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Meet
"Mike": |
Your Personal Web Site (PWS) |
Why do we need personal web sites?
As intellectuals, we have a valuable and perishable resource- our minds and our
individual knowledge and experience. We invest a great deal of resources in
training ourselves, learning our professions and practicing what we have
learned. We learn by doing and we learn by failing too- we learn from
experience and sometimes we learn more from our failures than we do from our
successes.
The concept of a PWS is that if we host our
personal intellectual property (IP) on our PWSs and develop it in a rigorous
manner over our entire careers; we have a way of preserving and sharing our
expertise with others that has never been available to any generation that has
gone before.
MIT has taken the position that it will put
all of its course outlines, course materials, even examinations on the web for
free. The engineers at MIT are among the smartest in the world. They feel
confident that this will enhance the MIT experience- essentially; they are
saying that they don't care if someone on another part of the planet wants to
teach a MIT course or use their material. They believe that the spread of knowledge
can only benefit humankind. MIT will instead, as my friend Professor Tony
Bailletti says, sell the 'delta' factor- that is, the opportunity to actually
be in a classroom with the creators of the material; to be exposed to their
minds; to experience first hand the Socratic method of student/teacher
interaction.
Your PWS is, however, your opportunity to
contribute to and be a part of this new world-wide 'hive' mind. Ultimately, if
your personal IP is important enough, your PWS will make money for you 'while
you are lying on a beach'; that is it will create value separate from hourly
effort and independent of its creator and it will outlive you too.
I only wish that the web had been as
functional when I was twenty; thirty years ago!
I also have a somewhat selfish reason for wanting the students to have PWSs-
instead of emailing their assignments to me and clogging up our network with
huge files or, alternately, giving me a wad of paper, I just want their URLs.
It also is a resource for future classes to be able to see what previous
students have done and, reversing out the work to students, I am now letting
them upload their files to their PWSs instead of trying to do it all myself!
What does a Student PWS Look Like?
Well, initially, a student will have his or
her résumé on their PWS. They can post their assignments there for their Profs
to review. They can post corroborative work there for other student team
members to browse and contribute to. They can have password protected space where
they can post family history, family photos and other important parts of their
lives.
Students can preserve some of their best
work; their portfolios; letters of reference (some of the latter presumably in
a password protected space).
Young people will find myriad uses that can't
even be imagined now- their PWSs will become their alter egos; their personal
diaries of a life lived and a journey with many twists and turns. Music,
photographs, video, audio, personal radio, text, drawings and every form of communication
is a potential addition to a PWS that accretes over a long period of time- it
is like the sedimentary layers of the ocean floor, quite impressive, given
enough time.
So what type of other uses can you put
your PWS to?
Well, we have
pretty basic ones for student PWSs, like helping them get a job. There is also
the advantage of having a domain name that belongs to you, for life. It comes with its own email address, also for life—where
people can contact you forever. Never allow your PWS to be hosted by your
employer or, even if you are an entrepreneur, by your own company.
Why you may ask?
Because you could part company with your employer and he or she may argue that
your personal IP and your personal email address book belongs to them. Now look
where you are. You have lost an important part of your personal network. I have
over 3,500 email addresses in my address book and I enjoy getting email from
former students from around the globe as they move through their careers.
Don’t think for a
moment that you can’t lose control of your own company, by the way, you can.
You may have built that business from the ground up but someone else could end
up owning it, you never know. It happens. Tough. Move on. Get a (new) life. But
at least have your PWS and your personal IP stay with you—never pledge that for
a loan or leave it under someone else’s control. Comprehendo?
For the Senators
(Ottawa Senators Hockey Club), their most valuable possession, other than their
player contracts, is their list of season tickets holders and sponsors now all
email or mostly email contacts. How would you, like it if your lifetime list of
contacts was in the possession of someone else?
The most valuable
thing you actually own is your training and experience, your creativity and
education. When you walk out the door from a JOB or your last startup, it goes
with you. And it doesn’t hurt if all your personal research, writing, email
contacts and other material is safely stored on your personal ws. And don’t
forget to make a physical back up of your data—don’t just use an online backup
service. Make CD Rom
and DVD backups and remember the most reliable data
backup by far is still an acid free paper copy stored in a safe, dry
place.
