop everything they need on their own: they can benefit frominnovations developed and freely shared by others.”
“Users benefit directly from their innovations.”
Things Change By The Way They Are Used
Things Change By The Way They Are Used
Systems and devices should be designed so that users can change them.
Tools for Users
When the Multics system is shutdown, this group of researchers at BellLabs, against management’s wishes, begin writing their own operating system for their own use. The work began after they’d written the game “Space Travel.”
SHARING TOOLS, SHARING WORK
“What we wanted to preserve was not just a good environment in which to do programming, but a system around which a fellowship could form. We knew from experience that the essence of communal computing, as supplied by remote-access, time-shared machines, is not just to type programs into a terminal instead of a keypunch, but to encourage close communication”
http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/hist.html
HYPERCARD
Pei Wei
OPEN INNOVATION
LARRY WALLFATHER OF PERL, ENTHUSIAST
PERL CONFERENCE 1997
Andrew Schulman gave a talk “The Web as an API”
Every UPS package has its own homepage on the Web.
He talked about “how complex URLs can be used to cause programs to run on another machine and produce large ranges of data.”
“Distributed Computation in the Guise of Hypertext!”
http://www.sonic.net/~undoc/perl/talk/webapi1.html
OPEN SOURCE
Tim O’Reilly organized a summit around Open Source in April,1998, bringing together leaders of many open source projects.
The infrastructure of the Internet was built on open source and continues to be developed as open source software.
WEB AS AN OS PLATFORM
The Web as an Open Source Platform
Blogs, Flickr, and RSS
Small teams were creating cool applications
WEB 2.0A new generation of applications built on the Web
A new group of enthusiasts
EVAN WILLIAMS
Twitter is an open API
A Messaging platform for all kinds of devices
THE WEB MEETS THE WORLD OF THINGS
HACKS
Hacks are clever solutions to interesting problems.
Peter Samson of MIT and the Tech Model Railroad Club in 1960’s
“[He] had grown up with a specific relationship to the world, wherein things had meaning only if you found out how they worked. And how would you go about that if not by getting your hands on them?”
The First Hacker
from Steven Levy’s Hackers
HACKERS SHOULD BE J U D G E D B Y T H E I R HACKING, NOT BOGUS C R I T E R I A S U C H A S DEGREES, AGE, RACE, OR POSITION.
from Steven Levy’s Hackers
The Hacker Ethic
“I just loved going down to the Homebrew Computer Club, showing off my ideas and designing neat computers. I was willing to do that for free for the rest of my life.”
Steve Wozniak
“I’m not exactly sure why so many people are here. A lot of them are just curious about what’s going on.”
A DIY Tradition
MAKE IS WHERE
HACKING MEETS
TINKERING.
Makers are wild-eyedenthusiasts.
Send a Camcorder Up in a Model Rocket
ARDUINO
OPEN SOURCE HARDWARE PLATFORM
Phil Torrone, Enthusiast