It is possible that
future generations of archaeologists will rue the advent of the computer
age—the latter part of the 20th Century and the 21st
Century may be huge information voids to them. Information on your hard drive
is fantastically perishable; CD ROMs and DVDs are a bit better but we are
talking about a few years, a decade at most. Compare that to the millennia of
cave paintings, papyrus and clay tablets. The Digital Age could be a disaster
in terms of passing on our accomplishments to future generations and no species
on the planet is more dependent on the accurate transmission of data, knowledge
and know how from one generation to the next than humans.
Anyway, try to
choose a domain name that has personal meaning for you (don’t use things like
cooldude103.com; you might think that is pretty neat when you are 15 but it
looks ugly when you are 25). And host
your PWS with someone reliable.
So what might go up
on your PWS or what uses you can put your PWS to? Here is my list:
1.
Résumé
2.
Memories of a
life lived and a personal journey
3.
Great work done
by you
4.
Family and
friends spaces
5.
Ways for you to
make money with your personal IP
6.
Your personal
data and files
7.
Your personal
applications
8.
Links to
important places
9.
So many other
uses I can’t enumerate them all.
Your PWS has to take advantage of things
like:
·
Reversing out the work (i.e., the world is becoming a self help place)
·
Process automation
·
Groupware or shareware
·
Source Control
·
e-payments
·
Data Management
·
Relationship management
·
Supply chain management
·
Customization using standard inputs (moving up the value chain)
·
Simplicity and focus (at least in terms of making money from it)
·
Guerrilla marketing
·
Marketing by media release
·
e-commerce
·
e-business
·
email
·
the browser
·
intricating the web in work flow processes (move your desktop to the
web-- everything is on the web (either in a public space or private, password
protected space) unless you specify differently; e.g., the MIT model: IP wants
to be free but 'tools' cost you money.)
·
Making
money while you lie on a Beach
For more elaboration about the “keys to the web” as discussed by Internet pioneer Robert Hall at one of our Magic from a Hat Lectures, click here.
Your PWS is a first step towards a weightless
computing future and one in which you can live forever. Weightless computing
means that one day soon you will be able to be anywhere, in an Internet café in
Now just take your credit card and your back
pack with you and you can work from anywhere.
I can’t really work at all now without my
personal ws. It isn’t just that I post assignments to it for students or use it
to further my research. I mean, sure, I use it to do surveys and collect
interesting (at least to me) data. I also enjoy publishing stuff to it and
people tell me they enjoy reading it (at least some do). But it is much more
than this. I notice that at Hickling, a local
Some day, you may find ways to create new
value for yourself with your PWS—maybe it’ll make money for you while you lie
on a beach.
I include here a scanned in obituary of a
gentleman (see below). I don’t usually read the obits but somehow I was drawn
to this one. I read about his achievements, his service in the RCAF and his
many other involvements and it struck me, how sad that upon his passing, all
this is lost.
And then I thought, don’t let this happen to
you. Build a PWS that creates value for you during your life and value for your
heirs after your passing. See the Story of
Rachel for example.
Imagine if creative types like A. A. Milne
(creator of Winnie the Pooh and Piglet and Christopher Robin and the 100 acre
wood, for example) had access to the web during his life? Maybe Mr. Milne could
have created value for his family after his passing instead of just the Disney
Company and some others who now have control over his work.
Where does this New Journey Take You? (Now
we are getting more fanciful.)
Eventually, when there is sufficient
bandwidth, people will goggle into cyberspace (see Neal Stephenson's Snow
Crash. In a survey done by Business Week a few years ago, something like 36
of the top 50 tech. executives had read this book so you should probably read
it too. It’s not necessarily a great novel but Stephenson captured the
essence of future of the Internet in my view and he did this in 1989 and 1990
before most people knew much about the Internet.) People will create their own
avatars and faces will be important. People will meet and greet in cyberspace
(the Metaverse as Stephenson calls it).
The
Human/Computer Interface has come a long way in the last 60 years. Computers
were initially developed by the allies in WWII as de-encryption tools. The
interface has evolved from the teletype to punch cards and from there to line
commands and now to the GUI. If Neal Stephenson, author of Snow Crash is right, the Human/Computer Interface will move to an
avatar based one. People will ‘goggle’ into the Internet and use their avatars
(similar to the creatures being developed by EA in their online version of the
Sims) to meet, greet and exchange information.
God
or nature, if you prefer, has developed the human interface in RL (Real Life)
over a long period of time and there is no reason to think that the way we use
our senses to interact in RL might not also be useful in the metaverse
(Stephenson’s name for the future Internet. By the way, in a survey done by Business Week a few years ago,
something like 36 of the top 50 tech. executives had read this book so you
should probably read it too. It’s not necessarily a great novel but
Stephenson captured the essence of future of the Internet in my view and he did
this in 1989 and 1990 before most people knew much about the Internet.)
Or maybe we will use a stereo space interface
instead, especially if
Stereo space promises new ways to: educate,
entertain, inform, data mine, interact, travel, meet, communicate, work,
cooperate, produce, research, consult, sell, market, host and teach—all without
the physical requirement of moving people, goods or services around the planet.
It could revolutionize workspaces, kill distances and affect older industries
like the newsprint business.
Maybe the best way to think about stereo
space is to take the Spiderman ride at Universal Studios in FLA; imagine giving
a lecture to thousands or tens of thousands of students in 3 D stereo space or
imagine a concert, soccer match or football game ‘live’ in stereo space where
you can goggle in and watch the event from anywhere, even the field of play or
from the conductor’s viewpoint.
Stereo space or Stephenson’s avatar based
computing will impact the ‘software’ of cities; it will change the way we
design our cities. Homes will become workplaces and workplaces will become
homes. It will lead to both a safer environment and a more efficient form of
urban agglomeration with fewer pressures on transportation and other systems.
It may move the system to higher levels of sustainability both in terms of
reduction in environmental impacts and much higher utilization of existing
infrastructure. If you are interested in reading more about sustainability of
cites, click here.
"The best way to predict the future
is to invent it," Computer Scientist Alan Kay, Founder, Xerox’s
There
may be another possible intervening step in the meantime—we may use a Mapping
Interface for our PWSs as a step towards easier navigation. To see a document I
wrote on this, click here.
(Copyright. Dr. Bruce M.
Firestone,
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POSTSCRIPT: Developing Your PWS, Avatar and
Cyber-borg Your avatar and your personal
agent (a software agent that helps you navigate the web) will be combined
with your PWS to create a powerful new tool for self expression and learning.
They will alert you to new IP that might interest you, new films or music
too. They will make travel arrangements for you and keep your calendar too.
They will become your friends; they will learn from you and you will learn
from them. They may go to school with you and will certainly be on the job
with you. Your avatar gives you corporeal form in the
Metaverse; your personal agent is a learning and personal services tool. After your PWS, avatar and
personal software agent reach a certain minimum level of sophistication, it
becomes self actualizing. It is neither robot nor cyborg- it is a cyber-borg.
Your cyberborg has access to all the tools on the web including increasingly
sophisticated AI software agents that can help you in everything from
figuring out the best mortgage deal for the new house you and your partner
just bought to an investment strategy that will allow you to retire early to
the optimal rate of flow (maintaining laminar flow, say) in a water supply
network you are designing. The cyber-borg learns what you learn; it
knows what you know. It is created when you are created; it experiences what
you experience. It is given control over a Real Life (RL) entity at nano
scale that uses telepresence to go where you go and interface with RL. It
transcends RL and the Metaverse. It can continue to exist after you die and
preserve the knowledge and experience you have gained in a lifetime of
effort. Your cyber-borg needs to be
taught morality and discipline. It needs to respect Isaac Asimov's rules of
robotics (slightly abridged here): Rule 1- I shall cause no harm to humans; Rule 2- I shall not stand by and allow
others to harm humans; Rule 3- I shall protect my own existence
except where such effort conflicts with Rules 1 and 2. |
After you pass away, your cyber-borg will
need to have a job. It will compete for resources in the Metaverse; higher
skilled cyber-borgs will be in greater demand and will be paid more, one
assumes. An architect's cyber-borg can presumably get a job in an office
running a CAD system; setting up functional programming surveys and much more.
It needs to get along with people and other cyber-borgs. It needs to be able to
work in teams. I suppose they will compete for resources so that they can get
more real estate (for data storage, say) or, more fundamentally, so that no one
pulls the plug on a useless cyber-borg that simply takes up netspace or breaks
the law (see below).
ps.
Cyberborgs may become unstable. Since they are lifelong companions and capable
of learning, they are likely to experience a wide range of human emotions
without the ability to express these fully by, say, experiencing pleasure,
falling in love, getting relief through sleep, etc. Cyberborgs would have to be
subject to the same types of sanctions as their human counterparts for breaking
the law including remediation or even, ultimately, termination.
http://www.dramatispersonae.org/DesignEconomics/MappingInterface.htm
http://www.dramatispersonae.org/DesignEconomicsFrontPage.htm
http://www.dramatispersonae.org/
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PWS-
Custom Results from Standard Processes* |